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JD - @CypherpunkCine
Bondor - @gildedpleb
Anton - @antonseim
Cory - @PykeCory
Zack - @idiotfortruth
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But they got it, and it's all I need, everything I wanted
to do, and it's all I need, everything I wanted to do.
What the fuck?
One of the most fiat fucking bunch of nonsense I've ever heard.
A gold bar is like this big.
You could wrap lead, tungsten, whatever.
How, if you have like thousands of bars,
nobody could ever know that it's really gold or not.
Yeah, yeah.
The only thing that matters for anybody
at this point in the game is the optics of like,
like Elon said, like, oh yeah,
live streaming of Fort Knox would be awesome.
Like, it's just the optics, the only thing that matters.
Nobody actually cares if there's gold there or not.
Like, you just, oh, we're just gonna have a bunch of,
Anton, you don't even need to wrap it.
You can like literally just get blocks of wood
and paint it gold, and it looks great on camera,
because that's the only thing that's gonna matter.
Yeah.
Have you ever lifted gold?
It's heavy as fuck.
The bar of gold is impossible.
So, if you have like two bars,
and then underneath it you got 10, 20 bars,
you're never gonna see the other bars anyway.
I guess the question really is what would be,
what's the point?
Okay, so do it or don't do it, what the fuck ever.
But what do we gain out of that?
Our currency isn't backed by gold.
Yeah.
What does the gold even matter?
It's our gold, Anton.
It's our gold.
It's not mine.
It's my gold and your gold.
It's our gold.
Our government, who habitually steals
hundreds of billions of dollars,
trillions of dollars from us,
has, oh, oh, no, it's the people's gold.
We need to make sure, we need to make,
oh, yeah, we need to make sure that it's the people's gold,
that it's still there.
Yeah, we gotta be checking with you.
We have no proof that the government
has nuked any money ever.
We have no proof whatsoever.
So, let's just be, you know, above board on that.
I heard a good one from that guy, Santiago Capital.
He was like, it's gonna be funny when they audit the gold
and there's more gold in it than there's supposed to be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's funny.
It's like, I don't know.
The only interesting thing I've heard on it is,
is, you know, if they just decide to, like,
reprice everything, you know,
if they decide to try to use gold as collateral again
and then just reprice all the gold
at 10,000 an ounce or whatever.
Yeah, I think that's it.
But again, like, I don't, how does that solve anything?
What does that do to the treasury market?
Like, I don't know.
I'm not that smart, but like, I don't know.
It just feels like theater to me.
It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah.
Yeah, theater.
I have the GLD ETF in an IRA.
I would love for them to reprice gold at $10,000 an ounce,
but I don't know what that actually does
other than just enrich people that hold the ETF.
No, the way they, you wouldn't,
nobody in the ETF would get enriched.
The only people who would get enriched are the government.
Nobody else would get enriched.
There's no point in doing it if everybody gets enriched.
The only way you do it is if the government gets enriched.
But wouldn't the, if the price of gold
just gets set to $10,000 an ounce?
Of course, but what they're gonna do,
what they would do, they'd be like,
oh yeah, cool, we're gonna chop down,
actually, sorry, your gold ETF,
like, it was pegged to this,
but because the government's doing this thing,
we had to unpeg it to that.
So now it's, oh yeah, you had 100 shares,
but it's actually worth whatever,
70 shares of gold now, sorry.
I think so.
I think part of the Bitcoin thesis,
at least in my mind, is that the government cannot,
they have to print, right?
We've got hundreds of trillions of unfunded liabilities.
They have to create more monetary units.
And that the only way to do that
where there isn't a revolution
and there isn't earth-shattering inflation
is that they have as many of the people in that society,
let's say it's the United States,
who own the asset that's getting inflated over time.
So their purchasing power doesn't go down.
It's just a boat on a lake of water
and then they can continue their bookkeeping shenanigans,
because it's all just bookkeeping, right?
But I think if you,
it does help them from an inflationary perspective
if people's, if they have the asset spread around
to as many people as possible, right?
Like let's just run the hypothetical, right?
Like let's say they get Bitcoin
into a bunch of retirement accounts
and then you have this like infinite bid,
kind of like the S&P.
Americans are buying this weekly
in their retirement accounts.
Everybody owns a little bit of Bitcoin.
And over the next 30 or 40 years,
they can print a bunch of money.
The value of Bitcoin goes up.
People's purchasing power or their wealth
feels like it hasn't gone down.
I think you could make the argument
that gold would do that as well, just price-wise.
But again, like.
There's another thing that's interesting about gold
and that it's generationally,
like millennials literally have Bitcoin
and boomers do not.
Most of them do not get it, but they do have gold
and they get gold,
especially if they've been investing for a long time.
They understand the systemic risks of things
and all this other stuff.
They're like, okay, cool.
When things get really inflationary,
obviously you go to gold.
So, but to your thesis of 20 to 40 years out,
well, there's no more boomers with us 20 years out,
honestly.
So, what does that do to gold?
Yeah, I think gold's done, it's over.
We're in the information age, we're in the digital age.
We're no longer using an analog sort of value.
I think it's done, it's dead.
They gotta let it go.
And hey, maybe it's just a giant smoke screen
while the US continues to accumulate Bitcoin
and US citizens continue to accumulate Bitcoin.
And more importantly, US corporations accumulate Bitcoin.
That is actually the one thing
that I was thinking about a lot today
is was the, you know,
everybody's talking about GME, GME, GME,
you know, is GameStop can actually like do something.
And I think what's fascinating about that though
is, you know, it's corporate theater for sure.
You know, Ryan Cohen could come on
and just be like, we're gonna buy a bunch of Bitcoin.
And it's like, it's gonna drive the price up for a second.
But it's not corporate theater that can be ignored
because as soon as somebody does that,
as soon as like a GME with like 4.7 billion,
I think is what they have on their books,
just like book value of cash.
Assume it is somebody that's not sailor,
that's more of a mainstream retail outlet
starts just piling on the Bitcoin.
The space race for Bitcoin begins, in my opinion,
because it's like Apple can't ignore that.
If like Utah starts buying,
I think I just saw Utah's one vote away
from actually starting to put like Bitcoin on their books.
I think there's a couple others.
I can't remember the account.
There's a couple accounts that are like tracking
the Bitcoin strategic reserves for the, you know,
for the States.
I think you're right though, Zach,
in that, you know, it's a marketing,
I think it actually is a marketing problem.
And the problem that Trump is in is the Fort Knox,
Fort Knox to me feels like the Gulf of America.
And what I mean by that is I want the dumbest people
in the world to just scream at me for something stupid,
like going into Fort Knox and auditing it,
or like renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.
So I can do my actual work,
which in this case, in my opinion,
monetarily is buying Bitcoin.
So I do actually think it's political theater intentionally
because, and I've talked about this at our meetup,
I don't think a Bitcoin strategic reserve
for America happens until 2027.
And the reason for that, in my opinion,
is they're stacking their asses off in the background
because the second a Bitcoin strategic reserve happens,
the price skyrockets.
The second it's like the US is doing an SBR, it's over.
Well, yeah, and I think I'm very much on the like,
the corporations are more important than individuals
or governments buying Bitcoin.
The corporations, the corporate world
has much more collateral.
You know, there's much more money for them to borrow money
against their current balance sheet to buy Bitcoin
than a government can just go and print money.
But I think the key thing here is that
the actual best way to my point previously
about getting as many people on the boat
to protect themselves against inflation
is to just get the corporations
that are already in these index funds to own Bitcoin.
Because now you have,
that's the easiest way to get every normie
who's never gonna buy Bitcoin on their own
or even care about Bitcoin to own Bitcoin.
Because now the stocks of the companies that own Bitcoin
are gonna start rising with the price of Bitcoin
and all of the people who have retirement accounts
or stocks that, you know,
is comprised of all of these companies owning Bitcoin,
that's gonna protect them from inflation
more than convincing a bunch of people to buy the thing.
So I think their mission has to be
get it onto the balance sheet of as many corporations
as possible in the United States
before they turn on the spigot,
before they turn on the money printer.
And that protects American citizens who are,
at least who are invested
against the worst parts of inflation.
Yeah.
Do you guys think we can do what Elon is saying
where it's, we're gonna have a 0% inflation year?
You know, or is that gonna happen
or is that just, you know, more bloviating?
I don't know.
I don't think so.
So in a post like Bitcoin hyper Bitcoin,
the hyper Bitcoinization world,
every currency has to be 0%.
And that's like, it's like a Nash equilibrium thing
where it's like, if you have a currency
that's more than 0%, well, you're fucking yourself.
Like everybody knows that everybody,
like you're not competitive.
Everyone's gonna sell your currency for the 0% currency.
So like, there's no reason.
Currency's become like a stable coin, basically.
Yeah, there's no reason for any of it,
there's no reason for any of it
in a post hyper Bitcoinization world.
Now, until we get that place, until people,
until like the, you know, the economics of scale
and efficient economics, like play their roles,
like where everyone kind of knows this,
until we get to the place where everyone knows it,
it's not gonna matter.
Yeah, yeah.
And the other thing too, you gotta keep in mind
that we're still in a debt-based system.
And if you start to see, you know,
we're saying inflation at 0%,
but like we have to define what that means.
You know, you can't, it would be a catastrophic problem
if you started to see housing
go through a deflationary situation.
That totally fucks the entire system,
that fucks the banks,
that fucks everybody who has a mortgage.
They can't have that.
So, you know, maybe the price of eggs goes down,
like maybe, you know, things that are produced
and manufactured, like, okay, that's cool.
But you still gotta keep in mind
that most of those businesses are in debt.
They're borrowing money to run their businesses.
And, you know, they just can't have debt,
they can't have the debt deflate
or the banking system collapses.
So, you know, I think it just,
it has to be this really long-term, you know,
like the plane we're at's already at 35,000 feet.
We're trying to get everybody onto another plane,
but you can't land the plane.
You have to do it in air, you know,
and it's gonna take a long time to do that.
So what you're saying is we shouldn't put DEI
in the cockpit and send them to Toronto from-
I am not- Actually.
I'm a merit-based individual.
Whoever the best pilot is, let them fly it.
Hey, let's be real, though.
They all survived, right?
You know, the plane looked a little jank when it was done,
but, you know.
It'll fly again.
It's good.
It's good to go.
Oh, yeah, that's true.
Let's put some duct tape on it.
So this is one of the things
that I've been thinking about recently
is like the nature of debt
and how much that's gonna change.
Because literally, our entire world
is literally predicated on debt.
Like, I've had this thought experiment
that I've just kind of like runs in the back of my mind,
like when I'm out about.
Yesterday, I was in Westwood, right?
And I was like,
oh, I wonder how much a home is in Westwood.
Like, what's the real estate here?
And it's like $5 million for like a three-bedroom home.
It's like, this is insane.
And then you're trying to think about that.
Like, how can you justify those prices?
Okay, so it's like, well, that person makes,
they have to make over $500,000 a year
just to like afford the down payment on a house like that.
Right?
Okay, well, but then it's like,
so this is not that, it's like,
the reality of the situation is that they're in,
to buy a house like that, you have to have,
you're in two, three, four million dollars of debt, right?
Now, to Zach's point, you are,
your life is over if the debt is not inflating away.
Like, it's like your life is literally over.
You can, you will never be able to,
especially if the currency itself
is a deflationary currency, like Bitcoin,
and your debt is denominated in a deflationary currency,
your life is over.
Okay, so how does this play out going forward?
Like, what are we going to be, like, you know,
is there a potential for a black swan
where it's like, nope, we're all going,
like, all currencies go to 0% inflation
because they can't sustain it, anybody,
and then everybody gets fucked who's in debt,
which is literally everybody.
The thought experiment is like,
including the banks and everybody else.
So, you know, does, like, is there some real risk there?
Like, how do you even quantify that risk?
Because this is an existential risk
to the entire system, right?
I want to play that out.
So let's say that happens, you know,
on January 4th for whatever reason,
or sorry, July 4th for whatever reason, you know,
just we have an Independence Day crash.
What's interesting to me about that as a thought experiment
is like, say for some reason we have the banks are closed,
everything's broken, we have a monetary incident
where we have Weimar hyperinflation overnight.
What's interesting to me about that is we have the ETFs
and we have the owner of the majority
of the banking system, BlackRock,
and Fidelity, like that co-mingled cohort of the banks,
right, because they are, oh, they, you know,
who's the largest holder of JPMorgan Chase?
BlackRock.
Who's the largest holder of Citibank?
BlackRock.
It's like, they have BlackRock on their books, right?
Or like BlackRock has everybody on their books
and they're all on everybody's books.
It's just this co-mingled crazy.
Like, what do you think that, like,
so what then happens on January 6th,
or July 6th when the markets open?
Like, you know, what happens?
I mean, I just, I don't think that we,
Weimar's done, that mechanic is done, that's over.
The risk is not to the downside,
the risk is to the upside, that we have a melt-up.
Because they have to protect the institutions,
they're gonna have to continue to print more money
to make sure that their balance sheets aren't at zero
and that there isn't a revolution in the streets.
That's what they have to protect themselves against.
And I just don't, I don't see a 20-style crash
or a Weimar-style crash downwards.
I'm talking up, by the way.
Weimar was up, Weimar wasn't down.
Yeah, but I mean, in terms of purchasing power.
So, you know, like, you can't,
I don't think it happens, excuse me.
I don't think that it happens overnight.
I think they pretty much, you know,
okay, go back to 2008, right?
They had never printed that much money,
they had never created a legal facility to do that before.
And now that's like the primary tool in their bag, right?
Just shore up the balance sheets.
We saw this, you know, with the BTFB or whatever,
the BTFP program, where they just,
they're gonna come up with more sophisticated ways
of just papering over the cracks.
And I just, I don't see that happening instantly.
And I think, I would go so far as to say that
I think that they're trying to,
this is a controlled demolition of the current system
and they wanna do it as orderly as they possibly can.
Do you think they will be successful?
Yeah, I do.
I think that's a great question.
I do.
Yeah.
How could they fail?
Yeah, they de facto have to be successful.
The legacy system is entirely centrally controlled.
Like there's no, it's like, oh, you're too big to fail.
Like that exists.
Like it's just, oh, we can just not have this bank fail
because it's all 100% centrally controlled.
So like that system is gonna continue on
however it continues on.
And it's gonna be less and less relevant as it continues on,
but it's not gonna be like, to Zach's point,
there's no Weimar collapse in any of that.
That's just goofy.
I think the way that it fails
is you elect somebody like Kamala, right?
You elect a bunch of leftists
and people who are like depopulationists
who don't understand how the current system works
and want the system to collapse in the first place.
Like deep down in their hearts,
they want there to be chaos and destruction.
I think that's how it fails.
But if you have, you know,
people who understand the dynamic running things,
like, you know, I mean, look at Trump's cabinet, right?
You got Lutnick, you know,
all of these people understand how the system works.
And it's not in their,
it's certainly not in their interest
to let the thing collapse.
So I think the biggest threat is who's in charge.
You know, and I don't know,
you guys remember Game of Thrones?
There's that scene where it was so prescient,
like there's all this chaos going on,
there's all this war,
and then they have to go to the bank,
you know, whatever that city was called,
and like borrow money for the war.
And it's like, oh man, yeah, yeah.
They totally nailed that,
which is to say the bank,
if evil people are running the world
and they want things to be destroyed,
then the banks are gonna do
what the banks are gonna do,
which is they're gonna lend to both sides
and whoever wins owes them a bunch of money.
That's, I think, the worst outcome possible.
But if you don't have a bunch
of total psychopaths running the thing,
they make the banks happy,
they make themselves happy,
and we do this long transition
into a new monetary world order,
which is pretty clearly what's happening.
Do you think the Rockefellers have a fat stack?
I don't know, probably.
Why wouldn't they?
I'm pretty sure they've had Bitcoin exposure
since GBTC was launched originally
through various whatever shell companies, et cetera.
They had a substantial amount of GBTC
shortly after it was launched, yeah.
It's like the Walt Disney of buying real estate.
And kind of back to my point,
Rockefeller has exposure to all of these other companies.
So the key thing is to make sure
that Bitcoin is on the balance sheet
of all the big companies.
Rockefeller already owns everything else.
So just make sure that the people they own own Bitcoin
and then now they own it.
Yeah, and I agree with that.
And I think that's kind of where I was trying to go
with the question is, I guess it's like,
what kind of an incident would it take
for the people to be like,
the emperor has no clothes on?
I do think Fort Knox is one of those moments
where it's like, there's nothing here.
And I don't think that would be good.
And if that was the case,
I don't think Trump would do a walkthrough of Fort Knox.
Like they're not gonna do a walkthrough of Fort Knox
if it's empty, right?
Something else that could happen though
is that they can do a walkthrough of Fort Knox
and everybody, I mean, you can already look at videos
of them doing like whatever the gold depository
in England is.
They can do a walkthrough and people will be like,
there are these undecorative pallets
of what looked like bricks just sitting on the ground.
There's nothing special about it.
And then people start talking about it
and they're like, wait, we're not on a gold standard anymore.
What is this?
What does this gold actually do?
It doesn't do anything.
And then people start thinking about it
and they're like, wait a second,
we're not on a gold standard anymore.
The gold doesn't have any meaning.
And so it might actually end up doing the opposite
of what they want it to do
by showing that it's actually there.
It may lose all of its meaning and luster
for lack of a better term.
Do you think enough people are smart enough for that though?
And it's like, I don't mean that in a mean way,
but there are a very large contingent.
And I would argue probably 70 to 80% of people in the world
who just want to punch a time card
and be told what to do and where to go and what to eat.
And then McDonald's is healthy for you and all that stuff.
Like, are there enough people to actually like,
like they have faith in this system
because it's just easier.
It takes all the processing power off of their brains
and they're just like, cool, this is great.
Yeah, that's most people.
I mean, most people are just,
they're just using the dollar out of total convenience.
And as long as everything's semi operates
the way that it does,
whether inflation is 2% or 8%, they don't rise up.
It's like we've watched house prices double
over the last two years,
grocery prices triple and nothing changed.
So yeah, I mean, this whole Fort Knox thing
will be a very slow,
it'll be just a little piece of the awakening
for everybody to realize that
what we've all already realized.
So I don't think it's gonna like be this fundamental change
in everybody's mentality.
It's just one more thing to make people
just take a second to question
why our currency has any value.
Yeah, I mean, like the,
who is it?
Maxine Waters or somebody was like,
the Fed, the Federal Reserve Bank
is a government run institution.
And it's just like, no,
you don't even understand how any of this stuff works.
And then you see in 10 points, it's like,
there's like a whole other level to it
where it's like, not only do people think
that the Federal Reserve is a government institution,
they also believe that the reason any money has value
is because it's backed by gold.
Or government bonds are, oh, it's backed.
Like that's what makes currency have value
because it's backed.
Most people think we're on a gold standard.
Most people think we are still on a gold standard.
We haven't been on a gold standard in 50,
more than 50 years.
And people still don't even know.
Not only do they think we're on a gold standard.
Not only do they think we're on a gold standard,
but they don't even know what that would mean anyway.
They just go like, oh, I think it's like,
they wouldn't even know how to unpack it past,
what does a gold standard mean?
Sorry, going back, JD, according to Grok,
the Rockefeller family has exposure to Bitcoin
in the broader cryptocurrency market
through their venture capital firm, Venrock.
In 2018, Venrock announced a partnership with CoinFund,
a Brooklyn-based cryptocurrency investment firm
focused on financing blockchain-based businesses.
So yeah, they, fuck yeah.
Okay, to my point, their main thing-
CoinFund is a bunch of shit coiners, but yeah.
The government needs to make sure
that people aren't starving to death
and killing each other in the streets.
Like they need to make sure
that there's not a giant revolution.
And it's gonna be bumpy, but most people don't,
most human beings are not violent.
They don't wanna have a revolution.
They're not gonna fight.
If you look at what happened in Weimar
and how fucking horrible that inflation was,
I mean, people were literally selling their children,
like in the sex trade to make money.
Shit was incredibly bad.
It was Venezuela.
That's exactly what happened
and started happening in Venezuela too.
It's wild, the rhyming of history there,
where it's like Venezuela and now we're like 50 years apart,
something like that, maybe a hundred years apart.
Not that we're a hundred years,
but I mean, because Weimar was 1920,
like it was before World War II,
so it was like 1914, right?
So 19, the 10s.
Yeah, 10s to mid-20s.
And then Venezuela, what, when was that, early 2000s?
Was when their stuff went out?
So 70, 80, a fourth turning basically, 80 years?
I think the thing too is like,
they're not concerned about what a bunch of people
who don't understand how the system works
and don't have any material wealth think anyway.
They only give a shit about the 20 or 30% of people
who have wealth.
That's who they have to convince to do a different thing
and everybody else will follow along.
They have to, they don't have a choice.
Yeah.
You know what's really interesting
about where we are right now
with the extremely wealthy class?
They're so unimaginably wealthy,
like we can't even picture what it would be like
to have an income of a billion dollars
or what some of these people have,
but they're not living in castles.
They, yeah, they have private jets
and they have a few houses
and they have like a place in Aspen and they ski
and maybe they have a yacht and everything,
but it's not ostentatious wealth.
When you see Jamie Dimon or something,
you're like, I mean, he's wearing a suit,
but he doesn't look that nice.
So it's just interesting to me that we're not in,
we as Bitcoiners, we think of like citadels and stuff
for when there's hyper-Bitcoinization,
but they're being sly enough
to not show how extreme the wealth is.
Yeah, they just, they don't do it in the United States.
They do it in Monaco and the Caribbean
and where their fucking boats are.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's wild the,
it's wild the wealth, but I think the difference is
actually kind of what Zach was talking about is
back then you essentially had to have a fiefdom.
You had to have serfs, you had to have people,
you had to have knights who were willing to die for you.
Like you actually had to have like,
just like, you know, meat hooks of people
to come in there and just like wreck shop
if somebody wanted to, you know,
try to conquer your land.
Cause it was, we didn't have these
massive institutions of governments.
And a great book is Snow Crash.
I'm listening to it right now.
And, you know, it kind of goes through what happens.
That's actually where the word metaverse was coined
was that book by Neil Stevenson.
And it's just fascinating to kind of like,
he kind of unpacks a little bit of a return to that
and like what it looks like.
And I don't think he's wrong.
It kind of follows right along with
the sovereign individual thesis of governments
kind of become these entities that need to actually
like provide value for their customers, i.e. the taxpayers.
And I think we're actually kind of like starting to see
the chinks in the armor right now,
where, you know, we're seeing this massive,
where we are literally watching the Cantillian effect
being proven in front of our eyes through Doge.
Like we are watching it in lifetime being exposed.
Yeah.
And I hope to God people can get mad enough
that it can stop.
And the only way it stops though,
is actually if people stop paying their taxes.
If people stop just like accepting
that what I'm being told is true.
And, you know, we're seeing a little bit of that
with like X, like this platform
and some of the other platforms.
But the problem is like X is such a small microcosm,
like Nostra is such a small microcosm of people
that it's gonna take more Elons and more Satoshis
to kind of get us there.
And I guess that's, you know,
my bigger question from before,
like if it happened on July 4th is maybe like
wishful thinking or aspirational thinking,
because we, you know, I don't wanna go back
to what we have.
We don't need more Nancy Pelosi's.
I don't think we can avoid going back
as long as we're on a fiat standard.
The only reason USAID and all this other stuff
can exist is because of fiat.
The only reason that the treasury can lose $4.7 billion
or trillion dollars or whatever,
because they didn't like add the database entry
is because fiat is literally BS money to start with.
Like until the fundamental problem,
which is the errors in the currency,
the lack of technological soundness in the currency,
until that's solved,
you're always gonna end up with USAID
like pumping billions of dollars into whatever.
Yeah, they can lose $2 billion into the Pentagon
that they can't audit.
And literally they can just print $2 billion like that.
And it's just restored.
It's all good.
If you lose $2 billion equivalent worth of Bitcoin,
if you like delete a wall or something,
it's gone forever.
And we're currently in a world where
for the people who are printing the money,
the numbers don't matter.
And we're-
There's no consequences.
Yeah.
And the thing is, is that in this system,
the money is created against collateral.
And that's how all of this money,
a tremendous amount of the money enters the system
is that the banks have the ability
to create money from nothing
against some kind of collateral.
If you take that away, the entire game changes.
And that's kind of my point.
Like the crash, it's gonna be such a long process
because that's not going away anytime soon.
All of these companies and where the people
who have the real power who can,
they don't need to have an income of $1 billion a year.
They have $5 billion worth of assets
and they can just go get a loan against any of it
at nothing percent and do whatever the fuck they want.
And the only reason that's possible
is because the bank can print the money from nothing.
It's not pulling it from depositors.
It's not pulling it from somewhere else.
So it's like Jeff Booth's point, right?
You've got two completely opposite forces at play here.
And I think they know that.
I think they understand that.
And I think that they're going to,
I was saying this at the meetup,
but Bitcoin and the dollar need each other right now.
Bitcoin needs to be used as collateral to print more dollars
to continue to pump the price of Bitcoin
to the point where it's worth five or 10
or 15 or $20 million.
And the people who run the system now
are going to see Bitcoin as a better form of collateral.
And then eventually Bitcoin will complete,
the dollar will just eventually poof gone
because Bitcoin will have so much more value.
And then it's question mark, because at that point,
I don't know if we go into just a full blown
Bitcoin deflationary standard,
or if they continue to try to manage currencies
against Bitcoin and using Bitcoin as collateral.
So I think that's very hard to predict
what happens in that scenario.
So let's say you have five Bitcoin or 10 Bitcoin or whatever
and maybe you have a friend who's worth $100 million
and maybe he puts 100,000 into Bitcoin and buys a Bitcoin.
Well, your friend with $100 million
is still way richer than you are.
And probably $100 million is in assets
that are paying him cashflow.
And he's just balling out of control.
If all of a sudden there's a hyper Bitcoinization
and now you technically have more Bitcoin,
he still has the assets, but you now have more Bitcoin
and technically your net worth is higher than his net worth.
If this thing happens,
which we all believe is going to happen,
what do you think happens to the system
when all of a sudden you have Bitcoiners all over the world
and there's this leveled playing field of wealth?
The wealthy people still have the assets,
but now the Bitcoiners have basically just a higher net worth
to where they can also compete for assets.
What happens then?
You have a total repricing of everything on the planet
and you have a bunch of Bitcoiners
who are gonna start buying shit at a fire sale
and you're gonna have a totally different cohort mentality
who's going to be in charge of these businesses.
They're gonna try and change or retool all these businesses
to convert their cashflow from US dollars,
which will be trash.
All their contracts will just be completely decimated
because of the inflation in US dollars.
They'll convert all that to Bitcoin cashflow.
Cool, you wanna get your car washed at a car wash?
Hey, we got, you know, it's gonna be whatever,
a thousand sats, you know?
I think what's interesting about that is,
I'm sorry, I'm fighting a cold.
So it's like every five seconds,
I end up getting punched in the face, like I have to sneeze.
Just do it, just sneeze.
You know, what's gonna be interesting,
and I'm gonna use Indy Hub as an example,
but, and I was actually thinking about Indy Hub
when I was getting off the highway earlier today
because of the,
I had a professor in college, Merlin Mann,
what a fricking awesome name.
What a name, dude.
Dude, he was fricking the best.
He's fricking Merlin.
And Mann, dude, let's go.
But he, I started in J school.
So I started in J school, and then like two years in,
I was like, this is a crack.
And I was like, if I wanna make stuff up,
I'm just gonna make stuff up.
And so that's when I switched to business.
But that's literally my thought.
And that's when I switched to filmmaking.
Yeah, head of the filmmaking.
Come on, propaganda, let's just do propaganda.
And where I was going with this is Merlin had the idea,
as a journalist,
because he'd worked for newspapers for a long time,
he's like, whoever can figure out,
this was before, and Bitcoin, I guess, had,
no, it wasn't even out yet,
because this was before Bitcoin.
But he's like, whoever can figure out microtransactions
to where it's like, you wanna go
to the New York Times website,
and you're gonna pay a couple pennies to read an article.
Whoever can figure out the microtransaction thing.
And I do think that's where we're going,
and that's Indy Hub, right?
It's the microtransaction.
And I think we're gonna get to a world
where that has to be the norm,
because, or rather, is more convenient as the norm.
Because you can be completely anonymous
in some way, shape, or form,
and try to get into an Uber,
or try to get into a self-driving car,
and just pay per mile, or pay per whatever, right?
And it's just slowly deducted from your account,
because people are gonna get to a formalized understanding
of what value really is.
And it'll be super convenient.
Like, I'm actually really excited
about the convenience of the future,
because I'm not gonna have to spend $19.99 a month
for crap I'm not gonna use.
Okay, great, there's 50 million movies
on whatever it is, I don't care.
But I can spend, in aggregate,
like $9.04 every month,
because that's what I watch, my consumption.
So it's like consumption-based compensation,
and consumption-based value is gonna be the future.
And it's gonna be interesting,
it's gonna be really interesting.
Yeah.
Now they can auto-debit your card right now.
Like, there's so many cloud things,
iCloud, Google, whatever thing,
and it's like $2.99 here, $1.99 here, $10.99 here.
And it just comes out,
and I'm like looking at my statements,
I'm like, what are all these things?
Well, in the near future, when we're paying,
we have to press a button
and allow that transaction to go through.
They can't just take that money.
And so, it's gonna be our choice,
the exact, what you're saying,
the exact things that we wanna pay for.
Yep, yep.
And we're gonna feel pain again.
Actually, we get back to feeling pain.
And that's actually a good thing.
Like, the reason, you know,
I did a bunch of things with credit cards
back in the day with credit card companies,
and the reason they do the dip,
and now actually why they're changing to the tap,
because at the time it was just when the dip
was being introduced in the United States,
is because essentially it's a 4% increase in spend
every single time they change the action to be faster.
So, like the swipe was 4% more,
and then the dip was 4% more.
And so, like in aggregate,
it's actually like you're spending 12% more money
because of the tap.
Yeah.
Versus what you spent even when you slid the card.
So, like, because the sliding
was kind of a pain in the ass.
It didn't work.
You had to like blow on it.
It was like an NES game.
And now you actually just like tap and walk away.
It's wild.
And it makes sense.
And that literally has never worked for me.
Every single time I've tried to tap,
it never works, and I just have to insert my card
and just wait.
It makes sense.
Like, the thing about the industrial revolution, right?
We're not in a software-based society.
You have to pay for something that's a complete product.
You go manufacture a car,
or even, you know,
even like editing software back in the day.
You bought Final Cut for $1,000 or whatever
because it was a completed product.
Because the way manufacturing worked
and the way everything worked
was you didn't buy a partial product.
But as value becomes increasingly digital,
the product is never really complete.
It's constant iteration.
Software development is this constant iteration.
And so it's just a much, much, much better allocation
of capital from the consumer perspective
and a society perspective where we can actually see
where people's attention and time
and needs and wants are truly going.
So I think it's a huge benefit with regards to that.
I gotta jump, homies.
Godspeed.
Thanks for coming on, brother.
Deuces.
You know, trying to keep these to the time frame.
So if we have like nine more minutes.
You know, and I'm not sure how many people
are actually still watching right now.
If you are still watching right now,
drop something in the chat
if you want us to talk about anything.
But I think what's interesting about the three of us
is we, actually all four of us, but Zach, I'll jump off.
But the, you know,
how do you think it's gonna change Hollywood?
You know, we're already kind of seeing it
with like the fires just kind of decimated.
And I'm very curious how many,
like I know Altadena and I know Palisades
had a lot of OGs.
There's a lot of OG grips and gaffers
and like, just like talented people
that are just like, what do we do?
Do we stay?
Do we go?
Like, you know, because the town is not picked back up.
Not only is the town not picked up,
I mean, even further out than LA and Hollywood,
the industry is super slow.
I mean, they had multiple strikes.
And if you think about it,
like I don't mean to like disparage the unions too hard.
Cause there are so many good people in the unions
and, you know, those people have made the movies
that I love, but they're working in a very antiquated system
and I'm talking like beyond what AI is gonna do
to the industry.
The distribution platforms are totally screwed up
and that threw off what the stories
that people were making, the actual movies,
the shows and everything.
Like there's nothing, well, there's not nothing,
but there's tons and tons of tentpole movies,
sequels, all these things that are kind of just this,
this garbage.
They're really great stories that we loved in the heyday
of when we were teenagers,
which was basically the late, mid, late 90s, early 2000s.
A lot of those types of movies
aren't even being made right now.
As things get easier, this is the positive part,
as things get easier for us to make movies,
like there've been so many ideas I've had recently
where I can go out, I can shoot some things,
I can make other things using AI tools.
I can make a product.
Now, if I can make a movie right now,
I could put it on Amazon.
There's lots of different platforms.
I could sell it to one of these platforms.
Yeah, but we're getting to a point
where we're going to be able to make movies
and this might be a transitionary time period,
but we're going to be able to put them
on a site like Indie Hub
and the cost of making the product is going to go down
and we're going to be able to sell them.
The issue is that it basically makes
for like a middle class of movie makers,
as opposed to the people that were successful
in movie making for the last hundred years
were the upper class.
If you could successfully make a movie,
it was riches.
You were going to be a rich, wealthy person
if you were a filmmaker with a successful movie
that went theatrical or when home video was a thing
or, and then when these streaming platforms
were buying movies from people.
And we're passing that time period right now.
Of course, there's still going to be those movies
to some degree, but we are entering a place now
where people can make a pretty decent livable income,
making movies and selling them directly to people to watch.
Of course, you guys know exactly where that's headed
to where it's going to become what we've talked about before
with the whole choose your own adventure type movie making
and basically AI is just going to make the movie for you
and it's going to take the filmmaker out of it.
But for a time period, and I think we're already there,
basically you can make a movie for very little money.
You can make back more than you spent on it
and you can make a living as a filmmaker,
which is exciting if you're just purely a filmmaker
for the love of it,
because the people who have the actual talent
are going to be able to just choose to do that job
and make a living at it.
I just, maybe you guys have a perspective on it.
I don't know how long that's going to last.
I don't think it's going to be a very long time period.
One thing that I think is, I think the key
or perhaps the key to all of this
and how it goes forward is the price feedback mechanism,
which is you release a movie on like Indy hub,
it's going to pay you in sats, right?
Right.
Immediately.
And you're gonna be like, wait a second,
people stopped watching my movie 13 minutes in.
And I know that because I can see all the stats
and I can see like, this is where I stopped getting paid.
Right?
So what was wrong with minute 13?
And you go and you look at minute 13,
you're like, wait a second.
Oh fuck, there's a boom.
It's just like the boom is like in the guy's forehead.
Right?
It's just like some stupid mistake that you just, whatever.
So you recut the movie and you release it on Indy hub,
again, version two.
And it's like, oh cool.
The audience made it past minute 13,
but now they get stuck on minute 30.
You can kind of like get into this zone of like,
wait a second, we have unlimited iteration
on movie making itself.
And then we get this feedback loop of price mechanism
on movie making itself.
And the consequence is there that Netflix doesn't have to
like whatever, just do buckshot at a wall
and see what hits and what doesn't hit.
They can like literally incrementally and systematically
just kind of give the filmmakers the tools
and the resources they need to do that.
And then the product cycle is just like so much shorter,
so much more feedback for all the artists to get cool.
Oh, wait, this doesn't work.
That does work.
Let's go with that thing, you know?
What you're describing already is happening, by the way.
I've been a part of a movie where we changed some things
and just re-uploaded it.
Nobody even knew that we changed it.
And I mean, you could also argue the movie Cats.
You guys remember that one?
Mm-hmm.
When they originally released it.
The great glorious Cats.
The Cats had buttholes.
Yeah.
It's true, look it up.
And they took them out.
They re-released it.
Thank you.
They did a similar thing with Sonic the Hedgehog too,
right, where it was like they released the-
Yeah, yeah.
They totally changed Sonic.
Which Sonic was gonna look like
and everyone was like, what the fuck?
Yeah, yeah.
So they changed it and that was, yeah.
Oh, man.
What's interesting about, actually,
you guys just gave me an idea
that I hadn't thought about until just right now,
but it's the, you know,
what's most exciting for me is the value.
Other people will value your time more.
And says the guy who wants to start a podcast
with people who have other things to do,
but you guys are graciously sitting on here for an hour.
But like, that's the thing about that
is actually advertising has to get better.
It actually has to add value to you.
It can't just be like screaming at you.
It goes to, you know, Alex Ramosi,
if you know who he is, he's the guy at acquisitions.com,
you know, his whole premise of the million dollar offer.
And it's like creating a category of one
for what you're selling.
But what's interesting about that is like that's,
I fully see a thing like Indie Hub
where instead of charging, you know, like CPM,
where it's like cost per thousand views or whatever,
or cost per million views or whatever,
you're gonna start seeing
an ad pay or like you're gonna start paying for ads
as an advertiser based on completion.
And it's not gonna be a forced completion type thing.
It's gonna be like a, you know, pay for completion thing.
And I do see a world where we start seeing at Brave,
the Brave browser started, like tried to do it
and it didn't really succeed with their Brave token.
But they're like, oh, we'll pay you for being served.
Gosh, who would have guessed?
I do think that's coming though.
Cause I think there is a world where you can say,
hey, I would love to like, you know,
oh, you wanna pay me to talk to me?
Cool, where are you seeing that with Nostr?
Like I'm getting, I get zaps all the time
and I haven't been on Nostr in a minute.
Like people literally zap with an ad
in the memo field, right?
And it's like, cool, I just got paid to be advertised to.
That is the future in my opinion.
But it goes both ways where it's like,
the advertisers are only gonna pay
for the amount of the ad viewed.
And so it's gonna force the quality of the ads
to get better, to entertain you and grip you for longer,
which means they need to add more value for longer.
And so I think it's just gonna be, you know,
the Bitcoin standard is the rising tide
that makes the entirety of life better, in my opinion.
From the ads that you are served
and that you get to watch,
to the content that you consume.
And I think we get back to patronage.
You know, I think what's gonna be interesting
is like Christopher Nolan in a Bitcoin future
still has blockbuster hits
because mass swaths of people are patronizing his movie.
And they're like-
They'll do anything to see his films, yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, this feedback loop continues.
But he can also acquire the best talent
and the best producers and the best locations
and everything else
because he's got such the brand recognition.
It's Christopher Nolan, right?
Yep.
And, you know, when you get into the cycle
of the positive virtuous feedback loop
of seeing how your content is like actually getting monetized
and what people like and what they wanna see or whatever,
you're gonna-
You're riding that stairway up as well to become a-
You know, obviously it's gonna be a lot-
You're gonna need a lot of skill
to become the next Christopher Nolan,
but you're on that path.
It's gonna be interesting.
Like we have such a fiat mentality
about everything having to do with money,
using credit cards, taking on loans.
We know-
We take on loans
because we know that the loan is gonna be cheaper
to service because of inflation and all this stuff.
And like, for me, I'm freelance.
I work, you know, as a cinematographer,
as like my bread and butter work.
And oftentimes I will negotiate a rate with somebody.
They're gonna pay me X amount of money.
I go do the job.
And then a few days later, when I remember,
I send them the invoice
and then eventually I'm trusting them to pay me
by either doing an ACH
or physically mailing me a check or whatever.
And it's like, I can instinctually feel
that everything about how that works currently
is gonna change when there's a Bitcoin standard.
People are going to-
They're not gonna trust you to send them Bitcoin,
I don't think.
I think it'll be like, in a very similar way
to the way that you're paying to watch a movie
on Indy Hub with a certain amount of sats.
The way that we work is gonna be very similar.
It's like, if you want my services,
you're gonna pay me right now by paying me in sats.
And it's gonna completely change our relationship
with how we even accept payment for what we do.
Do you guys agree with that?
Yeah, I agree.
But yeah, that takes us to 3.30.
You guys are gonna jump off here?
Yeah, I think it'd be probably good to jump and wrap
because I think we need to give ourselves some good bounds
and start trying to figure out what this thing is.
I think this is what Bitcoin is for me,
or like part of this is like the journey
of like figuring this out live in the open.
I'm realizing there's value and not value for other people.
There's like value for us, but not value for others.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I had somebody watch our last one
and he seemed to have enjoyed it.
One thing he didn't like, he didn't like watching on X
because every time he got pulled away from it,
he'd go back and be like, where was I?
Oh, I gotta restart.
I need to get the YouTube up.
I have the YouTube, but I do love the Martini's Up
idea name for the Indie Hub thing.
And I think one of the things about Better By Bitcoin
though is like, it doesn't tell me what it is.
And so, maybe we need to name change,
but I think we're still trying to figure out what it is.
But if it's like, better life, the Bitcoin way,
like the Bitcoin better way or whatever it is.
I really like Better By Bitcoin
because everything gets better
by Bitcoin being a part of that thing.
And you'd better buy Bitcoin
because we're gonna have hyper-Bitcoinization.
And if you want wealth in the future,
you need to have Bitcoin now.
I don't know.
Or if you want food in the future,
you better get Bitcoin now.
But yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, just don't try to buy eggs.
I've been everywhere and there's no eggs.
Yeah.
The Vaughn's here in Eagle Rock has ton of eggs.
That's good.
Costco did not.
I literally walked in and like,
there's like a flurry of people trying to buy eggs.
And there's one dude had like,
the last one is like walking around Costco
and people are like waiting for him to like leave his cart.
There's like 80 years old.
And if you're like going to his eggs,
I was like, you guys are terrible.
But I think that we're gonna get the flow
as we're doing these podcasts.
And there is so much value in our collective wisdom.
I mean, each one of us has put years and hours per day
into studying Bitcoin and really thinking through
how it applies to our lives
and how we can better our lives
by having Bitcoin being a part of our lives.
And there are, I mean,
the majority of people have not done that.
And so they need the knowledge that we have in our brains.
And I mean, it's gonna take us a little while
to figure out how to brand ourselves and everything
so that people know what they're getting
when they just click on this, but the value is there.
The value is within us and what we're doing.
So don't sell yourself short.
People will enjoy watching this.
There's lots of people that wanna watch us
talk about these subjects for an hour.
I was actually thinking about that actually
very specifically of the,
I do think a focus, like we just picked a question
and we're kind of riffing on it.
And we talked last week at the meetup
and I couldn't, you couldn't meet at Anton,
but I think we should try to do five days a week.
I think we should try to have everybody own a day
and or like four days a week or three days a week.
I think we did five days a week.
If everybody owned a day and they did like 30 minutes
or an hour on their subject,
where were they as me, a subject matter expert?
Because I do think you talking about how cinematography
is gonna get better because of a Bitcoin standard,
Bondor talking about engineering and also like ADing,
less people are gonna die from heart attacks
and stress, panic attacks.
I mean, or people are gonna, less people,
in terms of ADing, let's be honest,
less people are gonna die because of getting run over
by trains and shot by guns and that awful.
Oh, but I would love it like for me,
I really wanna dive into the advertising piece.
That's literally how I filter everything.
Every time I look at anything, I'm like,
how do you sell that?
How do you pitch that?
What's the story?
That's just the first thing I go to
because I've been doing it for 20 years and I love it.
I really do love trying to crack that proverbial nut
of how do I get somebody to feel something about this brand,
about this product and then see the full benefit of it.
Like see, oh wow, this would make my life better.
And I do enjoy doing that.
And so I just wanna, I wanna do that more
and actually like just dive into like,
it's like the advertising, it's like, okay,
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
you tune in, you're gonna get this.
And I do think we should probably have a more Hollywood
slant because that's just what we all have experience in.
But-
Absolutely, I agree.
Yeah, and maybe that's what it is.
Maybe it's like, you know, Hollywood better by bit,
like better by Bitcoin for Hollywood or something.
I don't know.
Yeah, we're all in Hollywood and we're all representing,
we're like the vanguard of the new Hollywood as well.
And that is-
But you can buy Bitcoin.
We don't limit you buying Bitcoin.
So not that vanguard, like the word vanguard.
I don't even know what the word means exactly.
Like if you asked me the definition,
I couldn't give it to you,
but I feel like I'm using it in the right context.
I could be wrong.
We're leading the charge for that thing
that is what Hollywood will become,
like the good part of the cycle.
I mean, I really think that we're in that time period
where Hollywood was when silent films were picking up steam
to where they went to the pinnacle of silent films.
That's where I think we are right now
in the cycle, personally.
According to Grok, the term vanguard means
literal and historically,
originally it refers to the foremost part
of an advancing army or military force,
the troops who led the way and are at the front line.
We are the vanguard, yeah.
Yeah, the vanguard.
Yeah, and I think part of that,
this is what killed me, killed the stream last,
killed my participation in the stream last time
was this point, which is, is Hollywood dead?
And I was trying to make the case that Hollywood is not dead.
And I've thought about this more and put this tweet out,
but it's like, California is the most incredible,
dynamic, ambitious, consequential,
and rich place on earth.
And the reason it's the most consequential
is because we have tech and we have entertainment.
We export everyone else's stories.
This is where we determine what is meaningful
for everyone else on earth.
Yeah, how do we maintain that?
Think about that.
I'll be honest, I don't know if, I don't know,
I agree now, but how do we maintain that?
Not only maintain it, reclaim it too.
I mean, it's been going down the tubes.
Yeah, okay.
With crazy leftist progressivism,
they've been literally burning it to the ground.
The only thing that's standing in the way
of California and LA is the retarded communism
that is seeping out of the pores of everything here.
Now, why is there retarded communism?
Why is all that?
It's because of fiat.
It's because California has more representatives
than any other state, which means we get more money
and we have more of these bullshit NGOs
and all the other garbage that comes out of Washington
because we are, again, then closer to the money printer.
Being closer to the money printer
means we have the most retarded communists here.
And then the most retarded people who are communists
flock to California and to Los Angeles
to just suckle off a little bit of the social programs
and to get the little drippings that fall off of the money
that's being embezzled by the people
who are at the top of these organizations
that are taking this printed fiat garbage money.
It's like Jesus.
So how do you fix this?
Well, the way you fix this is Bitcoin.
Bitcoin literally is egalitarian.
There is no money printer.
Nobody can print money.
Nobody can stop Bitcoin.
It is a force-multiplying retarded communist ender.
This is the end of retarded communists
because nobody can do anything about it.
There's no tit you can suckle off of.
It's done.
That whole world is over
as long as we start pushing on Bitcoin.
The complacent people who will watch
the auditing of Fort Knox and just be eating Cheetos
and drinking their Starbucks,
the horrifically burnt coffee beans.
Which is just sugar now.
Yeah.
Those people, they cannot stop.
Even though they're not aware of what's coming,
they can't stop what's coming.
And so hyper-Bitcoinization is going to take place.
And like I was saying, as this is happening
and people are just like, I can't stop this,
they're going to be looking to people like us
to tell them what the heck is happening.
Yeah, I think this goes actually
into why I started Cyberpunk Cinema.
I love that my camera always freezes.
I know.
It's just like every,
your camera dies every 30 minutes.
Mine just freezes.
It's just a little better than mine.
It's wild.
And it actually, it's every computer I'm on.
I have different computers.
It's like, it's something with my internet provider.
My ISP at certain points is just like,
no, we're going to turn that port off for like five seconds.
We don't need this one.
We don't need that one.
But no, what we,
we need to tell Bitcoin lore.
Like we need more Bitcoin lore stories.
Like we need, and that's literally what,
the Bitcoin mining thing I want to be doing.
Like, and I just need to figure out how I can
have enough money to quit my day job
to the company that I'm running my own day job.
But how do we tell these stories
and get them out there in such a way
that we can have people feel like,
I feel the best series that just kind of fell flat
because people, the twist really, really broke
a lot of people was the man in the high castle.
The man in the high castle, season one,
episode one through whatever,
had everybody wrapped with attention.
And then as soon as they, and spoiler alert,
turn it off if you haven't seen it before.
Like as soon as they said it was an alternate reality
and it wasn't real, the show just kind of folded on itself.
Because the problem is people felt lied to.
And I think what makes like Snow Crash
and Chuck Palahniuk, all these great authors and books
and things like that from the past era so good,
Christopher Nolan, is they show you a reality in 1984.
They show you a reality that helps you
kind of unpack some things,
but they need to just live in that reality
and not have an out.
Like they need to burn the ships of the story kind of thing.
And I think we haven't done that enough with Bitcoin.
Like we need to be telling Bitcoin future stories.
The Consensus Network guys are trying to do that
and I think they're doing a good job.
But we need those stories to get out there
and the challenge just now is the capital to do it.
Dytribe over it.
Good episode.
All right, team.
See you next time.
See you guys.
See you in a week.
Peace.
Better buy Bitcoin.
Better buy Bitcoin.
♪ Got a good day coming ♪
♪ And it's all I need ♪
♪ Everything I wanted ♪