EP70 "Once you see you can't unsee” @mtcbtc

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

Now, what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it. Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless, and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong? What if it's the system that is doomed to fail?

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space and deliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back, everyone. Today's guest is MTC, BTC. You probably recognize that name. He's the man behind the Sats Ledger, a really great product that helps teach kids about the fundamentals and the basics of Bitcoin.

If you don't recognize him from that, I think you will probably recognize the laser eyes until 100K. That is a meme that him and a few others have cooked up. It went absolutely crazy. We had Elon tweeting about it.

We've had everyone getting involved. It's been a lot of fun, and it's been a great way to get people involved and get people learning about Bitcoin. We didn't dive too much into these topics.

It was just a great opportunity for me to chat a little bit more with him. We worked together pretty closely, but we never get that one-on-one time, so really enjoyed it, loved having him on.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Welcome to the show, MTC, BTC, the MicroChad. Thank you very much, Max. It's always a pleasure to speak to you, Mike. Yeah, I enjoy our semi-regular catch-ups with the other 21 Ismfellers.

What a great bunch of people. You were a part of it before I was, right? How long ago did you actually join those guys and take up the mantel? I'm really bad with timelines. Bitcoin sort of screws with your perspective on time, doesn't it, a little bit, but-- It's a very handy lot to go.

[LAUGHTER] I think it was maybe it was six months ago, that sort of time. Right, OK. So it has started without me, and then I got a message from Bader's saying, look, we're thinking it would be really good to get one board, and then self-banked as well, and they'd add a discussion, and they're like, look, would you like to jump in?

And I had actually been looking at what they've been doing on the sidelines for some time, and I said, look, I want to get you guys, because I'd already interviewed them both early on. And then I'd been looking at what they were doing, and I was like, this is really fucking cool.

This is really different. And I was busy with other stuff, so it didn't even cross my mind to sort of reach out. And then when they reached out to me, I was just like, right, this is fate, then.

This is something I would love to be involved in. And then Mr. Crown joined, and then you and Rebel Money. And so it's like one big, happy family now. And I really feel things are moving forward at a faster rate, and also build a bit more direction as well.

So it's been really good to get a few more people on board and get those creative juices flowing. I mean, it's a bit of an ideas factory, isn't it? I agree with you completely. I saw what they were putting out, and I love what they were doing.

They nailed the brand image and the search for quality content and great production value kind of shone through from the outset, really. But getting the chance to speak to all you guys and hearing different ideas and perspectives on where this could go, it's a big melting pot of lots of different potential directions

and spin-offs and things that we could do with it. And I think that the sky's the limit, really. But it does feel like we've got some really cool ideas and cool sort of directions coming together that will hopefully translate into reality well and help the space to grow and continue maturing

and attracting new people and providing this spotlight that I think it does on quality talent in this place, quality contributions. So I love the fact that there's all these different seven columns that we have.

And potentially, there's more that we could be adding. We haven't called you the night, didn't we, where we talked about some different related-- maybe not associated related industries, but other industries, and other makers, mavericks, and creatives, and people who are on a bit of a mission of their own.

And I think that we can provide a bridge into the normy world and connect through shared values. So Bitcoin and Bitcoin is not just this sort of nebulous thing, even though it's a completely novel idea.

It's unparalleled in human history, the technology. But it's founded on very sound principles, right? And people have been living and seeking to return to those principles for a long time.

So I think that there is some potentially great opportunities for us to help the space grow in our own sort of modest way. So it's exciting to see it all coming together. Is that what drew you in initially to this crazy Bitcoin world?

Because I see you all over the place. You know what it's like when you follow someone in your chatting to them on Twitter, and then what they do comes up in your feed all the time. I see a lot of people are very specific on their bit of knowledge.

Like it might be within Bitcoin as finance, or it's what, you know, the Lightning Network, or it's, you know, tracking people on chain. Or people seem to have like a specific thing that they're drawn to.

You seem to just fucking annihilate no-coiners and people in all different disciplines. It seems as though your expertise lies in just abusing no-coiners. And I love that. I just jump on every day, and I just see you just like, put someone in their place.

And then I'm like, oh, that was really good. And then I see on some other subjects, and it's either like it's energy, or it's the COVID stuff, or it's something on Bitcoin, it's on finance.

And it seems like you're interested in so many different aspects of this and things outside. So what was it that drew you in in the first, like, how did you come to find Bitcoin and all of this craziness that we live in?

Yeah, it's interesting that you make that observation. I don't go out, you know, wake up every day thinking, right, I'm going to go and abuse and I have no problem with this. Don't ever stop, please.

It's so funny. But yeah, I mean, to be clear, I love getting the chance to speak to what I would define as pre-coiners. And it's only through the art of deduction and engaging with some of these people that you can quickly establish, whether or not they are pre-coiners or no-coiners.

So yeah, Bitcoin lights up all the parts of my brain, really. The adage goes that if you tell someone, you know, a bunch of facts, then, you know, they'll remember some of it. But if you tell them a story, then it lights up the whole brain like a Christmas tree and they'll remember the kind of, you know, all the details.

Bitcoin has that effect on me, really. It just seems to touch so many parts of our lives and has such profound implications that I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and learning about it, wrestling with it back in the day.

And yeah, I just think it's an absolutely phenomenal thing that we have at our feet now. And I just feel drawn to helping to, you know, either educate or bust myths or give idiots a bit of a bloody gnomes who don't know what they're talking about and are in danger of influencing people that may be, you know, on the cusp of coming into it,

but are put off because of stupid takes. I particularly like going after the likes of Nouriel Rabini and Schiff, but maybe you can say it's a bit of a waste of time, but I just think that sometimes it's fun and sometimes it's just, you know, an easy thing to say and, you know, I don't really give it that much thought,

to be honest with you, but I do like spending time telling people, educating other people, you know, who are earnestly interested in this stuff about it. But my journey into Bitcoin was a weird one, actually.

I suppose one thing that dawned on me a little while ago is that the subject of money has been something that has played a very dominant role in my life. When I was a kid, I didn't come, we weren't pull of it, but we certainly weren't well off.

My family weren't, and we went through a period where my dad lost his job and we had to properly pull the reins in, and I was quite young, but I do kind of vaguely remember. But I certainly remember I was struggling for a while, and I also remember having vivid dreams about money.

You know, it had such a significant effect that I can still remember the dreams that I had. - This was as a kid. - As a kid, yeah. - Wow. - I would have nightmares about money, and, you know, there was one particular recurring dream that I would have that would wake me up, and I would be kind of terrified of it.

You know, and I think back, and I kind of feel, you know, feel sorry for that little boy who obviously got quite badly affected by money and the subject of money at the time. But like everybody else, I mean, there's lots of people that have money shortage, right?

And I wasn't particularly, you know, especially in that regard, but it was always something that we struggled with as a family, and I wanted to change that, you know, as I grew up. And so it became something that I became interested in when the penny sort of dropped, no pun intended, around how the banking system worked,

and central banking and fractional reserve banking. And the path that we'd strayed from back in 1971, it was almost, you know, as if the kind of curtains dropped, the shutters on my eyes dropped, and suddenly so much made sense in terms of the economics of our reality and the different sort of pressures

that society will face through monetary, you know, policy and how that system is completely rigged and the game is played, and how the wealth get wealthier and the poor get poorer, and that's kind of made manifest through central banking, money printing, cantaloupe, and you never get exposed to any of this on TV.

There's never any discussion of it, nothing substantial anyway. Certainly, you know, school don't give you an education in it. You know, my kids are sort of learning about an inverted commas money at the moment, and what they're being taught is, you know, the original names of the 50P piece and have to recognize different banknotes.

And, you know, it's nonsense essentially. So, and there's nothing banning, obviously, with my kids, they understand what money is and what it is and how that differs from what we have in use today.

But, yeah, we're not helped to understand the mechanics of modern monetary system, right? You have to go and find that information out for yourself. And one thing that my dad had done for me writes throughout my life was encouraged to healthy distrust in authority and in government.

So, I'd always kind of had a level of healthy suspicion about things that were told and not told in the media. But when I really kind of started to understand how money worked, that led me on a journey to, you know, reconsidering other things that I'd either been told about or not been told about.

And I was convinced that, you know, back in sort of 2008, 2009, particularly with the economic crisis in 2009, I thought, you know, the writing is on the wall here. This system cannot last forever.

And arguably, it's a system that, when it's been designed, has been designed knowing that there will come a point where it fails because it's not sustainable. You just have to take one look at debt levels to understand that it's absolutely not sustainable and the fix is in, really.

So, you know, there's end games here. But I thought that that was going to come a lot sooner than it has. And so, I was seeking for ways to protect my, you know, what money I built up, you know, savings that I built up.

And Michael Saylor calls it, you know, the melting ice cube. I didn't have anything like, you know, the size of the problem that he had. But, you know, I've been OK back then, you know, with my job and stuff.

And they had a fair amount of savings. My wife and I got the chance to go traveling around the world, you know, before we started a family. But, yeah, I wanted to, I found the whole idea of banking, central banking, as it is today, sort of morally repugnant and felt that the writing was going to be on the wall.

And what was the best move that I could make? So I ended up, probably back in 2010, investing quite heavily in precious metals. Because I felt that that was going to be the natural sort of way out.

You know, I was listening to the likes of Shiff, Max Kizer, various other people on that scene, sort of Jim Rickards and various other folks like that. And they made convincing arguments.

And Bitcoin wasn't on my horizon back then. Obviously, we all know that it was 2009, where the Genesis block got mined. And Bitcoin really kind of kicked off in earnest. But I don't know anybody who knew about it back then, maybe Adam Back, Nick Zabo.

But obviously it wasn't a thing that-- It was so neat. It was not approachable, I think, was the thing. Like, you had to be one of very, very few people that had such specific knowledge to even conceive of the idea.

There was no education, there was none of what we have now. So yeah, like, I don't think anyone can be blamed for that. Yeah, yeah. But it's funny that it was around that time, I realized that there was a problem and I was seeking out solutions.

So I placed my bets and kind of forgot about it. But I think I first came across Bitcoin when Max Kaiser probably mentioned it. And it's possibly even watching Kaiser report when he had John Matonus on there.

And they were talking about it as a dollar per Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin is at a dollar per coin. And my god, I wish I'd got into it then. But as with most people, you don't get into it in the first introduction, right?

So there was lots of stuff that I was listening to back then. And I still felt that my bets on gold and silver were absolutely valid. And this idea about there being a form of money that could be minted, digitally, not double spent.

And in any way, capable of reaching the heights that it has now and proven out it's, you know, ostensibly it's promise of being censorship resistant, uncomfortable, immutable, you know, scarce, et cetera.

And the rules being obeyed and it growing to the levels of success that it has now. That just didn't even cross my mind that that would happen. It was kind of like a bit of a write-off for me, really.

I've spent, you know, a lot of time tinkering around with computers, but I'm not a techie. But, you know, every keyboard's got a command C and command V in it. So, you know, if I can copy and paste a digital photo or words from one screen to that, then really is this form of digital money

actually going to be fail-safe as far as that kind of thing is concerned. And all the other different challenges that Bitcoin had to navigate in its, you know, amazing architecture and operation for the last 12 years.

And I just didn't think it was viable, really. But it kept being mentioned. And so it kept tweaking the antennas. And eventually, I capitulated on my curiosity. And I thought, you know, it may not go anywhere, but it's at $30 now.

And I had the chance to get it in a dollar. And I'd have done it all right if I'd done that. But, you know, maybe it goes a bit higher. We'll see. So I bought a Bitcoin allocation on localBitcoins.com.

And it may have even been in the days when localBitcoins.com was pre-KYC. And it was weird. It felt like a backroom operation. I don't think I'd even use an exchange for buying, you know, stocks or shares or anything like that at that point.

So the idea of the type of exchanges that we have now, the likes of coin floor and Swan Bitcoin, et cetera, where, you know, these are experiences is much more user-friendly than it was back then.

And, you know, localBitcoins sort of felt like the equivalent of a dark backroom and a pub, right, but online. But I jutifully had a successful exchange with some guy who, you know, there's a reputation system there.

And I kind of felt like I could part with a bit of cash for it. Just as a test, see how it worked. And this was, this was in 2013. And everything that I was reading at the time was, I mean, I, yeah, if I'm going to part with money for something, then I want to be as certain as I can

that I'm going to see my money return to make as I'm when I want it. And what I was reading even back then was, was, you know, you should run your own node. And I think it was an interview that you had with Bitcoin Q&A, where he said, "No noobs ever go from having no Bitcoin to having some Bitcoin and running a full node on day one."

Do you remember that? Yeah. Well, I generally have that view as well, but it sounds like you're going to blow that out of the water and tell me that that's exactly what you did. That's exactly what I did.

Yeah. It's bizarre. I laughed out loud when he said that. Because, yeah, I mean, I don't think there were any apps back then, you know, on your phone. I'd probably tinker around with Electrum, but it didn't really seem to be quite the sort of, I mean, in terms of other

regular commercial software back then, UI and UX was still the thing, right? Things were well designed. Obviously, what we have nowadays knocks the old stuff, you know, it makes it look so dated, you know, any apps that you have on your desktop computer look weathered from those days compared to what we have now.

But there was still, you know, a level of design and good UI, and Electrum just seemed a little bit, not quite sure about this. Bloody idiot. Thinking about it now, you know. But I downloaded a copy of Bitcoin or, no, I went to the Bitcoin website, I downloaded a copy of the client and I tried to sync the blockchain.

Now, I don't exactly remember what happened in terms of the actual mechanics and steps that I went through, but I remember what bloody happened in terms of my journey over the next nine months, and particularly the following two weeks.

So I think that having set up the client, I think I create the wallet and transferred the Bitcoin from localBitcoins.com to my Bitcoin call wallet and then tried to sync the blockchain. Now, I think that's what happened.

I might be wrong. And if there's any, you know, experts out there who are listening to this, they might be jumping up and down saying, no, that's not what happens. But I can't think of any other way that it happened, because basically somewhere between the transferring the money off localBitcoins.com

to myself on my computer, the sync of the ledger failed. And the reason it failed was because when I downloaded or started the download process, over the next of the 12, 24 hours, things seem to be okay until I looked at my progress and tried to do other things on my computer.

And I realized that my service provider had clamped my traffic. - Really? - Yeah. They clamped it down to something like 24 kilobits a second. I mean, I spent two weeks essentially trying to get my internet connection working again, because I don't know whether it was, you know, a deliberate...

Obviously, I'm not, I don't think that it was, yeah, they knew what I was doing. It may have been that they saw the, they were seeing a highly unusual amount of traffic coming through my connection compared to normal.

And that made me triggered some kind of alert and maybe some kind of interruption trigger. But I mean, I don't know, God knows. But what I do know is that I couldn't do anything, you know, loading up even the most simple web page, sending emails to get it.

Just nothing was working for me. And at the end of that two weeks, the install had effectively corrupted. I've actually, I've still got that old computer and I've still not been able to figure out how to get core working on that, right?

There's something happened, right? And it may have been something on my computer as well, it could actually be that. So that was the test for me, right? That was the test. It's like, okay, I'll just see how this goes.

And if it works for me, then great. But because it corrupted, it all fell apart. I thought, bloody hell, you know, if this happens to me, and I'm not, you know, I'm not a technical guy, but I'm not, you know, my mother-in-law, Godmother, right? I have a certain degree of technical competence,

but I'm no Bitcoin Q&A, for example, right? I'm no Jimmy Strong. Oh, I don't know. That time doing what you did, whether you managed to do it or not, is pretty ahead of the curve, I have to say.

It was not like it is now. You didn't have guides. You didn't have a simple user interface. It's not like you had Umbral or something like that. You know, that sounds like quite a complicated thing to try.

So I would certainly not have, not have been able to. I mean, I wouldn't want my story to put anybody off running a node, but we could maybe, you know, talk about that separately. I run Umbral now, and it's brilliant. You know, if that had been available back, then my life would be very, very different now.

But, you know, I kind of, I only got myself to blame, really, because had I spent a bit more time giving a shit about it, you know, it wasn't a lot of money that I invested, but if I'd spent a bit more time, I could have taken the risk.

I could have actually just kept the keys, you know, my coins on localBitcoins.com until I figured out what to do properly. There could have been lots of things that I'd done differently. So, you know, shit happens, you move on.

I'm lucky, you know, in one respect, because even though I forgot about it, you know, I ended up being able to get, you know, I recovered from my private keys. But that wasn't until nine months later, you know, in the intervening period, I thought, solve this. Bitcoin's never going to take off.

You know, if this is what I need to do to secure my stack, and it's failed for me, and, you know, the network providers have this massive issue with me trying to download whatever it was at the time, 150 gigs, ledger, then it's not going to scale, right? That was my experience.

I'm just thinking, you know, and I've felt it was rational at the time to think, well, you know, this can't really take off if you're going to expect people to download a file that a major internet service provider aren't happy about your downloading.

So I wrote it off, I wrote it off, and over the next nine months, I saw it go from $30 to $900. And I'm like, oh, oh my God, right? Suddenly what I've invested in it went from nothing to a fairly decent amount of money. So I then figured out a way to recover my wallet.

So I'd managed to create a wallet.dat file as a backup. I think at the point at which I'd installed the client, so I could, you know, I'd created a receive address, but obviously, yeah, I mean, I can't remember exactly how it worked, but the long story short is that I was able

to recover the keys to blockchain.info. I figured out a way of doing it there. And that was nine months later. And I thought, you know, okay, I've missed a lot of upside here. Maybe it's worth me exploring some of these other things. And in 2013, there were shit coins.

And I thought, you know, if this happens to Bitcoin, then why is it not going to happen to other things? And there was, there was a couple of things like Quark, which, you know, it's, it's unique value proposition was that had seven different layers of encryption. And I think there's fed a coin and

a load of other bags of shit, basically, that were there to, to do people out of their money. And the founders were getting obviously stinking rich, picking up loads of easy, easy money from people who have the same idea as me that I would miss the Bitcoin boat. Let's try and get rich

with some of these other coins. You said that there wasn't the, you know, the kind of setup guides and the apps that we have available now that back then your podcast wasn't around then Max, you know, we didn't have the sort of content and education infrastructure. There were people like Max

Kaiser and one or two others. But I think in order to get the best quality content, you'd have to go to things like Bitcoin meetups and conferences and all that kind of stuff. And I wasn't down for that, you know, I had, I had a family. And so I was just trying to find

things and piece things together. I didn't find Andreas back in those days. I know he was very active. There were various others who were very active, but, you know, I managed to stitch enough of this, you know, or find enough of the Bitcoin pieces to retain an interest in it,

despite the fact that I played about in the Bitcoin casino and got my fingers burned. I did manage to gather enough of the story of what Bitcoin offered and what it was potentially becoming to pique my interest. And, you know, between then and 2017, I had sort of chewing and

throwing interest, you know, waxing and waning interest in it. Again, you know, life just kind of taking over. I was busy on a number of fronts with my family and job and one or two other things as well. And again, you know, back then, I'm not thinking for a second that it's going to get

into, you know, five figures or where we are today. But, you know, I was in it still for the potential for NGEU. And it was only really when I'd heard enough of the story to start to get my head around the fact that this wasn't just, you know, something that was there as a speculative

asset and a way of people becoming ridiculously wealthy in a short period of time. That this was something that actually protected our savings from nefarious actors provided you with a non-inflatable form of wealth preservation, you know, and the ultimate form of sovereignty that has, you know,

so many kind of different benefits besides that I had my sort of oh shit moment of the penny properly dropping or the Bitcoin properly dropping and thinking God, what have I been doing playing around with all these shit coins? What a complete waste of time and money. And Bitcoin is what

I've been looking for really. That moment when that happened, can you put your finger on something that you read, something that you thought about, something that made that penny drop? Can you go back to and think to something that just made you go, oh fuck, like you're saying, this is not

just a way to get rich. This is a way to change the world because that's such a big idea. It's such a huge crazy thought. It's something that I would have thought would probably stay with you. Is it something one thing or was it just like you managed to get some time to dig into it for a

while and then it just came together? I think it was probably in 2017, but that was such a crazy, I don't remember the the precise moment, but I think let me think about this. Yeah, I mean, not answering your question directly, but having seen the bull market run in 2013,

but as a spectator sitting outside the stadium who'd lost his ticket, but hearing the crowd roaring from the inside had quite an impact on my psychology at the time. And then seeing it play out again, but at this time in 2017, but not as an outside spectator, but as a player. Not not a big one,

I don't mean that in any grandsons, but somebody that was able to actively participate in it was just incredible. And I think that drove my interest further. I maintain that the biggest appeal for most people to come into this, whether you are the most ardent libertarian idealist or not,

is the NGE. At this point, it seemed to be the NGE. And that was the case for me. And I think particularly so, because not only had I tried to chase losses in my shitcoin casinoing, which I'd obviously made, right, I'd gone into various things thinking, this looks like it could

be a good contender and what have you. I was also chasing losses on other fronts as well, so I made big bets on precious metals that hadn't quite played out. Well, I mean, but gold ended up being okay, but silver was just a complete horror story for the last 10 years or so.

But there'd been a few other things kind of conspiring in my life as well that kind of made me, let me think about how do I put this. I've just made some bad financial decisions and kind of felt as though I was going to be sort of in a position where I was not going to be able

to provide for my kids the kind of life that I wanted to have as a kid, where they didn't have any money worries, right? They didn't have nightmares about money like I did, right? I just kind of, I wanted to create a life for myself and my family where they didn't have those kinds of money

impressions. And so that was, as I mentioned at the start, that had a big impact on me as a child and seeing how some of the plays that I've made back in the early part of the last decade hadn't quite panned out, but then seeing Bitcoin really kind of coming into its own,

that drove a large part of my interest into looking back at Bitcoin more seriously and trying to get my head around what exactly this thing was, it was probably after that that I really earnestly sought to figure out what it is I put some money into and whether it was really

going to play out and pan out as something that was sustainable and was on the path that I think it's on now to become, you know, our next reserve currency or not. You know, as I'd said, you know, even though I made a small allocation back in 2013, I was still super keen to figure out whether

or not I was able to get that money back. You know, I don't just want to throw money away, you know, I don't have money to burn. So the fact that I'd seen a really healthy return on what I'd managed to invest in it prior to the 2017 bull run, you know, and into the bull run,

that made me take a much more serious look at it. And it was then that, you know, I started reading books on it. And I mean, now you've got, you know, brilliant authors like Nurt and Safedeen and Bobby Breedlove, et cetera, who are just fabulous resources who've come into the space now, you know,

I don't remember who it was back then to be honest with you, Max, but I have a, you know, a kind of wide ranging taste in lots of things. I'm happy to get my teeth stuck into new subjects that interest me. And I just, you know, consumed as much as I could on the subject. And it was an

output of that process that made me sort of realize we were onto something incredible here. But I mean, just even understanding like basic concepts, such as proof of work, some people will have, you know, exposure to what those sorts of terms mean, you know, early on. But I think

probably the, the point at which I kind of went, Oh, shit, this is actually just really simple. And I can see why proof of work is so important was with Nurt's fan handbook sovereignty through mathematics. Yeah, that's a great book. You know, and really great. Yeah, I love that book. And I've

recommended it to to others as well. You know, it's a great sort of orange pill. And it's just having those sorts of, not a fab writer, you know, I really, really liked the guy. He's a brilliant, you know, part of the community, but just a great writer as well. And the way in which he kind of

sees and is able to break down the elements of Bitcoin and why they're important is a fabulous thing to behold. So, you know, that kind of thing really helps. And to be honest with you, I'm still learning about it, Max. You know, I think we go out, you know, into the world to

you know, promote what Bitcoin is. And we end up sort of sharpening our own understanding, right? Iron sharpens on and you get pushed back. And it makes you think about, you know, why you have certain beliefs or what you've made, made certain, you know, points about it. And I don't think that

process will ever end. I hope it never ends. Actually, no, it won't be staggering bloody work of genius that Satoshi has put together is really quite the thing to behold. And the end you use a complete added bonus. Yeah, I like you say that time. So when you were like really

digging in, you're like, okay, hold on, this is more than I thought it was. And you started to really focus in those laser eyes on really what this thing is and trying to understand it. That feeling or certainly for me, that feeling was pro I don't want to say the most exciting thing

in my life because my missus might hear me. But it's it is mind blowing like nothing I've ever experienced before. It lit a fire in me like nothing else has. And I don't think it's possible to explain that to somebody who's a no coin or hasn't really dug in yet. And I think that sometimes why,

you know, our excitement when we try and explain things and our confidence on things, because when you understand like you're saying proof of work, it's like it's so simple it, but it's so fucking obvious when you get it, it puts people off because it's just like, I mean, I've said it on this podcast

loads of times before, but I remember sprinting around my house at like three in the morning, just like screaming because I was so fucking excited because it like there has just been certain times where the penny drops on, you know, it's like a jigsaw puzzle, isn't it? You're putting all

these pieces together. And there's so many of them and they're in so many different disciplines. But there are several times where something drops and you just go, oh, I thought this was massive, but it's even bigger than I thought. And then it happens again. And then it happens again.

And then it happens again. It does never stop. And I think that's where the addiction lies for people who have these sort of brains that do like to dig in further and do like to understand the mechanics of how the world works and do like to question things. And, you know, I can tell that

is very much how your brain works. And no, you're going to be doing this for the rest of your life, I think you're going to be digging in and learning for the rest of your life. Yeah, I hope so. And if it's not about this, then it will definitely be something else.

You know, and when we get, we get to a hunt a bit on eyes world, I think there's going to be plenty of other stuff to first to dig into and use, you know, going forward. But it's funny. It is something that it's such a big idea. Again, you have to push back on the established kind of order.

The state is core of what you should be thinking about today, right? Which is, you know, current fairs, what's on the news, you know, things that the media and mainstream culture are trying to push onto you. That's what most people have spent their entire lives only thinking about.

You know, there's there's there's not been these these sort of big ideas that represent colossal change, because colossal change, unless it's, you know, ordained by the likes of the WF, you know, and what we have at the moment with these great reset fuckers.

People are just kind of encouraged to to watch the idiot box and get their information from, you know, a select number of news feeds and the internet's obviously massively changed that. And there was a path dependency there as well for Bitcoin of the internet, you know, coming first

in your telecom infrastructure, et cetera, cryptography and all that kind of good stuff. But it is such a big idea. And it pulls on so many different areas that there's something for everybody to chew on, if they're not familiar with it, you know, if you can kind of meet people

where they're at, you know, and introduce them to the right kind of part of it, then that for me is a good way of orange pilling them. You know, what one of the the issues that I think we have, you know, I don't see it as my job to change it, by the way, but just kind of chewing the fat here.

When I got into this, everything that I was hearing was you need to run your own node and if you want to properly protect your keys, then that's what you should be doing. And I duly kind of took that on board. And because I fucked it up, that ended up putting me off. And I think that there's

a danger of that, you know, still today, fanaticism to doing things well. And maybe I shouldn't call it fanaticism because it's a slightly loading term. But, you know, people who who promote fresh practices to everybody are potentially doing a bit of a disservice because not everybody is

ready to spin up their own full node, even those great options now available. You know, if even if you're planning on just dropping 100 quid into Bitcoin, you don't then have to spend 150 quid on a fucking node, right? Yeah, it makes no sense. It doesn't make any sense. And I'd be interested

in actually knowing what, you know, what point you think that threshold gets, gets crossed. It's very personal. I mean, for example, I didn't run one for the first year and a half fish that I was in. But I also didn't send any transactions. Right. I didn't buy Bitcoin to use

on darknet markets. I didn't buy it for any other reason. In all honesty, then I want to make some money. I'm not a techie person. So I was like, you know, started reading and learning and then, you know, I sort of got the conclusion that it's like, okay, well, if I want to make sure that when

I'm, you know, when I have some privacy, when I'm sending and I want to make sure that I choose the rules, basically, then I'll run one of these nodes. But there was not really any need for me to realistically, when I'm just holding my coins, like I used a hardware wallet and that relied on

at the time it was Ledger and then it was Ledger's node. But I didn't send any transactions. I think you're right. There's not a need to run one straight away and people will just get confused and scared and, you know, it depends what someone wants. Somebody who just wants to store their value

and they're like, Oh, well, I just I don't want to move it. I don't want to send it. I don't want to do anything. I just want to hold it for 10 years. Probably don't need a node being completely honest. They just don't need one. But there's a lot of other people that do and it's just about

making it accessible for them and not putting them off and not telling anyone what they should do with Bitcoin. It pisses me off. No end to have anyone who comes in and says Bitcoin is not for payment. Fuck off. Anyone who says if you're using it just for store of value and you're not using

it for payments, you're doing it wrong. Also, fuck off. Bitcoin can be whatever the person who owns it wants it to be. That's the whole point is that you decide what you want to do with it. So trying to put it into some specific box is just it's just a bit stupid, really, in my eyes.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree there. It's got got a different use case for everybody. I got to speak to yellow. I see a fender on Sunday. How did it go? Yeah. Yeah. He's he's a great guy.

Yeah. He's bloody funny. The stuff that he puts out is is just hilarious. And he had a different story to me, right? So I'm about, you know, I'm I find central banking and the modern kind of banking system morally objectionable and and of course, of soaked grief in our society. Now, you know, I

really I really understand how much of a plague central banking is on the world. You know, fundamentally Marxist institutions that somehow seem to carry, you know, a label is like a capitalist engine and they're anything fucking but and the way in which, you know, that that has just led to

systematic reallocation of wealth in our society. Lastening, right, grand theft from from the populace to the the the kind of, you know, ruling kleptocracy. I wanted to just exit that, you know, it was it was for me as much if anything. And I kind of, you know, there were things about Bitcoin

back in in the early days. You know, I when I bought some, I didn't give up everything to play in the shit coin casino. It was probably like a, I don't know, a 20% allocation to to shit coins thinking that I was going to do well, but obviously that didn't pan out. It was a kind

of vote against that system. You know, it was a vote that it has a kind of one-to-one mapping. They didn't get the chance to operate their fraction of reserve fraud with my cash because I'd taken it out of the system. So that was a good is good enough reason, if any, for me,

but it got validated by the NGE or not, I'm not going to lie. But when you when you speak to people like Icy Offender and what he went through in Greece, you know, with austerity, where, you know, the economy was essentially kind of ravaged, you know, and he he knew people who, you know, had

businesses destroyed, people who were killing themselves, government policy and monetary policy and all the rest of it. He told me about what happened. I mean, we probably everybody knows, but the affair in Cyprus, the Cypriot government dipped into people's bank accounts overnight.

And if you had over a disgusting 50k, then they they just went in and took like five figure amounts for themselves to bail in. They called it right. And I think I read, I read what Ben, Ben Mezrich's book, Bitcoin Billionaires, where he talked about that that episode as well. And that was that was

quite, you know, a big wake up call for a lot of Bitcoiners at the time. And you know, he kind of had a like a ringside seat being from from Greece, you know, it's just over the water from from Cyprus. And you know, that's kind of, you know, his origin story, you look at what Jack Nalas is

building with with strike and the stories that he tells with what's happening in El Salvador and people getting Western Union transfers and having to essentially take their lives into their own hands and just pray that they don't get beaten up when they walk out with an envelope of cash

stuffed in their jacket, which is the regular occurrence, right? Yeah. And likewise, people in Argentina, in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, you know, go back through history as well. I mean, there's other countries that I couldn't name, but it's a regular occurrence, right, of hyperinflation,

where currencies get destroyed. I mean, we have inflation here. The CPI figures are obviously a complete fabricated joke. There was something called the Chapman index, which unfortunately is no longer available. But it was up until recently, and it represented a more accurate view

of how inflation actually was stacking up. And you're talking the 15 20% cost of capital, the sale of it, right? Because the cost of keeping money in your bank and not having it in assets that appreciate is around 15 20% a year, because the price of everything from property to, you know,

anything else that you need to buy or spend spending money on that represent real kind of outlays for you to live, forget malleable foodstuffs that might be in the centre hours of a supermarket.

Yeah, we're talking about real things here. The real cost is growing sharply each year, and then it's impoverishing people. But, you know, the point being is that there's a different reason to get into Bitcoin for everybody. You know, it has something to offer from everybody.

The value proposition is not one thing. You probably just distill it down into, yeah, it's fully self sovereign, it's non inflatable, it's censorship resistant, it's immediate, et cetera. Then when you actually start to kind of boil it down, you realize that there's use cases for so many different people, right? And where this then goes

with new technical developments in, as the network kind of grows and has, you know, this build out of second layer solutions like lightning and what Striker doing. You kind of think, you know, oh my God, we're at the beginning of something really, really amazing here. And it's incredible

to think, and the thing that pisses me off, right, the most in this Bitcoin community, and it's kind of partly what drives me to being such a toxic arsehole sometimes. For me, is, you know, you see the likes of Nouri Al-Rabini and Professor Steve Hanke,

and I mean, even idiots like Ral Powell, right, who have got their own sort of version of the shit going casino now with his crypto vision stuff. Well, actually, maybe I think he actually does get some of it. I just think he's really misguided. But with people like Nouri Al- incentives. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, incentives.

He's not an idiot, but I think he's short-sighted because this can change the world and he's fucking around with shit coins. How much money do you really need if you've got family and you've got children and people who are going to be on this planet after you've gone? What the

fuck are you doing messing around with that shit? Yeah, yeah. Do you think he gets it? I think he gets it. I don't think he's that stupid. I think he's a smart guy. Like, people will say, oh, no, he's an idiot. I don't think he's an idiot. I also think like Shiff,

I think he gets it as well. I think he holds a stack of Bitcoin. It's just incentives. They're going to make much more money shilling shit coins on some platform to people who don't know any better. And none of us know any better. I'd have bought the shit coins when I first came in.

I did. You did. I think almost everyone I speak to did. And it's easy to misinform people. It's so complicated. It's so difficult to wrap your head around. And it's so different to everything we've ever known before. That it's easy to just say, oh, well, you know, here's Bitcoin, but buy my

shit coin. And that's what he's doing. And he's probably stacking Bitcoin. And if he is doing that, which I think is more likely than just him being a complete idiot, I lose respect for him. Because I think, you know, you've got the chance to do something great here. And instead, you're just

being a greedy asshole. But that is how a lot of people behave, unfortunately. I'm more on the count. I think he's an idiot. I think he's far in in respect of, you know, his kind of understanding of macro finance. But I just don't think he gets Bitcoin at all.

I think he's kind of purely for the NGEU. And he spent, you know, time studying the charts and all the rest of it. Yeah, I lean more towards idiot. But I think whether he's an idiot or he's doing it on purpose, you know, he's certainly not doing a bloody service to the people that

somehow find their way into his crypto vision thing and take anything that you might say seriously. So, yeah. Either way, fuck you, Rob. Either way, fuck you, Rob. But yeah, it's, it's, it pisses me off that we still see time and again, idiots like Schiff and Robini or bad actors,

let's call them, who may well get it, actually, they may well understand what this represents. And they are, you know, deliberately being obtuse and keeping people away from Bitcoin and trying to shake out a holders on it. You know, they're doing the service to the people who

actually fucking need it, right? This isn't like a luxury good now. This offers something that could help to, I kind of don't want to overstate it, but really kind of financially emancipate and liberate a lot of hell and a lot of people. I mean, actually, yeah, it could, you probably

couldn't overstate it when you, when you kind of statement against the backdrop of central banks and what's that, what that's doing to the world and what the likes of the world bank and the IMF are doing, right? It's such a phenomenal opportunity that we have and an incredible network

that we have that people like that who just say, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, are just the absolute scum of the earth for me at this point, because no excuse not to understand it at this point.

Everybody's have done, you know, known about it for many years now, right? 2017, it really kind of rose into into prominence, I think, particularly. Everybody's had the opportunity to learn about it and get their head around it. And, you know, even though I think to, we have institutional

schooling that doesn't promote critical thinking. And so you're, if you kind of got into Bitcoin early and, and found, you know, principles that I kind of like living my life by early, in spite of the, the school system, then you're a bit of an outlier. But the quality of the content that's

now available and the prominence of some figures in the space that you can just, you know, different of a screen and watch and kind of fully digest and hear these ideas being played out in really simple terms and juxtaposed against the existing system, it kind of feels to me like

there's, there's very little excuse for you not to know what Bitcoin represents and how much of a good thing that is. It's very true. And just circling back to, you know, the beginning of when we were chatting and I was saying, I always see you shitting on no coiners. I think that the

point there that's been made, and I think it's definitely true is the people you shit on are the rubinis, they are the people who are, as you rightly say, standing in the way of people getting on that lifeboat. They're fine. Like we can say, Oh, have fun staying poor and all the rest of it. You know,

they're not poor. They've got more than enough money. They'd be fine. But they are blocking people who really need it. And that's really disgusting. It's really annoying. And the majority of them, they know, you know, exactly what they're doing. And it's really, really sad. It's really

disgusting to see, you know, you're talking about your childhood, having to think about money and worry about money. And there's so many people who are living in that situation. And there are more and more people living in that situation now. It's only going to get worse. The money print is going

burr. There's lockdowns. People's businesses are being stripped away from them. People's sanity is being stripped away from them. All this shit is going on. And there's one thing out there. There's only one thing that I can see, which is not only an active protest, but it also can save people

from having fun staying poor. And these dickheads are standing there touting bullshit that's provably wrong. It's provably wrong now. Like you say, there's so much good information. It's so clear. All the fud is just recycled fucking bollocks. And they should really, really take a

long, hard look in the mirror and ask themselves, is the world going to be a better place for me being on it? And I think the answer is no. Yeah. What are you doing in life then? What the fuck are you doing? If we don't want to try and make the world slightly better, you might as well not

being born, mate. You know, what do you think it is that, you know, that's driving these people? Do you think that it's they are, you know, they're knowingly putting people off the cent, knowing exactly what what Bitcoin is and the threat that it represents to, you know, this rigged financial

gain? Or is it ego? Is it stupidity? What do you think it is? I think it's obviously a mixture, but definitely the big players, definitely the big banks, the people pulling the strings, the people in control. I think it would be unreasonable to think that they don't understand

this. I think a lot of it is they're entrenched and life's good for them. So you don't really look, you don't really think you're like, well, you know, I'm doing well, I've got a good salary, like everything's fine for me. They might not have known hardship. And so they're not really

thinking and they'll say, oh, you know, we care about everyone and we don't want anyone to be in poverty. They give a fuck. So there definitely be some of that. But I think a lot of it really is misinformation. I think it is like, hold on a minute, if this thing becomes more popular and

more and more people use this, we can't just sit and leech. We can't just create no value or actually less than no value. What they do is they take away freedom, they cause issues, they stop innovation, they're just fucking leeches who get paid a lot of money to be leeches. And they realize like,

oh, hold on a minute, we can't do that anymore if this thing takes off. And we're going to actually have to take responsibility for our bad choices because we can't create value out of nothing.

Like we'd have to either tax people or create something of value. And as far as I can see, that's never fucking happened. So I think that it is more misinformation than the stupidity. Although like some people like Nouriel Rabinet, I just think he's a fucking lunatic. I just think

he's an idiot. I think that that's the most likely thing I've come up with. I just look at him. I just, he's like a cartoon character. He's a fucking lunatic. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know, a mixture.

Yeah. I mean, we saw an example, I think it was just before Christmas, of how central bankers react to what Larry think of, is it BlackRock investment? As a management said to Mark Carney, he called it the B word? The B word. He interviewed Mark Carney. And towards the end of the interview,

he said, now, I know Mark probably doesn't want to talk about what doesn't like me talking about the B word referring to me. But let's spend five minutes on it and think essentially provided a level of interest and validation of it as an investable asset class. It's a master class

for anybody studying body language, right? Steve now, Mark Carney, twisted his word and bit his nails and touched his face and rested on his chair and in his cheekbone and just shifted, shuffled his bum around the sea as a fake talking about Bitcoin. So that to me, these guys must have spent a lot

of time thinking about it. To the point where it's making them deeply, deeply uncomfortable. And then you see the kind of output of that, that thinking on, you know, the face of Christine Lagarde, you know, Madame Prune and her sidekick, Lady Counter Lee, Janet Yellen, who come out and

say they're two cents worth about about Bitcoin. And Madame Prune said the pledge might, if they have a way of escaping, they will essentially use it, right? And we need to off that means of escape.

Very telling. Unbelievable, actually, to hear that, that kind of comment coming, you know, people who are crazed in their desire for power and control and who see freedom and other optionality

for normal people as escapes and threat vectors for them. I mean, that should do because, you know, the system that they have designed and which I imagine they are in the process of thoroughly redesigning in a bigger, badder and bolder way, going into this great reset idea and the alliance

of that with central bank digital currencies, you know, they need total control. You know, I think CDBC will effectively provide them. And the thing that I think keeps me saying it is hearing how, you know, or just understanding how the mechanics of Bitcoin are essentially resistant to

centralized forces and bad actors. And, you know, that for me just drives and validates the business case for Bitcoin further still. I don't know, you know, how do you see things playing out from here, Max, on that from? I think it's very, very unlikely that the people who are in control of the money

and in control of the rules will ever do anything to create more freedom for the citizens. I think they genuinely hate normal people. I think they only care about power. They only care about control. They will do anything they can to misinform the population, to keep them

stupid, to control them, to put them into a situation where they're going to have to comply so they get their cut bucks, so they get it into their new wallet that they're going to have. And if you break rules or you try and start your business or you do anything that could create more freedom,

they're going to make your life very, very difficult. I think they lose, but I do think they're going to put up a fight. I don't think it started yet. What about you? Do you think we've really seen any moves from them yet? Well, yeah, I do. And I've kind of seen since 2007, I think I mentioned

earlier, you know, my eyes sort of being open to how our money system works and what have you and that kind of leading me into other areas as well and kind of reevaluating and reassessing what I thought about how other things in society worked. And I think it's been in the post since

then that we are heading towards a much more technocratically controlled society. And so it's been with horror that I have seen the events over the last 12 months or so. Seeing how that's kind of played and been played by governments everywhere. Well, in many places, almost everywhere.

But in the main, there seems to have been like, you know, a moving lockstep. And how that is now morphing into, okay, well, you know, we've gone from the two weeks to flatten the curve to, you're now going to have a vaccine passport if you want to go about your normal life as you did do

just 12 months ago. And you know, we don't need to kind of get into that area in particular. But it is funny how the likes of, is it William Reesmod? Yeah, Jacob Reesmoder, his book, The Sovereign Individual, which is a mind-blowing, long book mind-blowing read from 20 odd years ago.

He telegraphed the fact that states would likely use a viral pandemic threat to clamp down on the rise of the, you know, the sovereign individual or the threat of the sovereign individual and the internationally mobile or the international mobility that those individuals would have.

He also predicted, you know, the rise of a digital money, et cetera. He's somebody who, in fact, I don't know, I don't know what his background was, I don't remember, but obviously he's somebody's in politics. I'm guessing he was in politics as well, and knew that the political machine.

And so, like an insider like that, to put in black and white back then, that he saw the reducing ability of violence-backed bargaining chip of the state, and some, you know, people having international agency and the ability reducing state power and how the state would respond to that.

It's a bit freaky, really, that that's kind of been the playbook over the last 12 months. Yeah. It's almost eliminated. And I'm in a position where, if you want to be able to even just move around freely in your own fucking town now, then you're going to need to bend the knee and roll

down your arm for a jam that the manufacturers of which insisted on full indemnification from liability before they agreed to roll it out. And yet, you're being told that you can't go to a purple football match or grocery shopping unless you have it in your body.

It's fucking disgusting. We all talk about this in our private channels and all the rest of it. It is fucking disgusting. And literally before we had this call, my auntie came over, all of my family, right? They've had the vaccine now. Other than her, she's having it tomorrow.

And I thought, I'll just try and not be combative here. And I'll just sort of try and see if I can put some facts out. And it was quite worrying how indoctrinated she was and everyone else is when you say something like, well, I'm not having the vaccine. Because not

only do I not know if it's going to harm me, but also I think that in principle, it's wrong. I believe that freedom of speech is very, very important. And I see that being infringed upon. I think that freedom to move freedom to travel is very, very important. It's a human right. That's being

completely infringed upon the freedom to earn and provide for your family has been taken. And now they're saying, we're actually going to infringe upon your right, what you can and cannot have in your body. You can't choose anymore. You don't even own your body. And to that, the response was,

you don't have to have it. And I said, well, you kind of do, because if they're saying you can't travel, you can't work, you can't go to a supermarket, you can't live in any way a normal life. And it's going to get worse. We all know it's going to get worse. Then do you really have a choice? And it

seems peculiar to me that nobody questions, is it all worth it? The death rates to me, I'm no doctor, I'm no scientist, but don't look concerned at all. I think that there's probably going to be more people topping themselves because they can't put food on their families plates and through depression

and all the other stuff that's going to happen. But the thing is that nobody's asking these questions and they're giving away that the most basic, I mean, we don't have human rights necessarily, but the things that would be most reasonable to assume that you'd have in a free country

would be you're allowed to move, you're allowed to speak, you're allowed to provide for your family. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me, even if I had no concerns whatsoever about these jabs and, you know, I don't want to call split hairs here, but I don't think you can actually

necessarily call these things conventional vaccines. It's kind of for gene therapy. So let's call them jabs. Even if I thought these jams were perfectly safe and there was a 100% safety record and all the necessary kind of, you know, clinical trial, I know that some were skipped. But if it ticked

all the boxes and I had zero concern, why would still be against people being forced to have it? Because it sets precedent that you don't have the choice as to, you don't, well, you don't fundamentally own your own body, right? Somebody else has the right to put something in your body,

you are their fucking property. And if you're willing to, you know, there is a word for somebody who is prepared to put something in their body in exchange for concessions, right? The oldest profession in the book. And I think that, you know, by opening that door, you will never get it closed.

You've set precedent. The fix is in at that point. So for me, even if it was just, I had no concerns whatsoever, you have to fucking draw the line somewhere. And it's so far past the line. It's a fucking scene. I can't help the feel, you know, I hate to kind of label groups of people, but I

just think people who are knocking on now, right? The boomers. Obviously, everybody's been in the same situation for last year, but you've got, you know, a lot of retired people now who are missing out on the holidays to Benidorm, and they're not getting the chance to go to the bingo and

all the rest of it. And, you know, I understand that, right? And a lot of them, they've been first receivers of this, they're going, okay, well, I'm a priority. You know, I kind of think that that generation tends to not be particularly free thinking. Maybe it is like a demographic

thing. Maybe it's just a generational thing. You know, you look at the likes of Neil Howen, his both turnings and all the rest of it and how that kind of, you know, apart. But, oh, sorry, you know, his perspective on it, which I find quite compelling, fascinating.

So, you know, but, I mean, you can't blame people for wanting to get their lives back, but holy shit, you know, we could well be in a situation where the kind of final gift that the boomers give to, you know, their progeny and the following generations is to just blindly give up their

rights to bodily self sovereignty in order that they can, you know, get back down to dominoes on a Tuesday night. It's absolutely true. It's very, very selfish. The same thing with the money.

You do realize that your life was very different to the life of your children and grandchildren, and you could go and buy a property as a young couple. You could go and have one person working, not two working two jobs and never owning a property. The difference in how hard it's going to be

for their children and grandchildren just financially is completely different, like it's a completely different world. And that seems not to be enough for them. It's like, we're not only going to fuck you financially, but like you say, we're going to actually take away the sovereignty over your own

body and your speech and your travel. And we're going to do it because it's convenient for us and we're lazy fucking sheep who can't be bothered to look at a chart, to think, to read a book, to look at history, to think about human incentives, to look at how governments work, to look at

anything, to do anything. And I think that's why there's this confrontation on Twitter and people like you have to go and shit on people, because if it just wakes one of them up, if it just makes one change, it's worth it. Because the stakes here are too high. You can't ignore this.

This is such a big turning point that is, I mean, never in history, never in history or something. This is without question, the most important phase of the life of anybody I know right now.

This time is absolutely fork in the road time. Everything is to play for here. And I don't think that's hyperbole in respect to the fact that people say, oh, well, you know, it's not going to be that bad. Don't worry. There's some idiot today. So no, just, you know, come on, just enjoy life,

just be happy. And it's like, okay, try telling that to your son or your grandkids. 20 years, 30 years down the line who are living in Klaus Schwab's open fucking Gulag, where they have nothing, but they're happy. This isn't, it's in the open, they are in the open, right? They've broken cover.

And it's not like this is just some, you know, crazy fucking communist prime minister or president of some country in the nether regions of the planet. This is a guy who's sitting in the middle of the top table for this self-titled world economic forum. The world's largest businesses are members

of and active supporters of. So what you've effectively got here is Fascist and 2.0 with the ruling kind of technocratic corporatocracy controlling all of the chips and you having fuck all right. So how does that then play out? Well, all right, what's this got to do with how things

are going now, you know, COVID and all that kind of shit? Well, you know, you can bet your bottom dollar that your vaccine ID will find its way to being connected through things like the Gavi Alliance and Bill Gates's ID 2020 agenda, which I think Germany are talking up at the moment,

possibly have even become a signatory team, where it's not just going to be a vaccine certificate. It's going to be other things associated with you as a person, you know, they've pushed for national IDs since the end of World War II. It's been a constant threat and a constant source of

friction between individual people and status. So it just keeps getting reinvented. And so now what you have, of course, is if this vaccine passport idea comes to pass, that'll be the thin end of the wedge. You'll then have that tied to other things. And do you think there's a chance

that central bank digital currencies are going to find their way integrated into that? Well, you're going to have to be a complete fucking moment to not see that, right? Unfortunately, all of Great Britain seem to be complete fucking moments.

Yeah, I mean, I think the level of, yeah, it's pretty serious time that we're in right now. I mean, I don't want to dwell on that any further because it's a bit of a low note. And the reality is that I'm actually quite optimistic in many respects. The Bitcoin community in

particular is a source of great hope for me. Bitcoin itself, you know, it's open my eyes to the fact that not only are there freedom, loving, intelligent mother fucking, you know, genius is out there who are working on stuff and have been for a long time and will continue to do so far more

effectual in a more far more effectual way than I can. And there's a whole load of us, right? I mean, well, I wouldn't put myself in that category, but yeah, I'm a Bitcoiner, right? We're fucking everywhere now, actually. The penny is dropping at a rapid rate.

And if it's NGU that's forcing that penny to be dropped, then that's cool, right? Bring it on because NGU will continue going up and people will start going, you know, I need to be taken maybe a more serious look at this. And when they start taking a more serious look at it,

they figure out what it is. And when they figure out what it is, they see the system and the emperors zero closed for what it is, right? So I think that we're in a bit of a race, technocrats seem to be in a hurry at this point. I think they know the race is on as well. But

we know who those fuckers are, right? They're out in the open, but we're everywhere. And we're nowhere. You know, when you think about how well, just just looking at how how Bitcoin Twitter plays out on a daily basis, yeah, I describe the folks there like shark's team. You know,

if if one gets bitten off, you know, one comes loose, then then you just have another one that rolls into its place. And with this laser ray until 100k, I'm paying that much like last week.

Seeing that way, it was just a mouth. And yeah, you're on, you know, it reached some pretty heedy heights and flew the flag for Bitcoin in a pretty visible way, right? You know, it got to, you know, Senator, a Congress person, it got to Eagle on World's Riches man,

David's well to CNBC. It made its way into Slate magazine, Newsweek. You know, a lot of people heard about Bitcoin at that point. A lot of people saw laser eyes. We've even got fake bloody merch popping up already, like within tanks. It's crazy to see and knock off NFTs, believe it or not. But

it kind of shows you the power that even though there's no sort of, you know, you know, it's kind of leaderless force. It has this kind of organic unity founded on common values and just driven by, you know, what we see that Bitcoin represents. And that for me is a source of massive, massive

hope. If it was Bitcoin, I'd probably be despairing right now. But I'm actually optimistic about the future. And I fucking love the folks that I knock around with on a daily basis in the Bitcoin community, you know, that they are the heart and soul of Bitcoin for me. And it's, it's really

cool to be part of it. We're very, very lucky to have the people around us that we do. I often think, wow, I'm so fucking grateful that firstly, I found this thing, which is just a beacon of hope in the darkness. There is just this hope. And there's something that I truly believe in. And also

that I get to meet the people that I do. I get to speak to all you boys in 21 ism. I get to find people who are thinking outside the box and are not here just for the money. Like, that's cool, but are here because they're like, you know what, I want to change this fucking world. I want to

make this place a better place for my children and children. And I want more freedom. It sounds really, really cringing and corny, but I think that good will triumph over evil. I think that we will win. It doesn't have like a leader or a direction, but the direction generally is

freedom and truth. And whatever comes out from this Bitcoin community is always freedom and truth. And what's coming from the other people is misinformation, misdirection, control, deceit, it stinks. And once people get a taste of that, once people start thinking critically,

they see NGU. They see that it's not just a group of people who want to attack in their toxic. Actually, some of the things that they're saying are pretty reasonable. You know, maybe we should be thinking about these things. Maybe it is reasonable to want to be able to store your

wealth and your value. And maybe it's not right to lose 20% of your purchasing power. And maybe some of the things that have been talked about are wrong. And once they come in and start thinking, I don't think anyone comes out again. And you're saying it's like, you know, a shark, it loses a

tooth, another one pops up. It is more than that. This thing is growing at a rapid rate. And like every day I come across someone new with some new content and looking at things in a different way.

And we've got the smartest people in the world building this stuff. We have something that people can't argue like at the end of the day, if it comes down to facts, we know this is the better system.

And we've got just within 21ism, the creativity, the excitement, the different ways of thinking, collaborating with other free thinkers. All of this stuff is it's not a selfish movement. It's about helping each other. Everyone's, you know, very, very kind with their time. There's always

someone who's willing to help. And it's just completely different to the outside world. It's completely different to what everyone else is experiencing. And it's infectious. And I think that, yeah, it wins. It just wins. And that is like you say, it's amazing to be part of.

Yeah, I mean, when I say like, when we leave one chart to it, you know, that's like maybe maybe one, one Bitcoin, it goes to bed, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. Once people come in, they tend not to leave it, it's a one way street, right? I mean, there's some exceptions to that,

these names, we went. Wait, bother mentioning some, some engracious and spectacular falls off horses of people have tried to kind of venture back into to shit coins and felt massive. Yeah. Yeah, that's another bullish thing for me as well, that there is so much

quality content available now. And it's sad in a way, but it's super, super bullish that there's so much that you'll never, you'll never be able to experience it all. You'll never get like the spectrum of what Bitcoin is, because everybody's going to have a different perspective

on it. And the direction will just grow organically. But I think that the, you know, the rule set is in, right? The fanboys have Bitcoin like, like me, you know, sort of understand what the principles are that it was founded on and what have you, and how that then permeates through, you know,

and influences other aspects of your life and your outlook, that then percolates into your content, you know, not just kind of, you know, percolates into your life in lots of ways, but you know, you're a content maker, right? You, you've got this great podcast and, you know, you reach lots of

new eyes and ears with what you're putting out there. And you've got others, I mean, 21 of them, you're part of that, you've got Princey down Prince with once bitten. You know, we know other great podcasts as well. And there's just, there's ones just popping up all over the place,

all the time, in every bloody language, because Bitcoin internationally, you know, it goes anywhere and everywhere. So, you know, it's going to happen. The idea is out there, the awareness of it, the interest in it, the desire, you know, and the, the action to actually get some

and, and figure it out more about what, what it is that you've bought. You know, that's the number one priority for me, that the number one thing that I think we need to help people do, you know, or they even understand it is get some in their hands. But I've not had great experience with

gifting people, Bitcoin, although they don't value it on time, mate. Do you want to wrap up soon or? Yeah, we'll start wrapping up. I've just been, I've been babbling more than usual, because I've never got a chance to chat to you. So I've just been, it's just been a catch up.

So, yeah, I found that when I've gifted Bitcoin to people, rather than get them interested in it to buy it themselves, or just get them to buy themselves, you know, and they've got some skin in the game and then giving them what they need to know about, you know, how to find out more

about it. I think that's probably the way to go. But when I've gifted it, it's, it hasn't, particularly with older people, it's, it's not had the effect that I thought it would, and it's just kind of almost been forgotten about which I kick myself for now, because I won't see

those sat again. A couple of examples. So I went to a family members, well, so my sister's house a few months back, and I've been banging on about Bitcoin so much that she had a glass jar at the dinner table that said no, no talking about, no talking about Bitcoin, and no talking about COVID.

Fine, five pounds, right? And she'd written this on a bloody sticker and put it, put it in the middle of the dinner table. So obviously much hilarity ensued. So a bit of a, bit of a running joke that I obviously get on my soapbox about those two issues last year. But anyway, my,

my niece, I said to my, my sisino, it, it was a, an important birthday. And I said, yeah, I wanted to get her something. What did she think I should get her? And she said, well, get us some nice jewelry or something. And I said, but she said, what, what do you want to get her? You know,

you decide. I said, well, to be honest, I want, I want to buy some Bitcoin, right? That's what I think's important. You'll be the same. I'm sure. Matt, right, Max, with, with. No, no, I'm such a tight fucking boss. And I've got no friends. So every, every set goes to me,

but no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not true. We, we do. I've got a few people who I care about who have got some sats that they don't know they have. I'll keep them safe for them. Right. Yes.

So anyway, I said, that's what I want to give her. So I, I'm about to pay her a visit on a birthday. I gave her a paper wallet, said, look after it. There's, you know, a certain amount of, of money that I've put on there for you. And over the next, what, two months? I mean, this was back in October.

So where were you in October? 10k? Nine 10k? Something about that. Yeah. And then by mid December, we've got to work. Do you know what? I haven't got a chart in front of me and I tried to look.

20. So again, maybe 20 or something like that. So she text me. Hey, I'm called MTC. Um, I don't know whether you've thought about getting me anything for Christmas this year, but if you have, could you please get me some more Bitcoin?

Amazing. So she's on the path now. Another shock job. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, that, that, that, that just, you know, massively validates as well, you know, the fact that if, if you, if you can give people some exposure to it, and you, you know, you make

them cherish it, cultivate some kind of interest in it, then the rest will, will probably, you know, work itself out for them. Yeah. I agree. I agree. Well, listen, it's been really, really good to chat to you and just shoot the shit. And it is a real pleasure to work with you and all the other

boys in 21ism. It's very, very exciting. And it's just cool to have people who are forward thinking and not afraid to put new ideas out there. So yeah, thanks for coming on. Thanks for being a part of all that. And thanks for shitting on all these no corners and amusingly every day.

It's, it's an absolute pleasure. Pleasure speaking to you. As always, thanks for having me on. If anyone's listening to, right up until this point, thanks for your attention. Let me up on Twitter and let me make sure that we're connected there. Max, we need to get a date in the diary to get

some steak and wine down us. 100%. Yeah. Well, if you feel like breaking some lockdown restrictions, you guys can all come round to mine if nowhere else. So we'll get some steak on and some wine in us. But yeah, definitely, we've got to do that for sure. Look forward to it, mate. Yeah, really

enjoy the chat. Thanks. Thanks again for having me. All right, mate. Well, enjoy the rest of your evening and we'll speak again soon.