Charlie Kirk’s assassination is both a tragedy and a turning point, shifting the Overton Window toward freer speech, open debate, and Bitcoin’s growing role in society.
The episode reflects on Charlie Kirk’s assassination as both a personal tragedy and a pivotal cultural event, highlighting his rare ability to persuade, inspire, and engage younger generations through respectful debate. His death is seen as an attack on open dialogue itself, with speculation about possible motives tied to his evolving political positions and influence. The discussion broadens to rising political tensions, the fragility of civil discourse, failures of mainstream narratives on issues like COVID-19, and the role of propaganda in driving division. Against this backdrop, Bitcoin emerges as a hopeful counterforce, an alternative system offering better incentives and transparency, underscoring how the Overton Window is shifting toward once-radical ideas about free speech, government manipulation, and financial sovereignty.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination is framed as a symbolic moment that could either deepen division or galvanize a renewed commitment to truth, dialogue, and cultural resilience. While his loss removes a uniquely persuasive voice, the ideas he championed, faith, family, civic engagement, and challenging entrenched power, continue to gain traction. The hosts stress restraint in the face of chaos, warning against manipulation designed to spark civil conflict, and point to Bitcoin as a stabilizing framework in a world plagued by fiat-driven incentives. Ultimately, Kirk’s legacy is cast as proof that individuals can shift culture, and that his work has already helped move the Overton Window in ways that cannot easily be undone.
0:00 - Intro
0:48 - Charlie Kirk
20:50 - Political and economic landscape
26:11 - Bitkey & Unchained
27:52 - Conspiracy spirals and orange/white pill
35:48 - Obscura & SLNT
38:02 - Don’t be divided and conquered
43:38 - Doc Woods and medical censorship
51:10 - Israel and Overton Window
57:34 - Opportunity Cost
58:18 - Bitcoin's as reserve asset
1:02:07 - Stablecoins
1:05:33 - Zaprite ticketing platform
1:31:03 - AI software development
1:37:20 - Stack Overflow backstory
1:44:27 - Gaps in bitcoin industry
1:48:36 - Electricity price
(00:00) guys like Charlie. There's a whole group of people have like shifted the over to window. There's Bitcoiners that have done it. There's people in DC. It seems obvious that this was a very professional operation. I was a little bit surprised by how Charlie was talking about Israel in the last few weeks. Charlie was generally like a white pill guy.
(00:19) He was a positive guy. That Overton window doesn't shift without brave people actually taking action and doing things and making sure that it goes that way. It doesn't happen by accident.
(00:31) Do you know why people use Tether? Do you think they're going to give you a license to spread dollars around the world? While JP Morgan totals their thumbs over here, a lot of these payment processors, they were doing Bitcoin stuff in 2015. Dell was accepting Bitcoin. Microsoft was accepting Bitcoin. It was clunky and the tools weren't that good and the wallets weren't that great. Then they just kind of gave up on it. It's one of those weeks, Will. It's insane, unfortunately. Yeah.
(00:57) Yeah. Uh yeah, the it's hard to um gather the thoughts with I mean not only the last 24 hours, I think the last 7 days. We were just talking before I hit record. Um that woman Arena was murdered on the bus. Uh we had pretty I would define them as catastrophic uh disclosures about vaccine studies on Capitol Hill. the Baja hearings earlier. I think they were pretty profound.
(01:30) And then obviously um less than 24 hours ago, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which really hits close to home. I didn't realize he was 31. I knew he was young. I didn't realize he was that young. Um it's incredible, right? His accomplishments to 31 are unparalleled. Yeah. And I'm recording this on 911. There's just weird vibes this week.
(01:53) Um I I I must point out that, you know, we've been talking about doing this for like weeks, maybe even over a month. Plan was just to come in and talk, you know, some good old fashioned Bitcoin, right? But obviously, we're going to have to mix in some other stuff now. Yeah.
(02:13) Yeah. I mean, the Charlie stuff, I'm sure we'll touch on potential motives, all that stuff, but I think just in general, you you speaking to the profound impact he had as an individual on political discourse in the United States, particularly for younger generations. I mean, again, I I didn't realize he was 31.
(02:37) I didn't realize he started Turning Point USA when he was 18. So, he's been on this grind for 13 years. And whether you liked the way he operated or not, I think it's undeniable he had an incredible impact on younger generation, particularly how they viewed politics. Most importantly, how to engage in political discourse. I think that was I mean obviously the the worst part about this is that he was a young father with two children.
(03:03) I believe his son's 2 years old. We'll never know his father. His daughter a couple years older. both lost their father. But I think the way in which he was assassinated at one of these events which have become rather famous where he sets up a a tent and engages in socratic dialogue with people who vehemently disagree with him.
(03:33) I think that is desperately needed these days and the grace and patience and respect he brought to those conversations um is something even though I didn't agree 100% with everything Charlie said over his career like I I really respected the format and it's a shame that he was assassinated during one of these events because not only uh an elimination of his life but an attack on the medium itself which as Bitcoiners I hits pretty close to home because we we attend a lot of these Socratic events whether it's debates or discussions about the protocol and they're very effective in terms of helping people better understand a
(04:11) subject or have tough conversations about things. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would start out by just saying like there's a lot of people that are going to listen to this who actually followed Charlie Kirk like closely. And I was not one of those people. Like I I mean I was aware of him. I even met him once uh briefly.
(04:34) Um and uh but I'll probably say some stuff where people are like, I've listened to a 100 hours of his stuff. And I'm not one of those guys. You know, I didn't I didn't listen to 100 hours of his stuff, but I'm I'm aware of what he was doing. I was also surprised how young he was. Um, I just assumed I don't know.
(04:51) Do you know how hard it is to become persuasive? Yeah, it's so hard to become persuasive. And he was I mean, if anything, like that's kind of what he's famous for. He was like a super persuasive person. Like unbelievably persuasive person. That was like his whole thing was that he could go to these college campuses and he could engage with young people and he could persuade them, you know, or at least like change their mind a little bit, you know, even if not all the way.
(05:16) It was like that talent like it's something I think about all the time like in work but mostly in like a work environment like sort of retail persuasion one-on-one teams of software developers stuff like that not like wholesale persuasion the way he does it which I can't even imagine being good at that um it was always fun to watch the clips and stuff that would come through because I know how hard it is to become good at something like that. It's a very difficult thing to do and to see someone that was 31.
(05:43) I mean he was like like that though I mean the last like three I'm kind of aware of him postco you know um and u it's an incredible talent like um very rare like very rare talent to have especially that young you know I think of guys like Christopher Hitchens and stuff like that like he didn't strike me like that until much more advanced age who's like you know master persuader in that in that sense.
(06:07) Yeah. No, I I think my exposure to Charlie Kirk is very similar to yours. I never tuned into his podcast or Yeah. watched a whole um stream of those debates that he would do, but picked up the clips and I would watch those and yeah, to your point, extremely persuasive. And yeah, the way in which he was assassinated is just very uh I don't know, very jarring.
(06:38) And just to get two two sort of jugular artery videos in one week of people dying in terrible ways is not good to watch. It's not good for anyone to watch. But um you know I will say like one one you know whatever I have one Charlie Kirk story which is this this January I was in DC for the uh inauguration and you know we went to you know dozens of events and stuff like that but we went to one aptly that is um there's a a political uh Republican donor foster freeze who died uh recently but uh his family still runs this event in DC um during the inauguration. It's
(07:24) at the I believe it's called the Museum of the Bible. Um and uh so we were going to the Museum of the Bible. It's very beautiful building, great museum, all this, but the event was it was an odd collection of characters, like not the typical inauguration event that you would expect.
(07:41) Uh Tucker Carlson was the MC. You kind of expect that. Uh the guest of honor was Conor McGregor. Okay, we're already getting into weird pairings. Um there was a lot of media uh but there weren't that many politicians at like an inauguration thing which is a little bit odd and uh and there were a lot of young men there right uh that were there to listen.
(08:07) Um and what was really funny is you have Tucker, you know, biggest media personality in the world right now. You have Conor McGregor, you would imagine for young men, like one of the coolest guys around, you know, UFC fighter, champion, all those things. And then uh in the back, Charlie Kirk wasn't speaking. He was just in the back listening.
(08:26) And when the event when the uh stage event was basically over, you know, I I went over to talk to him and he was every young person there, you know, you got Tucker here, you got you got uh you got UFC royalty over here. Everyone's mobbing him. Anyone under 30 was just on Charlie, you know, and I didn't I I I didn't know that much about him. I I found that as like interesting.
(08:52) I was like, "Huh?" You know, you got all these like political celebrities, athletes, stuff like that. And like Charlie's the guy that all the 26-year-old guys want to talk to. Yeah. Yeah. And it's um I think the message like politics aside, but I think his sort of life message, I mean, obviously he was a devout and very open Christian and yeah, love God. Loved God.
(09:19) talked a lot about uh the Bible, scripture, would um would basically verbatim recall lines of scripture during during his debates. And it was extremely impressive. And I I think I would not be surprised if he was being mobbed by the the young men in their 20s because his message was sort of hopeful in an age of uh an age of dis I don't want to say despair but it's a tough times. We know that. That's why we're in Bitcoin. Um, well, that's a notable thing.
(09:52) Like, uh, from what I've seen, of course, and if someone's watched hundreds of hours of him and disagrees, but from what I saw, and I see tons of clips, it's not like I I was unexposed. Um, is that uh Charlie was generally like a white pill guy. He was a positive guy. Um um obviously when you're debating there are like negative aspects and you have to like, you know, you know, win a debate, but like I don't know. Most of the stuff I saw was actually like hopeful, nice, respectful, um, uh, biblically oriented.
(10:26) Um, yeah, that's good stuff. That's a good person. Yeah. No, that's what the young generation needs. And not in any way trying to compare myself to uh, Charlie Kirk, but it's the message we try to get here. I mean, we talk about a lot like get married, have kids, and do good things, be a good person, go to church.
(10:48) I think it's a simple message that is being wellreceived by the uh the young men in the world today because it's the only one that seems to make sense. And I I guess this dubtales into potential motives and yeah, all that like it it was just weird how it unfolded. And I sent a tweet out and I don't know whether I need to amend it, but it's like literally 30 minutes after it happened when it seemed like at that at that point in time that um somebody in the crowd had been arrested for sure for shooting him. Um that old man.
(11:24) Um, people were saying people were like immediately I think some people were saying like we know who he is, we know his name, it's not the guy or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's what I worry about particularly. I mean, again, going back to the political clim climate in the country right now with I mean, everybody was already pretty riled up with the uh the death of um Arena the video. I mean, she really died last month, but the video was release was released last week. Political tensions
(11:56) high and then you just throw jet fuel on the the political tension fire. That that is kind of notable. I mean, like, you know, when you're talking about motives, there's a lot of things, but uh I remember, you know, we were walking to Cooper's uh here in Austin, Texas. I hope the freaks like that. Uh I'm holding down the fort here um in the in the TFTC TFTC studio.
(12:21) But uh Parker and John and I uh were walking down and we were talking about Marina and one of the things I had told them at that moment was like I find it really interesting like how much guys like Charlie Kirk have like sunk into this issue. I think it's probably the only time I've mentioned Charlie Kirk in a conversation in months, you know, and uh I was like, "No, no, this isn't going away.
(12:45) " And we were talking about the the guy who was offering the the um uh the the money for the murals and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. And uh that, you know, this wasn't going to go away anytime soon. It was like a galvanizing moment. Um and uh Charlie was a big part of that, right? Like I mean, I think that was over the last few days.
(13:08) one of the, if not the only, you know, thing he was really focused on uh in his public messaging. Um, and I'm sure that uh when you compare something like the arena, you know, you know, murder with something like, you know, George Floyd's death and like the aftermath of that and like how people are galvanizing on the right a little bit around this is like you might want to stop that momentum. Yeah. Yeah.
(13:39) That's one thing. Well, you either stop that momentum or I mean, if you're thinking extreme adversarily and I think there's nefarious actors out there want to accelerate and really drive the country to a powder keg to divide and conquer like that's what I like I think it became clear to me last night like again going back to the tweet that I wrote um that I sent out quickly after he was initially shot.
(14:10) I think my perspective on what is what happened yesterday changed quickly. I mean, it seems obvious that this was a very professional operation. There's many people out there saying, "Oh, you don't need to be uh a Green Beret to to make that shot from 200 yards," which may be the case. However, I think if you think about where he was shot in the jugular um and the fact that there was sort of a distraction cuz that guy sort of held his hands up and said it was me and it wasn't him and and then the um it certainly I mean like sorry it does
(14:47) it doesn't take a green but uh it might like it seems like a pretty wellexecuted plan uh that and as we're recording this I don't think the shooter or at least they've announced that the shooter's been found. Uh so pulling that off, getting away. Uh I I doesn't seem like an amateur job. Yeah.
(15:12) I don't think this has been verified yet, but I saw Steven Crowder was um sharing a screenshot apparently of correspondence, internal correspondence at the ATF um where they they found a rifle in the woods with um with the clip and a there was I believe there's three more bullets left in it and they had Antifa like trans stuff written on it which Oh yeah, if true.
(15:40) not confirmed yet at this point, but if that's true, that screams like like setup. Just trying to lean into that, accelerate the debate. True. And there's a lot of talk about civil war in the United States right now. And that I that is the last thing we need. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Count me in on the non-ivil war uh side of things. Yes. Um uh very much so. Um no. Yeah. last thing we need. But like I don't know.
(16:11) Uh yeah, you got that. Uh I I didn't hear the Crowder story about Antifa or whatever. That doesn't I mean if you talk if you talk the way Charlie did, sorry, not the way he talked, but about what he talked about. Yeah. There's going to be a lot of leftists in particular who are furious with you.
(16:32) you know, um, you know, anything from, you know, his, uh, love of God to, you know, the, uh, you know, sober understanding on, uh, uh, gender and sex to, uh, to an evolving view on Israel. It's like there there's a lot of uh, there's a lot of people that would not like a lot of those things. Yeah. And it never really occurred to me, but it made sense yesterday like he was 31 and if you look at the corpus of his resume over the last 13 years, like I would not like when it was first brought up yesterday, I saw somebody talking about like I was like, "Oh yeah, this does make sense." Like he could have been president one day if he
(17:20) continued. Oh, sure. Down this path. 31-year-old with mastered persuasion skills who has a young generation like like galvanized politically and is a moderate. It's like, yeah, I mean that was the other surprising thing is that like, you know, I have generally right-wing views, some would say faright views.
(17:48) And, uh, I always found Charlie to be pretty plain, you know, um, like he wasn't a far-right extremist or anything. Very far from it. Um, uh, I've I've I've met, uh, quite a few more extreme people, including, you know, when I look in the mirror. Um so yeah that that side of it is is actually you know you know that he you know to be persuasive that way you have to be palpable to palpable to like a lot of people and he was I mean he was very very popular in a non-extreme way.
(18:19) Um yeah, you know, well, obviously we're less than 24 hours out. Um yeah, fog of war. Uh probably need time for this to uh to develop before we make any uh any takes on the situation. They're they're well-rounded with enough information. But yeah, it's it stinks to me. That's all I'm going to say. And oh, it smells terribly. Yeah.
(18:55) Look, I mean, I got into it last night, and I don't want to go too far off on a limb, but I will say I was a little bit surprised by how Charlie was talking about Israel in the last few weeks. Um, both with Megan Kelly, I saw the clips from that. um and uh on his own show talking about like what funds like leftist Marxist ideology in the United States. That type of talk gets you in trouble. It's gotten presidents killed before. Yes, it has. Yeah.
(19:25) It's uh it's uh I mean it's I mean it's impossible not to talk about. I mean it sticks out like a sore thumb. and the fact that he hadn't always been on that. Oh, he was he was one of the biggest Israel defenders for Was he Pentecostal? I'm guessing something like that. He's he's a believer in Judeo-Christian values.
(19:47) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which sounds Pentecostal to me. Yeah. Um which is the you know, you know, biblical Israel is is modern day Israel sort of believe. It's like Pentecostal Southern Baptist, although I don't think he was Southern Baptist, but I don't actually know. So, no.
(20:06) That would that would be in line with that. Yeah. Yeah. And then there was Netanyahu was tweeting about his death before it was officially announced. And really? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. I don't follow him. It's uh We'll see. Let's We're less than 24 hours. All right. We're going to let it go. Yeah. We're going to let it develop. But the uh No, it stinks. It's uh No, it stinks like crazy.
(20:35) I'm sure you know you'll probably have Whitney on after me or something like that and have a real discussion on this of someone who actually knows how the world works in that way. Yeah, she is actually supposed to come on hopefully next week. Oh, nice. Um times are tough. The uh I guess just to wrap this up because we do have Bitcoin stuff to talk about.
(21:00) I think uh actually no. I mean whether it's Charlie like what like the political landscape right now is like it's cra you have a bunch of like this week is crazy beyond that like French prime minister uh kicked out essentially god damn it these reactions I'm sorry listening the apple reactions going automatically. Yeah. Uh French prime minister um kicked out Japanese prime minister resigned.
(21:26) You have been overt overthrowing of an attempted communist coup in Nepal. They blew up burnt down their parliament building. Uh you have China last week with their military parade meeting with Russia. India, Brazil and the misfit countries if you will.
(21:53) Uh then you have Jerome Pal and Donald Trump going our fiscal and monetary side of things here in the US getting getting more make more chaotic. You had that BLS jobs report revision come out where we have almost there are no new jobs but they just lied about it for it's very funny to see that like that that you know I don't you know that's a lot of things you just mentioned I don't I don't have takes on pretty much any of them although I will say on on Nepal though one thing I will say is that like you know uh you know congratulations to Jack Dorsey it seems like every time he invents a new product. Uh, you know, we had the Arab
(22:32) Spring when Twitter's coming out. Now we got the uprising Nepal and like the Bit Chat, you know, uh, usage is uh, shooting up like crazy there. It's like he seems to be a uh, agent of change himself. Yeah, it is. I mean, have you used Bit yet? I I have. I I was only using it on mesh, though, so it was just, you know, me and my brother uh, or something like that.
(22:57) Like I tried it actually at a diner down there and there was one other person. They didn't say anything back to me. So, uh it what what is amazing to me is that mesh networks actually work now. That's cool. Like you know I I've been following or not following but like I was interested in it you know maybe seven years ago and it just wasn't very good.
(23:16) Uh but it seems like mesh networks are really good now. Yeah. And I think the way that Jack and Cali are building out uh Bit Chat and incorporate Noster and things like that to expand not expand the range but add functionality like offline online functionality to to help people communicate from further distances.
(23:41) It is it is uh incredible to see and the fact in Indonesia there was another uprising but bit um down went up significantly there as well and so like people are using it on the ground and makes sense particularly if you're going to protest um and they're protesting I think in Nepal specifically I think the straw that broke the camel's back was just like basically in blackout on social media so like all right download this app we'll communicate be mash you can't shut this down. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah.
(24:11) And and you I don't know if you remember during the Arab Spring like Twitter was the thing. Oh yeah. Like at the time uh it was it was very I don't know from an American standpoint in New York City at the time it was very exciting to to see how you know something like Twitter was being used.
(24:33) It's just funny to see that, you know, Bitad is now, you know, the the Twitter of uh of, you know, 12 years ago, 15 years ago. That's what I'm searching right now. Like, did Egypt uh I believe Egypt sued Twitter? Did they? No, they didn't. They did not. Egyptian government along with others in the region tried to block to restrict access to Twitter and Facebook. Sure. In late January 2011. Yeah. 2011 there.
(24:57) went as far as shutting down nearly all internet and cellular data access nationwide for several days um from the stifle connection. Yeah, I mean it does kind of feel like that I I remember 2011 very well. I mean that's when I learned about Bitcoin and so like you know the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street stuff um like uh which I actually think is 2010.
(25:23) Um uh but it's all you know in that in that little range. Um, I don't know. I'm getting those vibes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, here in America, I I think in the United States specifically, it's like it does seem like we've been under a color revolution for something. I think CO BLM like made that very clear. Like, yeah, it seems like the political.
(25:50) Remember, you can't spread CO at at BLM events. No, no, you can't. That's the important thing. You can at church. You can spread CO at church, but you cannot spread COVID at um a BLM event. Yeah. You have to be able to express your your discontent with or at FiveStar Restaurants in Northern California. No, that's fine, too. French Laundry. That was French. Yeah. Yeah.
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(27:20) So, what's next? Tur demester is back with the 2025 edition, refreshed for the midcycle moment, packed with new data, new insights, and TUR's latest price outlook. Plus, you'll get exclusive access to charting our way through chaos. Tur's new 30inut Q3 2025 presentation explaining why this bull run might be only just beginning and what forces could push it to the next level. Read the first ever midcycle report from Adamant Research at unchained.com/tc.
(27:42) That's unchained.comTFTC. And also, if you're using Unchained, you can use the code TFTC for $50 off any of their services. Go check it out. No, but it seems for like and it seems that's the bring this back to Charlie Kirk like it seems like we have been getting to a critical point of people throwing their hands up and many moderate leftist even sort of coming to respect the policies of Trump particularly tough on crime because it's like hey we we live in a society we need to uh enforce the rules and the laws
(28:18) that have been laid out we and um by not doing So for many years like you're making places really unsafe where you can't even ride. You kind of have to experience it a little bit to appreciate it, right? Is like you ever seen that meme that's uh it's like the guy laying on the ground and it like it's like an out-of- body experience and uh the caption I saw on that was uh you know the libertarian leaving my body every time I smell pot on the street. Yeah, that basically sums up my politics at this point in life. you and I was a very dedicated libertarian when I lived
(28:49) in New York, you know, 2011, 2012, like that that time period. It was also like Bloomberg's New York, you know, and I'm making wise cracks about, you know, trying to ban big sodas. You taking our choice away from I don't even drink soda. Um, but um, you know, I was also younger. I was in like, you know, my my my 20s.
(29:14) Um and uh it's it's very easy to grow complacent with uh the rule of law and law and order when things are going good. It's very easy to look at that and just say like, well, but there's these minor injustices or these minor inconveniences that um that maybe we should fix. And then you're downtown in Austin, you know, 15 years later and there's uh literally dozens of criminally insane crackheads running around and you have to think about moving your office, right? And so like you get that little bit of experience of even just a little bit of chaos like a you know, you know, oh, we're just not going to arrest people if they steal
(29:52) stuff under 500 bucks, right? And um you know, I hate to say it, but like I think basically every like Baptist woman in 1994 that lived in Waco was essentially right about the world in general, you know, like uh you know, you know, gateway drugs and all this stuff. It's just like yeah, you get a little bit of chaos and look what happens.
(30:19) It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel safe. Of course, they're going to say, "Oh, it's the safest time of it's like cooking the books." You know, just like CPI, you know, the jobs numbers are fake. CPI is fake. Obviously, the crime statistics are fake.
(30:38) Obviously, people who live in downtown San Francisco or even downtown Austin where I live know that it's worse than it used to be, you know. Um, clearly that is true. Um, so you introduce just a little bit of that and it's easy to look at someone like Trump who has this, you know, sort of law and order philosophy. Um, and uh, even if you're younger and you have those idealistic views, you know, I was I was in Bloomberg's New York.
(31:01) It was it was very contained, safe environment. Uh, I don't even remember seeing crimes. Um, but these people do. They see it every day. Yeah. And bringing this back, that's my biggest worry with um the assassination of Charlie is that we were getting to a point where even people who are left of center were beginning to say, "Hey, this is not like we can't have Ukrainian people escaping wars coming to the United States for safe harbor getting stabbed in the neck on a train.
(31:35) " Uh and yesterday's events could be used as a divide and conquer like get away from that conversation. left first right. Like if they try try to frame this as some trans lunatic that killed him. Um some radical leftist trans uh I if if that comes out to be um the claim of who killed Charlie Clark Kirk, I'm going to be very skeptical. Um I will as well.
(32:03) Um Charlie's more important than that, I think. um has the eye of uh more important people than that I believe. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I I sent a tweet out last night like I think it's uh imperative to show relative restraint particularly in the short term. Um because I think that's what they want is some misguided backlash and confrontation.
(32:33) Um move people in the wrong direction, get them distracted and hit against each other. You know what I think about the most is if there is a um you know an uptick in uh leftist uh murders uh politically motivated or otherwise just you know could be general chaos of murders or it could be political assassination type things.
(32:59) If there's an uptick of that on the left I really worry because um imagine the backlash against the left. Little Nor McDonald for you there. Yeah, imagine the backlash. It wouldn't Yeah. The What was his joke? That's what I'm really worried about here. What was the uh the uh Bill Cosby joke? It was uh it was a friend of his says, um you know, um the worst part about the Bill Cosby thing was the hypocrisy. And uh I disagree.
(33:31) I think it was the raping. I find that most rapists are hypocrites. Um, yeah. Well, I could just do norm jokes this whole time if you want, but you could, you know, I mean, but yeah, the whole like back, you know, you already see it on MSNBC, CNN. I mean, I don't watch them, but I see the clips and stuff like that.
(33:56) They're like they're they're already worried about the backlash, you know, and it's like the back I mean like you don't want it or anything, but it's like I'm kind of worrying about the the the political leftist assassinations right now. That's kind of what top of mind. Yeah. You know, in this moment. Yeah. And the um and that was the other just disheartening thing and because it it is extremely nuanced cuz there is a radical left that is reing in what happened yesterday and these are demonic soulless people and I do believe there is a radical left that does not want to engage in dialogue and try to figure things out. They want to brute force their terrible ideas and the rest and
(34:33) we've seen this throughout history. I think a lot of people have been bringing up um the Spanish civil war um and Franco and what happened there um with the attempted well the communist regime there before it was overthrown. I mean they they were killing conservative opponents happened in Germany as well. Yeah.
(35:00) Weird times. Yeah. Uh, you know, in terms of, you know, top of my list, you know, I'm worried about downtown Austin where I work and the criminally insane that are um intentionally left on the street. Um, because u, you know, Joseé Garza likes them to be uh terrorizing people in the street. He wouldn't do it if he didn't like it.
(35:27) Um and uh you know then it's maybe you know uh you know you know worry for some of my friends uh who are publicly you know out there uh more right-wing people in a world where those people are being targeted. Um then like seven things and then maybe some backlash you know that that's kind of the list of my priorities right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So freaky was brought to you by our good friends at Obscura.
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(38:00) You'll get 15% off. That's uh I think part of any of this is these events, these tectonic events is uh they're meant to jar you, shock you, get you discombobulated, and force you to make bad decisions where I think the best course of action is sort of to really lean in and focus on what do your thing, do your thing.
(38:27) And so like us Bitcoin like I think a lot of these I'm not going to say these political murders be solved by Bitcoin but I think we believe that Bitcoin can bring about a better incentive framework that that takes away a lot of the uh the funding mechanisms for um a lot of the uh terrible stuff that's going on right now. Yeah.
(38:52) I mean I I think about that a lot because it's you have to figure out where to focus your energy and you know for me over especially over the last couple years um because it's very easy to get too cynical. I mean I' I I've gone through modes of that obviously and just like obsessing over black pills and um you know my conspiratorial mind you know swirling and uh that's where like you know even like stoicism doesn't help me on that type of stuff. I tried it. Didn't work for me, you know.
(39:21) Um and uh but you know what what seems to have worked for me is like focusing on family, focusing on church, focusing on like being productive and you know doing stuff. And I I I I have thought about this a little bit. Um is what is it? Is it Jimmy's book over here? Uh the thank God for Bitcoin. Yeah. Oh no.
(39:46) fiat ruins everything or like people say Bitcoin fixes everything and and sometimes I'll mention that to more casual friends and like really fiat ruins everything like I don't know what about you know sports I'm like well yeah I can make the argument that fiat does ruin that and so it does you I don't think I'm overrationalizing it too much is that um it is a white pill and it is a very rewarding thing to you know you know see a chaotic world and uh things that are popping up that are not pleasant and take you away from uh the things that bring you joy and that you should be focusing on to be productive and and
(40:23) have purpose and things like that cuz it does it feels very uh good to have this outlet, you know, in the Bitcoin world where uh I do believe that the people working on it are working on something that can fix a lot of a lot of these problems and that fiat does indeed, as Jimmy says in his book, ruin everything and everything. And that's not really too hyperbolic.
(40:48) Um, and uh, yeah, so I I do I do feel what you're saying there is being productive, working on Bitcoin because I can't even imagine how I would feel productive outside of, you know, being civically engaged in local or national politics if I weren't working on Bitcoin.
(41:14) I I don't know what else would would would bring me to like I'm actually doing that. I mean, I'm sure there are things obviously like, you know, you need people, you know, working in factories and farming and stuff like that. I'm not saying there's no there's obviously a purpose in that, but for my psychology, it it's like it feels very direct, I would say. Yeah. Yeah.
(41:38) like pertains to all the crazy going on the country it's been laid bare in the last 8 months like fiat misfunding a lot of these insane leftist NOS's and and groups that are basically indoctrinating college aid students and injecting this mind virus into into not the masses but a portion of the population that has really terrible world views and understanding of of reality and how it works.
(42:06) I think that was exemplified with some of the reactions on Tik Tok and other you said you wandered on the blue sky. How how terrible was that yesterday? Doesn't feel good, Marty. Uh it didn't uh increase my you know uh love of my neighbor. I I'll put it that way. Um so yeah, that was rough. Uh but you know there's you know I don't want to again I don't want to fill my head with horrific thoughts and things like that but I think it's important to see how people are reacting to you know an event of this magnitude and uh yeah it it was pretty disappointing. Yeah. And here we go. Uh confirmed
(42:47) by Wall Street Journal or Wall Street Journals didn't confirm it but is reporting it reporting on it. ammunition and Charlie Kirk shooting grade with transgender anti-fascist ideology. Um I mean Ozible doesn't doesn't seem right to me. Um I'm sure those people don't like him as well. Oh, they definitely don't. Yeah, but you would engage in civil discourse with them.
(43:16) But I think there's many people could recognize that those people probably did not like Charlie Kirk. And if you're looking for a psy to blame something on. Yeah. Yeah. That that would that would be probably choice number one. Yeah. It's too it's like that's the other thing too which is actually optimistic silver lining white bullet. It's get the propaganda is getting so bad.
(43:35) Uh and it does get easier to spot, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm sure like the vaccine thing earlier this week, I'm sure you saw the Bernie Sanders um doing a press conference with a bunch of doctors behind him and a sign that just says vaccines work. It's like you're just kind of like brute force this thought that um any any thought that the vaccines whether that's childhood vaccines or particularly I think it's very obvious now the co vaccines um were not safe and effective and were actually detrimental to the health of the people who took them. Um but like
(44:13) the propaganda like is just getting so bad. Vaccines work. It's like you are literally look I have seven actors behind me that say so you know that's an important thing you know the performative uh the the the perform you know reminds me of uh Joe Biden receiving his vaccine on the on a you know on a production set you know and it was like rubber too I'm pretty sure if I recall correctly.
(44:39) No I mean actually uh we we have a connection on that. It it's one of your YouTube strikes was um uh I had a doctor during COVID. Um I got COVID. I gave it to everyone in Miami at one of the Yeah. to you to all my friends. So like 4 days after me. All my friends are getting sick.
(44:59) And I had gone to this doctor who was a rancher in Wyoming slashdocctor. Great man uh Doc Woods. And uh my my my other neighbor had told me like, "Hey, you need to go see him. He's great." And I was like, "Dude, I'm I'm fine." You know, like I I'll write it out, but I was pretty sick. I didn't feel good.
(45:18) And so I go in and he's telling me uh you know, this is pre months and many many months before like Peter Mcola and those guys go on Rogan and like this stuff becomes a little bit more uh known is uh uh Doc Woods just said like, you know, you're going to take monoconal antibodies, ivormectin, um you know, uh vitamin D, all this stuff. And I was like, I I don't know what any of this is.
(45:39) like, "Can I just like not do anything and just be okay in 5 or 10 days?" And he's like, "Yeah, just promise me you don't get the vaccine." I didn't really have a super strong I wasn't going to get it, but I I wasn't like like if a doctor had told me I really needed to do that at that time, maybe I would have done it. Like I I don't really know.
(45:59) I I mean, I'm not like I wasn't thinking about it all that much to be honest. And uh he just said, "All all you have to do is promise me you won't get it." And that was like a big weird moment for me. And then uh he went on your show after that because you guys got sick, you guys got all the horse medicine you could take. Everyone got better like very very quickly. Immediately. Yeah.
(46:21) And so now when you watch uh when you have experiences like that and it's not just me, it was like all of our friends like everyone basically that I talked to in Miami got co and uh everyone got better. everyone. And and I found out only later when Makullo goes on Rogan, I called Woods.
(46:39) I was like, "Hey, this guy is saying like the exact same thing you told me like four months ago." He's like, "Yeah, dude. I send him all my data like like I'm I'm doing the McCulla protocol." And I was like, "Oh, okay. Okay. I don't know how doctors communicate with each other." Yeah. I mean, that was a crazy time because it I if I recall, Doc Woods and I didn't even talk about the vaccine because I don't believe it was I don't think that was really the point. I think it was about treatment.
(47:06) Yeah, it was about early treatment and censorship of course. Uh doc was being censored. Uh was until very recently. Um still sort of under that barrage from the I don't know what it's called. Wyoming medical board, you know, whatever. He got fired from his hospital, you know, literally for giving out ivormectin or prescribing it to people. Didn't have a single death.
(47:28) you know, he was treating for the most part like like the most at risk people, you know, um his age, very old um uh uh and no one ever died while he was there. Got fired. Few people started dying in the same clinic. I mentioned Doc Woods on my episode with Jessica Rose and the fact that our episode got censored because it's like it was insane back then. Yeah. that Doc Woods at the time we recorded, he was 72.
(48:00) He's probably well over 75 now. Humble man, good man trying to do goodbye his patience. Hey, very um softspoken, kindhearted gentleman. And you could tell he had dedicated his life to a small community in Wyoming for decades. And for trusting his gut and trying to treat his patients in the way he thought was best, he was drawn by the wayside in his. It's disgusting. Yeah. Unbelievable.
(48:35) Um but like it is I don't know. I mean co's very formative I think for everyone that went through it as especially I mean I'm sure you know the kids have a uh you know if you were in school during that time I'm sure it's formative in a very different way about you know being let down by adults um uh but like as an adult like working during that time it it makes the propaganda easier to spot I think where before where I would have been more skeptical about um early claims of deception and things like that. Um now when I see Bernie Sanders with a bunch of actors behind him, you
(49:12) know, talking about, you know, how awesome vaccines are, it it's a little bit easier to dismiss uh performative uh politics and performative uh pharmaceutical outreach. Yeah. Well, I hope this Charlie Kirk thing doesn't stop the momentum that we had earlier this week because I think that what was it? The Henry Ford Center study that was brought forth during the hearing.
(49:40) The study that Jessica Rose and Kevin McLaren have both been mccernin not mclaren excuse me um both been on this podcast. I mean they basically prove it's peer-reviewed study. It's being replicated. They prove that there's DNA fragments in all the Fiser vials and SV40 which uh accelerates cancer and there's snake DNA in it. Like it's insane. Yeah.
(50:01) Yeah. And I mean going back to the leaning into the vaccines work propaganda. It's like are you kidding me? It's like and and that's they make it so binary where it's like you have to believe all vaccines work or or you're alone. where it's like, well, no, like I think there's probably some perverse incentives in the pharmaceutical industry and within the that's safe to say and within the three-letter agencies of the government who are creating the mandates.
(50:25) Um, and I think it's okay to question that and we've got a lot of momentum going in the that direction. We have a lot of momentum going in bringing back the rule of law and making sure the people are safe. A lot of momentum at the border, a lot of momentum from an economic perspective in terms of um trying to depoliticize the Fed if you believe it's politicized.
(50:51) Uh and then you have this happened yesterday and it's like, you know, chaos. Chaos. They like chaos. Chaos breeds bad decisions. And we're getting a bunch of wins and then all of a sudden this happens. And guess what? It was an anti-fascist trans transgender. Of course it was that did it. It's like go into Portland and take care of it there.
(51:13) I mean, yeah, look, I don't I I don't know anything, but uh what I will say like to your point there is the Overton window has shifted so much. like the idea of, you know, I was totally one of these people, you know, in 2017, like I had a lot of cowardice running through my veins, you know, going to implicit bias trainings and not saying what I actually thought and, you know, stuff like just being a you know, like just being a wimp about this stuff.
(51:40) I would never and to a certain extent like buying into some of the brainwashing, you know, some of it's not just like me, you know, internalizing it. And I don't know, I mean, like I I used to say something uh about uh like Bitcoin and censorship, right? Which is I would talk to people and I still believe this to be true, but there are other aspects of any I'll say what I used to say.
(52:04) I used to say um you know, one of the reasons, you know, cold storage with keys that you control is so important, right, is the censorship in the world. you know, being able to say what you want to say without um uh you know, negative consequences. You know, just freedom of speech type things.
(52:24) Being able to work on what you want to work on, being able to associate uh with who you want to associate with, right, without having your bank account shut down or something like that. Do you think that's going to get better or worse? Right. Unanimous. Worse. I agree with that still. However, I'm starting to see more glimmers of hope. like in the last two years than ever that like this can be avoided because Bitcoin's actually working.
(52:45) The culture is actually changing. Um I still think you have to be extremely vigilant. Everything I said if you're in the UK right now, you probably feel that darkness more than you ever have. You know, right this minute, the way I was feeling, you know, 3 years ago or so, do you think this is going to get better or worse? And everyone's saying worse, right? In the UK, you're probably right there. I'm starting to see better.
(53:08) And I think that guys like Charlie, I mean like there's a whole group of people have like shifted the overton window. There's Bitcoiners that have done it. There's people in DC and you know stuff like that that have done it is that I don't think there's nearly as much cowardice anymore. I don't think it's as easy to like to to do that. And so basically I think we've succeed we've made a lot of progress and we succeeded in the last three years. Yeah.
(53:33) And not only is the overton window shifted, but it is being affected as it pertains to vaccines. I think people have been making um enough noise and highlighting a lot of like doing the hard work to find the data, to surface it, to talk about it, to make it known. And then you have something like happened in Florida last week where the surgeon general comes out and says, "Hey, uh it's not within the ethics of the field of medicine to course anybody to take any anything against their will.
(54:05) So vaccine mandates in the state of Florida are are over. We're not saying don't get the vaccines, but who are we as the state to coers you to do so?" That is a massive vibe shift from well only two years ago. Have you ever read the original Hypocratic Oath? It's been a while. It's been a while, but yeah. Yeah, it's it's uh it's a fun one. It doesn't talk about vaccines. Yeah. The do no harm, you know, uh type thing.
(54:30) you. Look, I hope I'm not falling for like some, you know, uh, Twitter reel, you know, you know, scam on this, but like I'm pretty sure two of the things in the original Hypocratic Oath are you can also never perform an abortion and you uh cannot assist in suicide. Really? Yeah. It's not in the current one.
(54:56) Yeah. Well, those are forms of murder, but Yes, of course. Yeah, the uh so it makes sense that this is injecting people with snake DNA, but you know what do I know about snake DNA either? So, you know, maybe it's really good for you. But then on the Israel front too, like not only was Charlie talking differently about um Israeli influence.
(55:18) Oh, sure. In US politics, we had Tucker on stage with like David Saxs and Davidberg uh two nights ago and David Saxs came out and stood up for Tucker. It's like Tucker doesn't have an anti-Semitic bone in his body. Like Israel is a government, a state with an intelligence apparatus and they do uh engage in state craft and it is okay to be critical of the Israeli government where for the longest time it's been conflated.
(55:52) Um, if you if you critique Israel and his potential influence over the United States, you were an anti-semite, which is completely Yeah. What a bunch of losers that say stuff like that. Like, yeah, absolutely insane. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I was going to say I said it on a podcast.
(56:15) I went on the coffee and mic podcast, but it like is like very obviously insane that we have like IPAC and Israel does have very obvious influence over US politicians. And excuse me, Ted Cruz convinced me that Apac is fine, right? It's not weird at all. Yeah, it's your senator, sir. I know, right? You know, I generally like Ted Cruz. I thought that was crazy. Yeah. Um it it was shocking to hear stated that way.
(56:46) I I don't follow politicians like I I I don't know every position that every politician has. I've actually talked to Ted Cruz about Bitcoin before and I found him to be very bright, you know, and so, you know, and not that everyone agrees with me on most things. Uh I it was the logic of his uh conversation with Tucker on that was seemed very strained.
(57:10) Uh, oh, I mean, just even the body language of that Yeah. back and forth was like, "This is weird." Yeah. Yeah. It didn't feel good. Especially, you know, someone who I'd had like a couple interactions with where I was like, "Oh, this guy's smart." Yeah. Like, he seems with it. And then I I I just didn't know his views on this stuff and it uh it surprised me to say the least. And I found it to be incredibly unconvincing. I've heard I've heard him be persuasive before.
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(58:16) That's opportunity cost.app. And I guess this is a good like good theme there like over to window shifting on Bitcoin too. Like I think Oh yeah, the over to window shifted dramatically. And maybe this is we got to find a natural segue to talk about what you're doing. Yeah, we do need to talk about Bitcoin.
(58:32) But let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. I talked to a lot of politicians about Bitcoin. That's changed a lot. Yeah. Well, like let's talk about through the years. Crazy internet money, bunch of computer nerds, uh drug money, Silk Road, uh degenerate gamblers, speculators trying to make a quick buck, Mount Gox era, um continued 2017, 2020.
(58:50) Then obviously Micro Strategy comes out, ETFs announced, Bitcoin strategic reserve executive order. We're at this point and people are talking about Bitcoin as a serious reserve asset that should be implemented in everybody's portfolio from the individual up to the pension, the nation state, whatever it may be. It seems like that's becoming sort of table stakes now.
(59:15) It's becoming recognized as table stakes. If you don't have exposure to Bitcoin, you're an idiot. Um, but over to window still needs to move a bit because it's like, hey, it's just a reserve asset. Doesn't compete with the dollar. It's good to have and we both know Yeah.
(59:36) that these monies compete and ultimately Bitcoin will win out and the the window is just shifting towards that slowly but surely. Yeah. I mean it bears like repeating some of the things you just said too is that especially for Americans, you know, I am one and therefore I I have the best perspective of what this has looked like in America over the years. And you know I I know it's not particularly hip to you know you know shill for you know the government and stuff like that but for the most part with some very egregious exceptions but for the most part honestly it's been nothing but green lights right things are going our way you know um and
(1:00:15) to me that's one it's a little bit surprising but it's also worth pointing out like you know even you know the connection to what we talked about before that Overton window doesn't shift without like brave people, you know, without brave people actually taking action and doing things and making sure that it goes that way.
(1:00:32) It doesn't happen by accident and it's not a coincidence that um things have gone well here. I mean, heck, I'm I'm sitting in Texas. What do we have somewhere like 5 gawatts mining Bitcoin in the state of Texas right now? Something like that. Three to five somewhere in there. That's 30% of the network. Yeah, it's nuts. That's insane.
(1:00:54) I mean, go back seven, eight years, you know, I think it's probably the first time I was on your podcast, you know, uh, or that's not six years, seven years. The idea of that would have been crazy. And you you would have come up with all these reasons that governments wouldn't allow that to happen, that the local government, the state government, the federal government would get in your way.
(1:01:12) And I'm not saying not to be adversarial thinking, like I'm not trying to, you know, again, it's not cool to, you know, shill, but it has been kind of green lights. You know, we're having very advanced talks uh about not whether the United States government should own Bitcoin, but how they should procure it and how much, right? It's not even really a question of whether they should have it.
(1:01:39) Like that's already, you know, in the executive order and we have legislation, you know, that looks to be very popular, uh, working on that exact thing. So, um, honestly, it's hard to embody my, you know, say 2014 self thinking about Bitcoin and, you know, where Mount Gaus goes down and all this type of stuff, you know, happens, you know, it's kind of a dark time. Um, you know, it's been pretty nice. It's gone pretty well.
(1:02:01) Yeah. And the, uh, the resistance has not been particularly effective or strong. Um the the the one I see the most right now that like some people hail is, you know, uh is progress on the Bitcoin front that I really disagree with is the stablecoin side of things. I don't think that that's particularly helpful for Bitcoin. Um I think I think interesting. I'm neutral on them.
(1:02:26) I'm like as a Bitcoiner, as an investor, as somebody who would like to see uh incumbents who have acted what I would deem to be nefariously in the past uh would like to see them uh stumble like lean into stable coins. Like like go for it. I do not care. Like you're you're totally agree with you there.
(1:02:54) you're on you're you're you're focusing on the wrong thing. I find I find it to be a tragic lack of focus. Yeah. Don't interrupt the enemy when they're making mistakes. That's that's my perspective on stable coins and the people um implementing them. Sure. No. Yeah. I mean, I get that.
(1:03:14) I I think the way the particularly the way the US is thinking about stable coins is like very funny to me where they're like, "No, it just needs to be regulated exactly like a bank. You know, you know, the issuer, you know, that's what you're getting at." It's like, "Oh, so just like ruin what stable coins are good at, you know, like the whole point of stable coins, you know, for uh getting around capital controls, you know, immoral capital controls in many cases.
(1:03:37) " Um uh you know, but uh it's like, okay, well then it's not you're just accomplish. It's like a tragic lack of focus. It's like, you know, we're doing this exciting stuff over here. But to your point, as it serves as a uh useful distraction, like sure, you know, whatever. It's Yeah.
(1:03:57) And it's funny, like I think the Genius Act, I mean, you probably understand it way better than I do, but it seems like Circle was pissed that Tether was winning all this business and crushing them. And so they and a couple others who were also not happy with uh Tether eating their lunch, went to the government, said, "You need to regulate this.
(1:04:16) " It's like, okay, be careful what you wish for because if the regulation, if the regulatory mode that you so wish for turns out to be too restrictive for the end user, like you're you're not going to have a market at the end of the day. It's like, do you know why people use Tether? It's not like getting rid of them all of a sudden because you have this this thing.
(1:04:36) It's like, do you think they're going to give you a license to spread dollars around the world while JP Morgan like twiddles their thumbs over here? That they're not going to be like, "Wait, why can't we do that?" You know, like they would do it if they were allowed. If they could, you know, disrupt South Korean, you know, sovereignty and allow you to, you know, dollarize that economy and like get money out and end. Like, of course they would do it.
(1:04:54) You know, you think just because you get rid of Tether that all of a sudden like you're going to be the CH It's so stupid. Yeah. And it is uh and like this I mean and I I don't I'm not saying I would want companies like this to fail, but like Stripe, the Collison twins, like leaning in. It's like how are you guys how are you guys missing that? Like we're going to build our own L1 blockchain for payments and stable coins.
(1:05:18) It's like everyone goes through the ride in their own way, right? I think we talked about it, but this one of the I believe it was John Collison was on the Allen podcast earlier this year and he still doesn't understand the Lightning Network and other second layers exist on Bitcoin. Yeah, I I don't you know I'm hoping that Zapright can like show people that like we've actually we obviously you know sorry I've worked with Zapright right and uh we're doing Bitcoin payments and we talk to these companies um I haven't talked to the Collison brothers about it um but um we do talk to Stripe and we
(1:05:57) talk to Square and we talk to the fiat processors and we talk to the big marketplaces and things like that and Like what I would say is that like what you're saying about a lack of knowledge about how Bitcoin is different from 2015. You saw this in the mining space. Here's a good uh uh comparison. You remember when people first started going out to do like the flare mining and like none of it worked and it kind of poisoned the well for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. I was there and then and then it started working, but like the people that had been burned
(1:06:28) had a really nasty taste in their mouth about it and they were just kind of stuck in what that looked like in 2017, but in 2021 it looked very very different, right? Well, a lot of these marketplaces, a lot of these businesses, a lot of these payment processors, they were doing Bitcoin stuff in 2015. Mhm. they were, you know, uh Dell was accepting Bitcoin.
(1:06:52) Microsoft was accepting Bitcoin, Patreon was accepting Bitcoin, uh uh uh you know, uh Shopify was announcing, you know, all these like different and then it didn't really go anywhere, right? Um and it was clunky and the tools weren't that good and the wallets weren't that great and the support wasn't that great and then they just kind of gave up on it, right? or they just let it sort of die on the vine, right? And so, just like those those uh you know, off-grid miners had this really bad taste in their mouth.
(1:07:24) I would say I would say it's a little bit less than that. They don't feel particularly burned because they didn't invest that much capital into the whole process, but they have they do have a negative view of it as being un unuseful at the at the very most.
(1:07:41) And so a lot of what we work on at Zapright is talking to these companies um and making them see that like hey a a lot's changed in the last you know 10 6 2 years when it uh pertains to the lightning network it support its reliability its um you know uh accessibility its liquidity you know all those things that um or that it exists at all right and it's not just onchain transactions that take 10 minutes or 30 minutes or 50 minutes to settle and so like we you know we're talking to those people all the time and um like I think for like Stripe and place like that they they've gone back and forth a lot right and uh I think right now they're just
(1:08:21) they're seeing this thing that they don't have any previous negative views on and they're like okay we'll give that a shot see how it works good luck yeah it seems like the the whole stable coin landscape is very confused cuz it looks like they're reintroducing the double coincidence of once problem with their sort of siloed stable coin. Sure, project.
(1:08:43) Sure, there's bridges and all these mechanisms, but it just complicates. It adds cost and UX friction that Yeah, once you start getting into atomic swaps and all this, it's like what are we doing, guys? Like just a really easy thing to do over here. Um I don't know. I'm a simple man, Marty.
(1:09:02) You know, um I've been building products, you know, on the internet for a long time here and uh I try to avoid complication wherever possible. Yeah. Well, I mean, just let's do a comparison, too. I think you're in a very unique position at Zap, right? Sort of being in the middle of all these companies.
(1:09:19) So, you compare Stripe's strategy as it pertains to Bitcoin to somebody like Square, which I know you guys have worked closely with. You've implemented it into um the the Square processor into Zapright as an option. And it seems like their team's pretty engaged in in Bitcoin. Like you look at block as a you know a parent company of many um subsidiaries that are focused on different niche markets uh square point of sale for small mediumsiz businesses cash app retail consumer appro now the mining thing like they seem pretty all in on Bitcoin and have taken a long view I believe Cash App launched by Bitcoin at the end of 2017 so
(1:09:57) right around then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. going on eight years now and slowly but surely maturing with Bitcoin, building out their product suite. It's been pretty impressive to see them do that. Oh, it's unbelievable. I I know that like there there's attack vectors even from the Bitcoin side on companies like Square, Block, Cash App. Um I don't know. It looks pretty good to me.
(1:10:20) You know, they built unique things, you know, uh they built different things. It's not exactly what I would have built. I see it as all good uh in general. uh people can buy Bitcoin, people can sell Bitcoin, people can store Bitcoin, people can transact in Bitcoin. Uh it seems like they're they're hitting a lot of good notes there.
(1:10:39) They're funding Bitcoin development uh outside of their own company. So, no, I'm not cynical about that. Um and I I do see like a strategy that that I can only assume is going to pay off very very well in the future, right? I I do think that uh you know they do share a fatal flaw with Stripe which is um that maybe co actually helped a little bit which is you know they're very San Francisco Silicon Valley ccentric right and you know as a broad generalization um that that San Francisco Silicon Valley culture never really understood Bitcoin obviously there are tons of individuals and stuff like that but as a startup culture as a entrepreneurial
(1:11:17) culture as a business building culture and funding culture um never understood Bitcoin. Uh so I think that that's even more impressive that Square has made the progress that they have given that that's sort of the root of their business as well. You know, I used to visit down there in like 2019 or so.
(1:11:36) I went to their offices a few times, talk about Bitcoin stuff, and there's several wonderful Bitcoiners there, but it was very clear to me that that was not a companywide thing. that was a top- down mandate um that we were going to do this and uh I think obviously it's been manifested the most on the cash app side that that's where like it's been a good business for them they make money off of it they you know it's profitable you know all those things but um I I have no reason to believe that these other things won't I'm I'm most excited
(1:12:06) honestly about the point of sale um you know at Zapright we built like this like very you know we call it a companion app point of just sort of the, you know, calculator screen that you could do on your phone if you also had like a a terminal.
(1:12:24) But, um, our hope was, we just did it for people that just needed a little bit of access there. Our hope was always that we would either integrate with another, uh, point of sale, which we still might do, or that someone like Square would just do that part of it and then we'd handle the rest, you know, over here and e-commerce and business invoicing and, you know, stuff like that.
(1:12:44) It's very similar to the decision we just made with uh our latest uh launch on uh ticketing, right? Was that my original goal was oh, we'll just it's very good when you build businesses to have a lot of naivity or else you'd never build these things. And so domain expertise when you're building something is the most overrated.
(1:13:01) And so I was just like, okay, we'll go integrate in with ticket master or Eventbrite or something like that. And then I find out that like the whole way or one of the major ways they make money is siphoning off transaction fees from the fiat payment processes and they're addicted to it and they can't live without it and that you know low low fee transactions from Bitcoin actually is at the heart of their business model and then you look at it and you're like well an event system is not actually that hard to build and so we build that right uh on I just wanted to be a checkout company but
(1:13:30) we're actually becoming more than that. Um, but I'm very glad we don't have to become a point of sale company, you know, in the Square, you know, Stripe or I guess it's a Square world. Sorry, I jumped around quite a bit there. But, um, you know, the point being is that like those companies doing, you know, Stripe is taking a very different angle than Square on this.
(1:13:54) Um, I think that, you know, David Mark has also has recently been talking about this with what I think it's what Stripe's doing. Um, and just saying like to take it from a guy who's been there, right? Uh, you don't want to do this. Um, and of course, you know, he chose as his uh, follow up to Libra being, you know, working on Lightning. Yeah. And now Spark. Yeah. With the state chains.
(1:14:20) And from what I hear, like people are really bullish on Spark. Yeah. I I don't know enough about it uh other than that we are looking at Zaprite and into integrating with it because it is something that's going to be it looks like it's going to be the uh critical infrastructure to a lot of the wallet ecosystem going forward um for a lot of wallets.
(1:14:44) I I I know that like wallet of Satoshi is back in the United States specifically because they're using Spark and so um I think that that's a good thing. Uh I don't know what other wallets are using them yet, but it does seem like there's momentum building there. Pretty sure Breeze implemented it. Breeze. That's right. That is another one. Yeah. And so that's great for someone like us like, you know, we don't operate a wallet.
(1:15:03) We're agnostic to the wallet uh that you choose. It's just we we want you we want you to get more Bitcoin, right? We want whether you're you know you business invoicing or you're selling something online or you know you're running an event you know uh the Bitcoin park people uh here in Austin and in Nashville use uh the ticketing system now if you're going to any of their events in September or NEMS in January next next year is like the whole point is just to get you more Bitcoin right and um you know we look at the wallet ecosystem and we try to
(1:15:35) support as much as we can uh to Hey, you know, come in here, uh, bring your own wallet. We don't ever touch your money. Um, and so I think Spark is actually going to open that up quite a bit. And we we we love seeing stuff like that.
(1:15:54) It's just more options for merchants, more options for individuals to get more Bitcoin. Yeah. Well, let's let's dive into the ticketing. Like, how how hard or easy was it to build? And like, could it be an event? Is is it an overt like event bright ticket master competitor? I I never when we started out doing it like I I always assume things are going to be way harder than they are.
(1:16:18) It's a it's a good mindset to be in when you build software. But um uh relatively speaking, events aren't that complicated. Um and uh now something like what ticket master does where their customers more like uh venues where you have seating charts and all that it gets more complicated there you know getting getting all that information but like what Eventbrite does was just you know I'm doing an event I want to issue tickets I want to be able to you know validate those tickets at a check-in things like that it's pretty simple actually um and of course we already had all the fun checkout stuff right so we
(1:16:54) just had to apply what we were already good at to these events and what became very clear to us was that the integration path was going to be very very long. I would still we would integrate in a second to any of these systems you know when it happens but then we started actually using the product that we had built.
(1:17:14) I was like, "Oh this might be better." Like this is supposed to be a lightweight and it is in in some ways there there's a lot of features that are missing that that you would get in like an Eventbrite that that we are planning on building like say transferring tickets like once you buy them transferring to other people.
(1:17:31) You can technically do it but you have to kind of go out of band in order to do that. So I'm I'm not claiming that feature for feature we've matched necessarily the the legacy uh uh ticketing system. However, what I would say is that it is surprisingly functional. It is surprisingly nice. Um, and in a lot of ways, it's already better uh because of the way we integrate both fiat and Bitcoin.
(1:17:56) Um, it's easy. You know, Apple wallet has changed us a little bit on the fiat side, although most people are still using credit cards online and things like that, is that uh just the process of paying in Bitcoin. there's a lot of friction that gets tak taken out of the sale both as like someone who's buying something but for your merchant to actually like close a deal to actually get conversions.
(1:18:20) Um if you're doing an event and uh and you have to put in, you know, what is all the billing information on your, you know, credit card, you know, all this stuff or just show them a QR code and they can, you know, zap over, you know, the 300 bucks for the for the event right away. um the actual friction in the checkout process because Bitcoin is put on the same level as fiat transaction methods, it's really nice and the conversions come through.
(1:18:46) Um so, you know, going back to your original questions, like there are some things that are hard, uh but for the most part, it's not rocket science. You know, it's it's a CRUD app, right? Um we've we we've built those before. Um, but we have great UX, great design, and more than anything, we have um a great checkout process that helps event organizers convert sales.
(1:19:10) Yeah. And I I think if you're trying to accumulate Bitcoin and you have something that is almost at parody with Eventbrite, like why leave SATs on the table? Exactly. Complicate your path to SATs by going fiat only and having to convert. And obviously for those who are unaware of Zapright like this is not Bitcoin only like you'll have an event you'll use Zaprite to sell tickets to that event and people can pay in Bitcoin or fiat. Yeah.
(1:19:40) I want to get ahead of something cuz you know we haven't I don't know if we've ever talked Zapright together. Maybe we have. Um we have me and you like on on the show. Okay. I all I have in my head is war mode. That was so much fun. We need to do that again. We do. Uh these guys have already slipped up. Uh no, I mean I want to get ahead of you know like you know we don't have like a bcasher mentality on any of this stuff.
(1:20:03) Like obviously I'm building a product and it's a two-sided market and I'm going to make both sides of the market a fabulous experience if you're a payer with Bitcoin or if you're receiving Bitcoin. But make no mistake, this is built Zaprite exists for people to stack sats for people to accept Bitcoin for people who want Bitcoin.
(1:20:26) And everyone's like, well, who would in their right mind would, you know, pay their hard-earned s? It's like, that's not the point. The point is there are people who want Bitcoin. It was the motivation when I joined Unchained, right, was I love the custody model. And the feature I had in my head the entire time when I joined Unchained was buy Bitcoin directly to cold storage with keys that you control.
(1:20:45) Can I get the Unchained vault, you know, and instead of buying over here and then sending it over, can I just have it go there directly? Right? Same thing with Zapright is that I want more Bitcoin. And so if I run a business and I'm sending out invoices, I'm realistic. You know, maybe most of my transactions are going to happen in fiat. Fine.
(1:21:05) I'm going to accumulate the Bitcoin that I can by putting Bitcoin on the same level as fiat there. And for most of our customers, most of our customers get actually quite a bit of Bitcoin. But for for some of them, minority of them, they'll be on Zapright for 3 months. they'll get zero Bitcoin transactions.
(1:21:23) Four months, zero Bitcoin transactions. Five months starts coming in, you know, and then it goes from 1% to 3% to 5% of their sales. On the event side, I think that there's kind of two things. One is there's a lot of Bitcoin ccentric events uh organized by people who are motivated to accumulate more Bitcoin. I want to help them.
(1:21:46) Those are my people, right? I want to help them get more Bitcoin and getting Bitcoin for events outside of Prague. The Bitcoin Prague guys, they were so motivated that they basically built their own, you know, system that's very very good, but it's not extensible. It's not usable for for other event organizers.
(1:22:05) Most of those people really do they would prefer getting Bitcoin for the hard work they put on uh doing the meetup or doing the event or doing the, you know, whatever they're doing. And then, you know, I look at this and I'm uh, you know, looking at other uh, event organizers out there and a lot of them would maybe they're not as motivated as the big conferences that we go to, but they would like some Bitcoin. They would like if 5% of their sales came in through Bitcoin.
(1:22:29) These are people doing music festivals and stuff like that. So, yeah, the motivation, you know, here is very much, you know, how do we allow these businesses who are motivated to receive Bitcoin do that? And I mean, you know, without sounding egotistical or anything, it's like we definitely have built the best way to do that.
(1:22:48) You definitely have. I mean, here at TFTC, if you go to TFTC merch.io, uh, and you buy one of our hats, we use that break for checkout. Pretty confident 90% of the sales are in Bitcoin. And we have fiat as an option. But to that point, I'm going screen share here. Uh, free ad for my favorite soap. But I think it's a perfect example. Well, if you have a product that's good enough and you are Oh, that's right.
(1:23:13) demanding Bitcoin, like I love this soap. I've been using it for the last 6 months and it is now my go-to soap. I'm buying a bit every month and you can only pay in Bitcoin. And so, and you guys have made it. So, I go I might check out. I go to check out, put in the information.
(1:23:36) Um, I can't do it now because I'm not going to put in my information, but like you click this and it's like I can only pay in Bitcoin. And this is a product that I have deemed um so good that if the only way I can get it is paying in Bitcoin, I'm going to pay in Bitcoin. Yeah.
(1:23:53) Powered by Zap, right? It's the way things work, right? The the incentive is there because you can't get the product otherwise. We have we have a few merchants that are like that. Um and um yeah, I mean, so it's it's it's built for those people, right? And uh I don't know if any of you out there are, you know, hosting a meetup and, you know, doing any of those things or have have an adventure yourself.
(1:24:11) I I would encourage you to try it out. Like I'm I'm I'm pretty excited about this one. Uh it's a really really good product and I think of the world in terms of really good products and this one is one of the one of the better ones out there. What is the uh the UX flow like if somebody has an event? Yeah. They have a gap right account.
(1:24:31) We focus more on the ticketing side of it than the event side. So if you have an event and it, you know, has a date and a location and all those things, it's there, but it's not, this isn't like a marketing website builder for your event.
(1:24:49) If you are on Squarespace or you're on some other, you know, website builder, you know, especially if your um uh conference or something like that is bigger, you probably have a lot of marketing assets out there. Um, now you can use it as a standalone. It has all the information that someone would need, but we really focus on the ticketing aspect of creating those tickets.
(1:25:08) Um, you have, you know, more advanced features like, uh, you know, having, uh, a stock or a max order per buy. You have all those sort of familiar things that you would get in, uh, a more advanced ticketing system. Um, and then, uh, you have this landing page, which is basically a a muted or smaller amount of information about the event itself.
(1:25:30) Um, and then you have, you know, the list of tickets, increment them, buy them, and really, you know, you know, what we're really good at is the checkout side, right, of once you've determined how many tickets you're going to buy, uh, going there and being able to buy in whatever the merchant is allowing, you know, whether that's credit card and and lightning or that's onchain and Apple Pay, you know, any of those combinations are all there, and you get to determine how uh what order they go in.
(1:25:55) if you add a discount or a premium to a certain type of payment. Uh all of that's still there. Everything that uh people are are sort of used to with our payment links and and invoices and things like that. Um and then on the merchant side, uh you have three ways to check people in. Uh we have a ticket scanner. It's a secret URL.
(1:26:15) you can share that secret URL with uh you know if you have uh event uh volunteers or anything like that that um are checking people in uh that will scan the tickets uh that are delivered via email. Those tickets by the way for your in customer they can they can be added to your Google wallet, your Apple wallet, you know, like any other real ticketing system.
(1:26:35) So you can scan people in there. We have um another check-in uh process that's native to the actual web app that you can uh do as well if you want to manually check people in without scanning. And then of course you can print things out where we give you a nice list of everyone who's bought tickets and whatever information you've gathered about them so that you can validate their entry for like a offline backup. So there's three ways to check people in. Um you can you can undo it.
(1:27:00) There are some features that will come down, you know, you know, in the future. Things like transferring tickets, things like, you know, uh, allowing, you know, having a more sophisticated understanding of allowing re-entries. But for right now, for the vast majority of, uh, events out there, what you see will get you will get you there.
(1:27:19) Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a well-baked MVP. I'll put it that way. It's definitely viable. And like this I think this part is still so cool to me. like connect the wallet like cold card being part of it. Like the thought that you could have an event like this be a business and the sales, let's say it's a high ticket item, you're you're selling like a $1,000 ticket.
(1:27:47) It's like boom, you can send it right to cold card and have that in cold storage in your your business wallet. It is one of the things that event organizers struggle with a lot is that when you know, you know, with any event, most of your ticket sales happen the closer you get to the actual event, right? But you have to put up a lot of capital beforehand to actually build out, you know, the venue, the you know, you know, the lodging, you know, all the things that you need to spend money on.
(1:28:11) And so when you're also sort of subject to a payment processor that holds your funds for 30, 60, 90 days before they pay you out, right? Whatever their policy is, or can put a hold on that fund. Uh you you've heard this before, you know, hold on the funds because of some, you know, you got tripped up and and uh some uh incorrect fraud automatic mechanism in their system and your funds are held up.
(1:28:40) is that uh especially for Bitcoin uh events is like you might have uh obligations denominated in Bitcoin. So you're getting this stuff right away that you can then use towards the event. Pay your people, pay your suppliers, pay your uh hard costs and all that is that getting getting the money directly to you is a is a huge advantage. Yeah, it really is.
(1:29:04) And I can attest to that as a business owner accepting both uh Bitcoin and fiat. Yeah, sharing here. Yeah, it's fun stuff. Yeah, I thought it was important to bring up the block because just help people visualize it for sure. Anybody watching on YouTube and if if you've ever done it, it feels very familiar.
(1:29:29) That's one of the things I wanted to make sure is that like if you're used to if you run an event before, you're going to see most of what you need right there, right now. And of course, you know, it's going to get better over time. We just launched it um I believe on Monday. Um so uh while it's a young product it is pretty fully baked. I mean just having Apple wallet functionality alone I think that that is what people I mean that is what I've come to um see as a mustave for events like physically physically getting tickets these days is a or even like having to go to the email and find the QR code. Yeah. Um yeah, that that's like ah this is so this is the old way of doing it
(1:30:06) like just being like add it to the wallet. Yeah. I took our oldest to the uh the Phillies game this summer and it was just like boom went to ticket master had the wallets on my had the tickets on my phone. Sure. And it was very easy. And then the tickets now it's like NFC. You don't even have to do the QR code. It's just like boop boop.
(1:30:23) Yeah. Right now we're still doing QRS even on the Apple wallet side of things. Funny enough is like I I do a lot of I go to a lot of sporting events and stuff like that. the the QR is actually faster for checking in, which is which is a nice thing. You've done it before. You put your phone up and guys like moving it around and trying to get the NFC thing to work.
(1:30:42) Uh NFC is one of those things we do want to still support, but you know, in our test of like, you know, lining up people at Pleb Lab and scanning them in is that the uh QR reader even on the u the Apple wallet much faster actually for getting people in. That's interesting. Yeah. Or sorry, it's not necessarily as much faster. It it works the first time more often. Yeah.
(1:31:06) Well, shifting gears a little bit, but really diving into the process of building this product. That's something I miss dearly about being uh in Bitcoin Park Austin is being around you and others in the space. Um particularly as you implement AI into your production flows. Sure. That's fun.
(1:31:25) Let's talk about that because I know you you guys have really been leaning into that at Zap, right? Yes. Um, eventually I'll become a programmer because of it. Uh, I'm not quite there yet. Uh, I've done a little programming in my past, but I am decidedly not a programmer. No, I mean there are definitely people that have leaned into this more than we have.
(1:31:41) However, I will say that like we're pretty motivated. We're small team, right? So any, you know, we have two full-time, one part-time uh, uh, developers um, you know, we're a team of, you know, five, six people. And so, uh, on the AI side of things, it it definitely helps like like what I've seen from, you know, people using, uh, COD, uh, claude code and cursor and, uh, these models is that like even the difference in the last 6 months is is shocking.
(1:32:15) Um, we've even had, you know, very close to an entire, you know, a small well-defined simple bug that goes into our ticketing system that gets picked up, you know, by AI agent that attempts to fix it and uh, puts up a PR that then needs to be reviewed.
(1:32:37) We've had that process go through on very, very small things um, uh, without human intervention, which is pretty wild, you know. Um, and I know there's people doing more sophisticated stuff out there, but that's a really exciting thing to see that like someone can put in a bug into a ticketing system that an AI agent can pick it up that it can discern what needs to be done to fix that bug.
(1:32:55) It can make a suggestion and create the code and put it up for review by a human. And that at least once we've had that happen to where we were like, "All right, put it live." That's right. Yeah. What was the bug? I can't remember. It was it was very it was I don't want to call it trivial but it it was a it was a very easy bug to fix right uh I can't remember exactly what it was um but uh it was small in nature it wasn't super complicated and we were all surprised now and then but but it's easy to extrapolate is what I'm trying to say is like that might have been a very trivial
(1:33:30) small thing but um you know I you know we're both friends with you know Amjad at Replet and we're seeing you know the end to end uh processes that they're working towards, right? is that like you know he just came out with his whole you know uh you know yeah you can get AI to write this code but there's there's hundreds of hours that go into like maintaining it and like you know you know reviewing it and QAing it and doing all these things and rewriting it and refactoring and doing all this stuff you know that's for building like an entire app but in terms of like
(1:34:02) supercharging an individual's productivity um you know uh we we I I've seen in it be it is hard I I I don't want to use the wrong word it's shocking it is shocking uh walking into that world even even on the product management side writing specs and like coming up with the stuff doing really research and stuff like that everything the whole production line of software development it is uh it's impactful everywhere and that's that's what I was going to ask if you had to attempt to quantify Like from a manpower perspective, like
(1:34:48) how many more people do you think you'd need to hire to get the same results by um if you were to do this without AI? All right, I'm going to say this and then I'm going to double check with, you know, Tom and Nate and Nick who are doing all the programming on our side to see if I lied to the audience and I'll tweet if I if I lied or not.
(1:35:12) I would I I I I would say they would say that it's as if we have somewhere between like two to four junior developers working with us on top of what they do because most of these people are all like we don't have any junior developers. These are very senior programmers that that work work at Zaprite right now and my guess is they would say it's somewhere around two to four junior developers working with us the way we're utilizing UI uh or AI right now which is not even its full extent. I would also say that, you know, one of those junior developers is John McIll, like our CEO. Like he's getting
(1:35:43) he's getting a lot of PRs in these days, you know. Um I'm going to be following suit here. Like John's uh more capable programmer than I am uh as a designer, but uh I'm getting a little bit jealous now.
(1:36:04) So like even someone like John is in there with some of the easier tasks um and can use cursor cloud code to get them there all the way. Yeah. And if we're trying to quantify that monetary, let's just say junior developer makes 150. Yeah. On consumer somewhere around there. Yeah. You're saving. Yeah. Saving between 300 and 600 grand a year. Yeah. And more than anything for a company like ours, it's not even saving money.
(1:36:22) We're just getting to do stuff we wouldn't be able to do otherwise cuz we didn't have the money to spend that on that anyway or we didn't want to spend our money that way, right? And so all of a sudden our output I mean Zapright is not a tiny project. you. It's not a huge project, but it's not a tiny project.
(1:36:40) And what we've been able to accomplish with a very small team is honestly, it's just not really possible, you know, 10 years ago. Like, you don't build you don't build an application to Zapright's stature with with four or five people. No. Just not a thing. It's so crazy. That's shocking. It's it it fits my personality so so much.
(1:37:04) just like every time a company gets big, I want to go start another one, you know, and uh knowing that like maybe I've stumbled into a world where um the company doesn't have to get big for the product to get big, you know. Uh that would be very fun for me. Uh, and then we'll see if I just have commitment issues.
(1:37:24) And uh, well, I mean, it is I think it's you're a fascinating individual because you've seen both ends of the spectrum um, being very high up at Stack Overflow for for many years. Talk about AI. Yikes. Yeah. Are you are you willing to tell your uh, Stack Overflow AI story? Oh, I mean, yeah, I'll say a little bit about it is that, you know, one is, you know, I worked at Stack Overflow for eight years.
(1:37:50) Uh, all that time I was into Bitcoin, but I was very excited about Stack Overflow. It was a incredibly rewarding business and product uh to work on and um and one of those things where it's like you know I could even rationalize how I was helping Bitcoin at the time the the Bitcoin stack exchange you know Peter Woola and Jimmy Song and Merch and all these guys still to this day you know there's a huge repository of Bitcoin stuff I helped start the Bitcoin stack exchange from the inside that was very fun um and then of course you know Stack Overflow itself and the the the aid it to programmers. You know,
(1:38:23) it's it's fun watching I I like watching all these AI companies getting so psyched on their work, especially when it comes to uh what they're doing in the programming world because I live that like I remember when Stackerflow would go down and what Twitter would look like. It's like well can't do my job today. It's like it was an impactful place to work. It was very fun.
(1:38:42) Um and the product was very good uh until the end. Um and uh but there was this moment like I don't know I want to say 2018 2019 where um chat bots you you you'd hear a lot about chat bots and it's the same thing we're talking about now it's just the LLMs but they weren't they just weren't very good yet you know they're very clunky but it was it was all the buzz in Silicon Valley and and while Stack Overflow wasn't a Silicon Valley company we were very attached to that culture even though we were in New York.
(1:39:13) Um, and of course all of our clients and everything were in Silicon Valley for the most part. And so chat bots were kind of the rage, right? And I remember you we were working on an integration with Microsoft on Visual Studio where you could kind of do some of the things you can do now which are like you could highlight code and then it would you know come up with this chatbot basically inside Visual Studio and uh say oh here's why you're having this bug you know based off of Stack Overflow data you know using a neural network that no
(1:39:48) one knew how it worked or anything like that. Uh that was really really fun and the pro the only problem with that it was unbelievable product except it just didn't work like the UX was great and like all these things were really cool. It's just you just got wrong answers.
(1:40:07) It was like and I remember when when Joel left and everything um and we were getting you know new management and some stuff like that. It was uh like I couldn't help but just, you know, tell all the new guys that came in after Joel uh or really just the new CEO. It wasn't like a whole management change. It was really just the CEO was just like, "Yeah, but imagine if it did work.
(1:40:26) Wouldn't this be the greatest product?" He was like, "No, but it doesn't. So, we're going to focus on this other stuff." I was like, "But it might, you know, uh" and of course eventually it did work. Um and uh and uh Stack's not really a part of it, unfortunately.
(1:40:45) Um, or I mean I know they're trying and I don't want to be too gloomy on it, but I think maybe stacks had its day in the sun and uh uh Oh, yeah. And I would imagine that a lot of these coding LLM specifically probably trained off of a lot of the uh information on Stack Overflow. Of course they did. Right. I mean, well, that was the other thing is uh it's all creative comments. That was that was the case the whole time.
(1:41:10) We we had tons of knockoff Stack Overflows uh throughout the years, especially in China and Russia in particular um that were, you know, just because all of the data was creative common and that was very important to Joel when he started out and like was a very noble thing to do. Um and it it was in direct response to you know Stack Overflow had a boogeyman that they were trying to unseat which was experts exchange where you had to like go pay for answers and all this stuff.
(1:41:36) Um but it was uh you know one of the reasons for its success was that it was creative common so people could go in there and you know create unimaginable value for the world of programmers right it the the value I mean like the way people would talk about Stack Overflow in 2017 2018 2019 um it was so crucial to the productivity of the programming workforce it was indispensable right in the same way that cursor and cloud code and all these things are becoming indispensable now.
(1:42:10) I mean that was it right and a lot of that value though was created because it was creative common like people wouldn't have contributed as much if they knew that we were just going to monetize their answers and and keep it in this uh walled garden. It was about as close as we could get for as a forprofit business of being like kind of open source uh was open sourcing all the question answer pairs and the voting and all that type of stuff.
(1:42:38) And some people, you know, the promise was always if we do a bad job, you can take the data and start up your own thing with all that. Like it's your data. It's not ours. And uh you know, it's both part of its success and part of its demise. You know, at the end of the day, it's because uh I don't think anyone broke any laws uh or or any uh user agreements or anything training off of that.
(1:42:57) Now, I do know that they have some form and I'm not privy to what Stack Overflow's been doing or their strategy or anything for the past uh 5 years, but um I do know they have some agreements with Google Open AAI. I think they're getting paid something, but I I don't think it's um uh I do I don't think it is uh correlating with the value that stack gave those uh very well. Yeah, that's a fascinating time.
(1:43:23) Yeah. stack just was a a very necessary product like as you said increased the productivity of the uh of the software engineer workforce massively and it's like it's like this connective product um company to to the AI world. Yeah.
(1:43:50) But you know you know going back to Bitcoin, Bitcoin saved me from becoming a hasb been which is like it would have been very easy. I remember I mean part of it's just being in your 20s but I remember like building in you know the you know you know early 2000s you know when when stacks coming alive in 2008 um is like I I I would look with contempt on the people like yeah but I built geocities I'm like ah who cares you know geio cities was a huge deal you know and now I'm that has been except that I get to keep on building really amazing stuff with uh with Bitcoin so I I I don't uh define my it wasn't my last chapter. So yeah, that that that's good.
(1:44:27) And uh I know we're running long here. We've had a very robust meandering conversation about many different topics, but one thing just to really lean into the Bitcoin side of things, what you're building at Zap, right? Um Sure. one question um that we'll be asking portfolio companies at 10:31 um at a retreat this year, which I'm I'm fine to open source on the uh on the podcast right now, but is uh what doesn't exist in the industry right now that Zapright probably won't build but you think should be built that could help you guys? Oh man.
(1:45:07) uh just on the software side, not on the policy side cuz I would change a lot of policy things as well. Um jeez, I mean I it it's hard to narrow down only because you know anything that money touches that Bitcoin is not predominantly featured in right now. Um I think that you know Bitcoin will be there.
(1:45:30) So um you know on the Zapright side there's all these integrations I want to do you know like there's all you know I don't want to rebuild Patreon. I just want you to be able to use Patreon and accept Bitcoin. You know, I don't want to rebuild YouTube. I just want you to be able to be paid in Bitcoin if you're already a content creator over there, right? And so there's, you know, we chose to build business invoicing in a very like robust way or or or the ticketing events um event tickets in a really robust way. But, you know, we're not going to build YouTube and we're not
(1:46:02) going to build Patreon and we're not going to build all these places where people that run businesses. Um, so there's kind of two things. There's one is u you can do what Zapright's doing and try to integrate with them or just pick your your point or you can go build YouTube.
(1:46:21) You know, you can do that uh in a Bitcoin ccentric way. Podcasting is is a little bit interesting because there's been a lot of podcasting tools. um you know the you know uh Adam Curry and stuff like that that have uh been trying to make sure that content creators there can um uh can you know accept Bitcoin but then there's all like the ancillary stuff and I know that there are some things that are working on this so I'm not trying to badmouth any startups that are out there trying to solve these problems um but a lot of the financial tools around accounting right
(1:46:52) it's not there yet right like it's still a little bit of a struggle Um there are good products out there. Uh I would say we're still waiting for those products to become great or for the existing infrastructure around uh uh accounting to become great, right? Um there's, you know, the treasury management like the castle guys are working on it, you know. Um there's all sorts of stuff like that.
(1:47:16) There's different ways uh like I like what the anchor watch guys are doing. You know, I feel like there's a lot custody in a lot better shape than it used to be. There's endless ways to play with that problem, right? Um that uh are suitable to very specific industries, uh types of businesses, things like that.
(1:47:41) Um I would say that uh gosh, what else have I been thinking about recently? Um, I think that on the, you know, other side is like I worry about with AI, uh, Bitcoin miners. I don't worry. Sorry, worry is the wrong word. Bitcoin miners are going to be fine. They're vultures. You know, they know how to survive.
(1:48:03) But, um, they have a lot more competition for power now. The I mean, like the AI stuff is is power hungry. And so I would like to see um uh uh Bitcoin companies that are also power producers actually behind the meter owning power production. So there's a lot of products out there and and things out there I'd like to see, but um I know from from our our side of things that, you know, we're both going to we're going to try to integrate until it's impossible to do so and then we'll build it ourselves.
(1:48:38) Yeah. And that's what I was going to say on the electricity side. The uh before I get to the electricity side, just on that point, like reason we're bringing this up and at 10:31 and just one to see if there's ways that companies in the portfolio can collaborate.
(1:48:56) And then number two, just like also to highlight the the massive opportunity that exists out there. Still so much to build. Um there's so much to build and I you know, I'll throw it out there. We we have a talent problem. We need more talent coming into Bitcoin. We just need it. And domain expertise is overrated. If as long as you have a positive view of Bitcoin, um your skill set, whether you're a software developer or a salesperson or marketer, it's like we really do need those people working at Bitcoin companies. Yeah.
(1:49:27) And just to tie tie a knot in the bow of your Bitcoin mining point, I think this chart highlights like this the miners are going to get if they're consuming electricity at these rates. Uh not going to be profitable. It's up to 19 cents per kilowatt hour on average in US cities. You're kidding.
(1:49:51) Oh, is that is that is that uh retail pricing? Uh it's not industrial. average price electricity per kilowatt hour in US city average. Um, okay. But this is this is not a good chart for the United States. And not only I mean unless Bitcoin's a million dollars with the current hash rate, then it's fine. Yeah, then it's fine. But I think this is this is a a bigger problem for the US generally.
(1:50:15) I think electricity is the raw input of Yeah, we got to build it everything. We got to build gas plants. We got to we got to reinstitute our coal plants. We got to I mean nuclear I don't even like talking about nuclear. It's just so state captured. Um build natural gas plants. Build coal plants. Build solar plants. I don't care. Build solar plants. They're great. Yeah.
(1:50:35) No, but we I mean we've long a lot of our conversations have been about CPI and how it's bunk. And it's funny because you get this info from the Federal Reserve and the source is the BLS which creates the CPI. And you just look at this cost per kilowatt hour in cities and it's up 35 40% in 5 years. It doesn't seem like uh what's actually being reported. Uh we need more generation.
(1:51:01) And I wrote about this chart last week cuz I had a feeling an intuition, a knowledge that electricity prices were going up based off of my monthly payment, but I hadn't taken the time to look at this chart and it's jarring. This that's I mean this jump that is and then this one here it looks like we're breaking away again. Uhhuh. It's going straight up.
(1:51:21) That's the wrong type of uh up and to the right. Well, I mean well we also have a new entrant into the space that is not price sensitive. No. And but they also I mean you know so much more about this than I do. They're burning so much like I wonder like they're at some point they will become that. Yeah. But it is crazy because as we discussed here, like the productivity of AI is undeniable.
(1:51:46) Undeniable. Like I'm you've seen the videos we've generated. It's like we have a team of three. Yeah. And we're generating videos that probably would have cost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in a week uh for $200 of tokens. Sure. It's insane.
(1:52:04) Um, but with that being said, there's a ton of this just the this sector of the market's being flooded with money. Whether or not these companies are actually profitable in burning this much cash is sustainable, I think is yet to be determined. Yeah. I I mean, I know that the programming side of it is sustainable because, you know, if you're paying uh mid-level programmer $200,000 a year and you can profitably sell them an AI agent, you know, for 300 bucks a month, it's like that's a no-brainer, you know, and uh some of the other applications for it, you know, uh
(1:52:41) I don't know if that'll be profitable, but certainly for the programming world, it's it's going to be profitable. Um, and uh, you know, I'll also say, you know, one of the fun things is, you know, I know everyone knows you as, you know, Uncle Marty the podcaster, but like you're also quite the product guy, you know, like we we got to do this a lot together. And even the stuff we we played with really early on. I remember the Verscell tool, VO or Vzero.
(1:53:07) Um, that now is just incredible. just just getting over the one hump of you can't iterate on a previously done image or you know CSS file you had to start over from scratch and now that you can actually go from something and not just say like no try it again be better here it's just like no take this bit of it you know the building UIs and building um u you know mobile flows and stuff like it's it's crazy that I mean we were we were playing with that like nine months ago and it was like it's almost useful now it's great And you're able to
(1:53:40) employ it not just in your videos, but you have to set up web stores and you have to do all this other stuff. I'm sure you're using it there, too. Yeah, we are. Yeah. And that like I remember I viv remember you pulling me into the room uh in the park and uh it was just for wireframing, but it was crazy even then how you were incredible. And then they had some open source models that we played with.
(1:54:02) I'm very bullish on the open source side right now as well. Um I I watch I have some friends and I've seen Tony and the the Maple AI guys, you know, uh exclusively focus on the open source models um in their uh private AI chats, but also like people running them locally. Um that that's looking like uh something that we didn't get with the first wave of the internet, right? You never got private search, you know? it didn't doesn't really make sense, right? Is that uh there there is a the a side of the AI side that is actually um exciting and sort of antithetical to the
(1:54:42) way um early internet companies grew by basically monetizing spying on you, right? Um and that while a lot of these AI companies are going to spy on you, no doubt is that um you actually have an alter like a viable alternative here which is very exciting. Yeah, it's uh I'm happy we're ending on this very gloomy first half of the conversation but there are things to be optimistic about.
(1:55:12) We have tools to make the world a better place to make better products to do things never doom. Never doom. Never doom. Things may be dark. Go to church, have kids. Yeah. Yeah. Live the way Charlie would have wanted you to. That was There you go. Right there. Yeah. We'll end it here. You enjoy your day. Yeah. You too, man. Keep crushing it. Go to zaprite.com. Check out the ticketing app.
(1:55:38) If you're a Bitcoin or a business owner and you're not using Zapright for invoicing, do it. I've been using it for 3 years now and it's only gotten better. our revenue in Bitcoin is going up consistently as it's just be I think I think it's just uh um I think it's just uh like the thing in marketing how many touch points till you get a conversion for us how many zap invoices with a paying bitcoin option do we have to get before people just say I'll pay in bitcoin we've seen that go up significantly I love hearing that just makes me so
(1:56:08) happy yeah so thank you for building it you're welcome all right peace and love freaks Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there.
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