0:03

Before the first time in the beginning of the year.

0:05

And

0:09

We are

0:11

Ken

0:12

Jennings and John Roderick. We

0:14

speak to you from our present which we can only

0:16

assume is your distant past, the turbulent

0:18

time that was the early twenty first century.

0:21

Fearing the great cataclysm that will surely

0:23

befall our civilization we began this

0:25

monumental reference of strange and obscure

0:27

human knowledge.

0:28

These recordings represent our attempt to compile

0:31

and preserve wonders and esoterica that

0:33

would otherwise must be lost. So

0:35

whether you're listening from an advanced civilization

0:37

or have just reinvented the technology to

0:39

decrypt our transmissions,

0:41

this is our legacy to you. This

0:43

is our time capsule. This

0:45

is the omnibus.

1:13

You have accessed entry 126

1:16

dot JV 1304

1:19

Certificate number 11904

1:22

Bitcoin Pizza Day.

1:25

So

1:25

we all agree changes, Bad.

1:27

Progress doesn't work. Handy's

1:29

scheme? Bad. So

1:31

how much Bitcoin do you own?

1:33

Let

1:33

me check. Let me just look and see how

1:35

it's doing today. I Zero

1:39

Bitcoin. Zero Bitcoin.

1:42

I also own zero Bitcoin. Oh,

1:44

our our investments are are kind of

1:46

matching each other. Yeah. Do you remember

1:49

when you first heard of Bitcoin?

1:52

I don't,

1:55

but it was years and years ago

1:57

--

1:58

Yeah. -- where it

1:59

was hey,

2:01

this is a new

2:03

crazy thing. Yeah. Why should

2:06

governments

2:06

have anything to do with currency?

2:09

Why

2:09

indeed? And in

2:11

the following decade, we have discovered. I

2:15

was, you know, I was

2:17

early

2:18

adopter of Twitter, and

2:22

and I was lurking on Fortune

2:24

a lot during those days.

2:27

And

2:27

What could go wrong? I know. What could go wrong?

2:29

I think it was before Fortune became

2:31

a a complete cesspool

2:33

when it was back when it was

2:36

like, only ninety percent a

2:38

sex a cesspool and a cesspool.

2:41

Yeah. You were there for the cesspool and then it became

2:43

a cesspool. Yeah. And so

2:45

in two thousand nine, when Bitcoin

2:48

first arrived on the scene, I I

2:50

don't think I was aware of it in two thousand nine,

2:52

but But

2:53

quickly thereafter, I started to read

2:55

about it. And and,

2:58

you know, the the Fortune bros

3:00

were very much

3:03

early adopters of

3:05

of every kind of that sort

3:07

of no way. If you can

3:09

believe it, And I remember,

3:12

you know, distinctly when Bitcoin was

3:15

was

3:16

it was valued at only a few

3:19

cents. or, you know, less than fifty cents.

3:21

And

3:22

thinking, you know, what's

3:24

the worse it can happen? I should buy

3:27

some of these. and

3:29

then thinking, oh,

3:31

oh you

3:33

know, it just feels like throwing five hundred

3:35

dollars into the garbage.

3:36

to buy a thousand of these. So super fun?

3:39

Oh, right. No. That's different for that's a different emotion

3:41

for you then. Yeah. I know five hundred dollars that you

3:43

spend on cigars and steaks makes

3:45

perfect sense to me, but five hundred dollars to

3:47

buy these dumb things. And then,

3:49

of course, when they were a dollar,

3:51

worth a dollar, it it seemed like,

3:53

wow, you know, I missed my chance. Five

3:55

hundred of them isn't ever gonna be worth anything.

3:58

Five hundred dollars being, you know,

3:59

the most I typically invest in anything. Now and

4:02

remind me the timeline here. The the far future

4:04

is not gonna have tracked the beginning of

4:06

Bitcoin as closely as you. How long ago

4:08

-- Sure. -- how yes. on. Quite certain.

4:10

How long ago would this have been? Two

4:13

thousand ten. Okay.

4:15

This is literally the ground floor. Yeah.

4:18

Yeah. I mean, two thousand ten,

4:20

two thousand eleven. But you know, then I didn't I

4:22

think I was a few years later. It went

4:24

from a dollar to a

4:26

hundred dollars pretty fast. you

4:28

know, in that first few years, but

4:30

then it kinda petered along at a

4:32

hundred, two hundred, three hundred,

4:35

up

4:35

and down, up and down,

4:37

And

4:37

even and when it was a

4:39

hundred dollars and it seemed like, wow,

4:41

buying buying fifty of these

4:43

would be, that's a substantial amount of

4:45

money. That's one homeowner monetary

4:47

unit, you could put a new roof on the barn for

4:49

five thousand bucks. I mean, you probably have

4:51

that just in ingot sitting by your door.

4:55

Yeah. Sure. But you but you wanted to

4:57

keep it in door ingots. It felt

4:59

it felt to me like like a silver

5:01

ingot was a better investment. And

5:03

the thing is I understood the

5:05

concept because

5:07

I had it explained to me

5:09

by all the the teenagers who

5:11

were busy doc mixing cheerleaders

5:13

with with a thousand pizzas. It

5:16

explained, you and

5:18

and it's not hard to understand.

5:20

the basically,

5:22

it's the idea

5:24

of a return to the gold standard. It's

5:26

a it's a finite thing.

5:28

All money is fake as we know.

5:30

and

5:32

money is made

5:34

more fake all the time by

5:36

the fact that governments just print more of it. And

5:38

sometimes when I draw a little moustaches on presence.

5:41

That's right. Yeah. That's right. If you if you

5:43

if you stamp your twenty dollar

5:45

bills with a stamp that says

5:47

this is a timber dollar, and

5:50

we eat spotted owls up up here

5:52

in Packwood, it invalidates the

5:54

money. I just put my little sovereign citizen.

5:56

stamp on it. I just gotta sign. That pick a word

5:58

that begins with a vowel

5:59

and

5:59

then a consonant or whatever. And then it

6:02

all the money's mine. Your

6:04

phone is always a submarine. Well and

6:06

you know what's what's crazy about

6:08

this phone call is it

6:10

says that it's my personal banker

6:12

at Wells Fargo calling. maybe

6:14

calling me to say that he invested all my stuff all

6:16

my my

6:18

my minimal savings in

6:20

Bitcoin Like, is did it say the name or does it

6:22

just say my personal banker at Wells Fargo

6:24

on your funds? No. No. No. It has his name too.

6:26

And I have no idea why. I guess I

6:28

guess it's in my And I don't

6:30

know. This is the third time he's called me, and I always let

6:32

it go to voicemail. So I don't know what he wants. I

6:34

could never -- Yeah. -- had to do with my money. I Oh,

6:37

that that copper mine you got into, that

6:39

Emerald mine in Namibia is not paying

6:41

off. The reason that I have a personal banker is

6:43

that he was my mother's and she

6:45

condem into dealing with me. I do not

6:47

meet the

6:47

the the financial

6:48

requirements to have a

6:50

personal bank Your mom's like, oh, add two

6:53

zeros. Yeah. Come on. And it's my boy

6:55

and, you know, everybody loves my mom. All

6:57

that all that her hairstylist will agree

6:59

to cut my hair, but I'm I never want my

7:01

haircut. Well,

7:03

you both have to agree. You know? Well, that's

7:05

a thing that has to be consensual for both

7:07

parties. My dad had all these relationship. friend,

7:10

he knew the he he had his own guy

7:12

at the at the hardware store. You

7:14

know? And he from that old he

7:16

had a cobbler, but none of those

7:18

relations transferred to me. I just find a little

7:20

upsetting how insistent your

7:22

phone ring is. Like, it seems very urgent

7:25

when your phone ring. Like, most people have kind

7:27

of a soothing melody. What's your

7:29

phone do? I don't even know. Whatever the default

7:31

is. No. No. No. No. No.

7:33

Yeah. That's right. But

7:35

can you imagine your phone rings and it's like,

7:37

baby baby baby, like like there's a torpedo

7:39

heading at you? Mine does. In the shape of a

7:41

personal banker, every phone call

7:43

is like a torpedo headed at me.

7:45

I mean, that's more accurate. That's the HMS

7:47

Prince of Wales. That's how I react to phone

7:49

calls like, oh, what could happen now?

7:51

Yeah. It actually should say,

7:55

see,

7:56

so I can hold up a little Wiley CODI

7:58

song that says, oh dear.

7:59

just in time. Pewdiepie.

8:02

So have you done the math? Like, what your

8:05

hypothetical non silver ingots?

8:07

thousand times, I've done the math over the

8:09

years. I mean, back when Bitcoin was a thousand

8:11

dollars, I did the math and

8:13

was like, No. But in the

8:15

last few months, you probably feel pretty good. The masking

8:17

more in your favorite. Oh, no. I mean, even It's

8:19

the multiplier still. Yeah. I mean,

8:22

it's a bit coins at twenty thousand

8:24

dollars when we record this episode. And

8:26

if I had bought a thousand bitcoin,

8:29

I think you can add zeros to

8:31

twenty thousand as well as I. But,

8:33

you know, the high watermark, whenever you

8:35

talk about one of these things, you always have

8:37

to resort to the high watermark because

8:39

not only should I have bought bitcoin at

8:41

fifty cents, I should have sold three months

8:43

ago. At sixty five thousand dollars

8:45

a Bitcoin. And now

8:47

and that's although it's

8:49

now twenty thousand, Every time

8:51

I talk about somebody that actually got

8:53

rich, I'm always gonna refer back to that

8:55

high watermark. because they all sold on that day. I'm

8:57

sure I'm sure they all did. No. They

8:59

didn't. That's why they're crying like a bunch of

9:01

babies right now. The I

9:03

don't I don't think I've told this story before.

9:05

I was I was on some

9:07

Internet forum, like, this first

9:09

entered by conscience and maybe a year ago where I

9:11

was on some Internet forum where somebody was asked,

9:13

you know, it's just some stupid Reddit prompt. Like,

9:15

what's your greatest regret? And

9:18

I really started thinking a lot about this. Were you

9:20

guys talking about this? Maybe I did this on this

9:22

show. Like, what would your greatest

9:24

regret to be. And I was thinking, well, you

9:26

know, like when my grandma was,

9:28

like, in the home, I should have

9:30

gone every week. Oh. You know, like

9:32

stuff like that. You know, the stuff where too late. Real,

9:34

like, real Mike and the Mechanics

9:36

Living Years kind of

9:38

emotional stuff. In my case, it's like they're

9:41

the top five are all like girls I should

9:43

have asked if they wanted to make out.

9:45

Do you wanna make out? I

9:47

should have said that, you know, over the years. Well,

9:49

unless unless one of them was my grandma, we

9:51

have different -- Yeah. -- we do. have different

9:53

targets of our regret. But

9:54

I was going through the

9:56

thread and it was amazing how many

9:58

of these yeah. I almost

9:59

think it was like some religious

10:01

setting. It was like some it was

10:03

it was like some, you know, like a Sunday

10:05

school kind of a forum or something.

10:07

And going through the chat, it was

10:09

amazing how many of them were not like

10:12

You know, I should've told my dad I

10:14

loved him. You know, I should've when

10:16

my dog got sick, we should've just gone to the park

10:18

every day. You know, you think that's what it would be?

10:20

I should've quit drinking six years exact

10:22

-- Yep. -- you know, personal

10:24

moral behavior, pretty much

10:26

two thirds of them because, you know, it's an

10:28

Internet thing, so it trended young and it trended

10:30

male. But two thirds of

10:32

them were like, why didn't I buy Bitcoin? Why

10:34

didn't I buy Bitcoin? Well, I should've bought

10:36

Bitcoin. Well, I could've and it's clear that this was

10:38

a generational trauma for a lot of these

10:40

people, that they are raised with the

10:42

idea that their last

10:45

chance at the middle class came and

10:47

went because

10:48

of what's And this isn't

10:50

this is something that's been true in every generation.

10:52

You could always look back and be like, well, if

10:54

I'd bought Microsoft at, you

10:56

know, or Right? IBM.

10:58

Why didn't I just buy IBM? generation

11:00

before that. Why didn't I buy IBM? So there's

11:03

always been this thing, but this seemed like

11:05

a real trauma for these people,

11:07

presumably because of

11:09

what's happened in capitalism

11:12

since then where seems

11:14

like most policy decisions are made

11:16

purely to eradicate the middle class and

11:18

concentrate world elsewhere. A lot of

11:20

people seem to think like that was the thing I would

11:22

have been my life would have been good

11:24

if I had made this one crypto transaction

11:26

and instead my life is

11:28

bad or the hard drive with my bitcoins

11:30

on it is in a dump

11:32

and I lost the password? Well,

11:34

I we

11:35

get criticized a lot not criticized. We get a

11:37

lot of comments in future links for

11:40

about how we we don't do

11:42

enough millennial topics. And

11:45

I do feel like this is a this

11:47

is a particularly millennial topic. It's

11:49

also by the way an anniversary. omnibus

11:50

entry. That's right. This is our

11:53

500th episode, 500th

11:55

entry. And I

11:57

I propose to you that we do the

11:59

five hundredth entry as

12:02

a an

12:03

entry about the omnibus pod

12:06

podcast. And then end the show.

12:08

Where where I

12:10

where I told you all about it and you acted as though

12:12

you'd never heard of it, but you kind

12:14

of, you know. This was the kind of sustained

12:16

improv that I could

12:18

not do for twenty seconds without

12:21

cringing. You didn't do enough theater

12:23

sports in the eighties to be able to pull that

12:25

off. That's exactly right. I

12:27

mean, I I've realized since then

12:29

that you will do every anniversary

12:31

show -- Oh, yeah. -- on this show.

12:33

Right. Because

12:33

there are you know, if we do every

12:35

other if you're

12:36

if you've noticed, John presents every

12:38

other show. I present the I'm always Tuesday

12:40

or Wednesday or Thursday, which means if you're

12:43

numbering them, I'm

12:44

always odd. Right. Although

12:46

you'll get all the prime numbers. I

12:48

was thinking what is the closest thing to

12:50

an anniversary show that is an odd number? and

12:52

I still don't know. What's our next prime? After five

12:55

hundred. I don't know. Come on.

12:57

Come on. Come on, genius. Harker wants to

12:59

develop 53I

13:02

think that in addition to the, you

13:05

know, the decline and fall of the

13:07

middle class, I think that there's also

13:09

within millennial culture. Things

13:13

really changed for them

13:15

in in in

13:17

terms of what

13:19

extraordinary wealth looked

13:21

like. You mean, it was more in their

13:23

face? Well, due to Just that

13:25

it was more outrageous. I mean,

13:28

if if it was if it was

13:30

eighteen eighty,

13:31

whether Rich's guy, you know, has a

13:33

nicer stick pin on his tie. Well, it was certainly

13:35

possible to become extremely wealthy, but you had to

13:38

own steel plants and railroads.

13:40

When we were kids and when when I

13:42

was in high school, if you made fifty

13:45

thousand dollars a year, you

13:48

were a lawyer or a doctor.

13:50

Right? I don't I mean, the first time

13:52

I heard of someone

13:54

making a hundred thousand dollars

13:56

a year. I think I was gobsmacked.

13:58

And I don't remember

14:00

Gen X doing as much glamorizing of

14:02

the super wealth. Because there were well,

14:04

it right. There were hardly any of those

14:07

people, and they still seemed

14:09

to be in

14:10

in they were

14:11

industrialists. Right? They were making

14:13

thing. And that was very it it kind of

14:15

seemed like, you know, back then, yeah. you

14:17

know, the kind of the the waning

14:19

boomer

14:20

arguments of the time was

14:22

that everything will be fine, you know.

14:24

You'll you'll go to college, and you'll

14:26

get some nice office job

14:28

and you will be so comfy.

14:30

Like, everybody's gonna be good.

14:32

Yeah. It was the opposite of the of the

14:34

doomsday. Going to college

14:36

was a direct path

14:38

to betterment. Right. And in a good

14:40

enough betterment. Like, look at that nice

14:42

How is your gonna have? I'm gonna make if

14:44

I'm a lawyer, what if I made fifty thousand

14:46

dollars a year? Can we talk about this that

14:48

the CEOs at the time

14:50

made two hundred thousand dollars a

14:52

year. And and that was

14:54

just like, holy, what couldn't

14:56

you buy? We were not a nation of shareholders.

14:59

Right at the time. And I remember the

15:01

first conversation I had in

15:03

the mid nineties with a with

15:05

who would I guess be now considered an

15:07

older millennial. who

15:08

was in the Microsoft

15:12

sphere. And I

15:13

remember saying

15:14

like, well, what's you plan. You know, like, I'm

15:16

I'm trying to be a rock musician and you're

15:19

he was rock adjacent, I

15:21

think, as a fan primarily. I

15:23

said, you know, what's your career arc? And he

15:25

said, well, I'm going to be a millionaire

15:27

by the time I'm twenty seven,

15:29

and then I'm gonna retire and

15:31

devote myself to habitat

15:33

for humanity or something. And

15:35

I and I laughed and said,

15:37

what kind of

15:40

what kind of life goal is that?

15:42

Like, you're not gonna be a you can't just say

15:44

I'm gonna be a millionaire by the time I'm going to

15:46

say and show and tell when you're like, eight.

15:49

Like, what are what are you even talking about?

15:51

That's you're you're basically saying I'm

15:53

gonna win the lottery. I'm gonna have a flying

15:55

and live under the ocean. And he looked at me kind of

15:57

like, I don't think you understand. I'm

15:59

going to be a millionaire by the time I'm twenty six. show

16:02

you his portfolio? Well, No. And and

16:04

who knows? I mean, I knew a lot of people that worked

16:06

in software then that aren't millionaires. Yeah.

16:09

Yeah. Those guys. But he

16:11

had ambition I have lost touch with him. I

16:13

don't know if he's a million. Are you listening? Do you

16:15

remember this conversation, sir? Send us your

16:17

network. But not the number. Send us your

16:19

actual network. But millennials were

16:21

the first

16:22

generation I think in history where

16:24

the news was full of

16:27

examples of their peers

16:29

who were doing the exact same

16:31

video gaming that they were doing in

16:33

college, dropping out

16:35

after their freshman year and becoming billionaires

16:38

by starting a company that basically took

16:40

them a day and a half to program and,

16:44

you know,

16:44

so money became you didn't

16:46

have to own a single mill. No. No.

16:48

Right. And you didn't even really have

16:50

to have family money although,

16:53

you know, family money always helps. That's what got

16:55

you into Harvard where you in

16:57

the dorms writing your stupid

16:59

website. But but it seemed like there was

17:01

at least a decade there where

17:02

you could open the newspaper without

17:05

being told that there was a twenty two year old

17:07

that was refusing to sell

17:09

their billion dollar company to Apple

17:11

because they believed it was gonna be worth

17:13

forty billion. And so that can't

17:15

help but become at least --

17:17

Yeah. -- emotionally standardized

17:19

in your mind, like, well, that's what success looks.

17:21

especially when average household incomes are staying that are dropping. Right.

17:23

And you're like, wait. So what am I the only one

17:25

that's having a bad month? Yeah. And

17:28

I'm also you know, I'm twenty four. I'm also a genius. I'm

17:30

doing all the same things and yet

17:32

I'm way less comfy than my parents were

17:34

what what's wrong with me?

17:36

Yeah. Exactly. And for for you and me, I mean,

17:39

making fifty thousand dollars a

17:41

year was

17:42

was I didn't

17:44

I'm not sure I had a goal

17:46

beyond it. Right? Like

17:48

the day my mom got to raise

17:51

over fifty thousand dollars a year, we looked

17:53

at each she came home and was like, guess what? I'm

17:55

making fifty

17:57

nine thousand dollars a year and it was like, that's more

17:59

than my dad ever made in his whole life. It was

18:01

the day that she's past

18:03

my

18:03

dad. Yeah. because he had always been you guys

18:06

weren't deferrals. He had always been the big

18:08

cheese, and then all of a sudden she was

18:10

like, guess who's the big cheese

18:12

now? And it was like a yeah. I don't think my

18:15

attitude about money changed until I was until

18:17

the maybe the two thousand

18:19

tens that I realized

18:21

fifty

18:21

thousand I've I

18:23

feel like I I feel like

18:25

one million dollars that fifty

18:28

thousand dollars was no longer like

18:30

an extraordinary amount of money. Yeah. The

18:32

one million dollars joke is kind of a result

18:34

of this time. Like, it's that's that's

18:36

pretty much the first year or two when

18:38

you would have understood the idea

18:40

that a million dollars is a little bit paltry for a

18:42

super villain. And I and I have a

18:45

I have tremendous sympathy for

18:48

millennials growing up in a time when there was

18:50

no path to a middle class, but also

18:52

this incredibly unrealistic. You know,

18:54

like you're saying, two thirds of the people on

18:56

this website are like, I could have

18:58

bought this

18:59

-- Mhmm. -- this

19:00

one one decision would have made me

19:02

a multimillionaire, and I wouldn't

19:05

be working further man. And at

19:07

at that time, a thousand dollars

19:09

probably meant a lot to all of those

19:11

people. They were young and a

19:13

thousand dollars was was real money as it was to

19:15

me. So buying Bitcoin

19:17

ever had a thousand dollars in any

19:19

accounts until I was out of college. I

19:21

was forty. before I had a thousand

19:23

dollars that I didn't have that

19:25

wasn't spoken for. And that

19:27

was about this time.

19:27

I was about forty

19:29

or forty

19:30

two, forty three. Luckily,

19:32

today,

19:32

you can just say how many followers you you

19:34

have or want to have. That's Well, at the

19:36

time, that was true for me too, and my number of followers

19:38

I wanted to have was seven thousand. Right.

19:40

But that was like you wanted to have a a cult in

19:42

big circle. I mean, basically, if you had seven thousand

19:45

followers then, you might as well be

19:47

I mean, you were you were Harrison Ford. You You

19:49

were

19:49

literally more popular than Jesus. Like

19:51

you were sixty times -- Yeah. --

19:53

fifty eight times more popular and

19:55

g. How many followers did g said nine, twelve,

19:58

twelve times? Well, you

20:00

know, twelve, but were they all Yeah. Judith

20:02

didn't board. Judith didn't seem super

20:04

into that.

20:04

So

20:06

so

20:07

Bitcoin, you know

20:10

what, did how much of it do

20:12

you understand? Do you know what a blockchain is?

20:14

Like, I don't know the like,

20:16

I don't I can't explain the how

20:18

the algorithm works. but I

20:20

understand the effect of it, which is that enforces

20:23

a certain kind of algorithmic scarcity

20:25

in the

20:26

amount of this currency that can

20:29

be produced because it

20:30

takes a, you know, a substantial amount

20:33

of computing power working with large

20:35

numbers. You know, the same way that large

20:37

numbers revolutionize cryptography. to

20:40

to create a situation where

20:42

money

20:42

appears when the algorithm decides

20:45

it does. And at

20:46

no other time, Well,

20:48

a blockchain is

20:50

you is really just a ledger

20:53

and

20:53

central accounting of

20:56

transactions happen and they

20:58

get ordered into a

21:00

block. And then

21:01

that block get when it when it gets

21:03

full, it gets attached to a

21:06

chain. Wait, a blockchain is a chain of

21:08

block. It's a chain of blocks and the

21:10

blocks are a

21:12

discrete number of transactions. So, you

21:14

know, if your if your

21:16

blockchain like the like

21:18

the Bitcoin blockchain, the

21:20

blocks are

21:21

all one megabyte of

21:24

data

21:25

representing a bunch of

21:28

transactions And this is all distributed.

21:30

So it's Everywhere and nowhere? Yeah.

21:32

It's visible to everyone. It's

21:34

completely open set

21:35

open source set

21:38

of of transactions, and then it gets

21:40

it gets clicked on

21:42

to the chain. It becomes the next link in

21:44

the chain. And the chain

21:47

then presumably is

21:50

eternal and accessible to ever. And the

21:52

virtue of this is that it's immutable

21:54

basically. like, the numbers have

21:56

spoken and and they know

21:58

there's no there's

21:59

no disputing

22:01

the who

22:03

did or said what first or what

22:05

happened when or how much the amount was,

22:07

the math

22:08

all follows from the

22:11

And blockchain after

22:13

Bitcoin, once

22:15

it was widely understood, has

22:17

become a technology,

22:19

a thought technology, but a real technology

22:21

that's used by companies

22:23

and, you know, it's being

22:26

it's being converted and exploited

22:28

and and, you know, used

22:31

used and privatized, I

22:33

mean, all the things that that

22:35

bitcoins block chain is

22:37

supposed to

22:38

provide transparency and universality.

22:41

I mean, you can make a blockchain that only

22:44

you only you're, you know, an internal blockchain,

22:46

like a like a network that's available

22:48

only to the employees of IBM.

22:50

This is gonna annoy people, but I'm a

22:52

little skeptical about you know,

22:54

blockchain technology, you know, how much hype

22:57

versus how much of a game changer actually

22:59

is. I'm I am unconvinced.

23:01

Well, this episode is definitely

23:04

gonna annoy certain

23:07

people because this is an

23:09

extremely emotional topic

23:11

and people are very passionate

23:13

about crypto. Well, they have to

23:15

be if they can't keep finding new

23:18

roops. I

23:18

mean, customers. Well,

23:22

Crypto,

23:22

and one of the reasons it's passionate and one

23:24

of the reasons that people are yelling at,

23:27

me right now. And I should I

23:29

should say, I

23:31

don't really understand

23:33

any of this. It's all

23:35

I thought crypto was Superman's dogs. It's all math. But

23:37

I'm bump. And who knows about math? Who

23:39

knows about computer math? I'm just gonna hold up

23:41

the not compatible with Marxism like,

23:43

in a vase. I'm

23:46

gonna say this whole episode. The

23:48

thing about about

23:50

money And

23:51

we've talked about this several times on

23:53

the show is that

23:56

at

23:56

the when when money was no

23:58

longer backed directly

23:59

by gold, when

24:00

we went off the gold standard and

24:03

money became just sort of

24:05

fiat money. It's

24:07

an a construct. It's an agreed

24:09

upon delusion. it really agitated

24:12

all of the gold standard

24:14

gold bug types who

24:16

all kind of congregated around

24:18

sort of John Burke's society idea

24:22

of what what

24:24

debt and government and

24:27

and the individual and

24:29

free speech. I mean, all of these

24:31

ideas kind of became

24:33

politicized and and

24:35

tended to be bet

24:37

noir or or cause Salib.

24:39

One of the one of the two,

24:41

whichever one you want.

24:44

whatever attributes you put on. Percher,

24:46

it's a Benoit. Yeah. You because

24:48

now we can't even trust the government

24:50

to to

24:51

be good for what it says, it's good for. So

24:54

so so the idea of a

24:56

e currency

24:57

was

24:57

floated decades

25:00

ago. And, you

25:02

know, I think Milton Friedman

25:04

already new already

25:07

suggested that it was the

25:09

future because there

25:11

needed to be as people envisioned

25:14

the Internet, there there also

25:16

became the possibility of

25:18

this medium of exchange

25:20

that wasn't controlled

25:22

by a government. And so

25:24

The idea being that it didn't fluctuate in

25:26

value or it didn't decline in

25:29

value because a government can

25:31

I mean, if you think about the number of dollars

25:33

that we are that

25:36

are on the market

25:38

as it were, right now. From

25:41

since the year two thousand, the

25:43

number

25:43

of the the number of dollars

25:46

in the world has gone from five hundred billion

25:49

dollars to two trillion

25:51

dollars. They're four

25:53

times more

25:55

dollars, just as a result of

25:58

monetary Jessica Buffet?

25:58

Yeah. Just as a result of the

25:59

United States printing dollars to

26:03

to keep keep the

26:06

the wheels turn. Who got

26:08

the additional what

26:10

was

26:10

it? Not me. Not you.

26:13

One point five -- One point five trillion dollars.

26:15

It did not go to us. a lot of it went

26:17

to bail out banks. As we'll

26:18

see soon, but also it

26:20

went to administrating a

26:23

middle class. And also who knows? I mean,

26:25

it's all monies just, you know, it's

26:27

flying around like paper airplanes. It's in the

26:29

couch. People who are lighting cigars

26:31

with it. mean, it's buried on

26:33

islands. Jeff Bezos's ex wife

26:35

has some number of

26:37

billions of it.

26:38

She's given away like more during this show than we

26:40

will ever have. Yeah. What

26:42

is she worth a trillion dollars? What even

26:44

is a trillion dollars? Nobody's worth a trillion

26:46

dollars. Not yet.

26:50

So

26:50

the when Bitcoin arrived,

26:53

it it really

26:56

tickled the fancy

26:58

of

26:58

this preexisting

27:00

sort of political

27:02

universe that

27:04

was

27:07

sort of

27:09

anti

27:11

global fiscal policy. And

27:14

if you can imagine what an

27:17

anti globalist gold

27:20

fixated group thinks about

27:22

other political topics.

27:25

Just typically

27:27

when you

27:28

think of those terms -- That's not

27:30

generalized. it definitely attracted

27:32

a certain segment of the population

27:38

that

27:38

what were we always I

27:40

always have this problem remembering the

27:42

term, libertarianism. Thank you. Libertarianism.

27:44

I think you've some kind of stage hypnotist

27:46

made you unable to remember the word libertarian

27:49

as firmly good. I can never I can never think of it.

27:51

When I sit here, I'm like, it's called the bear

27:53

bear. And who are those weirdos? Derbitur,

27:55

blah blah blah blah. I always think it starts

27:57

with a b.

27:59

it it's got a b in it. We just need to give you a post that we

28:01

can hold up that says, Ken, who are those weirdos? Who

28:03

are those weirdos? Got the

28:05

b in your bonnet.

28:08

A

28:08

b's in the middle. A b's in the middle. Thank you.

28:10

But yeah. It's so libertarianism

28:14

really and

28:17

and cryptocurrency really found

28:19

a common cause. And

28:21

libertarian saw in cryptocurrency

28:23

a kind of future. there's a

28:25

there's a way to get around it's a end run around government. It's

28:27

an end run around government, and it's an end

28:29

run around then the powers

28:31

of government to control

28:35

the individual. Bitcoin or or

28:37

cryptocurrency allows the individual to

28:39

then become completely

28:42

autonomous. in the in the

28:44

globe. I can put me on my money. Could you put

28:46

you on your money? I don't need Andrew

28:48

Jackson. And there's a lot

28:50

of talk and this is kind of a funny sidebar

28:52

within the conversation. But there's a lot

28:54

of talk that because code

28:56

code computer

28:57

code is the you

29:00

letters

29:01

the

29:01

and numbers, symbols,

29:04

it's a language, that therefore computer

29:07

code, writing computer code is

29:09

a form of speech.

29:11

And therefore speech,

29:14

free speech guarantees in the

29:16

United States include computer

29:18

codes

29:18

so that restricting any attempt

29:20

to restrict bick Bitcoin. That's

29:23

Saab Sitt nonsense. It's

29:25

pretty. Most -- Oh. -- you

29:27

just

29:27

said Saab Sitt and the no. You said

29:29

computer code. Oh. Oh.

29:31

the man.

29:32

We're the man. Of all

29:33

the things that computer code

29:35

is analogous to, speech is like

29:37

not in the time. twenty, if I'm

29:39

a court. Yeah. Well, in most of the most of

29:42

the legal scholars agreed that

29:44

that computer code, when it

29:46

when it communicates ideas,

29:49

maybe

29:49

protected speech. Oh

29:51

my god.

29:52

You're not gonna what

29:53

is your thing called? It's called computer. Right?

29:55

Computer shut up. not gonna say the word

29:57

computer a lot. I'm sorry. Oh my god. I hope

30:00

not. You can

30:01

turn it off. Right? You could. You could

30:03

unplug it. I don't I don't even know why

30:05

it's there. It's this isn't my this

30:08

bunker is really As a rental

30:10

It's a rental. It's been colonized

30:12

by Barbie RVs And can

30:15

can you do a voice activated? Hey,

30:17

computer.

30:18

Don't respond anymore when

30:20

I say computer.

30:22

Thanks

30:24

for

30:25

telling You think it's a worth. That feels a little

30:27

passive aggressive. Let's say it's a worth.

30:30

Computer. What's

30:31

what's that

30:32

up?

30:32

Well, maybe her

30:34

light went on, but she didn't say

30:36

anything. Maybe she's dead. Maybe I confused.

30:38

Wait.

30:41

If you say WhatsApp, she starts

30:43

playing NPR. Is this only in Seattle, or

30:45

do you all Alex's dude? I don't

30:47

think that that would happen in Wyoming. Computer

30:50

be quiet. Thanks

30:52

for telling me. Anyway, computer

30:56

code that is

30:58

that is a machine

31:01

that effectively is a machine,

31:04

is not I think the courts would

31:06

agree that it was not a form of speech.

31:08

And certainly, you can't No.

31:10

Computer, be quiet. unplug

31:13

it. Would you go unplug it? It's right there and the

31:15

plug is visible. Okay. Every time this happens,

31:17

the the message the Facebook board

31:19

has followed people up being like, this is so

31:22

easy to turn on. Alexa is such a great

31:24

tool. Obviously, you're just doing it

31:26

wrong. Doing it

31:29

wrong again. doing it

31:31

wrong. Again, interesting you unplugged

31:33

it from the wall. You know, I would have unplugged it

31:35

from the device. She started

31:37

singing bicycle built for two

31:39

as I unplugged it from the

31:41

wall. Great. Mhmm. It just seemed more

31:43

vital to do it at the wall.

31:45

See. And

31:47

you you clearly can't shout

31:50

fire in a crowded Bitcoin

31:52

blockchain and have it be

31:54

considered free speech. Are you allowed to say

31:56

Bitcoin is falling? No. There are a lot of

31:58

places you cannot say

31:59

that. So as

32:02

I

32:02

think most of us know,

32:05

It

32:06

is the scarcity of bitcoin and

32:09

its ability to be

32:11

used as a medium of exchange

32:14

outside of banks.

32:17

Right? Their Visa

32:19

and Mastercard and

32:22

the the HBS

32:24

C all charge fees

32:26

for transferring money, and

32:28

they also have all these archaic

32:31

restrictions on transferring money. You

32:33

can't, you know, Friday at five, it all

32:35

shuts down and and it

32:37

requires even though, you

32:39

know, I could take a

32:41

five minute long video of

32:43

myself eating a hotdog

32:45

and send it to Australia in a blink of

32:47

an eye I if you wanna send

32:49

me my half

32:50

of the the

32:52

the omnibus

32:54

Patreon Well, according

32:56

to you and Mindy, it takes you fourteen days.

32:58

I don't

32:59

know what that's all. And it comes to me in an envelope

33:01

and it's

33:02

and it's got a scented ripsal

33:05

warm Yeah. I mean, we we get we get a lot of use out of that

33:07

money in in the fourteen days that we are

33:09

telling you to get some of them. You invested

33:11

in Bitcoin, I'm sure. So

33:14

So, you know, its value is not just in its

33:16

scarcity. Its value was at least

33:19

initially that it

33:22

was that it was a new medium

33:24

of exchange. We're gonna do money right this time. That's right.

33:26

Money two point o. In a global

33:29

sense. Now, of course, it immediately

33:31

got used to sell

33:33

cocaine and ritalin on Silk

33:35

Road. And that, you know,

33:37

that kinda put a bad rep

33:39

on it. early

33:40

because early I mean, isn't it

33:42

still hard to use mid isn't it still hard

33:44

to use Bitcoin for oh,

33:46

can I pay my mortgage in Bitcoin?

33:48

So what happened. The the advocates

33:51

of Bitcoin really believed that it was

33:53

gonna be a new media of exchange.

33:55

But the problem with the

33:57

blockchain was

33:58

that those blocks were

34:00

off

34:00

the chain. Well, the the blocks

34:02

did did not have a ton of capacity

34:05

and

34:05

there was a there developed a

34:08

queue as the

34:09

transaction stacked up to get included

34:11

in blocks and then the blocks

34:13

added onto the chain. there was

34:15

a chokepoint. And that did

34:16

was it slowed down Bitcoin

34:19

transactions so that it

34:22

no longer seemed well,

34:25

it was no longer useful. Alright. Right?

34:27

You would you would try

34:29

to buy something at

34:31

a store, Visa

34:32

is capable

34:33

of processing sixty

34:36

five hundred seven

34:38

transactions per second on

34:41

each

34:41

card. And then that's right. If

34:43

you if the Russians get a hold of your

34:45

Visa card, they're gonna buy sixty

34:47

five hundred TVs -- Same thing. --

34:49

whereas Bitcoin could only process

34:52

four and a half transactions

34:54

per second. Is this built in is this something built

34:56

into the the format it's baked in?

34:58

Or is this something that could be solved with better tech? Well, as you can imagine,

35:00

the techy types said,

35:02

well, they all had different

35:06

ideas

35:06

about how to fix this problem. And and the

35:09

the ideas broke down into

35:11

two kind

35:13

kind of of general

35:14

ideas about how to solve. One of

35:17

them was that the data

35:19

that was actually going

35:21

into the blocks

35:23

didn't need

35:24

to be so

35:26

such

35:26

fat stacks. There

35:29

was a lot of

35:31

extraneous data that was kind of

35:34

clogging the the aperture,

35:36

streamline the block. That's right. So we need to get

35:38

we need to get the

35:40

data small the other option, as you can probably

35:42

guess, make the blocks

35:44

bigger.

35:45

And both things, make

35:48

the holes bigger. Right? Make the tubes bigger. Yeah.

35:50

Well, no. The blocks themselves. Right? You're building

35:52

a chain. Nice. And so we've got

35:54

this fewer blocks in a larger size. We've

35:56

got this elegant chain. Are we gonna keep the

35:58

blocks the same size and

35:59

put put less data in them

36:02

per transaction? or are we going to

36:04

suddenly halfway up the

36:05

chain,

36:06

enlarge the chain by either

36:08

an exponential amount or double it

36:11

or whatever. And so those were competing

36:14

concepts. And in

36:18

July of two

36:20

thousand seventeen, there actually

36:22

was applied to it

36:24

something called a segregated

36:28

witness or

36:28

segwit, don't have a segwit,

36:29

which was a new way of

36:32

verifying the

36:34

transactions so that they didn't require

36:38

of the the

36:40

information to validate the transaction.

36:42

Now people could just kind of witness

36:44

it and enough people witnessed it and it

36:46

was validated. But

36:48

there are a lot of

36:51

bros involved

36:52

here. What? Yeah.

36:54

i'm afraid so I'm so. This is a

36:57

pro intensive environment. Bro rich environment. And

36:59

a lot of the early bros

37:01

a lot of the early

37:03

adopters were bros. and I remember most

37:05

of them in those early days, certified bro. There was a guy

37:08

named Roger Vaire who

37:10

was known as Bitcoin Jesus.

37:14

because I was just, I know. He could turn bitcoins into one. He had

37:17

he also had twelve disciples. But

37:19

Bitcoin, Jesus was a was

37:21

a real evangelist he

37:24

was always trying to get Bitcoin to be the

37:26

to, you know, to

37:30

supplant the global money

37:32

supply. He from

37:34

what I can tell is

37:37

fairly unlikable. And this is this is

37:39

something you might be surprised to

37:41

learn. There are a lot of bros that are that are fairly unlikable. In

37:43

this in this particular space in Crypto in particular. Yeah. That's

37:45

what I'd expect. It's

37:48

surprising. but he decided

37:50

that this choke point

37:53

in Bitcoin, there's

37:55

a lot of competition

37:58

over kind of the ownership of the

37:59

intellectual property of Bitcoin.

38:03

Bitcoin was was like who can

38:06

sell the t shirts? Sort of. Bitcoin was

38:08

initiated. The original code

38:11

was written and and

38:13

activated, I guess,

38:15

by a

38:15

mysterious

38:18

character,

38:18

character by the name

38:20

name of Satoshi

38:23

Nakamoto. And

38:24

nobody knows who Satoshi

38:27

Nakamoto is. He doesn't exist. Well,

38:30

Satoshi Nakamoto may be

38:32

an elusive person who left no

38:34

trail or

38:35

left a confusing and and

38:37

fractured trail. It seems difficult today. Nakamoto might be a

38:40

group of

38:42

people. Satoshi

38:44

Nagamoto, there are several people that have been

38:46

that have been, you

38:47

know, put

38:49

forward as potentially the

38:52

the satoshi. It could be a pseudonym. Right? Is

38:54

that what you're saying? Well, it's almost certainly

38:57

one. There's no No

38:59

one can find a Japanese census record

39:01

for Yeah. He there's

39:03

no list of traffic

39:06

tickets.

39:06

But But

39:07

crucially, although Bitcoin

39:10

entered the world in

39:13

two thousand nine, In two thousand

39:16

eleven, Satoshi disappeared.

39:20

Satoshi Very

39:22

definitely, the idea behind Bitcoin was that

39:24

it was not controlled. It was not

39:26

controlled by anyone. It

39:28

was not

39:29

there

39:30

was no leader. It was it was completely open source.

39:33

And satoshi up until

39:35

that point, until April

39:37

of two thousand eleven. So, Toshi continued

39:40

to kind of engage.

39:43

Nobody could quite track them down?

39:46

There appear to be dozens of candidates.

39:48

Yeah. But on April

39:50

twenty eighth,

39:52

two thousand eleven. Satoshi stopped communicating. And

39:56

April twenty eight is

39:58

now known as Satoshi

39:59

DisappEAR Day.

40:02

because within the

40:02

bit Bitcoin community, there's a

40:04

lot of I mean, they're

40:06

trying to create a kind of

40:09

Well, I don't like any

40:11

cold. They're trying to create, like, a

40:13

-- Well, like, an intellectual pedigree. -- on

40:15

the day when he comes back to

40:17

Earth, you know, you wanna be able to

40:19

celebrate that as well. here he is. Finally, he's been

40:22

in the team for ten

40:24

years. Right. So

40:26

back to

40:27

Bitcoin Jesus

40:28

or

40:29

Roger Verr, I'm

40:30

a Bitcoin Jesus.

40:33

He believed

40:36

that the solution to this sort

40:38

of well, so what happened

40:40

was because Bitcoin was difficult to use as an

40:43

an actual media of

40:46

exchange.

40:47

It

40:48

it

40:49

started to be used as

40:51

just

40:52

a repository

40:54

of wealth.

40:57

the

40:59

people People sequestered it.

41:01

You know, they kept it in their

41:03

wallets in their wallets. gained in value,

41:05

but it was now it

41:08

had primarily, its value was

41:10

in its scarcity, and it

41:12

had lost its

41:14

value as a an

41:16

Internet as a medium

41:18

of exchange. A medium. Right. And

41:20

as an instant monetary instrument

41:22

because nobody would accepted for

41:24

most

41:26

goods or services?

41:26

Well, because it would, you know, it sometimes

41:28

took seventy two

41:29

hours for the transaction

41:32

to clear. And the thing about

41:34

money is that money

41:36

itself, this is

41:36

like, you know, kind of a misconception that a

41:38

lot of us have, money is not wealth.

41:42

money is strictly AAA

41:44

unit

41:47

of value that that

41:50

facilitates the movement of wealth,

41:52

which is stuff

41:53

or services.

41:56

and so And so you

41:58

know, gold is a repository of

42:02

utility. You can

42:03

trade gold for

42:04

this. You can

42:06

trade gold for that. You can trade this for that

42:08

using gold. But gold itself, you know, it has

42:11

it's useful in jewelry. useful

42:13

and jewelry and then and it's useful

42:15

if you're gonna try and coat the outside of

42:17

a lunar lander. Unlike paper money, it

42:19

has other limited

42:22

uses. limited use. Paperman is not ductile. But

42:24

so Bitcoin, Jesus decided

42:27

to start a

42:29

the

42:30

his

42:31

idea was that he was going

42:33

to start a

42:34

separate iteration

42:36

of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash.

42:40

which was going to then be a

42:43

faster, you know, built

42:45

around a a

42:48

wider architecture and that chain

42:50

was then going to allow you

42:52

to use Bitcoin Cash as you would

42:54

cash. The Bitcoin sits in your wallet, but

42:56

Bitcoin Cash is your way of. passing it back and

42:58

forth more quickly and efficiently. But in

43:00

order to do it, he basically just

43:02

built a new blockchain and Bitcoin

43:04

Cash is not

43:06

really Bitcoin. It's a

43:08

new crypto. Oh, it's in parallel. And

43:10

This is the was this the first new

43:13

crypto? No. Right? No. There

43:15

had been other attempts. There had been other attempts.

43:17

And the the most

43:18

the the second most

43:20

widely used and valuable crypto

43:24

is ether, which was started

43:26

by a nineteen year

43:28

old,

43:28

you know,

43:31

like, pimply faced smart kid

43:33

who had

43:34

an idea that

43:36

the blockchain could not

43:40

only It it wasn't only about this sort

43:42

of only about this sort of cryptocurrency

43:45

generation, but you could

43:47

use a blockchain to also like,

43:50

program in

43:54

future transactions. Like

43:54

on March seventh every year, you're

43:56

gonna give me a hundred

43:59

dollars. because

44:00

it's it's John

44:02

DisappEAR Day.

44:03

And and so you can

44:05

put that into

44:08

Ether,

44:08

the blockchain, it's

44:09

not just a ledger

44:12

of transactions. It's also

44:14

a place where

44:16

you can schedule. You can store programs and

44:18

those programs would then be

44:20

activated. Or, you know, it's

44:21

and you can

44:22

there's a there's a great example

44:26

of a of a Chinese dissident,

44:28

a woman who was being persecuted

44:31

because she reported her

44:33

bosses for sexual harassment. And

44:36

within China, she was

44:38

she was

44:38

severely censored, but

44:41

she took her letter of

44:43

accusation, encoded it and put it

44:45

into ether.

44:48

And and then it was in the blockchain

44:50

for eternity. so readable

44:52

by anyone and, you know,

44:54

it became a seems

44:56

like an unusual use case

44:59

for the for crypto watching. Right.

45:01

But it be it made Ethereum a

45:03

company that seemed like it

45:05

was and

45:08

and The thing is that they never intended ether to be a cryptocurrency.

45:12

But because of

45:14

its because of the way a blockchain

45:18

works, people

45:18

started

45:19

to use it as a

45:21

cryptocurrency, and now it

45:24

is the

45:26

second most valuable

45:27

cryptocurrency around. And actually, sir and

45:29

it's just by virtue

45:32

of.

45:34

right

45:35

place at the right time? I mean,

45:37

maybe there's advantages to some of these

45:39

over others. But Well, looking

45:41

into the future, Right? Like

45:43

anytime you adopt a new technology, when we look back at

45:46

it, it

45:48

seems like the Jet airplane

45:52

or the steam engine

45:54

or the printing press,

45:56

followed an inevitable

45:57

course. But of course,

45:59

there

45:59

were always

46:01

sixty

46:02

different people building steam

46:04

engines and some of them required

46:06

a live cat and some

46:08

of them were made out of leather

46:11

And the ones that became

46:13

the dominant forms are the ones that

46:15

kind of survived that period,

46:18

sometimes decades,

46:20

where the

46:20

new technology was trying to work itself out.

46:22

And initially, everybody was dubious of its

46:24

steam engine. What are we ever gonna do with that?

46:27

A horse will always be to locomotive.

46:30

And

46:30

then eventually,

46:32

it

46:33

works itself out. And there are a lot

46:35

of people betting on

46:37

Ethereum

46:38

as being AAA

46:40

more useful

46:43

blockchain, still open source, although that's

46:45

arguable too.

46:45

I mean, it's as good

46:47

ideas get adopted now. You know,

46:49

it

46:50

was it was different in the days of the

46:52

printing press

46:52

movable type where, you know, that's

46:55

gonna take a new thing will take decades

46:57

to change a culture. We know from experience that the

46:59

iPhone did not take

47:00

decades to change a culture. We know that

47:04

social media did not take decades to change their culture.

47:06

No. I mean, I'm not saying these are good,

47:09

but it

47:11

seems like crypto has been

47:13

surprisingly slow at this revolution in

47:15

ushered in. Yeah. And there are a

47:17

lot there are a lot

47:19

of people arguing that

47:21

crypto

47:24

is a will

47:26

will result in a global liberation. If

47:28

you think about all the nations of the

47:30

world, where the government uses their

47:32

monetary policy to control the population or

47:35

governments devalue their

47:38

currency Governments restrict

47:41

their currency. There

47:43

are lots of examples

47:45

of women in Afghanistan

47:47

for instance who

47:49

whose husbands

47:51

control the finances and they

47:53

have no

47:54

options options but there there's

47:57

one particular example of a woman that

47:59

began to maintain a

48:02

crypto account where she,

48:04

you know, she squared away,

48:06

the money that came her way, and I and I think,

48:08

you know,

48:08

as part of an she got

48:11

people contributing to it. and eventually was

48:13

able to leave her husband because she had this account.

48:15

She wouldn't have otherwise been

48:18

able to

48:19

who you

48:20

know, to to put together a safe Under our

48:22

monitor. Yes. It seems

48:23

a little cherry picked, but okay. I mean, there are

48:25

lots of examples, and they're all sort of

48:28

cherry picked. but each

48:30

used to describe this

48:33

science fiction world in the

48:35

future where we're not where

48:36

money and banks in

48:39

particular are not agents

48:41

of control. And of

48:43

course,

48:43

we've seen

48:46

banks

48:46

bank have also

48:49

become unhinged. The deregulation of them

48:51

over the last forty years

48:54

has produced a Wild

48:56

West in banking that has

48:58

benefited only a very small

49:00

proportion of the people. But you and I would argue that

49:02

that's a function of

49:04

deregulation, so an utterly

49:06

deregulated monetary marketplace. What would that

49:08

look like? Right. Right. Truly

49:10

untrammeled good. And that's where we are

49:12

today. So let's go all the

49:13

way back

49:17

to the first

49:20

instance,

49:20

when Bitcoin was

49:22

used to

49:23

buy an

49:25

actual thing. Oh,

49:27

was it heroin? It

49:28

was not, although of kind, was it plutonium, the kind

49:30

of heroin? Not plutonium either. I

49:32

don't think I mean, there is

49:34

no recorded instance of somebody buying

49:38

OxyContin with with the

49:40

Bitcoin before this moment.

49:42

Bitcoin was It was

49:44

all the subsequent transactions that are that are

49:46

all fenton. It was all it was all

49:49

oxy after that. But in the

49:51

in the initial days of Bitcoin,

49:54

it was It was

49:55

a dream. It was a bag inside of a suitcase. It was

49:57

a hat on a hat. It was turtles

49:59

all the way down.

50:03

fascinating to people as

50:05

a theory and those early

50:08

Bitcoin miners, which is

50:10

is to say to say,

50:11

people who

50:14

were performing those transactions

50:16

over time on

50:17

their personal computers. I

50:19

just realized we haven't even talked about the environmental impacts,

50:21

but okay. Yeah. We'll we'll we'll get

50:24

there.

50:24

i'm They were

50:26

often I mean, they were rewarded

50:29

early on

50:30

with with thousands

50:34

of Bitcoin. they were

50:34

a lot easier to find back

50:35

then. Super it's super easy to find. There's a

50:37

hard theoretical cap on the number of bitcoins there can be

50:39

there can be twenty one

50:42

million Bitcoin. and almost all have

50:44

been mined out of the ether. There

50:45

are a lot, although the final Bitcoin

50:48

won't be

50:50

mined until to

50:52

twenty one forty. Okay. I'll start then.

50:54

I wanna get the last one. So it's a, you know,

50:56

it's kind of a it's a it's

50:58

a curve on a graph. Right? It went up really fast and now it's

51:00

curving over and and it's

51:02

gonna be a a

51:04

line increasingly that. It's like

51:06

how a final home run or something is more

51:08

valuable. So I wanna get the last

51:10

Bitcoin, and that'll be my only one. In two

51:12

thousand nine,

51:14

every ten Bitcoin.

51:18

Fifty

51:20

Bitcoin. at The maximum

51:23

price representing what's

51:26

fifty times sixty

51:28

five thousand? got

51:29

three million is sixty five thousand equals

51:31

three

51:32

million two hundred and fifty

51:34

thousand. So

51:36

you could you could mine fifty of those in a

51:39

minute. Now Bitcoin started in

51:41

two thousand nine

51:44

By two thousand ten, halfway through the year, there

51:46

were a lot of people around

51:49

the world kind of mining

51:51

these little coins. with

51:53

no real sense of what their

51:56

actual value was.

51:58

In May of two

51:59

thousand ten, a man by the name of

52:02

Oslo Hanats who

52:04

lived in

52:05

Florida. Ultimately, this is Hungary?

52:08

No. He's Hungarian.

52:10

Hungarian name floridian

52:12

by Hungarian hyphen Floridian.

52:14

And and, ultimately, this is

52:16

just a Florida man I mean, it

52:19

kind of is. When you think about, like, if these guys are right,

52:21

and this is like an actual massive wealth transfer

52:23

because our

52:24

money

52:25

systems fundamentally change.

52:28

had

52:28

just completed a massive transfer of wealth to the people who were

52:30

most likely to be dicking

52:32

around with libertarian

52:32

thought tech in in two

52:35

thousand nine. That's right. which is, well,

52:37

I think that's right. That's who should get rewarded. Yeah. And, you

52:39

know, who's unfortunate in two thousand

52:41

nine? Steve Bannon, Like,

52:43

he's he he was he's a crypto guy. I mean, a

52:46

lot of these people a lot of them might

52:48

wonder, why are you still working?

52:50

Like, if you have sixty million

52:52

billion trillion dollars, like, go buy an

52:54

aircraft carrier. I keep saying it. Can they sell

52:56

it? Could somebody who

52:58

owns who owns, you know, nine figures

53:00

in Crypto? is there an easy

53:02

way to I don't know the answer is. Is there an easy way to

53:04

turn into US dollars and therefore real estate?

53:06

Yeah. Ultimately, you you

53:08

could find you find a buyer because there because

53:10

now no one can afford one Bitcoin for for

53:12

even twenty thousand dollars or

53:14

or a few people can. but

53:18

you can go to your

53:20

supermarket, put the money into Bitcoin

53:22

cash, and buy a fraction of a

53:24

fraction of Bitcoin. That's how those weird

53:26

Bitcoin ATMs work. Yeah. I

53:28

mean, if you're gonna

53:29

buy five hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin,

53:31

it's going to be a very small fraction

53:33

of a Bitcoin, but you can add them

53:35

up in your wallet. And I should

53:37

say at this point that because neither of us

53:39

have any bitcoin,

53:42

one of

53:43

the things that kept me from doing it

53:45

I think in two thousand ten was I have

53:47

to do what now. Remember a

53:50

long password and keep it on a hard

53:52

drive like I don't know. Well, you were wrong. Think of all those people who have

53:54

millions trapped on a trapped on a

53:56

file because they don't have the password.

53:57

Well, I know. I mean, that's a

53:59

brilliant

53:59

thing. There's there was a drive

54:02

in Australia. And he

54:05

had been mining bitcoin for a

54:06

long time, and

54:07

he had something like

54:10

he had fifteen hundred Bitcoin or more

54:12

on this hard drive. That's worth

54:14

a hundred and fifty million dollars or,

54:18

you know, maybe maybe more than a hundred million dollars. And

54:20

it's sitting in a landfill and

54:22

it's an in a

54:24

noble landfill in Australia.

54:26

As long as it costs less than a hundred and forty

54:28

nine million dollars to get it

54:30

out, but nobody yet

54:32

has decided like, okay,

54:34

I'm gonna I'm going to

54:36

put put together what it

54:38

would take to sift an

54:40

entire landfill knowing what we know

54:42

which is it went in on a

54:43

certain date in a

54:45

certain place. And I think it

54:47

was probably a lot

54:49

easier five years

54:50

ago to figure out where that was.

54:52

But it's there. I

54:53

mean, luckily, they don't recycle in Australia. Yeah. Well, and

54:55

also, I mean, I don't I mean, you're I

54:57

have a hard drive

55:00

that just sitting here on this table and

55:02

molested and it doesn't work anymore. Every hard drive I've ever owned is like in a weird

55:04

desk in my drawer drawer in

55:06

my desk. Anyway, last night,

55:10

I

55:10

went

55:11

on and

55:12

got an

55:13

account on

55:15

queen base wallet Welcome

55:17

to the Revolution John, and it's under the

55:20

name All The Great

55:22

Shows. That's my Coinbase

55:24

Wallet name. Are you

55:25

saying this because people can ask to send you

55:27

yes. crypto? Yes. We'll see. So I tried to

55:29

get John Roderick somebody in Australia

55:31

already has it. but all the great shows. So let's see what

55:33

happens. There are a lot of crypto people that are listening

55:35

to the show. If you're mad and I that I'm not

55:37

doing it right,

55:40

or mad that we're Why would they reward you? It's disparaging

55:42

libertarianism. Why don't you show me what an

55:44

effective medium of exchange it is? If

55:46

your business model here is to rely on the

55:48

generosity of

55:50

libertarian, Well, it has some bad news for you. Except some

55:52

Republicans see me as a as a

55:54

beacon of light. They do the dark. Maybe they can

55:58

convert you. If John just gets enough free Bitcoin, he'll see that it's good. See, that's

56:00

what I'm saying. And don't do this. Nobody send John

56:02

your bet. No. No. No. No. No. No. Send

56:04

me some Bitcoin. You know, even

56:06

a small small minor a

56:08

little bit. Send whatever you're gonna send him to the

56:10

humane society. That's for some actual cause.

56:12

All the great shows

56:14

at at coin

56:16

based wallets. send it to the rainforest. And it's not gonna do

56:18

any good in the rainforest, but it is gonna do because

56:20

what if I became like a like

56:22

a like a super excited crypto

56:25

guy. It might happen. What I'd be the What

56:27

an evangelist, John, would be for your cause. It's

56:29

like it'd be a

56:30

conversion of of of solid Tarsen.

56:33

That's right. That's exactly right. So anyway, that's all

56:35

the green shows. So

56:38

on this day in May of

56:41

on this day in May, in two thousand

56:44

ten. LASLOW, Florida

56:46

Man, was on

56:48

one of the forums and if you can

56:51

believe this, there are for a devoted

56:53

just to talking about crypto. I don't

56:56

believe that. It's true. That's crazy. It's true. What

56:58

would you have to say? Well, people were

57:00

talking about it even twelve years ago.

57:02

I do that with US currency. I'm like,

57:04

hey, I got a couple of quarters

57:06

today. And US dollar

57:08

dot dot org I think they're in the center console

57:10

of my car now. Mhmm. Who else who

57:12

else has a dollar story today? Well,

57:15

he

57:15

was on a he was on a

57:17

a crypto blog And

57:20

he

57:21

said,

57:23

hi I

57:24

am hungry. I want

57:26

i some pizza.

57:30

And I will give

57:32

ten

57:32

him thousand bitcoin thousand

57:34

Bitcoin to whoever brings me two large

57:36

pizzas. At the time, what was

57:38

the fair market value? What

57:40

was Bitcoin trading

57:41

at against the dollar?

57:44

At

57:44

the time, a Bitcoin was

57:48

four

57:49

one hundredth

57:50

of a cent.

57:53

So let me see a

57:55

twenty fifth of

57:58

ascent. So

57:59

though

57:59

So

58:00

four hundred to the dollar? Or was that what you said? Yeah. So

58:03

ten thousand coins was worth about forty

58:05

one dollars.

58:07

Okay. And

58:09

he said

58:10

and this was it's a lot for a pizza,

58:12

but It's a lot for a pizza, but it's two pizzas,

58:14

and it's delivered to your house. You have a

58:16

little Caesar's does the pizza pizza thing. So

58:19

really, that's you know. If you cheaped out on this guy, you

58:21

could probably get plugged back then. Eleven dollars worth

58:23

of pizza. But these guys are all on these

58:25

blogs. They're talking about oh, this

58:27

is gonna be the new media exchange. And even

58:29

though it's worth, you know, point 004

58:32

cents, and did he realize, hey, I'm the first person to

58:34

ever try to get goods to service. I don't think he did. Maybe he was like, let's

58:36

try this out. I mean, I think that was his

58:38

mentality. Look, let's see what happens. Here's

58:41

Here it is. Here's the here's the the moment. I'm gonna

58:44

offer forty ten

58:46

thousand Bitcoin to the first person to bring me

58:48

a pizza.

58:49

And nobody everybody

58:51

was like, that's a great idea.

58:53

Nobody bit. What? May

58:55

nineteenth came and went. It's more like nobody bit

58:57

coin. Am I right? Lal.

59:00

And he's

59:00

on there like, hey, you know,

59:03

I'm still hungry. Help a brother out. He didn't eat anything

59:05

in the meantime. It's a very unusual

59:07

part of Well, and he's got a family too. He's got a family to

59:09

feed. I think they kept eating. But every

59:11

day, he's on there like anyone,

59:13

anyone's the one pizza. The

59:15

twentieth of May, two thousand ten

59:17

comes and goes, the twenty first comes and

59:20

goes. And

59:20

he's like seriously And

59:22

at the

59:23

time, you know, their mind in Bitcoin, like, it's

59:25

going out of style. This is Ten thousand Bitcoin

59:27

is nothing to discount. Little dwarves are swinging, pick access. Yeah, it's

59:29

worth forty dollars. Finally, on

59:31

May twenty second, the day before

59:33

my birthday. Oh,

59:36

In two thousand ten, how old would you have been? I would have been thirty six.

59:38

Or do you regret not buying Bitcoin on this

59:40

day? Do you regret not flying to Florida and

59:43

bringing this guy to I wish it

59:45

had been a day later so that every year on my birthday, I could remember

59:47

this amazing pioneer. Well, remember this

59:49

moment because it was the day

59:51

before your birthday. a young

59:53

guy

59:53

by the name of Jeremy Sturtevant

59:56

who who

59:57

went by

1:00:00

the handle

1:00:01

Dirkos. Sturtevant

1:00:04

said, you

1:00:05

know what? I'm gonna do

1:00:06

this. He was nineteen years old.

1:00:10

he accepted the the bargain.

1:00:12

He went to Papa John's,

1:00:15

bought two pizzas, to be too and

1:00:18

brought them

1:00:19

to LASLOW, and they both I'm

1:00:21

sure physically

1:00:22

brought it. They were both yep. They

1:00:24

were a new I mean, one thing

1:00:26

that limits this is the geographic. Although, you can order

1:00:28

somebody pizza right now. He's another Florida man.

1:00:30

But but I think part of the

1:00:32

part of the gag was, like, yeah, you gotta break this. We can go hang on.

1:00:34

Oh, you couldn't just have his local

1:00:36

place delivered. And I don't know. I'm

1:00:39

not sure what deal was. I don't I,

1:00:41

you know, I I org at the time. You were asleep that night.

1:00:44

And you know, I would pay forty dollars for

1:00:46

you not to bring to Papa John's Pizza to

1:00:48

my house.

1:00:50

although don't anybody take me up on that.

1:00:52

If you wanna give me forty

1:00:54

one dollars worth of bitcoin for

1:00:57

me to call up your local pizza parlor and send two

1:00:59

pizzas your way. Let's

1:01:00

see if that happens. You send me

1:01:02

the you send me the money. You send

1:01:05

me ten thousand bit coin. And I'll The problem of

1:01:07

you took The problem was podcasting for people of thousands of

1:01:09

years in the future is that nobody can you know, we're not

1:01:11

this is not a livestream.

1:01:13

if we were doing some e sports version of London, most people would just

1:01:16

be sending us pizzas right now. Right. We'd

1:01:18

be knee deep and delicious pizza. Well, the thing

1:01:20

is that when this airs at the end of

1:01:22

September, if I get two pizzas then. I'm

1:01:24

gonna be just as thrilled as I would if I got them if

1:01:26

I got two pizzas now. But what if it's thousand

1:01:30

millennia, hence? and

1:01:31

they send you some glowing jellyfish equivalent of pizza. Well, that'll

1:01:33

be the road less traveled by to your Karen or

1:01:35

your your AI presence.

1:01:39

My AI presence is gonna love pizza as

1:01:41

much as my actual presence does

1:01:44

now. And so

1:01:46

this day, is

1:01:47

now commemorated May twenty second, not

1:01:49

May eighteenth when the offer was made,

1:01:51

but May twenty second

1:01:54

is commemorated in the

1:01:56

crypto universe as

1:01:58

Bitcoin pizza day

1:02:00

because it's the first moment

1:02:02

that

1:02:02

Bitcoin was used to actually buy a fin. And or

1:02:05

do they commemorate it as a as the beginning

1:02:07

of an era? Or or is it

1:02:09

a joking reference

1:02:12

to what

1:02:13

the value of that Bitcoin is or would be

1:02:15

today? Well, so

1:02:15

a lot of people

1:02:17

have similar stories.

1:02:22

that laslow is presumably

1:02:24

not a billion trillionaire

1:02:26

because at a time when Bitcoin

1:02:28

was worth a hundred dollars, It

1:02:30

seemed like -- Wow. -- cashed out. Look at me. I'm you

1:02:32

know, I've got a hundred thousand dollars worth

1:02:34

of coins here. In in

1:02:36

the case of Jeremy Sternmont,

1:02:40

or,

1:02:40

jerkos, jerkos,

1:02:41

to his friends, he

1:02:43

ended up one

1:02:46

year later selling

1:02:48

his Bitcoin for

1:02:50

four hundred dollars. His ten thousand Bitcoin

1:02:52

at that time had gone

1:02:55

up a hundred percent. No. Had gone

1:02:57

up times a hundred. He's gotta get

1:02:58

out or times ten.

1:03:00

And he's

1:03:01

like, wow. Four hundred

1:03:02

bucks. Best pizza I ever bought. I just got

1:03:05

four hundred bucks. he yeah.

1:03:08

He he made a he

1:03:09

made a bundle. And

1:03:11

both of them,

1:03:14

when you when they've and

1:03:16

they've both been interviewed

1:03:17

many times. They both

1:03:19

say, you know, Our

1:03:21

idea of Bitcoin is that it's there

1:03:23

to be used and

1:03:26

we in doing this sort of popularized

1:03:28

it and that was our goal. That's what I

1:03:30

tell myself. too. They both kick

1:03:33

themselves obviously because ten

1:03:35

thousand Bitcoin at the at

1:03:37

the peak. I have not

1:03:39

done them. In November, of two

1:03:41

thousand twenty one was worth six

1:03:43

fifty million dollars.

1:03:45

No. I'd

1:03:48

pay that for a pizza, but probably not Papa

1:03:50

John's. No. No. Does that come with that

1:03:52

little bit of that garlic sauce? I I

1:03:54

have not I haven't eaten

1:03:56

at a Papa John's in one billion years. Now the

1:03:59

the

1:03:59

sad

1:04:01

thing And

1:04:03

I and, you know, we've been we've mostly supportive on this

1:04:05

episode of Millennials. We

1:04:07

love the Millennials. But

1:04:09

there's We do think they slay. We do think they

1:04:12

slay. They are the tea. No. They

1:04:14

are the they're not the they're they

1:04:16

spill the

1:04:18

tea. They are on fleek.

1:04:20

Why do you say like it's up French?

1:04:22

Because I spell it EMFLIQUE

1:04:28

on fleek. Okay. Is that gonna catch on? I

1:04:29

think it will. No. No. No. Nobody says

1:04:31

it anymore. Yeah. Gen Z loves you now

1:04:33

that you say

1:04:36

on

1:04:36

fleek. Here's the Their newest catchphrase. Here's

1:04:38

the Gen Z. Are you

1:04:40

familiar? You've never been to El Salvador.

1:04:43

I have not.

1:04:45

Well, the president of

1:04:47

El Salvador is

1:04:49

a bro. He's

1:04:50

an

1:04:51

El Salvadorian bro. on a

1:04:53

bro. He's a crypto visionary. He's damaged. He is a crypto

1:04:55

he's a millennial crypto bro. There's no

1:04:58

countries run

1:05:00

by cryptozoologists. No. Who

1:05:02

believed in those as far as we know. Such watches, but

1:05:04

there is one run by a crypto bro.

1:05:06

The president of El Salvador is a young

1:05:08

guy named Naiib Bouquilé

1:05:10

and by young just mean he's younger

1:05:12

than me. He's about forty.

1:05:14

And he's a world leader. He's a world leader. He's a

1:05:16

world leader. He ran for

1:05:18

president of El Salvador, basically because he had to

1:05:20

let a tutor follow. because he was

1:05:22

a, you

1:05:22

know, like a it's this guy, five and

1:05:24

white guy. He actually wears a baseball

1:05:26

hat on backwards. So a lot of

1:05:28

his promo photos because he's just that kind of cool guy.

1:05:31

His party is

1:05:32

called the Nuevais Ideas.

1:05:37

They're

1:05:37

the party of

1:05:39

new ideas.

1:05:40

And

1:05:41

he decided, you know,

1:05:43

El Salvador for many

1:05:45

years, has had since they were run by

1:05:48

a a nationalist,

1:05:50

United States of America, CIA

1:05:54

funded dictatorship. Good old days. They decided that it was too hard

1:05:56

to maintain their own currency, and

1:05:58

so they were just gonna pig their currency to the

1:05:59

US dollar. And

1:06:02

then eventually, just use

1:06:04

the US dollar as their current That

1:06:06

happens. I think Ecuador doesn't know.

1:06:08

Yeah. But

1:06:09

but

1:06:11

Buckelli decided that

1:06:13

El Salvador was going

1:06:16

to make Bitcoin

1:06:18

legal tender. because he is a booster and

1:06:20

he believes that this is the

1:06:22

this is the way the truth and the light. Now,

1:06:24

Bouquilé came into power as a young

1:06:26

hip dude.

1:06:28

he has increasingly become a

1:06:31

proto fascist. Not

1:06:32

to say that that

1:06:34

is what millennials

1:06:36

would all do if they were elected the president of El Salvador, but pretty much

1:06:38

I think. Pretty much every bro of the baseball

1:06:41

cap backwards should not have an army. Yeah. They're

1:06:43

going he and so

1:06:46

who

1:06:46

Kelly in in

1:06:48

two thousand

1:06:48

twenty one, just last year,

1:06:50

sept well, a year ago, September

1:06:53

of twenty one. Never

1:06:56

forget. he passed a Bitcoin law that

1:06:58

made Bitcoin legal tender

1:07:00

in El Salvador. Although, something

1:07:03

like seventy percent of El

1:07:06

Salvadorans were against it,

1:07:08

recognized that it was a dumb move. But

1:07:10

in September

1:07:12

of two thousand twenty one,

1:07:14

Bitcoin was worth sixty thousand

1:07:17

dollars. And McKelley put

1:07:19

a lot of El Salvador

1:07:22

doors,

1:07:22

cash

1:07:23

reserves, made the big

1:07:25

play, and put it in bitcoin. With

1:07:27

the idea that

1:07:30

it

1:07:30

was gonna solve El Salvador's debt if

1:07:33

it keeps if it keeps

1:07:34

bringing tenfold

1:07:36

tenfold growth

1:07:39

every one to three years. Sure.

1:07:40

Sure. And

1:07:41

however, two months after

1:07:44

and and El Salvador would become

1:07:46

a crypto Enclave,

1:07:49

a Crypto Exclave, or

1:07:50

a Crypto, you

1:07:52

know, destination for Crypto Banking

1:07:55

and and whatnot. you

1:07:58

know, right now, I mean, there are crypto banks

1:07:59

in they're dug into the hillside

1:08:02

in Switzerland

1:08:04

where

1:08:04

I don't

1:08:05

even know what they're doing. They're

1:08:07

storing crypto as though it's real money, but

1:08:09

it's on hard drives.

1:08:11

So bizarre. Anyway,

1:08:12

anyway can I put everything into

1:08:15

Bitcoin or if not everything,

1:08:17

a lot of things

1:08:19

too much? And and

1:08:22

devised a whole, like, Bitcoin ATM

1:08:25

system. He started a

1:08:28

thing called the Chivo

1:08:30

Wallet, Chivo being El Salvadoran term for, like,

1:08:32

cool. This guy does have some new Webex

1:08:34

he did. Yeah. He does. It's a

1:08:38

chiro wallet. Hey, Most of the population of El Salvador

1:08:40

was like, this is a terrible

1:08:42

idea. And as you said, just

1:08:45

a a couple of months later,

1:08:47

Bitcoin

1:08:47

started to decline. And then over the

1:08:49

course of the first half of two

1:08:51

thousand twenty two,

1:08:54

Bitcoin

1:08:54

went from sixty five thousand dollars

1:08:57

to nineteen thousand dollars

1:08:59

in value, and

1:09:01

El Salvador

1:09:03

lost sixty percent of the the value of its investment.

1:09:05

It's a bummer because the great thing our crypto going down is you can

1:09:07

actually you can

1:09:10

actually you can actually root for it. Well, because, you know, generally, it's, you know,

1:09:12

the the dumber people. And and and

1:09:14

and Bouquilly has But here,

1:09:18

it's it's a developing world now taken on the chain because of this yoyo.

1:09:21

He has doubled down on it and is,

1:09:23

like, very confidently saying that he's buying

1:09:25

the dip. Gotta buy the dip.

1:09:27

Gotta buy His big idea is to is

1:09:29

it a grande idea? It's a grande idea. And it's also

1:09:31

in the way of

1:09:33

us. He's not a new party. you know, El Salvador is a is

1:09:35

a volcanic hot spot. There are a lot of

1:09:38

old volcanoes there and there's a lot of,

1:09:43

like, steam power I

1:09:45

mean, one of the one of

1:09:47

the ways they they generate power there is

1:09:49

is using geothermal. geothermal. And so his idea was

1:09:51

that they would build

1:09:54

Bitcoin

1:09:54

City.

1:09:56

Bitcoin

1:09:56

City, where Bitcoin

1:09:59

city, where they

1:10:03

would have power,

1:10:04

our eco

1:10:05

power to generate bitcoins in

1:10:07

their big

1:10:11

geothermal steam engines. getting

1:10:14

getting around the objection that

1:10:16

Bitcoin's an incredibly inefficient carbon

1:10:18

energy wave. It's the worst.

1:10:20

It uses so much energy

1:10:23

to produce this tiny, you know, these little little well,

1:10:25

when they're sixty five thousand dollars, it's

1:10:27

kinda like fracking. Right? When oil is

1:10:29

up to here, I would never

1:10:31

do it, but I would never put half the

1:10:33

Texas electricity grid in this so that everybody's AC goes out. But look if that hard drive's worth a hundred and fifty a

1:10:36

million dollars, go dig

1:10:38

in the landfill. Hello? I'll

1:10:40

do the problem with unprecedented

1:10:42

ideas here is that, you know, Bitcoin City could get all this clean geothermal energy and use it for literally

1:10:48

anything else Here's the problem. Geothermal

1:10:50

energy only produces twenty three percent of El Salvador's energy -- Correct.

1:10:52

-- and the

1:10:55

rest is produced by either burning coal.

1:10:57

The dirtiest coal we could find, or they're importing it from other places. So

1:10:59

it's not like geothermal

1:11:02

is some, like, on

1:11:04

tap amount

1:11:06

of energy that they're just like Oh, we don't

1:11:08

even know what's just sitting there.

1:11:10

All this electricity.

1:11:11

So right now,

1:11:13

And

1:11:13

this is a tragedy. El Salvador is laboring

1:11:15

under twenty three billion dollars worth

1:11:19

of national debt. that

1:11:22

coin debt that they owe the international monetary fund because, of course, global

1:11:25

banking

1:11:28

I'll

1:11:30

have it Friday or whenever Bitcoin goes

1:11:33

back up. So right

1:11:35

now, Ken,

1:11:36

as my

1:11:39

wealth increases at my coin based wallet,

1:11:40

all the great

1:11:42

shows

1:11:42

and yours because people

1:11:45

are people are giving me

1:11:47

the dip. Right? They're at the they're like, you know what, Roderick

1:11:49

Bitcoin's hardly worth a thing now. It's only

1:11:51

twenty thousand dollars.

1:11:54

You can have ten

1:11:55

thousand a mine. Is this something that happens

1:11:57

a donation economy based on beat me?

1:11:59

I mean, all of

1:12:00

this is new to me. I just think

1:12:02

the kind of people that on bitcoin are are

1:12:04

are the

1:12:06

least likely. Yeah. But

1:12:07

it's I mean, scarcity is

1:12:09

relative.

1:12:12

Right?

1:12:13

Sure. They can give you a tiny crumb, a tiny morsel from their

1:12:15

Bitcoin table. I went to a I went to a party at your house

1:12:17

a couple of weekends ago,

1:12:19

and there were so many

1:12:21

hamburgers on the grill. There were a lot of hamburger. You were and then I noticed there was Costco

1:12:23

hamburgers out of a bag,

1:12:28

but still you had made enough hamburgers. They were all getting eaten.

1:12:30

No. They were. Everybody ate a hamburger. Well, the problem was at the end, like, I made a

1:12:34

batch and they all went and I was like, no. I gotta make ten more. And I made ten more,

1:12:36

and none of those got hit. Yeah. And I, you

1:12:38

know, I think I probably had two and I had

1:12:42

a hotdog. But, you know, so I am. They you should be contributing

1:12:44

to my Ethereum Wallet. You know what

1:12:46

I'm not being Don't don't hamburger

1:12:50

shamed me. But yeah. So, I mean, to

1:12:52

some people, one Bitcoin would be a

1:12:54

year's wages and to other people, ten

1:12:57

thousand Bitcoin is just to drop in

1:12:59

the bucket. if you're a Salvatorio, do not send your No. No.

1:13:01

No. No. But if you are if you're a

1:13:03

tech bro that wanna prove that

1:13:05

Bitcoin is a way

1:13:07

to support your favorite podcaster. I will not

1:13:09

split it with Ken, mister hamburgers, mister Cervless and hamburgers. You're the

1:13:12

hamburglar. Did I did I mention

1:13:14

it's all the great shows at

1:13:16

Coinbase wallet.

1:13:18

I have no idea whether they can

1:13:20

actually based on that scant amount of information. Right.

1:13:22

They might be laughing at me right now. Instead,

1:13:24

I need a twenty digit number. Gonna get twenty

1:13:27

emails explaining why this is not a thing. If yeah. Okay.

1:13:29

Here's the burden to prove. If you send

1:13:31

me an email, you

1:13:33

have to follow-up with actual bit when I figure out how to

1:13:35

use it. If you don't have that coins, just send me a

1:13:37

pizza. Yeah. Or you could send can

1:13:40

a pizza.

1:13:40

And that

1:13:44

concludes Bitcoin pizza

1:13:44

day entry 126

1:13:46

dot JB1304

1:13:49

certificate

1:13:49

number 11904

1:13:52

in the omnibus. Futurelings, there

1:13:54

are a

1:13:55

number of ways that

1:13:58

you can support the show that do not

1:13:59

involve John's coin based wallet.

1:14:02

I would like to emphasize

1:14:04

these as we celebrate our 500th

1:14:06

anniversary. All the great

1:14:09

shows at

1:14:10

Coinbase Wallet. You could

1:14:12

You could write a nice review of us. You

1:14:15

could Oh, wow. We never say that. You could A good idea. Go ahead. A nice review. I feel like

1:14:17

Apple Podcasts, we get like a

1:14:19

nice review about Once

1:14:22

a month. Wait. Star and review. Five

1:14:25

stars and give us a good review.

1:14:27

Thank you, Ken. You don't even have

1:14:29

to do five stars. You could you could give us give

1:14:31

us no. Give us an honest review. No. It's

1:14:33

a that's a false economy. Everything

1:14:35

is either a five star or a one star.

1:14:37

There's no one. But nobody listening at this point is

1:14:40

gonna give one star. No. But but the ones

1:14:42

that are

1:14:42

Libertarians that are like, oh, I'm only gonna give three stars because John

1:14:44

doesn't know about blah,

1:14:47

blah, blah, blah, blah, John

1:14:48

pronounced mute Okay. Giving an giving an

1:14:50

Uber driver three star is a little different than giving an artwork like

1:14:53

a podcast. How

1:14:55

is it different? Because there's

1:14:58

an economy of reviews and criticism around art and not about rideshairs.

1:15:01

Yeah. But,

1:15:04

you know, people are gonna be like,

1:15:06

I wanna I wanna listen to a podcast, and they're gonna look at ten thousand five star

1:15:09

reviews for

1:15:12

Joe Regan's pile hot trash. And then we're gonna have a four

1:15:14

and a half star because you're encouraging people to leave us three stars. No. I think

1:15:16

you should. There's this is a we

1:15:18

have the integrity that other shows. Do not

1:15:22

Alright. If you have if you think this

1:15:24

is a four star podcast, give us four. If

1:15:26

you

1:15:26

think it's a three star podcast, give us three.

1:15:28

If you think

1:15:29

it's a two star podcast, why are you listening

1:15:31

this long? We're like well over an hour show. This is the end of

1:15:33

the show and you're still hanging on. You're all

1:15:35

five star podcasts or

1:15:38

nothing. Write or die. You could

1:15:40

email us at the omnibus project at gmail dot

1:15:42

com. You could follow various social media presences at omnibus project at

1:15:46

congenings at John Roderick.

1:15:48

You could send us things. You could? You

1:15:50

can't I don't wanna open this

1:15:53

one because there's a lot

1:15:55

of tape on it. Yeah.

1:15:56

That does have a lot of tape. Maybe I'll

1:15:58

open that one later on. This one, I wanna thank oh, this one doesn't even

1:15:59

have a name, some mystery person. I

1:16:01

wanna thank mystery person for not putting

1:16:03

tape on their back.

1:16:06

I'm gonna open this and it's just gonna be like,

1:16:09

can't autograph my

1:16:12

baseball. Oh,

1:16:12

no, it is. No. It's

1:16:14

not an No. No. Is it really? I

1:16:17

thought it was an SASE but it's

1:16:19

not. No. It's a what

1:16:21

what now? We're talking. What is it? Who

1:16:23

is this from? There are two blank

1:16:25

envelopes. Is it Omaha the

1:16:27

cat dancer? No.

1:16:31

Even better. Michelle.

1:16:32

My bell notes that

1:16:34

in the

1:16:35

tweet entry, I said more mister

1:16:37

Rogers than and I was trying to think

1:16:39

of a very tough mister

1:16:42

character that would make the the similarly work. Mister Bean? He's more mister Rogers than mister no.

1:16:44

It has to be a

1:16:46

tough one. Oh, mister mister No.

1:16:51

So we

1:16:51

still can't think of one, but Michelle has done the

1:16:53

work here and has actually

1:16:55

crocheted us or

1:16:57

crustched cross stitch does a little

1:17:00

sampler that says the correct answer.

1:17:02

Oh. More mister Rogers than mister

1:17:04

t. Is that actually cross

1:17:06

stitch or is that AAA picture

1:17:08

of a cross stitch. From across the room, it looks like

1:17:10

a picture of a cross stitch up close. No. Michelle has actually cross ditched

1:17:13

more mister Rogers

1:17:15

than mister T. Wow. This

1:17:17

needs to go on its own sign. That's not beautiful. Did that? That is beautiful. And she sent us a

1:17:19

couple of relics of a Midwestern mister t loving

1:17:22

childhood, a, I pity the fool sticker.

1:17:24

Yep. and

1:17:27

even better, the annual. I don't know

1:17:28

why this would have an annual of

1:17:30

mister t's Saturday morning television cartoon.

1:17:34

Hey. Hey. Why why does

1:17:35

he have an annual? This is British. First name, mister. I

1:17:37

can tell I used to have a

1:17:39

moonraker annual, which

1:17:41

was one of these Weird hardcover children's

1:17:43

books about a pop culture property. Those

1:17:46

hardcover books are Disney put

1:17:48

out so many

1:17:50

of those. for all their properties. But I could tell this was British the

1:17:52

second, I saw this three thousand AD

1:17:54

asked lettering on this mister T comment.

1:17:58

I

1:17:58

think judgerade's gonna appear at some

1:17:59

point. My question here is more

1:18:02

mister Rogers than mister t, but

1:18:04

she didn't capitalize the m and

1:18:06

more. So it's more than

1:18:08

It's a stylistic

1:18:08

choice. Wow. It it foregrounds the

1:18:10

names, surely. But, I mean, it's a

1:18:13

it's a sentence more than -- It's

1:18:15

not -- -- more for Roger's than miss What

1:18:17

would the verb be in the sentence? I'm the implied

1:18:19

I'm your it. It

1:18:23

is it's That is

1:18:25

fantastic. And I love this weird

1:18:27

off brand British animated

1:18:29

mister T thing I am actually taking this time.

1:18:31

Usually, I just leave junk here in your

1:18:34

bunker. Yeah. You do. My daughter's

1:18:36

mother was saying yesterday, oh, the the basement's a

1:18:38

mess. Ken is gonna be mad, and I was

1:18:40

like, you see Ken's area?

1:18:42

Ken makes the mess. Ken is the mess. Look at mister Key and the island of fear. This amazing

1:18:44

adventure that he's

1:18:47

having in a British font.

1:18:50

Oh, it is good. Look at that. I love a jean vest that has

1:18:52

the slip the

1:18:55

sleeves ripped off. and

1:18:57

look at this little red headed kid, he has a matching vest. Yeah. Mister T and this cartoon apparently

1:18:59

had a multiracial team of young people -- Yep. -- who

1:19:02

he would lead on adventures probably based on real

1:19:04

life. Well,

1:19:07

what's interesting is there's an Asian girl. There's who seem

1:19:10

someone who seems like a Latin

1:19:15

guy. There's African descendant person? That's not

1:19:17

the right way to say. A red

1:19:19

a red headed woman

1:19:21

and a red headed boy. So it's

1:19:23

very UK and then a dog with a Mohawk.

1:19:25

Do you think in real life

1:19:28

mister Tied he gives his dog

1:19:30

a Mohawk? Yeah. See here's his

1:19:32

group. Kim Makimura. Miss Priscilla

1:19:34

Bisbee, is that

1:19:35

the dog? No. Spike, who's

1:19:37

the young. Yes. Priscilla,

1:19:38

why does he have a

1:19:41

southern bell in his misrepresent of Disney. And then Vince DeMato, so he's kind

1:19:43

of the Italian guy. This is like a World War

1:19:46

two movie. Then Garcia -- Oh. -- Saint

1:19:48

Augustine. And

1:19:51

then the black kid is Woody Daniels.

1:19:52

Okay. Here's the thing about Garcia Lopez. I'm

1:19:54

a hundred percent sure he is named after the

1:19:57

DC

1:19:58

Comics

1:19:59

books artist Jose

1:20:01

Luis Garcia Lopez who did a lot

1:20:03

of model sheets for animation in the eighties. He looks exactly like Epstein from Welcome

1:20:07

back Carter. No. That's offensive to our Latino friends. No. They're they all

1:20:10

look like welcome back Carter characters. Vince DiMotto

1:20:12

looks like looks like John Travolta.

1:20:14

I don't think there was a Kim

1:20:16

Makamura. We'll put

1:20:18

a picture of there's a hacker in

1:20:20

a wheelchair. There's a robot on a keyboard. And then the

1:20:22

dog's name so the kid's name is Spike.

1:20:25

The dog's name is dozer. We're gonna put a picture of

1:20:27

this up on the Patreon so you

1:20:30

can enjoy it. If In

1:20:34

the five hundred previous entries of

1:20:36

activists, you have become a loyal supporter

1:20:38

of the show. They're all gymnasts. Look

1:20:40

at them. They're

1:20:41

they're jim they're gymnasts. I once mister Key on a

1:20:43

Spanish television New Year celebration in the nineties when

1:20:45

when apparently you could get him

1:20:48

very cheap. and

1:20:51

he had to do all these physical challenges and he was the

1:20:53

poor guy was not in any kind of

1:20:55

condition in the mid nineties to be

1:20:58

doing physical challenges on late night Spanish

1:21:00

TV. So everybody here is

1:21:02

a is a gymnast, and they're all doing gymnast activities.

1:21:04

And there is do you

1:21:06

think that was mister t's own

1:21:10

Yes.

1:21:10

I will let you license me for anime for

1:21:12

Saturday morning animation, but I

1:21:14

must

1:21:15

be associated with my true

1:21:17

love. competitive

1:21:17

gymnastics? Maybe I must be hanging out with a team of

1:21:19

agile gymnasts. Yes. Here in the final story, this

1:21:21

is gonna disappoint you

1:21:24

a lot. In

1:21:26

the final story, Mr. T. and the Mystery Ranch.

1:21:29

The bad

1:21:29

guy is a

1:21:31

Native American in

1:21:33

a full headdress, feathered headdress with

1:21:36

a Tomahawk, and he

1:21:38

is fighting the gymnasts

1:21:40

who are doing gymnastics.

1:21:42

to

1:21:43

defeat him. I don't know

1:21:45

if

1:21:45

he says how at any point

1:21:47

here. Does seem like the mid aged

1:21:49

is a little late to have an

1:21:51

evil headdress wearing native American villain. I'm

1:21:54

not sure. Yeah. I mean, unless he's like a anti hero who's like, you took

1:21:55

my land, gymnasts, but

1:21:58

I I

1:21:59

feel like There were

1:22:02

still members of the conservative party in Britain that were wearing them to parties at Oxford until two

1:22:04

thousand five. Yes.

1:22:07

I probably lost by

1:22:10

last, nicholas. So you can

1:22:12

see the cool things people send

1:22:14

to us

1:22:15

by going to our patreon,

1:22:18

patreon dot com slash omnibus project. Look,

1:22:21

you've gotten five hundred free shows,

1:22:23

many of you. It's time to

1:22:25

send a man up. pony. Yep. This is

1:22:27

a You can woman up. This is not

1:22:29

this is not bitcoin city, a libertarian paradise

1:22:31

where nothing is free. You can

1:22:33

gender neutral up. Yes. You can what

1:22:35

you don't think Pony is gender neutral? Oh, man.

1:22:37

You can man up. Oh, I see. I

1:22:39

mean, no. Pony.

1:22:41

Send us a pony.

1:22:43

send

1:22:43

my send me a pony to to your Bitcoin

1:22:45

wall.

1:22:45

To my coin base. All the

1:22:47

great shows. So also,

1:22:49

I'm a I'm a

1:22:52

Bitcoin maximalist. So I don't

1:22:52

want your doze coin. Although if you wanna send me doze

1:22:54

coin, I'm fine with that too. Would you

1:22:58

take Ethereum? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what theory was worth

1:23:00

worth bang. Wouldn't a maximalist mean you take anything?

1:23:02

But you're saying you won't take Deutsche Klein. That's

1:23:04

a minimalist. No. So there

1:23:06

are people who are Bitcoin only.

1:23:09

They're right or doctor's coin and they don't want they

1:23:11

they don't believe because they think all the other coins, every

1:23:15

other cryptocoyne is just a

1:23:17

scam. They're all pyramids. But you're more of a unitarian, like, man,

1:23:19

all these all these systems have something good to

1:23:21

offer. Yeah.

1:23:21

Well, but Bitcoin, I'm I'm a

1:23:24

crypto unitary Bitcoin's

1:23:26

the thing. It's the it's the big

1:23:28

daddy. And maybe the rest are scams, but, you

1:23:30

know, people get rich off the sky. not

1:23:32

not damaged one. I'm sure that one's real.

1:23:34

Okay. Hey, take the take the big risk. What was his tagline? Hey.

1:23:37

How do

1:23:38

you like

1:23:39

them apples? Hey. You would have

1:23:41

lost a lot of money if you had done what

1:23:43

I asked you to do. I'm

1:23:46

making money off this ad. Why shouldn't

1:23:48

you? I bet he was paid in

1:23:50

bitcoin and I bet he's

1:23:52

like, damn. Please pay us an

1:23:54

actual legal tender backed by a government and regulated

1:23:56

by all the banking regulations that

1:23:58

I promise you exist for

1:24:00

a reason even

1:24:02

though John's