The Big Red Button That’s Destroying Your Future

Jackson Mikalic (00:02.27) All right, we are live. It's the last trade. We have a special episode this week. sitting down with Joe Brian. Joe is the creator and educator of what's the problem. We will be linking that certainly in the show notes, but if you haven't seen it already, it's one of the best primers, I would say, on really understanding the root cause of inflation, a lot of the societal ills that people are experiencing these days, and ultimately why Bitcoin can be the solution, but it's really important first to understand the problem. So Joe, it's a pleasure to have you on and then we're also joined today by Brian, my typical co-host and Michael isn't here today so we have Liam from Early Riders joining in place of Michael as the second co-host for The Last Trade today. Joe, thank you for joining us, really nice to meet you and looking forward to this conversation, how are you doing? Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (00:51.004) Yeah, good. Thanks. Pleasure to be on. So thank you for having me guys. Jackson Mikalic (00:55.89) Absolutely. So let's start with your background. I know that you have a background in traditional finance. You worked at firms like Goldman and Morgan Stanley UBS. It looks like mostly on the trading side with derivatives and to be now an educator of the monetary system and being an advocate for Bitcoin. It's I guess a big shift from where you were 20 years ago when you started your career. So what was your career like? What's your background? If you can just tell us a little bit more. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:23.71) Well, it's a big shift for all of us from wherever we started from to where we are now. Yeah, I mean, did. I've always been maths, maths focused. did physics, Oxford, I went straight to Goldman, spent five years there and then five years at Morgan Stanley UBS, just trading equity derivatives the whole time. And then I left when I started modelling sports, applying derivatives maths to modelling. the likelihood of events in sports matches, predominantly soccer and cricket, and left to move exclusively into that writing algoes. And we set up a quantum engineering business where we would model the sports in real time, bolt them on real time engineering and then provide prices and new innovative products to bookmakers. And so we then grew that business. We were acquired and then grew the acquire, help grow the acquiring business to be a global player. And so I spent 10 years as an entrepreneur after leaving the city. And so I've had two 10 year stints. then last year, early last year, I was able to take a step out of that business and focus on the only thing that matters outside family, which is Bitcoin. And I think my whole journey has led me to Bitcoin. And I think I... I overlap a lot with the personality types of most of the, you know, where we over index in the, in the space, sort of engineering systems, logical, this and that type of sequence thinking. And yeah, it led me to focus all my time on, on Bitcoin, which I've been doing for over a year and caused me to create the, create the presentation and create the video. And then that's. that's taken off a lot of this year and I've been doing other stuff on the sides, it is just, Big Crunch is entirely logical. And it's so logical that everyone's going to get there. And so, you know, once the penny drops, there's just, there's nothing, it's not worth working on anything else because everything else is just downstream of this, of this thing that needs to be fixed. If you're working on anything else, it's working on a symptom, not the cause. Brian Cubellis (03:50.877) Yeah, that's a fascinating journey, I think, you know, Jackson, myself and Liam also all come from some form of traditional finance background before we sort of moved into Bitcoin and felt that calling that you're referencing, where you realize it's the thing that matters and it's the highest leverage. activity or area of focus that you could possibly imagine for your life. And me personally, when I was in private banking for many years, As I started to learn about Bitcoin, I became increasingly jaded with what I was doing professionally in terms of thinking about asset allocation and equities and bonds and just realizing that none of that really matters if you can just have a better form of savings. there's a lot of money to be made in traditional finance for purporting various strategies, trading, whether it's FX or... And then interestingly, where... your career ended up in terms of getting into algorithms around sports betting. I'm curious, was there a moment in that initial journey of your career where you started to feel that what you were doing was not necessarily your ultimate calling and maybe also just... Secondary to that, what was your initial foray into Bitcoin? Was there someone in your life that spoke to you about it initially or did you find it yourself? What was that initial interaction with Bitcoin? Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (05:25.58) Well, there's a few questions there. wouldn't say, I always wanted to be a bookmaker growing up. I worked in betting shops as a teenager in Yorkshire. I always liked being the bookmaker, not the better. And I don't enjoy betting. It's not a thrill. It's if you have an advantage, you take advantage systematically. And that's been... my journey all the way through. And, you know, the 10 years I spent in banking, I didn't particularly enjoy all of it. Went through the financial crisis in 2008, which was an incredible learning experience. But you end up having a family, having a mortgage, having to do the things that you have to do as the breadwinner to support your family. But I wouldn't say there was a point where I... had a light bulb moment with Bitcoin while I was working in the banks and these sorts of things because it's all consuming and you're trapped. It's like that article by Crosis, which is just so accurate. The Yuppie elite don't get Bitcoin and I was in that Yuppie elite for a long time. It's only when you leave the banking system, you become an entrepreneur, you see that there is no safety net anymore. Brian Cubellis (06:27.421) Mm-hmm. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (06:54.727) Right, you're last in the line for help from the government, right, when you're an entrepreneur of a small business. And then you realize actually, you start to question things more critically. You go back to those first assumptions and then it was during COVID when the whole world shut down, but then the stock market is flying. Evaluation is good. I was like, makes no sense at all. This makes no sense at all. And it's clearly just money printing. And then you start to go down the steps of, okay, well, how do I best position this? Brian Cubellis (07:20.828) Right. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (07:35.912) to protect my family and then you talk, you think about gold and then you start learning about Bitcoin and then it's like, okay, this makes sense. But I think a lot of people go through that same thought process. You sort of realize something's happening. You realize you need to protect your wealth. So you need to own hard assets of some form and then gradually you realize the qualities of Bitcoin make everything else totally redundant. But that is not an overnight. Realization matching your overnight, matching your conviction, conviction builds slowly over time. Right. And so, know, it's 2020, I got into Bitcoin and then I very much enjoyed being an entrepreneur for 10 years, working and helping to grow that business. I was very passionate about that business. But once you reach that tipping point, It's like I could continue working here and could continue helping to this business become number one. but I can have a much bigger impact if I go and fix the problem. I focus my energies on fixing the problem. And that tipping point came for me a few years ago. so, you know, private businesses being private businesses, you can't necessarily make changes when you want to make changes. And you have to wait for a certain point of, you know, liquidity events and size of business, et cetera, et cetera, to be able to take a step out. And so... 2024 was the perfect timing for me there and allowed me to move across. But it was a great experience because I'd done derivatives trading, I'd then done modeling and co-founded this business and growing it. But then I ended up going almost full circle because the business I joined was an Eastern European betting company on its path to be a global player. so the... Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (09:36.658) The internal capability when it came to finance, driving growth and these sorts of things from governance almost, that accessing markets wasn't there. And so I ended up moving closer and closer to the finance side, working with private equity, working with private credit, running the &A, running the venture fund that we had on balance sheets, working with small companies again, investing in startups. going full circle into the finance side and away from the trading side again. And I was like, well, I've done the full 360 here from almost back to where I started. yeah, just you wake up every day thinking about Bitcoin once the penny drops. And, you know, I think many people listen to this podcast, if you gave them the chance to step out of fear and focus all their energy on Bitcoin, they would. they would bite your arm off to do so. So I'm fortunately lucky to be in that position and now I'm trying to make the biggest contribution I can to help Bitcoin win as soon as possible because that's what we all need, whether you realize it or not. Jackson Mikalic (10:51.506) Yeah, I love so much of what you just said there, Joe, because what I heard is kind of a call to action by people, listeners of the show, because Bitcoin does not become the standard. does not become the global form of money without people actually participating, whether it's on education or building businesses. So if you've been listening to the show and this has been on your mind, on your heart for a while, it's really something that is worth pursuing. I think All four of us on this call here, Joe, wasn't like someone gave you the opportunity or you asked for permission to create what's the problem. You just felt that desire and that calling to do so in the same way that Liam, Brian, myself thought a calling to build out in this industry as well. So certainly anyone who's looking to get involved, I... You know, there's always uncertainty in anything in any new venture you take on, but that is ultimately the most rewarding thing. And a couple of other things you said there, Joe, that I think are, you know, might sound crazy to many people because you said earlier in the episode that Bitcoin is really the only thing worth focusing on besides family. And to 99 % of people, if you just, if we could distribute this podcast to everyone's radio and television. they would think that is an absurd statement, but really we know that it isn't. I want to give, I want to share a little vignette that I think will help to paint the picture, inform the conversation around really what is the problem. So unfortunately I was informed just a couple of days ago that a family run small business, restaurant in a local to me is closing after 40 years in operation. And let me just share a few words from the owners of the business because it is, it's really sad. And I think this also ties into Joe, your point you made about, you know, entrepreneurs, small businesses, they're typically last in line as it relates to getting any sort of aid or help in terms of, you know, from the government. And they're ultimately have been, you know, these are individuals at the end of the day that are forming small businesses and they are being crushed by the problem, which is inflation that we're going to talk about. And so Jackson Mikalic (13:01.034) Let me just share this with the four of you and I think there's a lot of directions we can go. So this is from the article, iconic Lawrenceville restaurant closing its door after over 40 years. Sharing meals with you and your loved ones across three, even four generations has given us priceless memories we will always treasure. However, considering the ever changing world, cost of goods and staffing on the rise and so much more. We have had to make a difficult decision to uphold the quality and standards you've always expected. We believe the time has come for us to close Enzo's." The current owner said, Rita and Anna. Our hope is to celebrate with you over the next four to five weeks, reminiscing about our friendships as you enjoy wonderful meals with us. We look forward to serving you during this time, just as we have for decades past. So this restaurant was opened in 1983, serves great Italian dishes. I for one, my favorite food hands down, chicken parmesan. So this one hits especially home for me here and I've married into an Italian family as well. And so this is really a sad thing because it's not isolated to this restaurant Enzo's. This is something that is, we're continuously seeing here, at least in the United States, the closure of small businesses, citing most of the time rising costs, staffing, quality or cost of goods, rent. property taxes, what have you. so Joe, what is the problem? I mean, it's a big question, but like, why are businesses like this facing issues of rising costs? And could you just maybe demystify some of the misconceptions that people typically have about inflation? Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (14:38.693) Yeah, absolutely. mean, the core problem is there's a big red button. I exist that the government can press and change the aspects of the money whenever they want, whether it be the quantity or the characteristics of the money, right? Which is a massive simplification of the entire financial system as to how it works, but it encapsulates everything that people need to understand, right? Somebody has the option to change something and you're on the losing side of that change. Now for, for Enzo's, It sounds like it is inflation, but it's downstream consequences of the reaction to the money printer coming from the government, which then layers extra pain on top of them. So changes in taxation, changes in laws and regulations, and also the downstream consequences of the staff and the people that work there and maybe the long term or short term mindsets that. it instills in the younger generations because the money is broken. Right. So you've got a core problem of the money itself being corrupted because the government has a big red button, but then you've got the impact of that flowing downstream and then accelerated by all these other social factors, which sort of bolt on the side and undermine the viability of that business going forward. But if we zoom back and just think about the inflation aspect, which causes all of these things to precipitously fall out. When the government presses the big red button and effectively just prints extra money for the government, I'm using a government and central bank sort of interchangeably because they're not independent, nominally independent, but it can be removed at any point, there's political pressure, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just a promise to be independent. But when they print extra money, that goes into... And again, I'm not going to drill into what printing extra money actually means mechanically because there's lots of different ways, right? If you want to understand that, you get Lynn Alden in and she'll spend two hours explaining how all of these things fit together. What I'm going to do is try and abstract as much of it away into an explanation that somebody can then share with a friend. So when the government prints money, that money goes into the pocket of the government. And so... Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (17:01.981) For that to reach the economy, they've got to spend it. And they spend it with people connected to the government. People, businesses, et cetera, et cetera. Now, when you do that, you distort the price signals in the market. If you think about a free market which had perfect money, when nobody could print any money, the only reason prices would change in that market is if there was a change in demand or supply. So demand goes up, prices start going up, which is a price signal to everyone else that there's an imbalance, it attracts supply. But when you can print extra money and then that gets spent, that looks like extra demand. But it's not, it's just extra money. So when the government spends it, it drives the prices up in the areas of the economy it touches, which is then a signal to everyone else in the economy, there's a price imbalance. And so you have then active people and capital across the rest of the economy look over there and think there's extra profitability to play for. I'm going to stop doing what I'm doing. I'm going to move closer to the government. We're going to try and bring extra supply over there. Now that makes the rest of the economy less efficient. And so the productivity increases you should be getting and that should be accruing to the population through the money, through the purchasing power of the money gets eroded across the wider economy because the government's printing money. because you also have the most productive people, the most mobile capital move first and becomes closer and closer to the government. So that's the first thing. Distortion of the price signals. The second is that when those businesses spend money with other businesses in the economy on labor, inputs, et cetera, et cetera, that fresh money starts to gradually move out across all the businesses. Well, when it does this, it drives the input costs up for everybody. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (19:12.347) So Enzo's now sees all its products cost more. It sees the staff cost more. And every business, every business is run by an entrepreneur who's doing a constant calculation of risk and reward. Running the business is not risk free. I need to make a certain amount of profit to justify me taking the risk of running the business. Otherwise I'll close the business. I go and work for someone else. They can take the risk. And so when the government prints money, they drive the prices up closer to the government, it then spreads out and it erodes the profit margins of all the existing businesses because their input costs have gone up, but the prices are still the same. And so now every entrepreneur is like, how do I reinstate my profit margin to justify the existence of my business? And then so every entrepreneur has now got a choice. It's like, well, the easiest thing is just to pass the cost on to the customer. So now Enzo. He just puts the prices up of all the meals. But that impacts the consumer. So now the consumer is worse off because they're having to pay more for the same meal. So it probably impacts his turnover, the number of customers that come. He could charge the same, but put 10 % less food on every plate. And this is shrink inflation. And it's not just food, it's all the products. So same quality, same price, just smaller. And you're reinstating your profit margin that way, but that's still inflation. The customer leaves hungry, they to buy something else. They're still spending the same amount of money. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (20:58.484) Or Enzo says, well, I don't want to shrink the amount of food I put on the plate. I don't want to charge any more for it. I'll just use worse ingredients. I'll cut down the cost of the ingredients that I put on the plate. And typically that's moving to lower quality ingredients. And that's still inflation, but it manifests itself to the population through health. Now, if everybody's eating lower quality food, people start getting sick. They start getting fat. This is why we have the obesity crisis. It's because the money's It's a race to the bottom in terms of standards to protect profit margins for entrepreneurs through no fault of their own. It's logical decision-making driven from the fact that government prints money. And that's considering it as if it was a consumable one time, like food. If it was a product, so say it was a kettle or a toaster. They just use worse components. So the toaster now doesn't last five years, it lasts two years. And you have to rebuy it. That's still inflation. You're still spending more money over a fixed period of time. It's just dragged out through time. And so when we think about inflation, and whenever we hear people talk about inflation, it's just prices going up. When they measure inflation, it's prices going up. That's one aspect. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (22:34.628) of the three aspects of inflation. That's the visible inflation. It's not the semi-visible inflation like shrink inflation. And it's not the hidden inflation, which is passed through time through lower quality outcomes, lower quality production or health or negative human outcomes. So it's inflation manifested in health. So we only ever talk about one of the three aspects of consumer inflation, which is mental. But once you lay it out like that, it's just so obvious. It's so obvious we're only looking at one third of the picture. And even that one third of the picture is misrepresented because when they report the inflation statistics, they get to change the calculations. They get to underreport it by replacing things in the basket. You know, the cost of lamb has gone up. So we'll replace it with chicken. Right. And therefore there's no inflation. And the logic is people won't buy lamb anymore, they'll buy more chicken, so therefore there is no inflation. I mean, that's just ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. And so we have far more inflation than is reported and is far more inflation than reported in two aspects. One, it's misreported and two, there's two hidden aspects of it that never get talked about. And that's just consumer inflation and that doesn't consider asset inflation as well. So know, Enzo has been... Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (24:08.826) systematically crushed by the government from across all three of these aspects of inflation. And he's probably ended up, if he was honest, now producing lower quality foods than he did 40 years ago, at a much higher nominal price for the consumer. And I'm paying probably far more in taxes and having more far more overheads from regulation, from local state interference, from all of these things. But these all just flow naturally. This this overhang of governmental creep flows naturally from the fact that they're corrupting the money because they're corrupting the money. They create all these extra issues which creates more societal issues. And then they have to get more involved to try and fix the societal issues through social justice and, you know, higher taxes to pay for the fact that they're just pouring money into a giant black hole despite being able to print it themselves. And then constantly expanding the remit of the government to try and address the social issues that they've created by printing the money. And that falls at the door of the businessmen and business women. And this is a never-ending cycle at this point. There is no escape. Brian Cubellis (25:36.732) Yeah, no, that's a... Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (25:36.826) The natural outcome is the currency goes to zero. They're going to destroy the currency and they're going to destroy the free market. What remains of the free market in the process? That's a very long answer to the inflation, but hopefully it explains it in a way which... reveals the different consumer inflation aspects. Brian Cubellis (25:59.815) Yeah, absolutely. That was a fantastic articulation, not only of the root cause of inflation, but to your point, the sort of hidden aspects that most people don't even think or talk about, both in forms of shrink inflation, deteriorating quality. And then to your point, just the misrepresentation of this metric that the government itself is issuing in CPI, which is just not reflective of the reality on the ground. think You know, something in there that you sort of alluded to that when I speak to average normal people about inflation, I think there's a disconnect because, you know, it's sort of the the the fish and water problem of, know, if you've lived your entire life in a fiat regime, it's very difficult to understand the state in which you are swimming effectively. And so when someone thinks about inflation, they're not really sure. what the cause is, why it's happening, but they generally know that like prices go up over time. I think one way that I've tried to articulate to folks is like, Forget about the word inflation right now. Just think about your purchasing power. So like what do your dollars buy you over time? Do they buy you more eggs or less eggs over time? And I think that's often a more visceral explanation for someone to think in purchasing power terms as opposed to inflation or CPI. Curious your thoughts on that and like, is that a helpful heuristic for folks? Like, you do you buy more or less eggs over time? Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (27:32.103) definitely helpful. think rooting the financial system and financial jargon can be complicated for people inaccessible and intentionally obfuscated and also redefined constantly as to what these things even mean. And so rooting it back in day to day life, like what actually impacts somebody and how it impacts somebody. So I think that's a very good example. One of the one that I try to help people understand is that, after 50 years, 50 years, people assume inflation is natural. It's like this background process that has to be there. And within two minutes, you can show that's totally wrong. And once you understand it's totally wrong, you then begin to question, well, why is it like that then? Because we hear on the TV, we hear from the central banks, all of these things that we need inflation. We need inflation. It's a lie. It's a lie. It's manmade. And it's there to constantly steal the purchasing power, steal the energy and the life from the population. But the clear example of why that should not be the case is that imagine a money you couldn't print. And it's the example from the video. Like if you wash up on an island and there's a few of you there and you're trying to survive, everyone's doing their own fishing, cutting down the trees, building their own shelters. They're not very efficient. So they've got perfect money, but no one's really got any excess because they're just about surviving. because they're doing everything themselves. Whereas you're better at fishing, you're better at cutting down wood, and you're better at building shelters, you all specialise. You can now produce twice the amount in half the time. And it's higher quality. So what's happened? The prices have gone down and the quality has gone up. But there's a hundred other people on the island and there's lots of people fishing, lots of people cutting down trees, lots of people building shelters, you're all competing with each other. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (29:49.853) And now everyone has to trade because you can't build a house out of fish. You can't eat wood. So you trade with each other. Everyone is competing and everyone is making a purchasing decision on a combination of price and quality. They want the highest quality at the lowest price. So what happens? People compete. They become more specialized. They invest in their processes. They improve their quality of output. Their cost of production goes down, which means they can compete more on price and quality goes up again. So when you have perfect money in a free market, prices go down forever and quality goes up forever. What was that? 60 seconds, right? That's how the world is when you leave people alone and they've got perfect money. So why do we see a world for 50 years where prices have gone up and quality has gone down? Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (30:50.108) That's not the natural state. Like, you explain that to people, they're like, okay, well, what's the difference? What's changed? The change is the money's broken. The money's broken, and then the people who are enforcing the rules get to change the rules and interfere and make it even less effective. They distort the free market. They kill the free market. So now you have no free market and you don't have perfect money. So what outcome did you expect? That's where we are today. But it's totally unnatural. Totally unnatural. And once people make that realization, then the question is, well, okay, well, it sounds like there's a better way. How do I protect myself against this massive distortion? compared to what the natural state of the world is. so yeah, I feel like that helps people have that little penny drop moment as well. Jackson Mikalic (31:52.833) It absolutely does. And just the 54 years since the closing of the gold window in 1971. And perhaps one of the most frustrating things about all this, Joe, is that the political apparatus uses the obfuscates the truth, of course, right? Which is why there's a problem here that not many people are aware of. They obfuscate the truth behind it and then they have their constituents, have citizens within their country at each other's throats because if you tune into, you know, in the US Fox as an example on the right, they'll tell you, you know, back with the Biden administration, inflation is all Biden's fault, right? But then if you tune into CNN, you're told that it's greedy corporations that are just price gouging people at the grocery store. And so perhaps the most nefarious part of all this and not to say that you know, lot of journalists or a lot of people in media, they aren't aware of this problem either. But if you really get to get, you know, peeled back the curtains, there are, of course, a lot of people who are aware of buddy printing and because they're the ones who are driving this force in the economy. Yet the the public is so misled as to the root cause of it. And you have just these opposing these opposing viewpoints on what's driving the problem. And ultimately, everyone is convinced that it is. you know, people on the other side of the political aisle that are at fault here, when in reality it's, it's, you know, we're kind of all in the same team at the end of the day. We're all trying to, you know, we're all, we all have the same ambitions and goals for the most part. We want to live a good life. We want to have family. We want to spend time with friends. We want to have an honest living so that we can enjoy all these things that we want. And what happens though is now you have all these like, you know, people kind of parroting in your ear and saying, well it's this person's fault. It's this person's fault. And Now you get to a point now where the past 50 years there's been deficit spending, know, 45 out of those last 50 years. It doesn't matter who's in office and you have prices that were probably unfathomable 50 years ago. And so one of the things that continues to go viral as of the last two weeks or so is the data point around being married and being a homeowner in the United States. And so that's got for people under 30 years old. And so that's gone from 50 % of the population, 30 or younger. Jackson Mikalic (34:18.368) We're both married and a homeowner. 50 % of those people in 1950 to just 12 % today in 2025. And so it really is a, it's a major problem we have on our hands here. And it's to your point, Joe, affecting everything that we have going for us. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (34:36.26) It's all the money. It's all the money. That drop. Liam Nelson (34:39.688) You said earlier that was the only important things are Bitcoin and family and they're directly tied together too of money and family. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (34:50.044) The perfect money breeds strong family. Corrupted money destroys the family. Because if you think about, to go back to our example of inflation, the people who are eating at Enzo's, they're spending their money, but their costs are going up faster than their income is going up. and the quality is going down at the same time. So their all-in inflation rate is way higher than their take-home pay. So they're becoming poorer at the same time as asset prices are going up because the money is being printed and the assets are measured in the money that's being printed. So even leaving aside the fact that these assets get monetized because people can't keep money in the bank, they know the money is getting eroded. So you don't keep money in the bank if you wanna save it, you've gotta invest it. to try and get over the rate at which the money printing is occurring, which drives asset prices up even more. So you then get a premium over the debasement. If you don't own the assets, you're getting further and further left behind. You're squeezed on, you're living paycheck to paycheck. You're getting squeezed on your quality of living. At the same time, the asset prices are going up. Your ability to buy a home is constantly declined. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (36:32.634) And then at some point it slips out of being achievable on one salary. And so you need to have your wife working as well. You need two salaries to buy a house. and you've got to take on a load of debt to do so. And if you have two parents working and a load of debt to buy a house just for somewhere to live, you have less time together, you have less time for children and you can afford fewer children. You can't balance that economic equation if you want to have children and you want your wife to be able to stay home and look after the children as they're grown up. You can't keep the roof over your head. And your wife can't go to work as well because the childcare cost is too much. So you have fewer children. This is just economics. This is just the decision making process that whether people are aware of it or not, they are going through. And so when you When you hammer people with inflation on their cost of living and you drive the asset prices through the roof, you break down the family. And this is why you don't get people who are married and buying houses at more than 12 % now. And this is why their population is declining or the birth rates are declining. And this is why all the developed countries are starting to go like that in the demographics. It's because their money's broken. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (38:05.806) As your demographics turn over, your pension system goes underfunded. It's insolvent. You have to push back the retirement age. You have to water down the promises you've made to try and balance the books. You put more pressure on your young people coming through who don't own the assets who already getting squeezed by the cost of living. It's all broken. The outcome is already known. Like it all just collapses. The only way you can sustain it is just printing more money to paper over the cracks. But that just destroys it even faster. There is no solution. There's no solution other than adopting Bitcoin. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (38:52.72) The currency is going to zero, the dollar is going to zero, the pound, the euro, all going to zero purchasing power because they're going to print it forever. Brian Cubellis (38:52.892) Yeah. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (39:02.364) because there's no other option. And they're going to print it forever and they're going to steal everything. The government is going to slowly creep higher taxes, less freedom, greater surveillance. You're going to be renting, not owning. They're slowly going to just steal all the assets, whether explicitly bailing people in or taxing things hugely, but taxing things hugely on a nominal basis when they've just printed money and caused them to go up in value. You can print more money, drive the asset prices up and then tax you massively on anything you sell. That's just stealing the asset. That's all it is. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (39:53.009) This is the world we live in. It's broken and you can't fix it. All you can do is try and protect yourself and your family by owning Bitcoin. It's the thing that they can't print and it's the thing they are going to print their fiat currencies, add infinite them to ultimately buy. Brian Cubellis (39:53.084) Yeah. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (40:15.228) Because if you've got access to a big red button and as soon as you realize you can't fix the problem, you print what you can to buy what you can't. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (40:27.866) And that's how this, that's how this all, that's how this all ends. Brian Cubellis (40:32.968) Yeah, it's all very well said. think there's a few things to pull out of what you just walked through. One is, you know, I always like to describe Bitcoin as just superior savings technology, right? Like people want to frame this as an investment akin to, you know, equities or some other, you know, whether it's real estate or any type of investment. like, no, this is this is just better money. It's savings technology that will allow you to protect your purchasing power into the future. And this sort of ties back to what you were talking about around you know, whether it's needing two incomes to support a family or even just the mental burden of saying, OK, now I need to go in addition to my job. I need to go be an investor. need to figure out the right stocks to pick the right real estate. got to do an Airbnb rental on the side. Like it's it's also the mental burden of having to put that investor cap on in addition to a full time job, which is just insane to think about. And it's like, no, if you just had better money, you could save it. and you can just go about your life and be more productive, be a better member of society. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (41:36.957) 100 % you could like just for a moment. Think if we had perfect money, you go out and do a day's work. You can store that economic output forever. You're not forced to spend it before it melts. You're not forced to speculate with it. You're also not forced to buy assets that are unproductive that saddle you with debt forever. So when you go and buy a house, you're paying, I don't know, five, six, 10 times your salary. You're becoming an indentured servant for the next 40 years because you're earning money to pay off a debt where you've incurred the debt from somebody who could print the money for free and charge you interest on Okay, the money that goes to pay off that unproductive asset is not being utilized productively. Imagine if we had perfect money and in perfect money... If you had perfect money, all the other asset classes would be demonetized back to their utility value. So housing would be far less expensive relative to incomes than it is today. Think about what that means. Will you be able to buy a house on one salary again, like Homer Simpson could 30 years ago? On one salary, the money you saved in not having to pay Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (43:12.848) the mortgage on the money that was printed for free to make you buy an extortionately expensive asset, you could save. And what could you do with that saving? You could build businesses. You could invest productively. You could create more wealth. You could drive a higher quality life for everybody. And imagine if everyone was in that position. We'd go from being a debt-based society where we're constantly trying to repay debt and it's going to be printed forever to an equity-based society where people have savings. and you're driving a faster rate of productivity gain for everyone, which accrues to the money. So the faster people are productive, the more innovative people are, the faster the money's purchasing power increases, raising the quality of life for everybody. This is what we're missing out on by not having perfect money. Just imagine, just think about what... that day-to-day life for you and your family would be like. Like you have security, you can plan for the long term, you can make long term decisions. You're not chasing something forever where you're subject to however Jay Powell's feeling in the morning. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (44:43.676) mean, this is absolutely just ludicrous that we live in this world. It's because the money's broken. Just take away the big red button and fix it all. This is why we need Bitcoin. Bitcoin cleans the slate. It restores Bitcoin's honest money. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (45:04.774) and it restores the rights of the individual. And that's the smallest minority there is. It changes people's outlooks. It changes their time preference. You start thinking about the long-term future and not about tomorrow. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (45:23.91) The younger people today, they only care about tomorrow or next week or next month because they know they're never going to be able to buy a house or have enough savings. Never going to have the quality of life of their parents. So why bother? Why bother saving? Just go and live a great life, go on holiday all the time. know, put off getting married and having kids and sacrificing in the short term. It's all just downstream of the money. It's now just so obvious. It's just so obvious. And this is why it's the most important thing in the world. If you fix that, you fix that one thing, fix everything else. Jackson Mikalic (46:10.75) Yeah, it's well said. should, I think on that notion of having to be an investor thinking about asset prices, because Joe, one thing you mentioned as well is you have these, you know, our utility bills, our grocery bills, housing costs are all going up due to what you just described, but also asset prices are going up because of the big red button, because there's more dollars or there's more pounds, name your currency entering the markets. And so I think to try to bridge the gap here, we've talked a lot about the root cause and you've done, you've done a fantastic job articulating that. I would like to kind of shift into where things are today as it relates to just kind of the investment landscape, because one thing that stood out to me, well, first of all, before I hit on that, to your point, everyone is trying to preserve their purchasing power. So by nature of fiat currencies losing value over time, Brian's point was, well, maybe I will start an Airbnb business, right? And I need some income because I don't want to leave my dollars in my checking account in the same way that people contribute passively to the SMP 500 or name your index fund. And so one of the things that stood out to me this week was Vanguard put out some sort of note about asset allocation recommendation for the next 10 years. And interestingly enough, They cite a lot of fundamental ways or metrics you would value equities would say that the equity market is overvalued, one of them being the CAPE ratio and the fact that where that number is today is comparable to where it has been prior to major drawdowns in the markets like the Great Depression, the dot com bubble. Because of that, because of the stretch equity valuations, they're recommending in some sort of like tactical allocation framework to maybe consider 70 % allocation to fixed income and 30 % allocation to equities. And when I read that, I was kind of baffled because for all the reasons you just described, we know that fixed income is guaranteed to generate negative real returns, meaning the nominal return that you see in your Jackson Mikalic (48:28.618) brokerage account is going to be lower than the rising cost of everything that you wanna purchase. So over time you're actually being diluted, you're losing money in these fixed income instruments. And it's remarkable, there's a couple things that the group could pick on here, but why that's remarkable to me is because most people still do not know that A, they don't even think about real returns, right? They think about nominal returns and the fact that they don't think about what actually they could purchase five or 10 years from now. And the second piece is, well, if the money printing continues, aren't asset prices going up into the right kind of forever? Not to say there won't be corrections, there won't be, you know, volatility in the markets, but everything is getting more expensive on, you know, when you look at fundamentals, equities are going to be more expensive because people are willing to pay more to not lose their money in their checking account. And they're willing to pay more because there's really in their mind nowhere else to go. A lot of the people don't know about Bitcoin yet. So it's the same reason why home prices are so stretched as well. And so I'm curious just to get the group's thoughts on like this, you know, this note from Vanguard on the 70 % bond allocation, 30 % equities and just like general investment landscape thoughts. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (49:44.605) I think it shows how early we are that they're not even talking about Bitcoin. I know these guys are already left behind when it comes to Bitcoin. I may be wrong in thinking, but I think didn't their CEO come out and say, we're never going to touch that or something to that degree. To be going out and giving people advice like that is almost criminal. It's almost criminal. It shows the degree to which you do not understand the financial system. Brian Cubellis (50:04.05) Yep. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (50:14.972) do not understand what is actually happening. For people to be putting the majority of their money in bonds is basically to set it alight over the next period of time. Because the real returns are going to be negative. They're never going to stop printing money. Ever. Ever. And you couldn't have asked for clearer evidence of this than the last 12 months. Right, so since Trump comes in, you have, you know, Elon Musk, most productive man in the world, right? With the most, greatest level of resources, greatest level of governmental access and support, couldn't make a dent in the budget. Not even balance it, couldn't even make a dent in it. If he can't do it, no one can do You couldn't even do it temporarily. This thing is a one way train. Nothing stops this train. They're just going to debase it forever and they're going to have to print more and more and more. So why would you want to own? Why would you want to own bonds? It makes no sense. And the greatest trick that the Fiat system plays is to make you feel like you're getting wealthier when you're getting robbed. because you think about your wealth in fiat terms. It's like being in, it's like being a Zimbabwean stock market investor. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (51:54.961) You have amazing returns every year. Best performance stock index in the world, always. Because the currency is getting smashed. The purchasing power of that is going to zero. It's going to zero so fast. That's why the stock market is flying. Stock market returns don't mean anything. What does it mean when measured in the thing that cannot be printed? What does it mean in the independent measure? And the independent measure is Bitcoin. All these things are getting destroyed. They're getting absolutely destroyed. And bonds are getting destroyed faster than everything else. So advice like that is just terrible. It's terrible. It's very fear. It's entirely fear advice. It shows you how weary we are, but many people are going to listen and get destroyed. Not only are they going to get destroyed in real terms, the gains they make on them are going to be taxed to high heaven. So they're get stolen from twice, once in the purchasing power and once through the taxation. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (53:06.704) Just know, absolutely not. You need to learn about Bitcoin. you do not learn about, if you don't understand what Bitcoin is, you don't understand why it's important, you don't own any Bitcoin, make it the top thing on your list just to fix. Your future self will thank you. And Brian, you talked about Bitcoin as being savings technology. And the conversation we're having here is about the returns. It's about the preservation of wealth, but that's only half of it. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (53:42.864) There's the preservation of wealth and then there's your ability to access your wealth. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (53:50.104) All of these things, you don't own them. You don't own the stock market. You don't own the bonds. You don't own your house. They're all confiscatable with the stroke of a pen. They're all confiscatable via the back door, via increased taxes, via property taxes. They come in and put a 10 % property tax on you every year. You've lost a house in 10 years if you can't pay it. All these assets will get taken by the state, either explicitly or likely not, likely through some sort of taxation change, some rule change, some mandatory gold order, something like that. They're all going to get taken one way or the other. The only thing that cannot be taken is Bitcoin. They can't take the Bitcoin. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (54:49.668) You become self-sovereign. It's the only thing. It's the only thing you can be self-sovereign with. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (54:57.84) And so it's absolutely savings technology, it's the technology, It's the savings and it's the technology. It's the only solution we have ever had to be able to separate money and state. That's it. All right. Brian Cubellis (55:16.038) Yeah, yeah, the ultimate the ultimate form of property rights to your point. And where I was actually going to take this is right along those lines in terms of thinking about government debt generally more from like a macro perspective. You know, we saw this in twenty two when the United States decided decided to freeze Russia's U.S. Treasury reserves. I think that that was a pivotal moment for people to recognize like, hey, this thing that they like to call risk free. is not risk-free at all. One, from the perspective of negative real returns, and two, from the perspective that you just described, it's actually not yours, and it can be seized at any moment. I think that that was a super critical moment in sort of the timeline of monetary history and people waking up to a lot of these realities, and you've seen the knock-on effects of that from central banks around the world, ex-US, kind of sitting around and realizing like, hey, maybe we don't want to own so much US government debt. and maybe let's buy some gold because one, a government can't print that and two, we can own it more securely with better assurances than U.S. government debt. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (56:19.644) Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the US shot itself well and truly in the foot. You can't ask the world to treat you as the reserve currency and reserve paper and then decide you don't like someone and cancel it. What's going to be the logical decision of everyone else? Well, we can't trust the fact that you'll give us this back. And the US has just got a history of just breaking promises. You shouldn't have to trust anyone. And say the US, it's the same with all of the currencies, just the US is the center of the financial system now, right? Broke its promise in 71. Broke its promise before 71 by printing more money than it had gold, right? And then it broke the promise by separating it temporarily from gold. And this is exactly the same. You shouldn't have to trust anyone. Think about it this way. If you were to design money, like let's say money didn't exist, you were to design this thing called money. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (57:31.718) think that you would design it with a characteristic that you weren't able to hold it yourself. You had to have someone else hold it for you. would be ludicrous. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (57:45.799) So for someone to hold dollars, even if it's a person to hold dollars in a bank account, you're not holding that yourself, someone else is having to hold it for you. How does that make good money? It's the same with treasury bills. You got to hold treasury bills, which is a promise of some other country, whatever, whatever, and they can just decide not to pay it and it invalidates your claim on that. It's just nonsense. How is that good money? How is that valuable? It's not. Liam Nelson (58:15.172) Yeah. One of the things that you, that kind of makes this a little bit frustrating for people like yourself and others who have been really paying attention to history is that we've pretty much done all this already. It's history just kind of repeats with very slight different nuances over time. And over time, you know, gold has been money. Everybody is known and gone through essentially like coin clipping in Rome and pretty much all across the world where every time that people have turned in their own Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (58:26.096) See you. Liam Nelson (58:46.378) gold and silver coins that they typically use as money in circulation. are small amounts clipped off of it or just replaced by poor quality money that is redistributed out to the people. And so it was written into the US Constitution that all money shall be backed by gold and silver, which is why the only reason that I think US dollars as they exist today were able to bootstrap any sort of market value is just kind of by associating themselves with real money, you know, meeting gold and silver. And so it's just kind of unfortunate to see the lack of history and knowledge of what's happened over time play out again and again, because, you know, gold and silver certainly have their faults of, you know, centralizing aspects. And Bitcoin is, you know, a very emergent technology. So it's understandable that many people who can write it off because especially at first it's I think human nature to be skeptical if something seems too good to be true it usually is but it's it really makes it frustrates a lot of people because we haven't really learned a lot of the lessons that we should have over time but part of that also is because a lot of the education is done by public school systems as well which probably are not really incentivized to tell you all about how money works and you know what what's going on with the monetary system and how you should be thinking about protecting your savings. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:00:27.204) If you have access to a big red button, you don't educate people as to the dangers of having a big red button. You tend to push education that makes people think you need the big red button to be successful. Liam Nelson (01:00:32.427) You Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:00:43.184) This is why inflation is good. And to think that public schools, even if... Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:00:53.008) The education you get in schools anyway on the subject of money is terrible. Even putting aside the advice itself is terrible. Just the coverage and the education we get generally with finance is terrible. They could be doing a much better job of educating us badly, educating our children badly with the wrong information than they are doing. So it's the combination of the two. But you're right Liam, this has happened for thousands and thousands of years. It just happens over and over again. The government steals everything from the population. We've seen this film a hundred times. It's just this is going to be the last time. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:01:41.901) You now have a choice. you can decide to say no. You've never had the ability in history to say no. we finally have the ability to say no. And that's But we still have a huge gap in education. It's awareness, it's understanding, it's getting over the skepticism. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:02:14.862) And, you know, one of the, I think one of the things that people struggle with is like, why is Bitcoin have any value at all? Isn't it just a Ponzi scheme? You want me to buy it so you can sell it? Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:02:33.414) But I think people wouldn't have any issue with saying gold is valuable. Like you say, gold, do you think gold is valuable to someone? be like, yeah, of course. Of course, gold is valuable. But they haven't really ever thought about why they would say that. But once you take them through, once you help them understand why they think gold is valuable. Bitcoin is very obviously valuable. And then, you know, the penny drops then, just to let, okay, I get it. But you say to them, like, why is gold valuable? And you say, well, it's not much of it. You know, it's been used as money. It's hard to produce. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:03:26.596) It's rare. It'll be around. It's been used for a long time. OK, fine. So it's outcompeted all other versions, outcompeted silver, it's outcompeted copper, all of these things because it's It's attractive, right, compared to those things, but primarily because it's hard to produce. Right. And it has aspects of money that are good enough to be able to function as money, like roughly into coins. You can transport it. You can't send it over the internet, et cetera. It's hard to verify. Like it's compromised. It's not perfect money. That's why we have a paper layer on top of it. Or we did have a paper layer on top of it because it wasn't good enough. to use as money itself, that is a core characteristic. But no one questions it has value. The value is derived from its difficulty to produce with the, combined with the characteristics of being good enough money. And then you say, okay, why is being hard to produce valuable? And they say, it stops people creating it for free. You can be sure there's not going to be more of it in the future. And it's like, okay, well, there is going be more of it brought into existence over time. It's just not above the ground. So how does someone bring it into the supply? Well, they've got to go and do some work. You're going to do some work to get this gold out of the ground and bring it into the supply. So you've got to expend real world energy to bring gold into the supply. And you think that's invaluable. Okay, if you think that's valuable, I've got something you're gonna love, right? Imagine that you didn't have a money where if the price of it went up, the supply went up, because now you can dig more out the ground because it's economical. Imagine you didn't waste most of the energy getting it out the ground to bring it into the supply. And imagine... Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:05:31.588) You could hold it yourself. You didn't have to get someone to look after it in a vault. Imagine you could verify that it was actually real, not titanium or whatever painted gold. Imagine you could send it on the internet instantly to anyone, anywhere. Imagine no one could stop you doing it. Imagine you can carry it in your head. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:05:55.097) like that's perfect money. You wouldn't need the paper layer anymore because it is the currency. It's both the currency and the money. It's just got its perfect energy money. It's not imperfect energy money like gold. So you had no issue that gold is valuable. You're going to absolutely love Bitcoin. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:06:19.61) And I think like just it's helping people just get over these little gaps in their logical thinking from what they already take as for granted and just linking that to Bitcoin and showing that it's Bitcoin is just the logical extension of everything they already believe to be true with some minor, minor 180s in some places where they've just been told completely they're wrong. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:06:48.08) Yes, so that's how I would typically explain it to them. Jackson Mikalic (01:06:54.068) Yeah, I know we got to wrap here in a few minutes, maybe I just, I know Brian has some thoughts, so I want to at least let him speak to it. So Ethereum or Joe, if Bitcoin sound money, if it's perfect money, I've heard that Ethereum is ultrasound money. Brian I would love to hand it over to you quickly because I know there was something you wanted to speak to and I know aetherium has gotten a lot of attention the past couple months, you know We thought that maybe it was on its way down and we wouldn't have to fight this battle any longer six months ago But since then there's been a you know, the price has been ripping back higher and one of the biggest challenges you beyond what we Yeah, exactly. So beyond so like the challenges we've already discussed there then, you know Brian Cubellis (01:07:35.464) Tom Lee said otherwise. Jackson Mikalic (01:07:43.914) Joe's people start to understand this problem. Well, then they're presented with so many different options, right? And so it's like, there's these distractions from actually learning more about Bitcoin. So Brian, what caught your attention on Ethereum this week? Brian Cubellis (01:07:56.265) Yeah, if you could pull up that tweet that Pierre had put out, I think it ties nicely into everything we've sort of described in terms of one, the angle of what you just said in terms of, people are offered all these different distractions of things to focus on because they know there's they have some semblance of an idea that they need to do something with their money. They can't just hold dollars. And I thought this was just a great tweet by Pierre, who this is an older tweet from Vitalik for those not familiar. The guy who's started Ethereum, he said, idea that an individual can have immutable right to own a fixed percentage of all the world's money indefinitely, on the other hand, feels very oligarchic. And I mean, that's just patently false. It's actually the opposite. You should be able to own a fixed percentage of all the world's money. That's what sound money represents. And Pierre replies to this saying, Ethereum will systematically dilute you out of your ETH. Stakers will vote for more issuance in the fullness of time. is infinite ETH. And so I... I saw this tweet and I said, you could just swap the word ETH for fiat. And it's, it's identically true. The fiat system will systematically dilute you out of your purchasing power. Stakers, central banks will vote for politicians will vote for more issuance and the fullness of time there's, there's infinite dollars. And I think it just, speaks to everything we sort of discussed today in terms of the, the vectors of control around money are necessarily a bad thing. That is how it gets corrupted. And to Joe's point, like a perfect money cannot be controlled, it cannot be diluted, and you can own a fixed percentage of it indefinitely. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:09:35.884) I % agree with you, Brian. ETH is just fiat. It's all just fiat. All of this stuff is just fiat. If it's not Bitcoin, it doesn't matter. They all have a big red button. It's just what form the big red button takes. That's it. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:09:58.672) You-you-you Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:10:03.61) You have perfect money. and then there's everything else. And everything else is somewhere on the spectrum from fraud to speculative technology looking for product market fit. That's it. It's not money. And it's certainly not perfect money. to even have them in the same sentences. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:10:29.892) Yeah, it confuses everybody. And the people who push these narratives, do so for their own reasons and for their own short-term wealth to ultimately be able to buy more Bitcoin. That's what it comes down to. Jackson Mikalic (01:10:51.54) Totally agree. Well, Joe, thank you for joining us today. Appreciate your generosity with your time. those who. Yeah, thank you. For those who are not familiar with your work, where would you like to send them? Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:10:58.896) Thanks for having me. It's great to chat with you guys. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:11:07.356) Oh, please go and watch. If you haven't seen what's the problem, go and watch what's the problem. If you just Google what's the problem, it's there on the front page of Google. Now it's the first result back. Or you can go to sats versus fiat.com or even whatstheproblem.org is the new, is the updated handle, which is the URL we should have always had. And you can go watch the video there and then just share it with as many people as possible. It's the... It's the video you can send to absolutely anybody and within half an hour they will understand why we need Bitcoin. And then they will ask you to send them something about Bitcoin. And so it's open to everyone, accessible to everyone, whether a child or old person, whether you have any financial background at all, it's just a story. And you understand, you a skeletal mental framework understanding of why Bitcoin is important through a story. And then, you know, once you see it, you can't see it again and we just need everyone to see it. And so please watch the video. And that's it. I'm Satmojo on Onyx. Happy to say hello to anybody and help more people find Bitcoin. Jackson Mikalic (01:12:31.37) Thank you, Joe. Enjoy the conversation today. I'll say, highly recommend, what's the problem? It's incredibly well done. And it really is, you know, it really is one of the few places I think you can point someone without having them to read a full book and get educated on the matter and to your point, matter of 30 minutes. So thanks for the work you're doing. Joe Bryan (@SatmoJoe) (01:12:50.877) All right, thanks guys. Brian Cubellis (01:12:50.973) Thank you, Joe. This was fun.