"German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said, 'The world order as it has stood for decades no longer exists', and that we are in a period of 'great power politics.'" "He made clear that freedom 'is no longer a given' in this new era. French President Emmanuel Macron echoed Merz’s assessment and said that Europe’s old security structures tied to the previous world order don't exist and that Europe must prepare for war." "U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that we are in a 'new geopolitics era' be...
Feb 18, 2026•1 hr 6 min
The Roundtable is back, and we are kicking off 2026 with some stories that I definitely didn't have on my bingo card. After catching up on Jeff's frostbite scare and Steve getting the cops called on him for sleeping in a gym lobby, we dive headfirst into the Epstein files. The released documents have implicated some major names in the space, raising the uncomfortable question: did a compromised elite try to co-opt Bitcoin early on? We debate the "Andy" Back theories, the influence of the MIT Med...
Feb 12, 2026•2 hr 16 min
"Bitcoin is a lifeline. It is a money that cannot be shut down. Native money for the internet. But what happens when the internet gets shut off?" Iran's currency collapses 98%, the government kills thousands and cuts every wire connecting its people to the outside world. Uganda shuts down the internet the day before an election. And somehow, hundreds of thousands of people find a way to communicate anyway. What does it actually look like when Bitcoin's promise meets the brutal reality of authori...
Feb 10, 2026•37 min
"You can’t open your own private mint moving that kind of liquidity and hope to stay under the regulatory radar." ~ Roy Sheinfeld Stablecoins are booming, but are they building toward something bigger - or just recreating the old system with a crypto coat of paint? Roy Sheinfeld breaks down why centralization guarantees regulation, and I go deep on why the real shift isn't technological - it's monetary. If stablecoins can't escape the state, and Bitcoin can, who wins the utility race in the long...
Feb 07, 2026•34 min
"It's a dangerous business to help people out of slavery. But so what? We have to do this. This is a moral obligation, an ethical obligation, as a technical possibility, and a lot of fun. So the risks of it are real and substantial and have been forever, especially in the last 30, 40 years or so. Countless builders have gotten into serious trouble or even been kidnapped or killed. And that's a hard fact of reality that we have to deal with. But I'm way more scared of the alternative of not worki...
Feb 06, 2026•2 hr 55 min
"PearDrive is like, how could you make stuff seamless across devices and how can you leverage that device that has a lot of storage to get the most out of the device that has a little storage? How do you make it so that when I boot something up, it just syncs to my Linux? And if I delete anything from my phone or my MacBook, I still see the thumbnail and I still connect to my Linux to bring it up and I can even play it directly off of my Linux machine. And if I want it locally to edit with or to...
Jan 28, 2026•1 hr 11 min
"Imagine the Stanford marshmallow experiment in reverse. Instead of getting a second marshmallow for waiting, the children are told that every fifteen minutes they wait, the marshmallow in front of them will shrink one tiny bite at a time, until nothing remains. Naturally, they eat their marshmallow immediately, not out of impatience or hunger, but common sense. That's exactly how our money works today." ~ Connor Dolan What if the real cost of our broken money isn't just inflation – but the slow...
Jan 27, 2026•1 hr 3 min
"Of course, central banking, fiat money is bad, but nevertheless, maybe AI and robotics and this productivity is going to be really beneficial to the global economy, not just the U.S. economy. We're going to start to see the liquidity, the whole U.S. PMI go up, and that's going to cause Bitcoin NGU. That's kind of how I'm seeing this next year or two. I think we're going to see a lot of AI, productivity and extra liquidity coming in. So I am very bullish on this coming year." ~ Stephan Livera Th...
Jan 22, 2026•1 hr 56 min
"The end of mankind wouldn't even be biological in such an instance. It would be neurological." ~ Copernican What if AI's biggest flaw - training on its own recycled data - isn't just a tech glitch, but a universal law unraveling societies, economies, and even mouse utopias? Dive into this mind-bending theory that ties neural networks to human decadence, explores why socialism collapses like a bad map, and questions if superintelligence is doomed to diminishing returns - could this be the hidden...
Jan 22, 2026•1 hr 19 min
"To describe what’s coming as “impossibly borked” is charitable. This is going to be an unholy mess of indiscernible media, messaging, photography, and fakery. ... “reality fade” into fractal digital fog will stress even the highest trust networks." ~ El Gato Malo What happens when anything and everything can be faked at essentially zero cost? When the line between parody and reality completely dissolves? In this episode, I explore El Gato Malo's brilliant piece on the coming "reality fracture" ...
Jan 18, 2026•1 hr 5 min
"If you are not paying for it, you are the product. And if it is a political system, the product that they are buying is control over you." What if a "free" digital currency from the government sounds like a sweet deal - but hides total surveillance and control? Dive into the UAE's CBDC rollout, parallels to sneaky inflation tactics, and real stories of financial repression from Iran, all while exploring how Bitcoin and open-source tools let us fight back. Will we fall for the trap, or build our...
Jan 16, 2026•44 min
"Bitcoin needs to be exciting because it provides a utility that no other technology provides. The value transfer technology needs to be embedded in every application in the world. Period. That's super exciting." ~ Roy Sheinfeld It has been nearly three years since Roy was on the show, and the landscape of Bitcoin scaling has completely transformed. We dive deep into the evolution of Lightning - not just as a network of nodes, but as a "common language" that ties together entirely new sub-networ...
Jan 15, 2026•2 hr 31 min
"My problem with the core side has been what we talked about with the people that are technical and don't have the empathy or understand what it was like before you were [technical]. The core people are so dismissive and the hubris is so high that they dismiss these people that are not technical but understand Bitcoin as money right. "I always say, like my Twitter phrase, Bitcoin is not open source software. Obviously that doesn't mean it's not open source, it's just so much more than that. It's...
Jan 08, 2026•2 hr 30 min
"Today's the day." ~ Mel Fisher Why does a reinsurance company's annual letter get me this fired up? Ross Stevens weaves together treasure hunting, Bayesian statistics, and the raw reality of Bitcoin as a human rights tool - culminating in a voice message from Nobel Prize winner Maria Karina Machado that moved him to tears. In my rant, I unpack why optimism isn't woo-woo, it's basic logic - and why waiting for certainty before believing in your own success is a guaranteed path to failure. Check ...
Jan 07, 2026•1 hr 33 min
In this episode, I’m joined by Simple Steve, Bitcoin Mechanic, and Jeff Swann for a year-end roundtable that starts with the Samourai Wallet case, spirals into quantum fears, and keeps coming back to the same question - how do you build freedom tech without painting a target on your back? We dig into CoinJoin, coordinators, and why privacy tools can suddenly become "hostile activity" when the state decides it wants a villain. What happens when spam wars collide with soft fork politics, mempool p...
Jan 02, 2026•2 hr 21 min
What if prosecuting innovative Bitcoin developers like Rodriguez and Burroughs signals the death of American entrepreneurship? In this episode, I read Beautyon's "American Bitcoin Suicide" and dive into how activist judges and unchecked fraud are killing innovation - could building decentralized tools like Bitcoin and Nostr be our only way to fight back and save the country's future? After ranting on all this, I wanted to point you to a few things I referenced - they've helped shape my thoughts,...
Dec 31, 2025•48 min
“You don’t want money that is not a good store of value. We’re in a very specific point in human history where that exists, but that’s not the default, right? We have to remember that. These more or less last hundred years - this is just a very small spot in human history where we all happened to be born - where money is not a good store of value, right? Because governments have coerced it upon us. But it wasn’t like that before. It’s not the normal state of things. The normal state of things is...
Dec 28, 2025•1 hr 31 min
Merry Christmas! Working with the amazing crew at Braiins, we are happy to share the full audiobook of Bitcoin: The Ultimate Collateral free for all. You can find the ebook as well as the video version on youtube at the links below! Thank you guys for a wild and awesome year. So much more to come. Don't forget to subscribe and enjoy this incredible book on one of the least appreciated and most insane values that Bitcoin can provide to a more free and soeverign world. Youtube: https://www.youtube...
Dec 25, 2025•2 hr 44 min
"We have entered a space where we literally own nothing." ~ Guy What happens when 25 years of digital identity vanishes overnight because of a $500 gift card? This jaw-dropping story exposes how deeply we've surrendered control of our digital lives to platforms that can lock us out without recourse. But is there a way to reclaim sovereignty over our identities, payments, and content before we lose everything? Check out the original article 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant by Dr Paris...
Dec 22, 2025•52 min
"The images are hacks in the first place, and it's not like Bitcoin had like a 'please put your NFT here' sign, so hackers found weird ways to do it. And if you stop them from using that weird way, they'll just do it some other weird way. And so the CAT kind of understands that and says, fine, we can't stop you from making these things and we're not going to try to stop you from making these things. Instead, we're going to disrupt your markets, disrupt the trust in your markets and remove all fi...
Dec 19, 2025•1 hr 49 min
"The broad point is that only the strong survive was correct. We are entering the endgame of crypto having any reason to exist. My thesis as to why it exists at all is a combination of a novel vector for gambling and an affinity scam. Bitcoin is extremely difficult to even begin to understand, and even though what it fundamentally 'fixes' is money printing, its novelty ironically lends itself to confusing the uninitiated and impatient with meaningless appeals to 'blockchain technology' that mani...
Dec 16, 2025•42 min
"We cannot master any one particular modality in the way that a company can master that on their own when it's the only thing they do. Basically what we can do at PPQ, is we can bring all of these models in one place and we can make the experience 90 to 95 % as good as the solo subscription. And I think in some cases that works perfectly well for people, and if that is true, then PPQ is going to go a long way." ~ Matt Ahlborg In this Chat, I speak with Matt from PPQ.ai about the broken world of ...
Dec 12, 2025•2 hr 11 min
“If you think they'll have restraint, I think you're making a grave error.” Can your wallet, your node, or even your hardware become “unlicensed financial activity” overnight? I walk through HRF’s latest Financial Freedom report on new laws in places like the UAE and Belarus, then riff on how these tactics bleed into Western “financial stability” narratives, KYC social media, and digital ID. Along the way we explore the tools—from DIY hardware to Lightning and e‑cash—that might be the thin line ...
Dec 10, 2025•43 min
"What role do intermediaries—such as merchants, distributors, and traders—play in the market? Far from being mere profiteers, these intermediaries play an essential role in the division of labor. Without them, society as a whole could not function." ~ Ulrich Fromy I dig into Bastiat’s forgotten defense of “middlemen” and ask: are banks, platforms, and merchants really the villains, or is the problem that we let them own the networks they run on? Using Bitcoin, Lightning, and Nostr as examples, I...
Dec 07, 2025•44 min
What if the future of Bitcoin is decided in the mempool? I sit down with Simple Steve, Bitcoin Mechanic and Jeff Swann for a chaotic, curious roundtable. We riff on conspiracies and culture rot, pick apart BIP444 and Taproot edge cases, and ask; can soft forks, replay risks and mining centralization be managed without breaking the network? We dig into real-world friction: Square payments at the point of sale, Lava’s DLC-to-custodial pivot, and the fine print on Bitcoin-backed loans. Steve brings...
Dec 04, 2025•2 hr 37 min
"Bitcoin will fail. Because it is a lie... Because it claims truths that cannot be. That trust is defect. That property is virtue. That law, shared meaning should not supervene... I used to see value. Now I see a void. An emptiness where meaning should be." ~ Mike Brock What happens when someone claims Bitcoin is designed for enemies and breeds cruelty? I dive deep into an article arguing Bitcoin promotes antisocial behavior and destroys cooperation, then break down why this fundamentally misund...
Dec 03, 2025•57 min
In this 2Sats refresh, I revisit one of my most-shared videos - What Does $6 Trillion Mean? It’s a quick but powerful look at what happens when we normalize creating money out of thin air. Six trillion dollars - it sounds abstract, but when you translate it into the real human lives and sacrifices it represents, the scale of the damage becomes personal. Through a simple analogy, I break down how fiat distortions erase value, manipulate incentives, and steal the weight of our decisions. Check out...
Dec 02, 2025•6 min
"If you can get a court to say you're Satoshi, and you are of this mindset, you can then go ahead and you can sue Bitcoin developers, Bitcoin exchanges, whatever, to say, "look, I've got a court ruling that I'm Satoshi. Your version of Bitcoin is not the real Bitcoin. I'm Satoshi. My version of Bitcoin", which in Craig's world as BSV, is the real Bitcoin. So you need to either pay damages or license from me, etc. So the whole point was to get a court to rule he was Satoshi, which would give him ...
Nov 28, 2025•2 hr 10 min
"The best, simplest, ultimate form of collateral is something that can instantly be claimed and sold at any time when the debtor fails to make their payments. A house can take months, even years to sell. Stocks too have time restrictions, but Bitcoin doesn't." ~ The Ultimate Collateral Today we take a chapter out of a book to dive into one big idea: Bitcoin as the best collateral humanity’s ever had. Most people think houses, stocks, gold and cash, but because there's never been anything better,...
Nov 25, 2025•24 min
" This analysis has demonstrated through 30 universal laws, empirically validated across 16 years and $1.83 trillion in market capitalization, that Bitcoin represents a genuine phase transition in monetary coordination. It is the first system deriving legitimacy from thermodynamic irreversibility rather than social consensus or institutional authority. The implications extend beyond finance." — Shanaka Anslem Parera If money has always depended on kings, banks, and belief… what does it mean to h...
Nov 23, 2025•1 hr
