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- [00:07]
Marty Bent
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
- [00:11]
Jack Mallers
If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitco.
- [00:32]
Marty Bent
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
- [00:34]
Jack Mallers
Probably should be.
- [00:35]
Marty Bent
Probably should be. It's one of those weeks, Will. It's insane, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard to gather the thoughts with. I mean, not only the last 24 hours, I think the last seven days. We were just talking before hit record that woman arena was murdered on the bus. We had pretty. I would define them as catastrophic disclosures about vaccine studies on Capitol Hill. The Baja hearings earlier, I think they were pretty profound. And then obviously less than 24 hours ago, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which really hits close to home. I didn't realize he was 31. I knew he was young. I didn't realize he was that young.
- [01:29]
Jack Mallers
Incredible, right? His accomplishments to 31 are unparalleled.
- [01:35]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And I'm recording this on 9 11. It's just weird vibes this week.
- [01:41]
Jack Mallers
I must point out that we've been talking about doing this for like weeks, maybe even over a month. Plan was just to come in and talk some good old fashioned Bitcoin.
- [01:50]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [01:51]
Jack Mallers
But obviously we're going to have to mix in some other stuff now.
- [01:54]
Marty Bent
Yeah, no, I mean the Charlie stuff. I'm sure we'll touch on potential motives, all that stuff. But I think just in general speaking to the profound impact he had as an individual on political discourse in the United States, particularly for younger generations. I mean, again, I didn't realize he was 31. I didn't realize he started Turning Point USA when he was 18. So he's been on this grind for 13 years. And whether you liked the way he operated or not, I think it's undeniable. He had an incredible impact on younger generation, particularly how they viewed politics. Most importantly how to engage in political discourse. I think that was, I mean, obviously the worst part about this is that he was a young father with two children. I believe his son's two years old. Never know his father, daughter a couple years older, both lost their father. But I think the way in which he was assassinated at one of these events, which have become rather famous, where he sets up a tent and engages in Socratic dialogue with people who vehemently disagree with him. I think that is desperately needed these days. And the grace and patience and respect he brought to those conversations is something, even though I didn't agree 100% with everything Charlie said over his career, like, I really respected the format. And it's a shame that he was assassinated during one of these events because not only an elimination of his life, but an attack on the medium itself, which as bitcoiners, I think hits pretty close to home because we attend a lot of these Socratic events, whether it's debates or discussions about the protocol. And they're very effective in terms of helping people better understand a subject or have tough conversations about things.
- [04:02]
Jack Mallers
Sure, yeah. I mean, I would start out by just saying there's a lot of people that are going to listen to this who actually followed Charlie Kirk, like closely. And I was not one of those people. Like, I mean, I was aware of him. I even met him once briefly. But I'll probably say some stuff where people are like, I've listened to 100 hours of his stuff and I'm not one of those guys. I didn't listen to 100 hours of his stuff, but I'm aware of what he was doing. I was also surprised how young he was. I just assumed, do you know how hard it is to become persuasive? Yeah, it's so hard to become persuasive. And he was, I mean, if anything, like, that's kind of what he's famous for. He was like a super persuasive person, like unbelievably persuasive person. That was like. His whole thing was that he could go to these college campuses and he can engage with young people and you could persuade them, you know, or at least like change their mind a little bit, you know, even if not all the way. It was like that talent, like, is something I think about all the time, like in work, but mostly in like a work environment. Like sort of retail persuasion, one on one, teams of software developers, stuff like that. Not like wholesale persuasion the way he does it, which I can't even imagine being good at. That. It was always fun to watch the clips and stuff that would come through because I know how hard it is to become good at something like that. It's a very difficult thing to do. And to see someone that was 31. I mean, he was like that though. I mean, the last like three. I'm kind of aware of him post Covid and it's an incredible talent. Like it's very rare, like, very rare talent to have, especially that young. You know, I think of guys like Christopher Hitchens and stuff like that. Like, he didn't strike me like that until much more advanced age, who's like, you know, master persuader in that. In that sense.
- [05:55]
Marty Bent
Yeah, No, I think my exposure to Charlie Kirk is very similar to yours. I never tuned into his podcast or. Yeah, watched a whole stream of those debates that he would do, but picked up the clips and I would watch those. And, yeah, then to your point, extremely persuasive. And, yeah, the way in which he was assassinated is just very, very jarring. And just to get to two sort of jugular artery videos in one week of people dying and terrible ways is.
- [06:35]
Jack Mallers
Not good to watch. It's not good for anyone to watch.
- [06:38]
Guest or Producer
But.
- [06:41]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, I will say, like, whatever. I have one Charlie Kirk story, which is this January. I was in D.C. for the inauguration, and we went to dozens of events and stuff like that, but we went to one aptly, that is there's a political Republican donor, Foster Fries, who died recently, but his family still runs this event in D.C. during the inauguration, it's at the. I believe it's called the Museum of the Bible. And so we were going to the Museum of the Bible. It's very beautiful building, Great museum, all this. But the event was. It was an odd collection of characters. Like, not the typical inauguration event that you would expect. Tucker Carlson was the mc. You kind of expect that the guest of honor was Conor McGregor. Okay, we're already getting into weird pairings. There's a lot of media, but there weren't that many politicians at, like, an inauguration thing, which is a little bit odd. And. And there were a lot of young men there, right, that were there to listen. And what was really funny is you have Tucker, you know, biggest media personality in the world right now. You have Conor McGregor, you would imagine, for young men, like, one of the coolest guys around, you know, UFC fighter champion, all those things. And then in the back, Charlie Kirk wasn't speaking. He was just in the back listening. And when the event. When the stage event was basically over, you know, I went over to talk to him, and he was. Every young person there, you know, you got Tucker here, you got. You got. You got UFC royalty over here. Everyone's mobbing him. Anyone under 30, which is on Charlie, you know, and I didn't. I didn't know that much about him. I found that is, like, interesting. Was like, huh. You know, you got all these, like, political celebrities, athletes stuff like that and like Charlie's the guy that all the 26 year old guys want to talk to.
- [08:49]
Marty Bent
Yeah, yeah. It's. I think the message, politics aside, but I think his sort of life message, I mean, obviously he was devout and very open Christian and yeah, love God. Loved God. Talked a lot about the Bible. Scripture would, would basically verbatim recall lines of scripture during, during his debates. And it was extremely impressive. But think would not be surprised if he was being mobbed by the young men in their 20s because his message was hopeful in an age of, I don't want to say despair, but it's tough times. We know that. That's why we're in bitcoin.
- [09:37]
Jack Mallers
That's a notable thing from what I've seen, of course, and if someone's watched hundreds of hours of him and disagrees, but from what I saw, and I see tons of clips, it's not like I was unexposed, is that Charlie was generally like a white pill guy. He's a positive guy. Obviously when you're debating there are like negative aspects and you have to like, you know, you know, win a debate. But like, I don't know, most of the stuff I saw was actually like hopeful, nice, respectful, biblically oriented. Yeah, that's good stuff. That's a good person.
- [10:16]
Marty Bent
Yeah, no, that's what the young generation needs. And not in any way trying to compare myself to Charlie Kirk, but it's the message we try to get here. I mean, we talk about it a lot like get married, have kids and do good things, be a good person, go to church. I think it's a simple message that being well received by the young men in the world today because it's the only one that seems to make sense. And I guess this dovetails into potential motives and yeah, all that, like, it was just weird how it unfolded. And I sent a tweet out and I don't know whether I need to amend it, but literally 30 minutes after it happened, when it seemed like at that, at that point in time that somebody in the crowd had been arrested for sure for shooting him, that old man, people were saying, People were like.
- [11:15]
Jack Mallers
Immediately, I think some people were saying, like, we know who he is, we know his name, it's not the guy or something like that. Yeah, yeah.
- [11:24]
Marty Bent
Yeah. That's what I worry about, particularly, I mean, going back to the political climate in the country right now with, I mean, everybody was already pretty riled up with the, the death of Irina, the video, I mean, she really died last month, but the video release Was released last week. Political tensions high. And then you just throw jet fuel on the.
- [11:48]
Jack Mallers
The political tension fire that is kind of notable. I mean, like, you know, when you're talking about motives, there's a lot of things. But I remember we were walking to Cooper's here in Austin, Texas. I hope the freaks like that. I'm holding down the fort here in the TFTC studio. But Parker and John and I were walking down and we were talking about arena. And one of the things I had told them at that moment was like, I find it really interesting how much guys like Charlie Kirk have sunk into this issue. I think it's probably the only time I've mentioned Charlie Kirk in a conversation. Conversation in months, you know, and I was like, no, this isn't going away. And we were talking about the. The guy who was offering the. The. The. The money for the murals and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And that, you know, this wasn't going to go away anytime soon. It was like a galvanizing moment. And Charlie was a big part of that.
- [12:50]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [12:50]
Jack Mallers
Like, I mean, I think that was over the last few days, one of the, if not the only, you know, thing he was really focused on in his public messaging. And I'm sure that when you compare something like the arena, you know, you know, murder with something like, you know, George Floyd's death and, like, the aftermath of that and like, how people are galvanizing on the right a little bit around this is like, you might want to stop that momentum. Yeah, yeah, that's one thing.
- [13:29]
Marty Bent
Well, either stop that momentum or, I mean, if you're thinking extreme adversarially, and I think there's nefarious actors out there, want to accelerate, really drive the country to a powder keg to divide and conquer. Like, that's what I. I think it became clear to me last night. Like, again, going back to the tweet that I wrote that I sent out quickly after he was initially shot, I think my perspective on what. Is what happened yesterday changed quickly. I mean, it seems obvious that this was a very professional operation. There's many people out there saying, oh, you don't need to be. And a green beret to make that shot from 200 yards, which may be the case. However, I think a few think about where it was shot in the jugular and the fact that there was sort of a distraction because that guy sort of held his hands up and said it was me and it wasn't him. And.
- [14:28]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [14:29]
Marty Bent
And then the.
- [14:32]
Jack Mallers
It certainly. I mean, like, sorry, it doesn't take a Green Beret, but it might like. It seems like a pretty well executed plan that in a. As we're recording this, I don't think the shooter, or at least they've announced that the shooter's been found. So pulling that off, getting away, I. Doesn't seem like an amateur job.
- [14:56]
Marty Bent
Yeah. I don't think it's been verified yet, but I saw Steven Crowder was sharing a screenshot apparently of correspondence, internal correspondence at the ATF where they. They found a rifle in the woods with, with the clip. And there was, I believe there's three more bullets left in it. And they had antifa, like trans stuff written on it, which.
- [15:22]
Jack Mallers
Oh, yeah.
- [15:23]
Marty Bent
If true. Not confirmed yet at this point, but if that's true, that screams like, like set up. Just trying to lean into that, accelerate the division. Sure. And there's a lot of talk about civil war in the United States right now. And I. That is the last thing we need.
- [15:43]
Jack Mallers
Oh yeah, yeah. Count me in on the non civil war side of things. Yes, very much so. No. Yeah, last thing we need. But like, I don't know. Yeah, you got that. I didn't hear the Crowder story about antifa. Whatever. That doesn't. I mean, if you talk the way Charlie did. Sorry, not the way he talked, but about what he talked about. Yeah. There's going to be a lot of leftists in particular who are furious with you. You know, anything from his love of God to the sober understanding on gender and sex to, to an evolving view on Israel. It's like there's a lot of. There's a lot of people that would not like a lot of those things.
- [16:46]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And it never really occurred to me, but it made sense yesterday. Like he was 31 and if you look at the corpus of his resume over the last 13 years, like, I would not. Like when it was first brought up yesterday, when I saw somebody talking about like, I was like, oh yeah, this does make sense. Like he could have been president one day if he continued.
- [17:09]
Jack Mallers
Oh sure.
- [17:10]
Marty Bent
Down this path.
- [17:10]
Jack Mallers
31 year old with master persuasion skills who has a young generation like, like galvanized politically and is a moderate. It's like that was the other surprising thing is that like, you know, I have generally right wing views, some would say far right views. And I always found Charlie to be pretty plain, you know, like he wasn't a far right extremist or anything. Very far from it. I've met quite a few more extreme people, including, you know, when I look in the mirror. So yeah, that that side of it is, is actually, you know, you know, that he, you know, to be persuasive that way, you have to be palpable to. Palpable to like a lot of people. And he was, I mean, he was very, very popular in a non extreme way. Yeah.
- [18:08]
Marty Bent
You know. Well, I say we're less than 24 hours out.
- [18:15]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [18:16]
Marty Bent
Fog of war. Probably need time for this to, to develop before we make any, any, any takes on the situation there. They're well rounded with enough information, but yeah, it's. It stinks to me. That's all I'm gonna say.
- [18:37]
Jack Mallers
Oh, it smells terribly.
- [18:38]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [18:39]
Jack Mallers
Look, I mean, I got into it last night, and I don't want to go too far off on a limb, but I will say I was a little bit surprised by how Charlie was talking about Israel in the last few weeks, both with Megyn Kelly. I saw the clips from that and on his own show, talking about, like, what funds, like leftist Marxist ideology in the United States. That type of talk gets you in trouble.
- [19:09]
Marty Bent
It's gotten presidents killed before.
- [19:11]
Jack Mallers
Yes, it has. Yeah, it's.
- [19:16]
Marty Bent
It'S.
- [19:18]
Jack Mallers
I mean, it's. I mean, it's impossible not to talk about. I mean, it sticks out like a sore thumb. And the fact that he hadn't always been on that.
- [19:25]
Marty Bent
Oh, he was, he was one of the biggest Israel defenders for.
- [19:30]
Jack Mallers
Was he Pentecostal? I'm guessing something like that.
- [19:33]
Marty Bent
He's a believer in Judeo Christian values.
- [19:35]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which sounds Pentecostal to me, which is the, you know, you know, Biblical Israel is, is modern day Israel. Sort of believe it's like Pentecostal Southern Baptist, although I don't think he was Southern Baptist, but I don't actually know. So. No, that would, that would be in line with that.
- [19:55]
Marty Bent
Yeah, yeah. And then there was. Netanyahu was tweeting about his death before it was officially announced and.
- [20:04]
Jack Mallers
Really?
- [20:05]
Marty Bent
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:06]
Jack Mallers
I didn't know that.
- [20:08]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [20:08]
Jack Mallers
I don't follow him.
- [20:10]
Marty Bent
No, it's. We'll see. Let's. We're less than 24 hours.
- [20:15]
Jack Mallers
All right, we're gonna let it go.
- [20:16]
Marty Bent
Yeah, we're gonna let it develop. But the. No, that stinks. It's not.
- [20:21]
Jack Mallers
Stinks like crazy. I'm sure, you know, you'll probably have Whitney on after me or something like that and have a real discussion on this of someone who actually knows how the world works in that way.
- [20:32]
Marty Bent
Yeah, she's actually supposed to come on hopefully next week.
- [20:35]
Jack Mallers
Oh, nice.
- [20:39]
Marty Bent
Times are tough. The. I guess just to wrap this up because we do have bitcoin stuff to talk about, actually. Not because, I mean, Mother Charlie, like what? Like, the political landscape right now is like. It's crazy. You have a bunch of, like, this week is crazy. Beyond that, like, French prime minister kicked out, essentially. God damn it. These reactions. I'm sorry, listening. The apple reactions go on automatically. Yeah. French prime minister kicked out. Japanese prime minister resigned. You have been over overthrowing of an attempted communist coup in Nepal. They blew up, burnt down their parliament building. You have China last week with their military parade, meeting with Russia, India and Brazil, the misfit countries, if you will. Then you have Jerome Powell and Donald Trump going out. There are fiscal and monetary side of things here in the US getting. Getting more. Make more chaotic. You had that BLS jobs report revision.
- [21:49]
Jack Mallers
Come out where we have almost no new jobs. They just lied about it for. It's very funny to see that like, that. That I don't. You know, that's a lot of things you just mentioned. I don't have takes on pretty much any of them. Although I will say on Nepal, though, one thing I will say is that like, you know, you know, congratulations to Jack Dorsey. It seems like every time he invents a new product, you know, we had the Arab Spring when Twitter's coming out now we got the uprising Nepal. And like, the bit chat, you know, usage is shooting up like crazy there. It's like he seems to be a agent of change himself.
- [22:33]
Marty Bent
Yeah, that is. I mean, have you used Bitch?
- [22:36]
Jack Mallers
I have. I was only using it on Mesh, though, so it's just me and my brother or something like that. Like, I tried it actually at a diner down there. There's one other person. They didn't say anything back to me. So what is amazing to me is that mesh networks actually work now. Right. That's cool. Like, you know, I've been following. They're not following, but, like, I was interested in it, you know, maybe seven years ago, and it just wasn't very good. But it seems like mesh networks are really good now.
- [23:06]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And I think the way that Jack and Callie are building out Bitchat and incorporating NOSTR and things like that, to expand. Not expand the range, but add functionality, like offline online functionality to. To help people communicate from further distances. It is. It is incredible to see in the fact that in Indonesia there was another uprising. But Bitchat. Oh, really significantly there as well. And so, like, people are using it on the ground and it makes sense, particularly if you're gonna protest and they're protesting. I think in Nepal, specifically. I think the straw that broke the camel's back was just like, basically. And there's a blackout on social media. So like, all right, download this app. We'll communicate. Being that mesh, you can't shut this down.
- [23:55]
Jack Mallers
It's pretty. You know, I don't know if you remember during the Arab Spring, like, Twitter was the thing at the time. It was very, I don't know, from an American standpoint in New York City at the time, it was very exciting to see how something like Twitter was being used. It's just funny to see that bitch ad is now the Twitter of 12 years ago, 15 years ago.
- [24:26]
Marty Bent
That's what I'm searching right now. Did Egypt, I believe Egypt sued Twitter.
- [24:33]
Jack Mallers
Did they?
- [24:34]
Marty Bent
No, they didn't. They did not. Egyptian government, along with others in the region, try to block to restrict access to Twitter and Facebook in late January 2011.
- [24:43]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, 2011. There we go.
- [24:44]
Marty Bent
Went as far as shutting down nearly all Internet and cellular data access nationwide for several days from the stifled connection.
- [24:53]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, I mean, it does kind of feel like that. I remember 2011 very well. I mean, that's when I learned about bitcoin. And so like, you know, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall street stuff like, which I actually think is 2010. But it's all, you know, in that, in that little range. I don't know, I'm getting those vibes.
- [25:15]
Marty Bent
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, here in America, I think in the United States specifically, it's like, it does seem like we've been under a color revolution for something. I think Covid BLM like made that very clear. Like. Yeah, it seems like the political.
- [25:35]
Jack Mallers
Remember, you can't spread Covid at BLM events.
- [25:38]
Marty Bent
No, no, you can't.
- [25:39]
Jack Mallers
That's the important thing. You can at church. You can spread Covid at church, but you cannot spread Covid at a BLM event.
- [25:49]
Marty Bent
Yeah, you have to be able to express your. Your discontent with.
- [25:52]
Jack Mallers
Or at five star restaurants in Northern California. No, that's fine too.
- [25:57]
Marty Bent
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- [28:14]
Jack Mallers
You can't even ride a train. You kind of have to experience it a little bit to appreciate it.
- [28:18]
Guest or Producer
Right?
- [28:19]
Jack Mallers
You ever seen that meme? That's like the guy laying on the ground and it's like an out of body experience. And the caption I saw on that was the libertarian leaving my body every time I smell pot on the street. Yeah, that basically sums up my politics at this point in life. I was a very dedicated libertarian when I lived in New York. 2011, 2012. That time period. It was also like Bloomberg's New York and I'm making wisecracks about trying to ban big sodas. Taking our choice away from, I don't even drink soda. But I was also younger, I was in my 20s. And it's very easy to grow complacent with the rule of law and law and order when things are going good. It's very easy to look at that and just say, like, well, but there's these minor injustices or these minor inconveniences that maybe we should fix. And then you're downtown in Austin 15 years later, and there's literally dozens of criminally insane crackheads running around, and you have to think about moving your office, right? And so, like, you get that little bit of experience of even just a little bit of chaos. Like, you know, you know, oh, we're just not going to arrest people if they steal stuff under 500 bucks, right? And, you know, I hate to say it, but, like, I think basically every, like, Baptist woman in 1994 that lived in Waco was essentially right about the world in general. Like gateway drugs and all this stuff. It's just like, yeah, you get a little bit of chaos and look what happens. It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel safe. Of course they're going to say, oh, it's the safest time of it. It's like cooking the books. Just like cpi, the jobs numbers are fake, CPI is fake, obviously, the crime statistics are fake. Obviously, people who live in downtown San Francisco or even downtown Austin, where I live, know that it's worse than it used to be. Clearly that is true. So you introduce just a little bit of that, and it's easy to look at someone like Trump who has this sort of law and order philosophy. And even if you're younger and you have those idealistic views, I was in Bloomberg's New York. It was very contained, safe environment. I don't even remember seeing crimes. But these people do. They see it every day.
- [30:59]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And bringing this back, that's my biggest worry with the assassination of Charlie, is that we were getting to a point where even people who are left of center were beginning to say, hey, this is not like, we can't have Ukrainian people escaping wars, coming to the United States for safe harbor, getting stabbed in the neck on a train. And yesterday's events could be used as a divide and conquer. Like, get away from that conversation is left first, right? Like, if they try to try to frame this as some trans lunatic that killed him, some radical leftist trans. If that comes out to be the claim of who Killed Charlie Kirk. I'm gonna be very skeptical.
- [31:47]
Jack Mallers
I will as well. Charlie's more important than that, I think. Has the eye of more important people than that, I believe.
- [31:58]
Marty Bent
Yeah. That's why I sent a tweet out last night. I think it's imperative to show relative restraint, particularly in the short term, because I think that's what they want is some misguided backlash and confrontation. Move people in the wrong direction, get them distracted and pit against each other.
- [32:22]
Jack Mallers
You know what I think about the most is if there is an uptick in leftist murders, politically motivated or otherwise. Just could be general chaos of murders, or it could be political assassination type things. If there's an uptick of that on the left, I really worry because imagine the backlash against the left. Little Norm MacDonald for you there. Yeah, imagine the backlash. It was, you know, the.
- [32:57]
Marty Bent
What was his joke?
- [32:58]
Jack Mallers
That's what I'm really worried about here.
- [33:01]
Marty Bent
What was the. The Bill Cosby jokes?
- [33:08]
Jack Mallers
It was. It was. A friend of his says, you know, the worst part about the Bill Cosby thing was the hypocrisy. And I disagree. I think it was the raping. I find that most rapists are hypocrites. Yeah. I could just do norm jokes this whole time if you want.
- [33:31]
Marty Bent
We could, you know, I'm just. I mean.
- [33:33]
Jack Mallers
But yeah, the whole, like, back, you know, you already see it on msnbc, cnn. I mean, I don't watch them, but I see the clips and stuff like that. They're like. They're. They're already worried about the backlash, you know, and it's like the back. I mean, like, you don't want it or anything, but it's like I'm kind of worrying about the. The. The political leftist assassinations right now. That's kind of what. Top of mind.
- [33:54]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [33:55]
Jack Mallers
You know, in this moment.
- [33:56]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And that was the other just disheartening thing and because it is extremely nuanced because there is a radical left that is reveling in what happened yesterday. And these are demonic, soulless people. And I do believe there is a radical left that does not want to engage in dialogue and try to figure things out. They want to brute force their terrible ideas and the rest. And we've seen this throughout history. I think a lot of people have been bringing up the Spanish Civil War and Franco and what happened there with the attempted. Well, the communist regime there before it was overthrown. I mean, they were killing conservative political opponents.
- [34:42]
Jack Mallers
Happened in Germany as well.
- [34:44]
Marty Bent
Yeah. Weird times.
- [34:50]
Jack Mallers
Yeah. You know, in terms of, you know, top of my list. You know, I'm worried about downtown Austin where I work, and the criminally insane that are intentionally left on the street because, you know, Jose Garza likes them to be terrorizing people on the street. He wouldn't do it if he didn't like it. And, you know, then it's maybe, you know, you know, you know, worry for some of my friends who are publicly, you know, out there, more right wing people in a world where those people are being targeted, then like seven things and then maybe some backlash. You know, that. That's kind of the list of my priorities right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [35:37]
Marty Bent
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- [38:37]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, I mean I think about that a lot because it's, you have to figure out where to focus your energy. And you know, for me over, especially over the last couple years because it's very easy to get too cynical. I mean I've gone through modes of that obviously and just like obsessing over black pills and you know, my conspiratorial mind, you know, swirling. And that's where like, you know, even like stoicism doesn't help me on that type of stuff. I tried. It didn't work for me, you know, and, but what seems to have worked for me is like focusing on family, focusing on church, focusing on being productive and doing stuff. And I have thought about this a little bit. Is it Jimmy's book over here?
- [39:28]
Marty Bent
Thank God for bitcoin.
- [39:29]
Guest or Producer
Yeah.
- [39:30]
Jack Mallers
No, Fiat ruins everything. Or people say bitcoin fixes everything. And sometimes I'll mention that to more casual friends. And like really Fiat ruins everything. Like, I don't know what about, you know, sports? I'm like, well, yeah, I can make the argument that fiat does ruin that. And so it does. And I don't think I'm over rationalizing it too much, is that it is a white Pill. And it is a very rewarding thing to, you know, you know, see a chaotic world and things that are popping up that are not pleasant and take you away from the things that bring you joy and that you should be focusing on to be productive and, and have purpose and things like that. Because it does. It feels very good to have this outlet, you know, in the bitcoin world where I do believe that the people working on it are working on something that can fix a lot of, a lot of these problems. And that Fiat does indeed, as Jimmy says in his book, ruin everything and everything. And that's not really too hyperbolic. And yeah, so I do, I do feel what you're saying there is being productive working on bitcoin, because I can't even imagine how I would feel productive outside of, you know, being civically engaged in local or national politics if I weren't working on bitcoin. I don't know what else would bring me to, like, I'm actually doing that. I mean, I'm sure there are things obviously like, you know, you need people, you know, working in factories and farming and stuff like that. I'm not saying there's no, there's obviously a purpose in that, but for my psychology, it's like, it feels very direct. I would say.
- [41:17]
Marty Bent
Yeah, no, this pertains to all the crazy shit going on in the country. It's been laid bare in the last eight months. Fiat is funding a lot of these insane leftist NGOs and groups that are basically indoctrinating college age students and injecting this mind virus into not the masses, but a portion of the population that this really terrible world views and understanding of, of reality and how it works. I think that was exemplified with some of the reactions on Tick Tock and other. You said you wandered on the blue sky. How terrible was that yesterday?
- [42:01]
Jack Mallers
Doesn't feel good, Marty. It didn't increase my, you know, love of my neighbor, I'll put it that way. So, yeah, that was rough. But, you know, there's, you know, I don't want to. Again, I don't want to fill my head with horrific thoughts and things like that, but I think it's important to see how people are reacting to, you know, an event of this magnitude. And yeah, it was pretty disappointing.
- [42:31]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And here we go. Confirmed by the Wall Street Journal or Wall Street Journals didn't confirm it, but is reporting it reporting on an ammunition Charlie Kirk shooting grades with transgender anti fascist ideology.
- [42:48]
Jack Mallers
I mean, plausible? Doesn't, doesn't seem right to me. I'M sure those people don't like him as well.
- [42:57]
Marty Bent
Oh, they definitely don't.
- [42:58]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [42:58]
Marty Bent
But he would engage in civil discourse with them. But I think there's many people could recognize that those people probably did not like Charlie Kirk. And if you're looking for a patsy to blame something on.
- [43:10]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, yeah, that would. That would be probably choice number one.
- [43:14]
Marty Bent
Yeah, it's too. It's like that's the other thing too, which is actually optimistic. Silver lining. White bullet. Let's get. The propaganda is getting so bad and.
- [43:24]
Jack Mallers
It does get easier to spot, right?
- [43:26]
Marty Bent
Yeah, yeah. Like, I'm sure, like the vaccine thing earlier this week, I'm sure you saw the Bernie Sanders doing a press conference with a bunch of doctors behind him and a sign that just says vaccines work. It's like you're just kind of like brute force. This thought that any thought that the vaccines, whether that's childhood vaccines or particularly. I think it's very obvious now. The COVID vaccines were not safe and effective and were actually detrimental to the health of the people who took them. But, like, the propaganda, like, is just getting so bad. Vaccines work. It's like, you are literally.
- [44:05]
Jack Mallers
Look, I have seven actors behind me that say so. Yeah, that's an important thing. Yeah, the performative. The perform. You know, it reminds me of Joe Biden receiving his vaccine on the. On a, you know, production set.
- [44:23]
Marty Bent
And it was like rubber too. I'm pretty sure, if I recall correctly.
- [44:27]
Jack Mallers
No, I mean, actually we have a connection on that. It's One of your YouTube strikes was. I had a doctor during COVID I got Covid. I gave it to everyone in Miami at one of the. Yeah, to you, to all my friends. So, like, four days after me, all my friends are getting sick. And I had gone to this doctor who was a rancher in Wyoming, slash, Dr. Great Man Doc Woods. And my, my. My other neighbor had told me, like, hey, you need to go see him. He's great. And I was like, I'm fine. You know, like, I'll write it out. But I was pretty sick. I didn't feel good. And so I go in and he's telling me, you know, this is pre. Months and many, many months before, like, Peter McCullough and those guys go on Rogan and like, this stuff becomes a little bit more known is Doc woods just said, like, you know, you're going to take monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, you know, vitamin D, all this stuff. And I was like, I don't know what any of this is. Like, can I just, like, not do anything and just be okay in five or 10 days. And he's like, yeah, just promise me you don't get the vaccine. I didn't really have a super strong. I wasn't going to get it, but I wasn't like. Like, if a doctor had told me I really needed to do that at that time, maybe I would have done it. Like, I don't really know. I mean, I'm not. Like, I wasn't thinking about it all that much, to be honest. And he just said, all you have to do is promise me you won't get it. And that was, like, a big, weird moment for me. And then he went on your show after that because you guys got sick. You guys got all the horse medicine you could take. Everyone got better, like, very, very quickly, immediately. Yeah. And so now when you watch, when you have experiences like that, and it's not just me, it was like all of our friends, like, everyone, basically, that I talked to in Miami got Covid and everyone got better. Everyone. And I found out, only later when McCollo goes on Rogan, I called Woods. I was like, hey, this guy saying, like, the exact same thing you told me, like, four months ago. He's like, yeah, dude, I send them all my data. Like. Like, I'm doing the McCollo protocol. And I was like, oh, okay.
- [46:35]
Marty Bent
Okay. Yeah.
- [46:37]
Jack Mallers
I don't know how doctors communicate with each other. Yeah.
- [46:40]
Marty Bent
I mean, that was a crazy time because if I recall Dockwoods, that I didn't even talk about the vaccine because I don't believe it was.
- [46:48]
Jack Mallers
I don't think that was really the point. I think it was about treatment.
- [46:51]
Marty Bent
Yeah, it was about early treatment and censorship.
- [46:54]
Jack Mallers
Of course, Doc was being censored. Was until very recently. Still sort of under that barrage from the. I don't know what it's called, Wyoming Medical Board, you know, whatever. He got fired from his hospital, you know, literally, for giving out ivermectin, prescribing it to people. Didn't have a single death. You know, he was treating, for the most part, like. Like, the most at risk people, you know, his age, very old, and no one ever died while he was there. Got fired. A few people started dying in the same clinic.
- [47:34]
Marty Bent
I mentioned Doc woods on my episode with Jessica Rose and the fact that our episode got censored because it's like, it was insane back then.
- [47:42]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [47:43]
Marty Bent
That doc was. At the time we recorded, he was 72. He's probably well over 75 now. Humble man, good man, trying to do goodbye his patience. Hank, very soft spoken, kind hearted gentleman. And you could tell he had dedicated his life to a small community in Wyoming for decades. And for trusting his gut and trying to treat his patients in the way he thought was best, he was drawn by the wayside. In a 70s. It's disgusting.
- [48:18]
Jack Mallers
Yeah. Unbelievable. But like, it is, I don't know. I mean, Covid's very formative, I think for everyone that went through it as especially, I mean, I'm sure, you know, the kids have a, you know, if you were in school during that time, I'm sure it's formative in a very different way about, you know, being let down by adults. But like, as an adult, like working during that time, it, it makes the propaganda easier to spot. I think we're before where I would have been more skeptical about early claims of deception and things like that. Now when I see Bernie Sanders with a bunch of actors behind him, you know, talking about, you know, how awesome vaccines are, it, it's a little bit easier to dismiss performative politics and performative pharmaceutical outreach.
- [49:11]
Marty Bent
Yeah. Well, I hope this Charlie Kirk thing doesn't stop the momentum that we had earlier this week because I think that, what was it the Henry Ford center study that was brought forth during the hearing, the study that Jessica Rose and Kevin McClernand, who've both been McKernan, not McClernand, excuse me, both been on this podcast. I mean, they basically prove it's peer review studied, it's being replicated. They prove that there's DNA fragments in all the Pfizer vials and SV40, which.
- [49:40]
Jack Mallers
Accelerates cancer, there's snake DNA in it. It's insane. Yeah, yeah.
- [49:47]
Marty Bent
And I mean, going back to leaning into the vaccines work propaganda, it's like, are you kidding me? It's like. And that's. They make it so binary where it's like you have to believe all vaccines work or you're a loon. Where it's like, well, no, I think there's probably some perverse incentives in the pharmaceutical industry.
- [50:05]
Jack Mallers
It'S safe to say, and.
- [50:06]
Marty Bent
Within the three letter agencies of the government who are creating the mandates. And I think it's okay to question that. And we've got a lot of momentum going in that direction. We have a lot of momentum going in bringing back the rule of law and making sure the people are safe. A lot of momentum at the border. A lot of momentum from an economic perspective in terms of trying to depoliticize the Fed. If you believe it's politicized and then you have this happen yesterday, and it's.
- [50:37]
Jack Mallers
Like, you know, chaos.
- [50:41]
Marty Bent
They like chaos. Chaos breeds bad decisions, and we're getting a bunch of wins, and all of a sudden this happens. And guess what? It was an anti fascist transgender, of course, that did it. It's like a go into Portland and take care of it there.
- [50:58]
Jack Mallers
I mean, yeah, look, I don't know anything. But what I will say, like, to your point there is the Overton Window has shifted so much. Like, the idea of, you know, I was totally one of these people, you know, in 2017, like, I had a lot of cowardice running through my veins, you know, going to implicit bias trainings and not saying what I actually thought. And, you know, stuff like just being a pussy, you know, like, just being a wimp about this stuff. I would never end, to a certain extent, like, buying into some of the brainwashing, you know, some of it's not just, like, me, you know, internalizing it. And I don't know, I mean, like, I. I used to say something about, like, bitcoin and censorship, right? Which is. I would talk to people, and I still believe this to be true, but there are other aspects of. Anyway, I'll say what I used to say. I say, you know, one of the reasons, you know, cold storage with keys that you control is so important, right, Is the censorship in the world. You know, being able to say what you want to say without, you know, negative consequences. You know, just freedom of speech type things. Being able to work on what you want to work on. Being able to associate with who you want to associate with.
- [52:11]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [52:12]
Jack Mallers
Without having your bank account shut down or something like that. Do you think that's going to get better or worse?
- [52:18]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [52:19]
Jack Mallers
Unanimous worse. I agree with that. Still, however, I'm starting to see more glimmers of hope in the last two years than ever that this can be avoided because bitcoin's actually working. The culture's actually changing. I still think you have to be extremely vigilant. Everything I said, if you're in the UK right now, you probably feel that darkness more than you ever have, you know, right this minute. The way I was feeling, you know, three years ago or so. Do you think this is going to get better or worse? And everyone's saying worse, right, in the uk you're probably right there. I'm starting to see better. And I think that guys like Charlie, I mean, like, there's a whole group of people have, like, shifted the Overton Window. There's bitcoiners that have done it. There's people in D.C. and, you know, stuff like that that have done it is that I don't think there's nearly as much cowardice anymore. I don't think it is as easy to like, to do that. And so basically, I think we've made a lot of progress and we succeeded in the last three years.
- [53:18]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And not only is the Overton window shifted, but it is being affected as it pertains to vaccines. I think people have been making enough noise and highlighting a lot of, like, doing the hard work to find the data, to surface it, to talk about it, to make it known. And then you have something like happened in Florida last week where the surgeon General comes out and says, hey, it's not within the ethics of the field of medicine to coerce anybody to take any. Anything against their will. So vaccine mandates in the state of Florida are over. We're not saying don't get the vaccines, but who are we as the state to coerce you to do so? That is a massive vibe shift from, well, only two years ago.
- [54:06]
Jack Mallers
Have you ever read the original Hippocratic Oath?
- [54:09]
Marty Bent
It's been a great one. It's been a while, but yeah, yeah.
- [54:12]
Jack Mallers
It'S, it's, it's a fun one. It doesn't talk about vaccines. Yeah, the do no harm, you know, type thing. Yeah. Look, I hope I'm not falling for like some, you know, Twitter real, you know, you know, scam on this, but, like, I'm pretty sure two of the things in the original Hippocratic Oath are you can also never perform an abortion and you cannot assist in suicide.
- [54:41]
Marty Bent
Really?
- [54:41]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, it's not in the current one.
- [54:44]
Marty Bent
Yeah, well, those are forms of murder.
- [54:47]
Jack Mallers
But yes, of course.
- [54:48]
Marty Bent
Yeah, yeah. So it makes sense.
- [54:51]
Jack Mallers
This is injecting people with snake DNA. But what do I know about snake DNA either? So maybe it's really good for you.
- [54:59]
Marty Bent
But then on the Israel front too, like, not only was Charlie talking differently about Israeli influence.
- [55:06]
Jack Mallers
Oh, sure.
- [55:07]
Marty Bent
In U.S. politics, we had Tucker on stage with like David Sacks and David Spurg two nights ago, and David Sacks came out and stood up for Tucker is like, Tucker doesn't have an anti Semitic bone in his body. Like, Israel is a government, a state with an intelligence apparatus. And they do engage in statecraft. And it is okay to be critical of the Israeli government where for the longest time it's been conflated. If you, if you critique Israel and its potential influence over the United States, you are an anti Semite, which is completely.
- [55:44]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, what a bunch of losers that say stuff like that, Like.
- [55:46]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [55:47]
Jack Mallers
Absolutely insane.
- [55:49]
Marty Bent
Yeah, yeah.
- [55:54]
Jack Mallers
But, you know. Oh, sorry, go ahead.
- [55:56]
Marty Bent
I was gonna say I said it on a podcast. I went on the Coffee and Mike podcast. But it like, it was like very obviously insane that we have like IPAC and Israel does have very obvious influence over us politicians and.
- [56:12]
Jack Mallers
Excuse me, Ted Cruz convinced me the APAC is fine.
- [56:17]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [56:18]
Jack Mallers
It's not weird at all.
- [56:21]
Marty Bent
It's your senator, sir.
- [56:23]
Jack Mallers
I know, right? I generally like Ted Cruz. I thought that was crazy. It was shocking to hear stated that way. I don't follow politicians. Like, I don't know every position that every politician has. I've actually talked to Ted Cruz about Bitcoin before and I found him to be very bright and not that everyone agrees with me on most things. It was the logic of his conversation with Tucker on that was. Seemed very strained.
- [56:56]
Marty Bent
I mean, just even the body language of that.
- [56:58]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [56:59]
Marty Bent
Back and forth was like, this is weird.
- [57:01]
Jack Mallers
Yeah. Yeah. It didn't feel good. Especially, you know, someone who I'd had like a couple interactions with where I was like, oh, this guy's smart. Yeah. Like he seems with it. And then I just didn't know his views on this stuff. And it surprised me, to say the least. And I found it to be incredibly unconvincing. I've heard him be persuasive before. He was not persuasive there.
- [57:22]
Marty Bent
No. Sup freaks. Guess what? We launched a browser extension. It's called Opportunity Cost and it helps you see the true cost of everything in Bitcoin. Convert prices to Bitcoin as you browse the web. Opportunity Cost automatically displays fiat prices in Bitcoin or sats, helping you think in a bitcoin standard. It works on Amazon, Zillow, X, your bank account, QuickBooks. You can convert everything to Bitcoin. It's really cool. It's also 100% open source MIT license. We don't collect any data. All of the conversions happen in your browser on your local device. It's a great way to recalibrate your life and begin thinking in SATS. Go check it out at opportunity cost.app. that's opportunity cost dot app. And I guess you could like. Good theme there. Like over to Windows shifting on Bitcoin too. Like I think, oh yeah, the overwinter windows shifted dramatically. And maybe this is. We got to find a natural segue to talk about what you're doing.
- [58:19]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, we do need to talk about bitcoin, but let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. I talked to a lot of politicians about bitcoin. That's changed a lot.
- [58:24]
Marty Bent
Yeah. Well, let's talk about through the years. Crazy Internet money, bunch of computer nerds, drug money, Silk road, degenerate gambler speculators trying to make a quick buck. Mount Gox era continued. 2017, 2020. Then obviously MicroStrategy comes out. ETFs announced Bitcoin strategic Reserve Executive Order. We're at this point and people are talking about Bitcoin as a serious reserve asset that should be implemented in everybody's portfolio, from the individual up to the pension, the nation state, whatever it may be. It seems like that's becoming sort of table stakes now. It's becoming recognized as table stakes. If you don't have exposure to bitcoin, you're an idiot. But Overton Window still needs to move a bit because it's like, hey, it's just a reserve asset, doesn't compete with the dollar. It's good to have. And we both know that these monies compete and ultimately bitcoin will win out. And the window is just shifting towards that, slowly but surely.
- [59:27]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, I mean, it bears like, repeating some of the things you just said too, is that especially for Americans, I am one, and therefore I have the best perspective of what this has looked like in America over the years. And, you know, I know it's not particularly hip to, you know, you know, shill for, you know, the government and stuff like that, but for the most part, with some very egregious exceptions, but for the most part, honestly, it's been nothing but green lights. Right? Things are going our way, you know, and to me, that's one. It's a little bit surprising. But it's also worth pointing out, like, you know, even, you know, the connection to what we talked about before, that Overton Window doesn't shift without, like, brave people, you know, how brave people actually taking action and doing things and making sure that it goes that way it doesn't happen by accident. And it's not a coincidence that things have gone well here. I mean, heck, I'm sitting in Texas. What do we have somewhere like 5 gigawatts mining Bitcoin in the state of Texas right now? Something like that. Three to five. Somewhere in there. That's 30% of the network. It's nuts. That's insane. I mean, go back seven, eight years, you know, I think it's probably the first time I was on your podcast, you know, or that's not six years, seven years. The idea of that would have been crazy. And you would come up with all these Reasons that governments wouldn't allow that to happen, that the local government, the state government, the federal government would get in your way. And then I'm not saying not to be adversarial. Thinking, like, I'm not trying to, you know, again, it's not cool to, you know, shill, but it has been kind of green lights. You know, we're having very advanced talks about not whether the United States government should own bitcoin, but how they should procure it and how much.
- [61:17]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [61:18]
Jack Mallers
It's not even really a question of whether they should have it. Like, that's already, you know, in the executive order. And we have legislation that looks to be very popular working on that exact thing. So, honestly, it's hard to embody my, say, 2014 self thinking about Bitcoin and where Mount Gox goes down and all this type of stuff happens. It's kind of a dark time. It's been pretty nice. It's gone pretty well. And the resistance has not been particularly effective or strong. The one I see the most right now that, like some people hail is, you know, is progress on the bitcoin front that I really disagree with is the stablecoin side of things. I don't think that that's particularly helpful for bitcoin. I think.
- [62:11]
Marty Bent
I think I'm neutral. I'm like, as a bitcoiner, as an investor, as somebody who would like to see incumbents who have acted what I would deem to be nefariously in the past, would like to see them stumble, like, lean into stablecoins, Go for it. I do not care.
- [62:41]
Jack Mallers
Totally agree with you there.
- [62:43]
Marty Bent
You're focusing on the wrong thing.
- [62:45]
Jack Mallers
I find it to be a tragic lack of focus.
- [62:48]
Marty Bent
Yeah. Don't interrupt the enemy when they're making mistakes. That's my perspective on stablecoins and the people implementing them.
- [62:55]
Jack Mallers
Sure. No, yeah, I mean, I get that. I think the way that particularly the way the US Is thinking about stablecoins is, like, very funny to me, where they're like, no, it just needs to be regulated exactly like a bank. You know, the issuer, you know, that's.
- [63:09]
Marty Bent
What you're getting at.
- [63:10]
Jack Mallers
It's like, oh, so just like, ruin what stablecoins are good at. Like, the whole point of stablecoins for getting around capital controls, immoral capital controls in many cases. But it's like, okay, well, then it's not. You just accomplish. It's like a tragic lack of focus. It's like, we're doing this exciting stuff over here. But to your point, as it Serves as a useful distraction, like, sure, whatever.
- [63:39]
Marty Bent
And it's funny, I think the genius act, I mean, you probably understand it way better than I do, but it seems like Circle was pissed that Tether was winning all this business and crushing them. And so they and a couple others who were also not happy with Tether eating their lunch went to the government, said, you need to regulate this. And it's like, okay, be careful what you wish for. Because if the regulation, It's a regulatory moat that you so wish for, turns out to be too restrictive for the end user, like, you're. You're not gonna have a market. At the end of the day, it's.
- [64:12]
Jack Mallers
Like, do you know why people use Tether? It's not like getting rid of them all of a sudden because you have this thing. It's like, you think they're gonna give you a license to spread dollars around the world while JP Morgan, like, twiddles their thumbs over here, that they're not gonna be like, why can't we do that? They would do it if they were allowed. If they could disrupt South Korean sovereignty and allow you to dollarize that economy and get money out, and then of course they would do it. Yeah. You think just because you get rid of Tether, then all of a sudden you're going to be the. It's so stupid.
- [64:47]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And it is. And like this, I mean, and I don't. I'm not saying I would want companies like this to fail. Like Stripe, the Collison twins, like, leaning in. It's like, how are you guys. How are you guys missing that? Like, we're going to build our own L1 blockchain for payments and stablecoins.
- [65:04]
Jack Mallers
It's like everyone goes through the ride way.
- [65:08]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [65:09]
Marty Bent
I think we talked about it, but there's one of the. I believe it was. John Collison was on the all in podcast earlier this year, and he still doesn't understand the Lightning Network and other second layers exist on bitcoin.
- [65:21]
Jack Mallers
Yeah. I'm hoping that Zaprite can show people that obviously. Sorry. I worked with Zaprite.
- [65:32]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [65:32]
Jack Mallers
And we're doing bitcoin payments and.
- [65:38]
Marty Bent
We.
- [65:38]
Jack Mallers
Talk to these companies. I haven't talked to the Carlson brothers about it, but we do talk to Stripe and we talk to Square and we talk to the Fiat processors and we talk to the big marketplaces and things like that. And like, what I would say is that, like, what you're saying about a lack of knowledge about how bitcoin is different from 2015, you saw this in the mining space. Here's a good comparison. You remember when people first started going out to do like the flare mining and none of it worked and it kind of poisoned the well for a long time.
- [66:12]
Marty Bent
Yeah, right.
- [66:12]
Jack Mallers
It was there and then, and then it started working. But like the people that had been burned had a really nasty taste in their mouth about it and they were just kind of stuck in what that looked like in 2017. But in 2021 it looked very, very different.
- [66:24]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [66:25]
Jack Mallers
Well, a lot of these marketplaces, a lot of these businesses, a lot of these payment processors, they were doing bitcoin stuff. In 2015 they were. Dell was accepting bitcoin, Microsoft was accepting Bitcoin, Patreon was accepting Bitcoin, Shopify was announcing all these different. And then it didn't really go anywhere and it was clunky and the tools weren't that good and the wallets weren't that great and the support wasn't that great. And then they just kind of gave up on it.
- [67:01]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [67:01]
Jack Mallers
Or they just let it sort of die on the vine.
- [67:03]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [67:04]
Jack Mallers
And so just like those, those, you know, off grid miners had this really bad taste in their mouth. I would say, I would say it's a little bit less than that. They don't feel particularly burned because they didn't invest that much capital into the whole process. But they have, they do have a negative view of it as being unuseful at the very most. And so a lot of what we work on at zap, right, is talking to these companies and making them see that like, hey, a lot's changed in the last 10, six, two years when it pertains to the lightning network, its support, its reliability, its accessibility, its liquidity, all those things, or that it exists at all.
- [67:50]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [67:51]
Jack Mallers
And it's not just on chain transactions that take 10 minutes or 30 minutes or 50 minutes to settle. And so like we, you know, we're talking to those people all the time and like, I think for like stripe and place like that they, they've gone back and forth a lot.
- [68:06]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [68:07]
Jack Mallers
And I think right now they're just, they're seeing this thing that they don't have any previous negative views on and they're like, okay, we'll give that a shot. See how it works. Good luck.
- [68:17]
Marty Bent
Yeah, yeah. It seems like the, the whole stablecoin landscape is very confused because it looks like they're reintroducing the double coincidence of once problem with their sort of siloed stablecoin.
- [68:29]
Jack Mallers
Sure.
- [68:30]
Marty Bent
Project. Sure. There's bridges and all these mechanisms, but it just complicates. It adds cost and UX friction that.
- [68:36]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, once you start getting into atomic swaps and all this, it's like, what are we doing, guys? Just a really easy thing to do over here. I don't know. I'm a simple man, Marty. I've been building products on the Internet for a long time here and I try to avoid complication wherever possible.
- [68:53]
Marty Bent
Yeah, well, I mean, just let's do a comparison too. I think you're in a very unique position at Zaporate, sort of being in the middle of all these companies. So you compare Stripe's strategy as it pertains to bitcoin to somebody like Square, which I know you guys have worked closely with, you've implemented it into the Square processor, into Zaporite as an option. And it seems like their team's pretty engaged in bitcoin. And like you look at Block as well, a parent company of many subsidiaries that are focused on different niche markets. Square point of sale for small medium sized businesses. Cash App, retail consumer app, Proto, now the mining thing. They seem pretty all in on bitcoin and have taken a long view, I believe. Cash App launched by bitcoin at the end of 2017.
- [69:45]
Jack Mallers
Right around then, yeah.
- [69:47]
Marty Bent
Going on eight years now and slowly but surely maturing with bitcoin, building out their product suite. It's been pretty impressive to see them do that.
- [69:56]
Jack Mallers
Oh, it's unbelievable. I know that there's attack vectors even from the bitcoin side on companies like Square, Block, Cash App. I don't know, it looks pretty good to me. They built unique things, they built different things. It's not exactly what I would have built. I see it as all good in general. People can buy bitcoin, people can sell bitcoin, people can store bitcoin, people can transact in bitcoin. It seems like they're hitting a lot of good notes there. They're funding bitcoin development outside of their own company. So no, I'm not cynical about that. And I do see a strategy that I can only assume is going to pay off very, very well in the future.
- [70:37]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [70:38]
Jack Mallers
I do think that they do share a fatal flaw with Stripe, which is that maybe Covid actually helped a little bit, which is, you know, they're very San Francisco Silicon Valley centric.
- [70:50]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [70:51]
Jack Mallers
And you know, as a broad generalization that, that San Francisco Silicon Valley culture never really understood bitcoin. Obviously there are tons of individuals and stuff like that, but as a startup culture, as an entrepreneurial culture, As a business building culture and funding culture never understood Bitcoin. So I think that that's even more impressive that Square has made the progress that they have given that that's sort of the root of their business as well. Yeah, I used to visit down there in like 2019 or so. I went to their offices a few times, talk about bitcoin stuff. And there's several wonderful bitcoiners there. But it was very clear to me that that was not a company wide thing. That was a top down mandate that we are going to do this. And I think obviously it's been manifested the most on the cash app side. That's where it's been a good business for them. They make money off of it, it's profitable, all those things. But I have no reason to believe that these other things won't. I'm most excited honestly about the point of sale at Zap, right. We built this very. We call it a companion app, Point of Sale. Just sort of the calculator screen that you could do on your phone if you also had like a terminal. But our hope was we just did it for people that just needed a little bit of access there. Our hope was always that we would either integrate with another point of sale, which we still might do, or that someone like Square would just do that part of it and then we'd handle the rest over here in E commerce and business invoicing and stuff like that. It's very similar to the decision we just made with our latest launch on ticketing.
- [72:33]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [72:34]
Jack Mallers
Was that my original goal was, oh, we'll just. It's very good when you build businesses to have a lot of naivety or else you'd never build these things. And so domain expertise, when you're building something is the most overrated. And so I was just like, okay, we'll go integrate in with Ticketmaster or Eventbrite or something like that. And then I find out that like the whole way they're one of the major ways they make money is siphoning off transaction fees from the fiat payment processes and they're addicted to it and they can't live without it. And that, you know, low, low fee transactions from Bitcoin actually is at the heart of their business model. And then you look at it and you're like, well, an event system is not actually that hard to build. And so we build that right on. I just wanted to be a checkout company, but we're actually becoming more than that. But I'm very glad we don't have to become a point of sale company, you know, in the square Stripe, or I guess it's just square world. Sorry, I jumped around quite a bit there. But the point being is that those companies doing Stripe is taking a very different angle than square on this. I think that David Marcus also has recently been talking about this with what I think it's what Stripe's doing and just saying, like, take it from a guy who's been there. Right. You don't want to do this. And of course, you know, he chose as his follow up to Libra being, you know, working on Lightning.
- [74:01]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And now Spark.
- [74:03]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [74:04]
Marty Bent
The state chains. And from what I hear, like people are really bullish on Spark.
- [74:09]
Jack Mallers
Yeah. I don't know enough about it other than that. We are looking at Zap. Right. And into integrating with it because it is something that's going to be. It looks like it's going to be the critical infrastructure to a lot of the wallet ecosystem going forward for a lot of wallets. I know that wallet of Satoshi is back in the United States specifically because they're using Spark and so I think that that's a good thing. I don't know what other wallets are using them yet, but it does seem like there's momentum building there.
- [74:40]
Marty Bent
Pretty sure Breeze implemented Breeze.
- [74:42]
Jack Mallers
That's right. That is another one. Yeah. And so that's great for someone like us. Like, you know, we don't operate a wallet. We're agnostic to. The wallet that you choose is we. We want you. We want you to get more bitcoin. Right. We want, whether you're, you know, you know, business invoicing or you're selling something online or, you know, you're running an event. You know, the bitcoin park people here in Austin and in Nashville use the ticketing system now. If you're going to any of their events in September or nems in January, next next year is like the whole point is just to get you more bitcoin.
- [75:17]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [75:18]
Jack Mallers
And you know, we look at the wallet ecosystem and we try to support as much as we can to say, you know, come in here, bring your own wallet, we don't ever touch your money. And so I think Spark is actually going to open that up quite a bit. And we love seeing stuff like that. It's just more options for merchants, more options for individuals to get more bitcoin.
- [75:43]
Marty Bent
Yeah. Let's dive into the ticketing. How hard or easy was it to build and could it be an event? Is it overt, like eventbrite ticketmaster competitor.
- [75:59]
Jack Mallers
When we started out doing it, I always assume things are going to be way harder than they are. It's a good mindset to be in when you build software, but relatively speaking, events aren't that complicated. And now something like what Ticketmaster does, where their customers more like venues, where you have seating charts and all that, it gets more complicated there, you know, getting, getting all that information. But like what Eventbrite does, where it's just, you know, I'm doing an event, I want to issue tickets, I want to be able to, you know, validate those tickets at a check in, things like that. It's pretty simple, actually. And of course, we already had all the fun checkout stuff, right? So we just had to apply what we were already good at to these events. And what became very clear to us was that the integration path was going to be very, very long. I would still, we would integrate in a second to any of these systems, you know, when it happens. But then we started actually using the product that we had built. I was like, ooh, this might be better. This is supposed to be a lightweight, and it is in some ways. There's a lot of features that are missing that you would get in an Eventbrite that we are planning on building, say, transferring tickets once you buy them, transferring to other people. You can technically do it, but you have to go out of band in order to do that. So I'm not claiming that feature for feature we've matched necessarily the legacy ticketing system. However, what I would say is that it is surprisingly functional. It is surprisingly nice. And in a lot of ways it's already better because of the way we integrate both Fiat and Bitcoin. It's easy. You know, Apple Wallet has changed this a little bit on the fiat side, although most people are still using credit cards online and things like that. Is that just the process of paying in Bitcoin, there's a lot of friction that gets taken. Taken out of the sale. Both as like someone who's buying something, but for your merchant to actually, like, close a deal to actually get conversions. If you're doing an event and. And you have to put in, you know, what is all the billing information on your credit card, all the stuff, or just show them a QR code and they can, you know, zap over, you know, the 300 bucks for the, for the event right away, the actual friction in the checkout process. Because Bitcoin is put on the same level as fiat transaction methods, it's really nice. And the conversions come through so, you know, going back to your original questions, like, there are some things that are hard, but for the most part it's not rocket science. You know, it's. It's a crud app. Right. We've, we've built those before, but we have great ux, great design and more than anything, we have a great checkout process that helps event organizers convert sales.
- [78:57]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And I think if you're trying to accumulate bitcoin and you have something that is almost at parity with eventbrite, like why leave sats on the table?
- [79:08]
Jack Mallers
Exactly.
- [79:09]
Marty Bent
Complicate your path to sats by going fiat only and having to convert. And obviously for those who are unaware of zap, right, this is not bitcoin only. You'll have an event, you'll use Zap zap, right to sell tickets to that event. And people can pay in bitcoin or Fiat.
- [79:26]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, I want to get ahead of something because I don't know if we've ever talked Zap right together. Maybe we have. Yes, we have. We have me and you, like on the show. Okay. All I have in my head is War mode. That was so much fun.
- [79:41]
Marty Bent
We need to do that again.
- [79:42]
Jack Mallers
We do. Those guys have already slipped up. No, I mean, I want to get ahead of, you know, like, you know, we don't have like a be casher mentality on any of this stuff. Like, obviously I'm building a product and it's a two sided market and I'm going to make both sides of the market a fabulous experience. If you're a payer with bitcoin or if you're receiving bitcoin. But make no mistake, this is built zap, right, exists for people to stack sats for people to accept bitcoin, for people who want bitcoin. And everyone's like, well, who would in the right mind would pay their hard earned sat? It's like, that's not the point. The point is there are people who want bitcoin. It was the motivation when I joined Unchained, right, Was I love the custody model and the feature I had in my head the entire time when I joined Unchained was buy bitcoin directly to cold storage with keys that you control. Can I get the Unchained vault? You know, and instead of buying over here and then sending it over, can I just have it go there directly?
- [80:37]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [80:38]
Jack Mallers
Same thing with Zap, right. Is that I want more bitcoin. And so if I run a business and I'm sending out invoices, realistic, you know, maybe most of my transactions are going to happen in fiat. Fine. I'm going to accumulate the bitcoin that I can by putting bitcoin on the same level as fiat there. And for most of our customers, most of our customers get actually quite a bit of bitcoin. But for, for some of them, minority of them, they'll be on Zap, right, for three months. They'll get zero Bitcoin transactions. Four months, zero Bitcoin transactions, five months starts coming in, and then it goes from 1% to 3% to 5% of their sales. On the event side, I think that there's kind of two things. One is there's a lot of bitcoin centric events organized by people who are motivated to accumulate more bitcoin. I want to help them. Those are my people, right. I want to help them get more bitcoin and getting bitcoin for events outside of Prague. The bitcoin Prague guys, they were so motivated, they basically built their own system that's very, very good. But it's not extensible. It's not usable for other event organizers. Most of those people really do. They would prefer getting bitcoin for the hard work they put on doing the meetup or doing the event or doing whatever they're doing. And then I look at this and I'm, you know, looking at other event organizers out there, and a lot of them would, maybe they're not as motivated as the big conferences that we go to, but they would like some bitcoin. They would like if 5% of their sales came in through bitcoin. These are people doing music festivals and stuff like that. So, yeah, the motivation here is very much, you know, how do we allow these businesses who are motivated to receive bitcoin do that? And I mean, without sounding egotistical or anything, we definitely have built the best way to do that.
- [82:36]
Marty Bent
You definitely have. I mean, here at TFTC, if you go to TFTCMerch IO and you buy one of our hats, we use that break for checkout. Pretty confident. 90% of the sales are in bitcoin and we have fiat as an option. But to that point, I'm a screen share here, free ad for my favorite soap. But I think this is a perfect example. If you have a product that's good enough and you are, oh, that's right. Demanding bitcoin. I love this soap. I've been using it for the last six months and it is now my go to soap. I'm buying a bit every month and you can only pay in bitcoin. And so. And you guys have made it. So I go, I might check out. I go to checkout, put in the information. I can't do it now because I'm not going to put in my information. But you click this and it's like, I can only pay in bitcoin. And this is a product that I have deemed so good that if the only way I can get it is paying in bitcoin, I'm going to pay in bitcoin.
- [83:37]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [83:38]
Marty Bent
Powered by Zap. Right.
- [83:39]
Jack Mallers
The way things work, right, the incentive is there because you can't get the product otherwise. We have, we have a few merchants that are like that. And yeah, I mean, so it's, it's built for those people.
- [83:51]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [83:51]
Jack Mallers
And I don't know if any of you out there are hosting a meetup and you know, doing any of those things or have, have an adventure yourself, I would encourage you to try it out. I'm pretty excited about this one. It's a really, really good product and I think of the world in terms of really good products. And this one is one of the, one of the better ones out there.
- [84:12]
Marty Bent
What is the UX flow like if somebody has an event?
- [84:16]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, Zap.
- [84:17]
Marty Bent
Right account.
- [84:18]
Jack Mallers
We focus more on the ticketing side of it than the event side. So if you have an event and you know, as a date and a location and all those things, it's there, but it's not. This isn't like a marketing website builder for your event. If you are on Squarespace or you're on some other website builder, especially if your conference or something like that is bigger, you probably have a lot of marketing assets out there now. You can use it as a standalone. It has all the information that someone would need. But we really focus on the ticketing aspect of creating those tickets. You have more advanced features like having a stock or a max order per buy. You have all those sort of familiar things that you would get in a more advanced ticketing system. And then you have this landing page which is basically a muted or smaller amount of information about the event itself. And then you have the list of tickets, increment them by them. And really what we're really good at is the checkout side, right. Once you've determined how many tickets you're going to buy, going there and being able to buy and whatever the merchant is allowing, you know, whether that's credit card and lightning or that's on chain and Apple pay, you know, any of those combinations are all there and you get to Determine how, what order they go in. If you add a discount or a premium to a certain type of payment, all of that's still there. Everything that people are sort of used to with our payment links and invoices and things like that. And then on the merchant side you have three ways to check people in. We have a ticket scanner. It's a secret URL you can share that secret URL with. You know, if you have event volunteers or anything like that that are checking people in that will scan the tickets that are delivered via email. Those tickets, by the way, for your end customer, they can, they can be added to your Google Wallet, your Apple Wallet, you know, like any other real ticketing system. So you can scan people in there. We have another check in process that's native to the ACT web app that you can do as well if you want to manually check people in without scanning. And then of course you can print things out where we give you a nice list of everyone who's bought tickets and whatever information you've gathered about them so that you can validate their entry for like an offline backup. So there's three ways to check people in. You can undo it. There are some features that will come down, you know, in the future, things like transferring tickets, things like, you know, allowing, you know, having more sophisticated understanding of allowing re entries. But for right now, for the vast majority of events out there, what you see will get you, will get you there.
- [87:07]
Marty Bent
Yeah, it's beautiful.
- [87:09]
Jack Mallers
It's a well baked mvp, I'll put it that way. It's definitely viable.
- [87:13]
Marty Bent
And I think this part is still so cool to me. Connect the wallet like cold card being part of it. Like the thought that you could have an event like this be a business and the sales, let's say it's a high ticket item, you're selling like a thousand dollar ticket, it's like boom. You can send it right to Coldcard and have that in cold storage in your business wallet.
- [87:38]
Jack Mallers
It is one of the things that event organizers struggle with a lot is that when you know, with any event, most of your ticket sales happen the closer you get to the actual event, right. But you have to put up a lot of capital beforehand to actually build out the venue, the lodging, all the things that you need to spend money on. And so when you're also sort of subject to a payment processor that holds your funds for 30, 60, 90 days before they pay you out, whatever their policy is or can put a hold on that fund. You've heard this before, hold on the Funds because of some. You got tripped up in some incorrect fraud, automatic mechanism in their system and your funds are held up. Is that especially for bitcoin events is like you might have obligations denominated in bitcoin. So you're getting this stuff right away that you can then use towards the event. Pay your people, pay your suppliers, pay your hard costs and all that. Is that getting. Getting the money directly to you is. Is a huge advantage.
- [88:49]
Marty Bent
Yeah, it really is. And I can attest to that as a business owner accepting both bitcoin and fiat.
- [88:57]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [88:58]
Marty Bent
Sharing here.
- [89:01]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, it's fun stuff.
- [89:02]
Marty Bent
Yeah. I thought it was important to bring up the block because just help people visualize it. For sure. Anybody watching on YouTube and if you've.
- [89:10]
Jack Mallers
Ever done it feels very familiar. That's one of the things I wanted to make sure is that like, if you're used to, if you run an event before, you're going to see most of what you need right there, right now. And of course you know it's going to get better over time. We just launched it, I believe on Monday. So while it's a young product, it is pretty fully baked.
- [89:31]
Marty Bent
I mean just having Apple Wallet functionality alone, I think that is what people. I mean that is what I've come to see as a must have for events. Physically getting tickets these days is. Or even like having to go to the email and find the QR code. Yeah, that's like. So this is the old way of doing it, like just being like added to the wallet. Yeah. I took our oldest to the Phillies game this summer and it was just like, boom. Went to Ticketmaster, had the wallets on my tickets, on my phone.
- [90:05]
Jack Mallers
Sure.
- [90:05]
Marty Bent
It was very easy. And tickets. Now it's like nfc. You don't even have to do the QR code. It's just like boop, boop.
- [90:11]
Jack Mallers
Yeah. Right now we're still doing QRs even on the Apple Wallet side of things. Funny enough is like I go to a lot of sporting events and stuff like that. The QR is actually faster for checking in, which is a nice thing. You've done it before. You put your phone up and the guy's like moving it around and trying to get the NFC thing to work. NFC is one of those things we do want to still support. But in our test of lining up people at Pleb Lab and scanning them in, is that the QR reader, even on the Apple Wallet, much faster actually for getting people in.
- [90:42]
Marty Bent
That's interesting. Yeah.
- [90:45]
Jack Mallers
Or sorry, it's not necessarily as much faster. It works the first time more often.
- [90:51]
Marty Bent
Yeah, well, shifting gears a little bit, but really diving into the process of building this product is something I miss dearly about being in Bitcoin Park Austin is being around you and others in the space, particularly as you implement AI into your production flows.
- [91:10]
Jack Mallers
Sure, that's fun.
- [91:12]
Marty Bent
Let's talk about that because I know you guys have really been leaning into that zap, right?
- [91:16]
Jack Mallers
Yes. Eventually I'll become a programmer because of it. I'm not quite there yet. I've done a little programming in my past, but I am decidedly not a programmer. No, I mean, there are definitely people that have leaned into this more than we have. However, I will say that we're pretty motivated. We're a small team. We have two full time, one part time developers. You know, we're a team of, you know, five, six people. And so on the AI side of things, it definitely helps like, like what I've seen from, you know, people using cod, Claude code and cursor and these models is that like even the difference in the last six months is, is shocking. We've even had, you know, very close to an entire, you know, a small, well defined, simple bug that goes into our ticketing system that gets picked up, you know, by an AI agent that attempts to fix it and puts up a PR that needs to be reviewed. We've had that process go through on very, very small things without human intervention, which is pretty wild. Yeah. And I know there's people doing more sophisticated stuff out there, but that's a really exciting thing to see that like someone can put in a bug into a ticketing system, that an AI agent can pick it up, that it can discern what needs to be done to fix that bug. It can make a suggestion and create the code and put it up for review by a human. And that at least once we've had that happen to where we were like, all right, put it live. That's right.
- [92:53]
Marty Bent
Yeah. What was the bug?
- [92:55]
Jack Mallers
I can't remember. I don't want to call it trivial, but it was a very easy bug to fix.
- [93:01]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [93:02]
Jack Mallers
I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was small in nature, it wasn't super complicated and we were all surprised and then, but, but it's easy to extrapolate is what I'm trying to say is like that might have been a very trivial, small thing. But you know, I, you know, we're both friends with, you know, Amjad at Replit and we're seeing, you know, the end to end processes that they're Working towards. Right. Is it like, you know, he just came out with his whole, you know, yeah, you can get AI to write this code, but there's hundreds of hours that go into maintaining it and reviewing it and qaing it and doing all these things and rewriting it and refactoring and doing all this stuff. That's for building an entire app. But in terms of supercharging an individual's productivity, I've seen it be. It is hard. I don't want to use the wrong word. It's shocking. It is shocking. Walking into that world even. Even on the product management side, writing specs and like coming up with the stuff, doing really research and stuff like that. Everything. The whole production line of software development. It is, it's impactful everywhere.
- [94:25]
Marty Bent
That's what I was going to ask. If you had to attempt to quantify, like from a manpower perspective, how many more people do you think you'd need to hire to get the same results by if you were to do this without AI?
- [94:46]
Jack Mallers
I'm going to say this and then I'm going to double check with Tom and Nate and Nick who are doing all the programming on our side to see if I lied to the audience and I'll tweet if I lied or not. I would say they would say that is as if we have somewhere between like two to four junior developers working with us on top of what they do. Because most of these people are all like, we don't have any junior developers. These are very senior programmers that work at ZAP right now. And my guess is they would say it's somewhere around two to four junior developers working with us the way we're utilizing AI right now, which is not even its full extent. I would also say that, you know, one of those junior developers is John McGill, like our CEO. Like he's getting. He's getting a lot of PRs in these days. Yeah. And I'm going to be following suit here. Like, John's more capable programmer than I am as a designer. But I'm getting a little bit jealous now. So, like even someone like John is in there with some of the easier tasks and can use cursor cloud code to get them there all the way.
- [95:53]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And if we're trying to quantify that monetary. Let's just say junior developer makes 150 on consumer.
- [96:01]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [96:04]
Marty Bent
Saving between 300 and 600 grand a year.
- [96:07]
Jack Mallers
And more than anything for a company like ours, it's not even saving money. We're just getting to do stuff we wouldn't be able to do otherwise because we didn't have the money to spend that on that anyway, or we didn't want to spend our money that way.
- [96:16]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [96:17]
Jack Mallers
And so all of a sudden, our output. I mean, Zaprite is not a tiny project. It's not a huge project, but it's not a tiny project. And what we've been able to accomplish with a very small team is, honestly, it's just not really possible. Ten years ago, you don't build an application to Zaprite's stature with four or five people. Just not a thing.
- [96:44]
Marty Bent
It's so crazy.
- [96:46]
Jack Mallers
That's shocking. It fits my personality so, so much. It's like every time a company gets big, I want to go start another one, you know, and knowing that maybe I've stumbled into a world where the company doesn't have to get big for the product to get big, you know, that would be very fun for me.
- [97:03]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [97:05]
Jack Mallers
And then we'll see if I just have commitment issues.
- [97:09]
Marty Bent
Well, I mean, it is. I think it's. You're a fascinating individual because you've seen both ends of the spectrum being very high up at Stack Overflow for many years.
- [97:19]
Jack Mallers
Talk about AI.
- [97:22]
Marty Bent
Are you Ethereum willing to tell your Stack Overflow AI story?
- [97:27]
Jack Mallers
Yeah. I'll say a little bit about it, is that one is I worked at Stack Overflow for eight years. All that time I was into Bitcoin, but I was very excited about Stack Overflow. It was an incredibly rewarding business and product to work on and. And one of those things where it's like I could even rationalize how I was helping Bitcoin at the time. The Bitcoin Stack Exchange, Peter Woola and Jimmy Song and Merch and all these guys still to this day, there's a huge repository of bitcoin stuff. I helped start the Bitcoin Stack Exchange from the inside. That was very fun. And then, of course, Stack Overflow itself and the aid it was to programmers. It's fun watching. I like watching all these AI companies getting so psyched on their work, especially when it comes to what they're doing in the programming world, because I lived that. Like, I remember when Stack Overflow would go down and what Twitter would look like, it's like, well, can't do my job today. It's like, it was an impactful place to work. It was very fun and the product was very good until the end. And. But there was this moment, like, I don't know, I want to say 2018, 2019, where chatbots you'd hear a lot about chatbots, and it's the same thing we're talking about now. It's just the LLMs, but they just weren't very good yet. They're very clunky. But it was all the buzz in Silicon Valley. And while Stack Overflow wasn't a Silicon Valley company, we were very attached to that culture, even though we were in New York. And of course, all of our clients and everything were in Silicon Valley for the most part. And so chatbots were kind of the rage.
- [99:09]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [99:10]
Jack Mallers
And I remember we were working on an integration with Microsoft on Visual Studio, where you could do some of the things you can do now, which are like, you could highlight code and then it would come up with this chatbot, basically inside Visual Studio and say, here's why. You're having this bug based off of Stack Overflow data using a neural network that no one knew how it worked or anything like that. That was really, really fun. And the only problem with that, it was unbelievable product, except it just didn't work. The UX was great and all these things were really cool. It's just. You just got wrong answers. And I remember when Joel left and everything, and we were getting new management and some stuff like that, it was like, I couldn't help but just tell all the new guys that came in after Joel, or really just the new CEO. It wasn't like a whole management change. It was really just. CE was just like, yeah, but imagine if it did work. Wouldn't this be the greatest product? He was like, no, but it doesn't. So we're going to focus on this other stuff. I was like, but it might, you know. And of course, eventually it did work and. And Stack's not really a part of it, unfortunately. I mean, I know they're trying, and I don't want to be too gloomy on it, but I think maybe Stacks had its day in the sun and.
- [100:39]
Marty Bent
Yeah, and I would imagine that a lot of these coding LLMs specifically probably trained off of a lot of the information on Stack Overflow.
- [100:47]
Jack Mallers
Of course they did.
- [100:48]
Guest or Producer
Right?
- [100:49]
Jack Mallers
Well, that was the other thing, is it's all Creative Commons. That was the case the whole time. We had tons of knockoff Stack Overflows throughout the years, especially in China and Russia in particular, that were just because all of the data was Creative Commons. And that was very important to Joel when he started out and, like, was a very noble thing to do. And it was in direct response to, you know, Stack Overflow had a boogeyman that they were trying to unseat, which was experts exchange, where you had to like go pay for answers and all this stuff. But it was, you know, one of the reasons for its success was that it was Creative Commons, so people could go in there and, you know, create unimaginable value for the world of programmers.
- [101:34]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [101:35]
Jack Mallers
The value, I mean, like the way people would talk about stack overflow in 2017, 2018, 2019, it was so crucial to the productivity of the programming workforce. It was indispensable.
- [101:48]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [101:49]
Jack Mallers
In the same way that cursor and cloud code and all these things are becoming indispensable now. I mean, that was it.
- [101:55]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [101:56]
Jack Mallers
And a lot of that value though was created because it was Creative Commons. Like people wouldn't have contributed as much if they knew that we were just going to monetize their answers and keep it in this walled garden. It was about as close as we could get as a for profit business of being like kind of open source was open, sourcing all the question answer pairs and the voting and all that type of stuff. And some people, the promise was always if we do a bad job, you can take the data and start up your own thing with all that. Like, it's your data, it's not ours. And you know, it's both part of its success and part of its demise at the end of the day because I don't think anyone broke any laws or any user agreements or anything training off of that. Now I do know that they have some form and I'm not privy to what Stack Overflow has been doing or their strategy or anything for the past five years, but I do know they have some agreements with Google OpenAI. I think they're getting paid something, but I don't think it's, I don't think it is correlating with the value that Stack gave those very well.
- [103:06]
Marty Bent
Yeah, that's fascinating. Time. Stack just was a very necessary product as you said, increase the productivity of the software engineer workforce massively. And it's like this connective product company to the AI world.
- [103:32]
Jack Mallers
Yeah. But going back to Bitcoin, Bitcoin saved me from becoming a has been, which is like, it would have been very easy. I remember, I mean part of it's just being in your 20s, but I remember like building in, you know, the, you know, early 2000s, you know, when, when stacks coming alive in 2008. It's like I would look with contempt on the people like, yeah, but I built geocities. I'm like, who cares? You know, geocities was a huge deal and now I'm. That has been. Except that I get to keep on building really amazing stuff with bitcoin. So I don't define my. It wasn't my last chapter, so that's good.
- [104:15]
Marty Bent
And I know we're running long here. We've had a very robust meandering conversation about many different topics. But one thing just to really lean into the bitcoin side of things. What you're building at Zap, right? Sure. One question that we'll be asking portfolio companies at 1031 at a retreat this year, which I'm fine to open source on the podcast right now, but what doesn't exist in the industry right now that Zap, right, probably won't build, but you think should be built that could help you guys.
- [104:53]
Jack Mallers
Oh, man. Just on the software side, not on the policy side. Because I would change a lot of policy things as well. Geez. I mean, it's hard to narrow down only because anything that money touches that bitcoin is not predominantly featured in right now, I think that bitcoin will be there. So on the Zap right side, there's all these integrations I want to do. I don't want to rebuild Patreon. I just want you to be able to use Patreon and accept Bitcoin. I don't want to rebuild YouTube, I just want you to be able to be paid in bitcoin if you're already a content creator over there.
- [105:34]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [105:34]
Jack Mallers
And so we chose to build business invoicing in a very robust way or the ticketing event tickets in a really robust way. But we're not going to build YouTube and we're not going to build Patreon and we're not going to build all these places where people that run businesses. So there's kind of two things. There's one is you can do what Zapright's doing and try to integrate with them or just pick your point, or you can go build YouTube. You can't do that in a bitcoin centric way. Podcasting is a little bit interesting because there's been a lot of podcasting tools, the, you know, Adam Curry and stuff like that, that have been trying to make sure that content creators there can can, you know, accept bitcoin. But then there's all like the ancillary stuff. And I know that there are some things that are working on this. So I'm not trying to badmouth any startups that are out there trying to solve these problems. But a lot of the Financial tools around accounting.
- [106:38]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [106:40]
Jack Mallers
It's not there yet.
- [106:41]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [106:41]
Jack Mallers
Like, it's still a little bit of a struggle. There are good products out there. I would say we're still waiting for those products to become great or for the existing infrastructure around accounting to become great.
- [106:56]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [106:58]
Jack Mallers
There's, you know, the treasury management, like the Castle guys are working on it. You know, there's all sorts of stuff like that. There's different ways, like, like what the anchor watch guys are doing. You know, I feel like there's a lot of custody's in a lot better shape than it used to be. There's endless ways to play with that problem.
- [107:16]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [107:17]
Jack Mallers
That are suitable to very specific industries, types of businesses, things like that. I would say that. Gosh, what else have I been thinking about recently? I think that on the, you know, other side is like I worry about with AI bitcoin miners. I don't worry. Sorry, worry is the wrong word. Bitcoin miners are going to be fine. They're vultures. They know how to survive, but they have a lot more competition for power now. The AI stuff is power hungry. And so I would like to see bitcoin companies that are also power producers actually behind the meter owning power production. So there's a lot of products out there and things out there I'd like to see, but I know from our side of things that we're going to try to integrate until it's impossible to do so, and then we'll build it ourselves.
- [108:25]
Marty Bent
Yeah, and that's what I was going to say on the electricity side before I get to the electricity side, just on that point. Reason we're bringing this up at 10:31 and just want to see if there's ways that companies in the portfolio can collaborate. And number two, just also to highlight the massive opportunity that exists out there. Still. So much to build.
- [108:48]
Jack Mallers
There's so much to build. And I'll throw it out there. We have a talent problem. We need more talent coming into bitcoin. We just need it. And domain expertise is overrated. As long as you have a positive view of bitcoin, your skill set, whether you're a software developer or salesperson or marketer, it's like we really do need those people working at bitcoin companies.
- [109:12]
Marty Bent
Yeah. And just to tie a knot in the bow of your bitcoin mining point, I think. Here we go. This chart highlights like this. The miners are going to get if they're consuming electricity at these rates, not going to be profitable. It's up to 19 cents per kilowatt hour on average in US cities.
- [109:35]
Jack Mallers
You're kidding. Oh, is that, is that, is that retail pricing? It's not industrial average price.
- [109:40]
Marty Bent
Electricity per kilowatt hour in US City average. Okay, but this is, this is not a good chart for the United States. And not only.
- [109:51]
Jack Mallers
I mean, unless Bitcoin's a million dollars with the current hash rate, then it's fine.
- [109:55]
Marty Bent
Yeah, then it's fine. But I think this is. This is a bigger problem for the US Generally. Like, electricity is the raw input of.
- [110:01]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, we got to build it. Everything. We got to build nat. Gas plants, we got to. We got to reinstitute our coal plants. We got to. I mean, nuclear. I don't even like talking about nuclear, just so state captured. Build natural gas plants, build coal plants, build solar plants. I don't care. Build solar plants. They're great.
- [110:21]
Marty Bent
No, but a lot of our conversations have been about CPI and how it's bunk. And it's funny because you get this info from the Federal Reserve and the source is the BLS, which creates the CPI, and you just look at this cost per kilowatt hour in cities and it's up 35, 40% in five years. That doesn't seem like what's actually being reported. We need more generation. And I wrote about this chart last week as I had a feeling, an intuition, a knowledge that electricity prices were going up based off of my monthly payment. But I hadn't taken the time to look at this chart. And it's jarring. This.
- [111:00]
Jack Mallers
That's. I mean, this jump that is.
- [111:03]
Marty Bent
And then this one here, it looks like we're breaking away again.
- [111:07]
Jack Mallers
It's going straight up. That's the wrong type of up and to the right. Well, I mean. Well, we also have a new entrant into the space that is not price sensitive. No, but they also. I mean, you know so much more about this than I do.
- [111:22]
Marty Bent
They're burning so much. Like, I wonder, like they're.
- [111:25]
Jack Mallers
At some point they will become that.
- [111:27]
Marty Bent
Yeah, but it is crazy because as we discussed here, like, the productivity of AI is undeniable.
- [111:33]
Jack Mallers
Undeniable.
- [111:35]
Marty Bent
You've seen the videos we've generated. It's like we have a team of three.
- [111:38]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [111:38]
Marty Bent
And we're generating videos that probably would have cost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and a week for $200 of tokens. Sure, it's insane, but with that being said, there's a ton of this sector. The market's being flooded with money. Whether or not these companies are actually profitable. And Burning this much cash is sustainable, I think is yet to be determined.
- [112:04]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, I mean, I know that the programming side of it is sustainable because if you're paying a mid level programmer $200,000 a year and you can profitably sell them an AI agent for 300 bucks a month, it's like that's a no brainer. And some of the other applications for it, I don't know if that'll be profitable, but certainly for the programming world it's going to be profitable. And I'll also say one of the fun things is I know everyone knows you as Uncle Marty the podcaster, but you're also quite the product guy. We got to do this a lot together. And even the stuff we played with really early on, I remember The Vercel tool VO or V0 that now is just incredible. Just getting over the one hump of you can't iterate on a previously done image or CSS file. You had to start over from scratch. And now that you can actually go from something and not just say like, no, try it again, be better here. It's just like, no, take this bit of it. The building UIs and building mobile flows and stuff. Like it's crazy. I mean, we were playing with that like nine months ago and I was like, it's almost useful and now it's great. And you're able to employ it not just in your videos, but you have to set up web stores and you have to do all this other stuff. I'm sure you're using it there too.
- [113:34]
Marty Bent
Yeah, we are.
- [113:35]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [113:36]
Marty Bent
And that was like, I remember, I vividly remember you pulling me into the room in the park and it was just for wireframing, but it was crazy even then. Hell, you were.
- [113:44]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, that Versailles, incredible. And then they had some open source models that we played with. I'm very bullish on the open source side right now as well. I watch, I have some friends and I've seen Tony and the Maple AI guys exclusively focus on the open source models in their private AI chats, but also people running them locally. That's looking like something that we didn't get with the first wave of the Internet.
- [114:16]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [114:16]
Jack Mallers
You never got private search. It didn't really make sense.
- [114:20]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [114:21]
Jack Mallers
Is that there is a side of the AI side that is actually exciting and sort of antithetical to the way early Internet companies grew by basically monetizing spying on you.
- [114:38]
Guest or Producer
Right.
- [114:39]
Jack Mallers
And that while a lot of these AI companies are going to spy on you, no doubt is that you actually have an Like a viable alternative here, which is very exciting.
- [114:51]
Marty Bent
Yeah. I'm happy we're ending on this very gloomy first half of the conversation, but there are things to be optimistic about. We have tools to make the world a better place, to make better products, to do things. Never doom, never doom, never doom. Things may be dark.
- [115:10]
Jack Mallers
Go to church. Have kids.
- [115:12]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [115:13]
Jack Mallers
Yeah.
- [115:14]
Marty Bent
Live the way Charlie would have wanted you to.
- [115:16]
Jack Mallers
There you go. Right there.
- [115:17]
Marty Bent
Yeah. London. Here. You enjoy your day.
- [115:19]
Jack Mallers
Yeah, you too, man.
- [115:21]
Marty Bent
Go to zapright.com check out the ticketing app. If you're a bitcoin or a business owner and you're not using Zapright for invoicing, do it. I've been using it for three years now, and it's only gotten better. Our revenue in bitcoin is going up consistently as. It's just. I think it's just. I think it's just the thing in marketing. How many touch points until you get a conversion for us? How many Zap earn invoices with a paying bitcoin option do we have to get before people just say, I'll pay in bitcoin? We've seen that go up significantly.
- [115:55]
Jack Mallers
I love hearing that. It just makes me so happy.
- [115:57]
Marty Bent
Yeah. But thank you for building it.
- [115:59]
Jack Mallers
You're welcome.
- [116:01]
Marty Bent
All right. Peace of love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. And you can go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month gets you every episode a day early. Ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.