Everybody, thanks for joining.
I'm just waiting for our guests.
Just waiting for our guests.
I hope this works.
see.
Hello.
Okay, great. everyone can hear.
I hear it fit well.
Oh.
So I think it's working.
Hello, everyone.
Mike, can you say something again so that...
okay yeah there we go.
is the signal everyone who comes to tab comp supports Bitcoin and if you weren't there
you you don't care about Bitcoin.
Was Podcom there we don't we don't know if they were or do we?
If they're anonymous, just assumed they were there.
can't, that's like when in 30 Rock, when Jack Donaghy says,
uh, Kenneth says when he votes, he just writes in Jesus Christ.
then Jack Donaghy says, that's Republican.
We count those.
We're just waiting for Rod Palmer to take the stage.
I see people are coming up.
Okay. So you guys are very funny,
But I can't figure out what the point of it all is.
So I've been listening to the podcast
and I've been following you guys on Twitter.
And one example was like,
didn't you make this AI like thing
with like Michael Saylor in tuxedos?
And then there was the midget wrestling.
I went to the midget wrestling event in Las Vegas,
but I thought there was supposed to be a...
Fundraiser for Samurai and no one ever asked me for money. I brought rich friends and no one asked me for money, and then they had to plead guilty.
And I was just confused the whole time. But that is a metaphor for how I feel when I listen to the podcast, where I think it's really funny.
I don't know what the point is.
the point that you really get Matthew Cratter because I'm in, that's the point.
know, if that's all it is.
The point is to report the news.
We're credentialed We are just reporting the news and discussing
the latest events in the Bitcoin community.
people often tell us that they think, or you're not funny,
like you said, they tell us that we're funny.
point is not to be funny.
The point is to report the news.
And we have just found that a lot of people, it's just a bifuritated
environment where some people think the news is hilarious and some people it makes them
grumpy.
that is kind of the phenomenon.
are like, plebslop is a good example.
It's kind of the point of the space.
We are reporting on the plebslop.
Plebslop is ubiquitous.
Plebslop is everywhere.
Plebslop is the lifeblood, it is the pulse of this entire ecosystem.
Some people think that's funny.
Some people, makes them giggle.
And some people, it makes them very grumpy.
It makes them crash out.
It makes
them study extra hard at Crattergarden.
But, you know, we're just reporting the news.
And yeah, I definitely share your disdain for like when you see,
you just see like, I remember this happened like years ago, but it was just like you
got like Michael
Sale has this huge Twitter account and then it's just like Bitcoin is hope and like the
AI generated image and you're just like and then like that's like the whole account
is just that and you just think like why does it have any followers at all like he
doesn't He didn't say anything.
And it's just baffling.
And then he did the,
and he's totally phoned it in in Las Vegas
and he just did like a 21 AI art slides or whatever.
And they're just like, it's simple.
I mean, but on the other hand, you don't know.
I mean, Milton Friedman used to say
there are idea manufacturers and then idea distributors.
And so there's gotta be like a,
there's like this food chain of people.
There's like a Neil deGrasse Tyson who's like,
He's not like doing the original research, but he's moving it from zone C to zone D,
and then slowly it makes it into the masses.
And so I don't know, maybe it's just, maybe I'm being grumpy, I don't know.
But I am disappointed by the whole media landscape is predictable and boring.
And when I follow you guys on Twitter, you have the only Twitter account that I cannot predict what will happen next.
Everyone else, even you, Mike, I know what the whole next year's tweets are going to be.
But...
But with this Bitcoin bugle thing, have no idea where it's going to I don't know how
much of that is just because it's completely random, but it is definitely interesting.
let's it's
entropy. we listened to 48.
We talk about this.
Anybody who knows who we are, listen to 40 hours of Bitcoin podcasts per week.
in what's important in that is not to focus all on macro or not the focus
all on octet or any specific subject.
It's to get the entropy.
I think the randomness that you're thinking about comes from the entropy of
the
Yes, so we have a hand up, please.
I think it's very apparent that people aren't smoking enough cigarettes, and I think that's
what you're running into on a regular basis of, you know, the plebslop industrial complex,
it really started.
to
on. And started to on.
And
the history of PLEPSLOP, the chapter two of my book, The PLEPSLOP Standard.
And it's,
I think what we've done a good job is we have done a good job of classifying and
explaining something that everybody sees and feels, but they haven't been able to
put a finger on what it is. But I think that the confusion that you're seeing
right now is very few people are doing the very basic things that they should
be doing.
Like there's a general disrespect for credentials.
There's generally a disrespect for anything thoughtful
or just generally thought out in general.
And I think where the bugle shines,
Well, as we put time into things that we do, we have low time preference and we just, you know, we observe that's part of the 40 hours per week is lots of observation.
the general. Observe and report.
Observe and report.
It's kind of the mine.
most ignorance. mean, you guys are reminding me a of Bitcoin Uncensored, where they
just slowly and carefully built their own vocabulary
over each episode.
And they just had like a little inside joke for like every word.
And that, I kinda see you guys as doing that.
And that is the creation of a new credentialed
You know, it's a good forming of a new discipline in science.
It's like, you know, how like they had physics and they had particle physics, large body physics, quantum physics, you know, and then they have biology and then they had like biochem, you know, so this is like a new branch on the tree of knowledge.
And it definitely should be commented on because like Bitcoin is the super important project and yet the like the way that information gets around is unbelievably like now it's just lowest common denominator slop as you put it just that's what people want like people want I saw everyone at Las Vegas after Ross Ulbricht spoke
I know after Saylor spoke, Ross Ulbrich was going to be on last,
and then all these people were just walking out.
They don't want to hear from Ross, who actually might know something,
but they want to hear from Saylor and his AI slides.
And then, where are they going?
They've got somewhere to be?
Where are all these people going?
Are they going to hit the food court or something?
It's baffling, but...
I actually, I have some questions.
so you guys have been posting PlevSlot memes for...
Oh, it's been at least a month, right?
And it seems like over the past three or four days,
I'm going talk
that asked
you, Michael, was it that inspired you
to finally ask that question?
you already seen Pled Slop in the month before?
I like to think that I'm the courageous one to ask the questions that everyone's too
afraid to ask.
Ironically, I've probably got the most comments and engagement on that tweet that I've had probably since I've had a Twitter account, which is kind of weird.
Maybe, maybe not. Like, if you go like years, years back, I actually had a previous Twitter account that I deleted.
Maybe there's some chains there.
But I think for this account, this is probably the highest.
I've gotten, which is of funny.
Anyways, yeah, I'm just here asking the questions that no one's going to ask and
hopefully we all learn from it.
but PlipSlop is like this, AI, it's like AI slop.
It's like low, it's like put a lot of, you don't put a lot of effort into your message
and you wanna hit like a lot of people and you don't care if they're just, if you hit
like 10,000 idiots.
But that's not, I don't think that's not really what Plebslop is, cause I think memes,
low effort memes that conveyed a strong message, I think were not
not necessarily considered plebslopped in the past, you know what mean?
So I think it's a unique, special kind of low IQ, purposely.
I think you can have a low effort, strong message in it not be plebslopped,
but it's, I don't know.
Yeah, you target the low, think is my understanding.
It's like you're targeting the, you kind of at the expense of the, at the expense of
someone who's actually knows something, you say,
it's not true, but we'll just say it.
It's also an indicator of our society.
I've,
think there's like this new conspiracy confirmed theory where it's like TV shows
purposely have to make the plot and the concepts of the show not
too complicated because the demographics of said TV show, it's assumed that your
viewers are gonna be on their phones.
So you can't make the TV show too complicated because we understand our demographic is
going to be on their phones the whole time.
So it's just.
Yeah, that's not.
That's different though, think, right?
think overall... memes can't too complicated now.
Let's let our guests get a word in, if they want.
Gentlemen, Mr. Bugle, I just see people on mute
and I think they want to say something.
So you guys are arguing about the definition of plop-slop?
I suppose.
I think it's different from...
The fact that people don't have as much, like there's more media now, so you can't do something that's slow.
Like I
posted about some songs, like some songs have like a slow opening
actually, but people wouldn't have the patience for that if you created a song like that now, like In The Air Tonight, or
even like Beethoven's Ninth, like would people even make it to like the first, because the
the song doesn't really start until like 50 seconds in.
But that was my point about talking about the TV shows having to be dumbed because
people are going to lose interest if it's, you know,
it's the same thing I was trying to convey.
But I think that's different, it's like you just need a good hook, because people are
busy and they've got a lot of options.
So that's different from plebslop, I think.
Plebslop is when you intentionally, like you're serving the devil, and you're saying, I want
to dumb everyone down.
Well, Richard is riding the plebslop standard, which is like a pretty in-depth,
study analysis. But when Michael Tidwell asked a question, my response was plebslap is a vector
because it's kind of unique to your experience and Mike's explanation I think is kind of getting
to it. I came up with the term and it was, I was thinking about the
The approach to this debate is no debate, and some of these are complex problems that go much further than any code, right?
It's like, how do you keep spam, quote-unquote, out of Bitcoin?
And the answers from the not side, you know, the filters to this slot fork, Matthew Cratter's videos, it was all this simplistic, dumbed down,
fiction type approach to solving a complex problem.
they were throwing plebslap at the problem and you can't solve a problem that is
complex in nature and nuanced in nature with plebslap
solutions. in this fork becomes this plan activated slop fork.
that kind of evolves from the fact that we have this complex solution, like all these
cord ends, no, like they claim they don't want
They don't like spam, but they've been trying to solve the problem for years and trying
to come up with a way to do it, to mitigate spam without making too many trade-offs.
And then, you know, like Leroy Jenkins comes in and just goes, you know, I'm going in and
just throws plebslop, an ocean of plebslop at the problem.
And that's kind of where the term came in my mind.
That's interesting. So to be clear, you guys are just the first people who posted about plebslop, right? But much like Bitcoin, plebslop is the meme, is decentralized, right? So there's lots of people posting it now. There's lots of people redefining it and recontextualizing it.
I shared a post in the nest of a Twitter user named Raybon, and he made a meme book cover of the book The Big Print by Lawrence Levin.
leopard uh like the big slop or something like that and um Lawrence leopard himself
reposted it and he he took a lot of offense to it and there was tons of people in his
comments also like oh
you guys aren't funny.
this is, this is, this, there's some things you shouldn't joke about.
so my question to you guys, you know, as the progenitors of Pledslop, you know, is it
meant to be pejorative in your eyes?
Well, it's... Go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think so. I think...
You know, there's a lot of people that are proud to be plebs.
And that's fine. I mean, that's a sign of humility, you know.
What does it mean to be a pleb? Pleb means that you're kind of dumb.
You know, and as we all know, there's a very large amount of dumb people in our society.
It's the majority of people are fairly dumb, whether it's a lack of intelligence or
it's just like a lack of awareness or lack of willingness to
become educated
And I a
I think a I thing.
You know, in a lot of circumstances, it's fairly harmless.
But there is a point where plebslop becomes weaponized.
And so, the point of defining it
is not to make the plebs feel bad about themselves
or not to, you know, make the slop dealers
feel bad about themselves, but it's just to
clearly showcase what is happening right now because I think a lot of people are
unfortunately doing is they're they're operating with understand without
understanding what the playbook that is being used is and you know my goal in
this is just to you know to clearly show the you know like when when Matt O'Dell
tweets bitcoins going up
Or the price is going to go much higher, whatever his plebslop tweet is from the 1031 account.
That really has no negative effect on anything.
You know what I mean?
Like that's a perfect example of harmless, you know, good-natured plebslop.
But when...
You know, somebody says, like when Luke Dash Jr.
says that Shinobi has a girlfriend, or a mechanic says that Bitcoin
developers can't have sex, like that, that's a form of weaponized plebslop
that, that does have negative impacts because it activates the pleb to become
angry.
and to direct their anger at others.
And I just want people to be a bit more aware of what is happening.
I want the plebs to just be a little bit more aware of how they're being used as cannon fodder.
I think also, you know, kind of defining clearly what a pleb is.
you know, and some of the dynamics at play here, you know, because why has the term pleb been
championed and celebrated in this ecosystem? It's been championed and celebrated because,
you know, people have trinkets to sell to the plebs. And so when you create a
You know, clear marketing base and an activated marketing base, you know, and you don't have a very compelling product, but you want it to be differentiated from services like Coinbase or, you know, other ones, you don't really have anything to offer other than, you know, maybe some superficial virtue signals, having, you know, you know, the celebration of your potential
market audience to sell trinkets to
is incredibly useful from a marketing standpoint
because you can get the plebs all excited about your mediocre product,
you can get them buying, it's just free, it's free marketing
and you know one thing that the plebs love
is they love to feel like they're doing something without actually doing anything
and you know
The slop, you know, really in the weaponized slop allows for that, you know, the, the plebs have the opportunity to, you know, actually become like, I like to use the term pioneer, but it's just, it might not be the best term, but I think it's a, it's a useful term in this context, because
In many ways, individuals that have been interacting with this technology and
actually using their brains and contributing in a meaningful way are
kind of like the old pioneers that settled the West and set the tone for
the future of the Western United States and really built and developed these
wild areas.
you know, for future generations, set the tone.
And there are many pioneers and they're feeling isolated.
They're feeling drowned out in a sea of plebs slob.
So I think defining it is helpful.
And also, you know, it acts as, you know, when you label something as plebs
slop, it's just, it's context.
order to be able to promote other things that are a little bit more thought out
than usual, I think.
Thanks for sharing that.
And so
it seems that you're not necessarily trying to campaign in any one
direction. For example, some people on Twitter already have suggested that Plubslop
is a PSYOP or
or coordinated effort. And from what you're expressing, it sounds like more of a organic kind of idea about some of your own frustrations and aspirations after having been a part of Bitcoin for however long.
Absolutely. wanted, go ahead.
Yeah, I was just gonna say, the importance here, before I forget, Paul mentioned
the lexicon that we're building and that is all documented at buglevorce.com
and there's a
Buglevorce Twitter account as well.
It's like a catalog of all the music, the memes, all the words, all the terms, Maxi
Madness to any Bitcoins, Payto per Bitcoin, etc.
Kaleb's lot, one of the recent song, it's like
pins at the top of my profile right now, the chorus is the plebslop in me is
the plebslop in you.
I think everybody's got a different view, a different perspective about plebslop.
But what I think is most important about it, least right
Right now is the self-awareness.
To me, the biggest thing lacking in the Bitcoin ecosystem broadly is self-awareness.
Everybody takes themselves so seriously.
They think that they are saving the world.
And in some sense, Bitcoin is saving the world.
It is fixing things.
It has the potential to fix a lot of things.
But...
Lawrence Lepard is a good example. He saw his book, that was probably like the
fourth or fifth different book, that famous Bitcoin book that was repurposed
and memed for plebslop in the name, and he didn't see that. He saw, he thought
somebody was calling his book slop and he freaked out. And it's just this
lack of self-awareness, this lack of ability to joke around and to have fun.
HGX is in.
And the audience right now, and him and Raybon and a few others, they got the meme hashtag,
we know.
And to me, it means, you know, Bitcoin is a very serious innovation.
It's a great technology.
It has the potential to free many people.
We know.
If you're on Bitcoin Twitter every day, like us, we know Bitcoin is important.
but it's the you still have to have fun.
still have to have a critique.
You still have that sense of humor and Plebslaff has just had some fucking self
-awareness.
Yeah, definitely seems to be lot of self -seriousness.
an ego of learning.
I agree, I like that. I think it's also like if people can't have a sense of humor, it's like they must be really insecure and they must really think Bitcoin is very fragile, actually.
And they must think like, it's just a big opinion. And if, you know, it's like Tinkerbell. And if we all believe in it, it will work. But if there's any doubt, it will all just collapse and fall apart.
And so I think they actually have a very
Poor understanding of Bitcoin, and they don't realize that they believe that it's actually very fragile and don't even believe it about themselves, so that's the lack of self-awareness, but that's what they think, they just don't realize it, they think that.
And another aspect to it.
is plebslop is like this condensed, it's all that, plebslop is so much information, all these books we've read, the 40 hours of Bitcoin podcast we've been listening to for years, the white paper we read, all of the different game theory scenarios we played out in the group chats, it coalesces into what you can fit into, in all caps, breaking tweet, blah, blah, blah, so-and-so's buying
Bitcoin, the institutions are coming.
so when you have a timeline that is pure unadulter plebslop and there's really no
other signal in there, what it signals to me is
that people have stopped
thinking critically, they've stopped thinking, coming up with new ideas, they've
stopped building, they've stopped because new
New ideas, new complex ideas, new solutions are very difficult sometimes, oftentimes, to communicate, to articulate to other people, and it's very difficult to try to get it out of your mind and onto, you know, a spec for software or a new
I'm not sure what happened there, guys. I kind of lost audio, and then it dropped.
Cool.
We'll wait for Paul and Michael to come back in here.
Oh, it seems to have crashed, but maybe it's back.
Not sure what happened that time, but I'm not sure if you guys heard the last thing I was saying.
I was saying let's move into a speed round of plebslop or not plebslop. Did you guys hear that part?
No.
No. I think Bugle was talking, and he got cut off mid-conversation is what I heard.
Okay. Sorry about that, guys.
On some of what I was saying, which was when the timeline is full of plebslop, it's a fact that nobody's thinking of new ideas, new solutions, because those are complex. Those are hard to communicate. Those are hard to articulate.
It's a struggle. It is a struggle to take a good idea, a new idea, and get it out there and make it valuable.
So if everybody's spewing plebslop, it's just everything's been said already. There's nothing new to hear.
I think it is the case that there's not a lot of novelty in the space, because there is nowhere to go once you just declare everything to be running a shitcoin.
So every direction of progress has been kind of walled off in a marketing sense, not literally, but people don't ...
Imagine that you join Bitcoin. It was very different in 2014, for example. People would join Bitcoin, and they'd say, I love Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the best. What should I do? And there were all these things you could do.
There was actually a lot more opportunity to get a job, work in customer service for an exchange, or work for BitPay, or try to work as a dev, try to work for whatever, Blockstream, etc.
Plenty of people were doing meetups. Plenty of people would go around and try to get merchants to accept Bitcoin.
So actually, there were more things to do, but now if someone joins, they're just told, don't tinker with the tech, don't try to get people to use the tech, don't advocate for any idea, because if you do, then that's bad, apparently.
So yeah, I don't know. I think that has created this weird media environment where only a few types of message are possible. And when everyone's growing, space is growing at a rapid rate, most of the people will be new at any given point in time.
So when 90% of the audience has only been there for one year, that could be the case over and over again for many years.
Yeah, and that is the case. It feels like all the new people are kind of funneled into paper Bitcoin. It's like the paper Bitcoin, plop, slop.
Because there really isn't a whole lot of interesting conversations taking place any longer, you know, so to speak, on layer one, or just about Bitcoin in general, everything's kind of moved to Wall Street, paper Bitcoin to the myriad of layer twos, most of which are vaporware still.
And then the only real layer two you've got is lightning. But, you know, this UTXO set yesterday that lightning is plop slop as well. And it's getting harder and harder to argue against that.
Well, yeah, I'm a well known skeptic of lightning. And in fact, Mike had me two weeks ago, at TapConf, and I debated the entire room about the premise being that the lightning network is a waste of time.
And unfortunately, it is mostly powered by lies and lack of self awareness and people not not realizing what they are shilling and people can now the whole thing is up, people can watch it, I do 10 minutes of slides, and then a 50 minute q&a.
And yeah, lightning is people don't even know what they're talking about when they when they say, Oh, I use lightning last week, and it worked. They don't even know people think like a zap, primal and nostril to nostril, primal to primal zap, they think that that uses the lightning network, but that's not true.
People don't know the difference between custodial lightning and real lightning, which is I said the difference between a driverless Waymo and a Waymo that says it's driverless, but it has a guy in the car driving you around. So it's night and day. It's custodial is opposite of lightning.
So, but the lightning meme has persisted because of for like religious and cult like reasons and because people are emotionally unable to face what they've done. And so they cannot, they just, you know, their shame and inner turmoil is just prevented them from owning up to their mistake and in simping for this idea for so long.
And now we're all just stuck with it. And it does suck the air out of the conversation. Like now you can't even talk about how to scale Bitcoin, because it looks like lightning has that covered from the outside. So people would just say, Oh, are you working for lightning company, and then you have to fight the whole meme plex, which most people are unwilling to do, or not even able to do.
I think, I think it's incorrect to say that lightning is scaling Bitcoin, because I think it's pretty apparent right now that paper Bitcoin is scaling Bitcoin. And, you know, Paul, I've known that. I think we all know that you've been promoting various, you know, ideas to, in your view, improve Bitcoin, make it more use, give it more use cases.
It seems like you've lacked the proper deployment of plebs slop. So are you, you know, you've seen lightning being promoted with plebs slop, you've seen paper Bitcoin being promoted with plebs slop, you've seen knots being promoted with plebs slop, plebs slop all around, you know, now that you are seeing this, do you think it's time for you and LayerTwo Labs to deploy?
Some plebs slop?
deficient in lying to people, lying to the masses in like a convincing
way. that's probably my responsibility, my fault as the
CEO, guess the buck stops here,
Satoshi stops
here. my thought was we'll keep it highbrow and we'll that peer
review to make sure that we get all the actual thoughts
and we get the, sorry, have re -approve this.
And we have to get all the like, you know, get all the thoughts out there and get all the actual peer review and make sure the idea is as good as possible. I think you want to do that first. And then when you're really happy with the idea, and you think it's really perfect, then maybe you switch gears and you go into like a marketing mode. And you go like full plebs slop. That's like maybe how I would defend my my strategy.
Well, do you feel like you have a fiduciary responsibility to your investors to deploy plebs slop?
I think I have a strategy that it still maximizes the value to the investors, even without lying to people committing like in those huge industrial fraud, because that does come with risks, you know, you could end up as like a kind of Sam Bankman Freed or whatever, you know, if you go down that road, and then what are you like, as an example, I gave a TABConf was Theranos, where Theranos, they maximized shareholder value for like 14 years.
But then it went to zero. So the question is, like, what, you know, the whole, the whole maximizing shareholder value thing, that's like trying to say, you know, you get the goal of the artist to paint a painting that has really good art.
And it's like really good. It's like it's like a creative act. It's inseparably creative, but I think my strategy will in the long run, have the highest ROI, cumulative ROI over the over the amortized over the time period. So I still think it would be the best way to go.
I'm clicking approve on this thing. And I don't know if it's not working or not. This, this app is so glitchy. Sometimes.
It really is. I've also been trying to get people mechanic up here.
When we did it like two years ago, I would, um, it would just like, I don't know, it would, it would crash, but it would do all kinds of weird other stuff where, yeah, my app would crash, it would like Google, like some kind of cash would fill up and it was just every time it would only make it like 40 minutes at a time.
So we had to have co hosts and everything. So I don't know why. I don't know what you wanted to get on it, but
And so, um, I did have something I wanted to do before crash last, uh, which I think would lend itself to your suggestion, Richard, uh, L2L deploying plebs flop and mass quantities.
Um, and that's to help us make the distinction, uh, as the name of the space implies of what is plebs flop and what is not plebs flop.
And so in the interest of keeping it in good fun, right, because we're not trying to be predorative, we would, I would request everybody's honest with the following.
And what I want to do is a speed round where I will name a list of media publications, podcasts, books, public figures, and concepts and Bitcoin.
And I would like that the speakers and potentially the audience as well, if you'd like to signal whether or not you think something is plebs flop, um, with a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and we'll just do a speed round.
And of course, you know, if we've had a debate about, you know, maybe bugle mechanic thinks something is plebs flop and Richard doesn't, then we'll stop and we'll talk about it.
And one way or another, we're going to, we're going to hone in on the definition.
So we're going to start with some low hanging fruit and I just want everybody to chime in whenever with the first one being the Bitcoin standard by safety and almost plebs flop or not plebs flop.
What, so thumbs up for yes, thumbs down for no.
What if, what if it's a little bit of both?
Then let's talk about it.
Let's hear why.
Well, yeah, he has like three chapters about Bitcoin and then he starts talking about how like Miley Cyrus is destroying society or whatever.
And that there's been no good music written after 1971.
And then you just kind of think like, okay, like, I guess that's what we're going with.
We need to hear from Michael Tidwell.
We need to hear from Michael Tidwell.
I think he's trying to, trying to avoid the discussion.
Let's hear what Michael Tidwell has to say.
Bitcoin standard, plebs flop or not plebs flop?
Plebs flop.
Okay.
Plebs flop, but also my, my app is kind of glitchy.
It says Richard is like the only one talking right now.
So I hope I can, I'm coming through.
I definitely think, I have to say that, um, I think like safety and Amos overall is way, way more plebs flop, like as a person than his, his book has like some redeeming.
I mean, there was like a market for a book, like everyone wanted like a book to put so that they could have it behind when they do like a zoom call or whatever, a podcast, they can have the book on the shelf behind them.
And safety, and he knew that there was a market for that, that book, even if the book, like just the pages are blank or whatever.
It's like I paid, it's like buying a shirt, you know, it's like you go into like a rock concert and you get a shirt and he knew that there was a niche for the book.
And I think the book has some redeeming qualities.
And I do respect anyone who produces a long piece of writing.
And, uh, and so the book is sort of, but he, he, he has become like a complete, like, I mean, I don't, it's hard to know exactly what to say, but, um, yeah, he has just become like a, like, and it's very predictable.
And he's very, like, he has very thin skin about ridiculous things.
And, uh, like he did that, um, interview with the trigonometry guys is a perfect example, but it's easy.
Very similarly, like Nassim Taleb, where you, some of his writings first come out, it's like some of the stuff's pretty interesting and he's got an interesting career, but it's like a slow devolved into plebs slot parody of the original author or the, like the original work.
And it's with safe.
It's, I hate to say this, but it seems like in the Austrian economics space, a lot of the new content that comes out or a lot of the content in general about Austrian economics is ultimately plebs slot.
There hasn't been really any, in my opinion, like really good new thinking or, um, any type of writing on, on Austrian economics in quite a long time.
And it's just a lot of people repeating, you know, Mises or Rothbardian plebs slot.
That's an excellent point because one thing that really turned me off of Austrian economics, I got very interested, like most people, I got into it in around 2008 and I, I majored in economics in college and then I worked in economics research at like a very high level.
But I, so I became interested in Austrian economics, but then I, one of the things that really started to annoy me was that the Austrian, you can go and you can go on like mises.org and you can look up year after year after year for like 40 years.
And I have, I have the links.
I had this all in a big post that I wrote in 2017 and never published it.
Unfortunately, I have to bang it out one of these weekends.
But the point is they complain about this obscure ordinal versus cardinal utility.
And the Austrian economists say we use ordinal utility, which is correct.
And the Keynesians or the whatever, neoclassical or mainstream economics, they use cardinal utility, which is wrong.
But the problem with this is that this has never been true ever.
And regular econ, even when I was an undergrad, freshman year, used ordinal utility.
And this is not really, you know, it's kind of an obscure point, but just the idea that for like 40 or 50 years that you would be, and there's link after link after link.
You can find it on, if you just search it on mises.org, whatever, you can see people complaining about this year after year after year.
And no one has ever like tapped them on the shoulder and told them that they're just wrong.
And even Brian Kaplan wrote an essay called Why I'm Not an Austrian Economist Anymore.
And he has this in his essay.
And this is like years after his essays, 10 years after his essay, 15 years after his essay.
Still, they are the ones who bring it up, the Austrians, who say they make a big deal about this.
But it's just flatly 100% wrong.
And you just kind of think like, what is going wrong in this culture that it is locked?
It's just remained where Rothbard and Mises left it.
And that is sad.
Yeah, Austrian economics ossified.
Right, ossified Austrian economics.
I think we got – Michael and Richard want to say something, and then we'll jump to the next topic.
I think it's ironic that the Austrian economic sephardin doesn't like ordinals in any respect.
But then apparently Austrian economists subscribe to ordinal theory when it comes to cardinal versus ordinal utility is what I'm hearing.
I also wanted to say that I think sephardin for this first question kind of has a bad –
like it's not kind of fair because his interaction with BU was so bad and was so sort of like damning, in my opinion,
in terms of being able to take him seriously that it's hard for me to give him a fair shake.
Just because he had a really bad performance on BU, and it was very, very funny.
That doesn't make any sense, Mike.
You're saying because of his performance as an intellectual and book author defending his work in a conversation on an interview?
That's unfair?
Wouldn't that be like exactly how you should form your opinion?
No, no, but what I'm saying is I didn't even read the book.
So that's why it's unfair because I didn't even give his book a chance because of his – because I couldn't take him seriously as a person.
So I'm not really able to answer the question in good faith.
I'm just – that's what I'm trying to – I'm trying to caveat that it's sort of a – yeah.
You should have just went with the safe answer and said that not plebslop.
We already got you on record saying sephardin almost is plebslop.
Well, I think the safe answer is saying it's plebslop in my opinion.
Always.
I think Richard has something to say, and then we'll jump to the next one.
Yeah, I just wanted to say real quick I also agree that the Bitcoin standard is plebslop.
I think in a lot of circumstances though for a lot of individuals it is helpful plebslop because sometimes plebslop is like the gateway drug into just more thought out thinking.
Austrian economics is kind of like a failed meme gang in a lot of ways, economic meme gang.
There's some aspects of it that I like and appreciate.
But I think it's just whenever anybody starts to come up with these labels for some sort of collective group thinking with tenants and dogma, it kind of becomes problematic and quickly devolves into just low signal plebslop.
I do appreciate the Bitcoin standard to some degree as a tolerable form of plebslop, but it is interesting to see how kind of the cognitive dissonance around.
The Austrian supporting ordinal theory, but at the same time, you know, being upset at Casey wrote a more.
Awesome. All right. That's a good segue into the next topic. Ordinals, plebslop or not plebslop?
It's a good question. I think since people are having fun and they mostly just.
They know that they're just having fun and they're just doing something.
That is a little new.
I'm going to have to go with somehow not plebslop.
I'm going with I'm going with good plebslop since bugle mechanic was saying or Richard, whoever.
Was saying there's, you know, not all plebslop has to be harmful and bad and and it could be a gateway to taking you other places. I think ordinals is a clear vehicle for that. It's something that's sort of silly. It's a meta protocol. You can't stop it. And it really, if anything, exposed how retarded.
You know, our peers are saying that this is a bad idea. It's almost like it's harmless plebslop and you're almost treating it like the devil. And it's really telling like what you kind of conceptually can understand about meta protocols that can be in people's minds and how you think that can attack Bitcoin. And I think it was very, it was like a very useful plebslop thing to expose, like kind of how dumb a lot of people were.
So I consider it plebslop through and through, but it's like a fun, harmless plebslop that can be a gateway to actually teach you how to use Bitcoin and how sats work and all sorts of things about Bitcoin scripting and all kinds of cool stuff. So I think it's ultimately a gateway plebslop thing to be harmless.
The, the idea, like TC's idea and like putting it together, like the, when you say is ordinals plebslop, I would say no. And I kind of agree with Michael. I think a lot of the ordinals inscriptions, like 99% of them that came as a result are plebslop. Some of them harmful, some not, but like the higher level concept, I would not consider plebslop.
And I think it probably was really helpful to a lot of people to understanding Bitcoin better, to helping the Bitcoin community understand it better. And it got a lot of people writing notes and like actually using Bitcoin. We went to the spamming Vegas ordinals side conference and it was people using Bitcoin, people not talking about paper Bitcoin, people not simping politicians. So I think it was, it's definitely not plebslop.
Awesome. So speaking of protocols, metaprotocols, lightning network, plebslop, not plebslop.
I like some aspects of lightning or plebslop. And I think some are like, there's some individuals using it or attempting to use it in interesting ways. But you think of like what's commonly promoted, like, you know, Wallace Satoshi, custodial lightning products in general, it's, it's pretty sloppy to say the least.
But what is strange about lightning and the transition that I've seen recently is it seems like the purpose of the lightning network is to act as stable coin rails and try and compete with Ethereum and Tron.
So that seems to be the new use case that individuals are excited about. And that feels a bit sloppy to me. But I use the lightning network and I appreciate it to some extent.
It's, it's a good way to transact for like, I mean, it's kind of pain in the ass if you're if you're selling loosey cigarettes to use on chain. So lightning is kind of useful in that regard.
I, Paul, I'll go and then I'll hand it off. I would say lightning clearly to me is not plebslop. There, I would actually be interested if anyone can convince me it is. I would say there's a lot of things around lightning that could be considered pretty sloppy, including a lot of the narrative that was captured by the community.
By quote unquote, plebs, and you could almost see the pleb movement, really starting in Bitcoin, like and really becoming like apex pleb, you know, era during the pleb net lightning, everyone run a node, everyone run lightning, open up these channels and lose money on lightning, you know, because these channels are forced closing and no one understands the software, blah, blah, blah.
I think you can say a lot of that was sloppy and owned also by the plebs. I mean, you could honestly say lightning started the plebslop movement in terms of people self identifying in mass as plebs, and doing, I guess you could say sloppy sort of narrative control over lightning saving, you know, the human race and scaling Bitcoin.
But I think it would be hard for you to convince me that the technology itself, without including the narrative and how that was captured is plebslop. I would say lightning clearly to me is not plebslop. It's a very interesting technology and works very, very well for B2B, and potentially in the future B2C, and it was sold as a complete peer to peer, you know, B2C, C2C, whatever, like out of the box kind of thing. I understand that.
However, for anyone who used lightning early, and actually try to make a business out of it, it was pretty clear that was not going to be the case. And I've been working on lightning since like 2019. So I've been through like a lot of the pain points of it. So I kind of would be interested if someone can convince me it was plebslop, because I would say it is not.
I mean, I definitely think that it is. And I think B2B, I would almost say there is no way to use Bitcoin or lightning B2B at all, because everyone has a mailing address. And you can just bill each other. And you're in like the same legal framework already. So saying that something is good for B2B and Bitcoin is just another way of saying that it doesn't work. And it should just be burned to the ground.
But the issue is this, like in most people's minds, if you had a big group of Bitcoin, or a big group of people, when they hear the word lightning, they have an idea in their head. And that idea is just a bunch of nonsense. And so in that sense, I think it's absolutely plebslop.
It's the idea in their head isn't even accurate. And even if it was, it's just it's just the Bitcoin is hope AI image. It's not anything. It has no substance.
Go ahead, Mike.
All right, so let me let me ask a clarification question. You said it's like pretty much anything can be used B2B. It's not really Bitcoin, but businesses use Bitcoin. I mean, you can send layer one Bitcoin, you can do whatever you want with. Are you trying to say any business that has agreements with each other? Bitcoin has no use case. I'm just trying to understand.
I'm saying it's not quite relevant. There's already an L2. When you're in the legal world, you're already on like an L3 or an L plus one or whatever you want to call it. Like you're already in a world where you can have like the bar tab. You're in the trust envelope. But Bitcoin is not designed to do that. Bitcoin is designed for people who don't trust each other.
And who don't have maybe they don't have they don't know each other's names or locations. That is the like design of Bitcoin. And the inherently it comes with a strategy for surviving and succeeding, which is to install itself in dark and gray markets to some extent, and also be compatible with the normal everyday markets.
Like an equal footing. So it's equal footing, but making it inroad, specializing inroad in the dark. And with the goal that regular people would decide, well, if I have US dollar, it works for XYZ. And but if I have Bitcoin, it works for XYZ. And it also works for these dark net type things.
And even if I don't use that myself, maybe one of my trading partners or friend of a friend of a friend, maybe they do. And so maybe it's better for me to just pick the one that is not constrained as a medium of exchange, it will have a superior network effect. I think all that is like inherent in the design of Bitcoin, like from the start, and I don't I don't know if it's possible to see it another way without entering into a contradiction.
Hey, guys, not to cut you off, but I'm we'll get bugle on lightning. But we know that this is a subject that we could probably talk about for hours. And this is a good time to plug TapConf. If you guys want to see Paul's thoughts in detail on the lightning network and its failures, go ahead and check out the TapConf Twitter page. And you can watch the entire rotating debate panel where he talks to a bunch of lightning developers and expresses his thoughts. But Bugle, pass it over to you.
Yeah, I have to jump after this, but I just wanted to come in and say, like, Paul, he's talking about how, like, the way people are using lightning is not how Bitcoin is kind of like what it was built for. And to some extent, that's true. But it's kind of like a Zempik.
Zempik was not built for weight loss, and we already have solutions for weight loss. You can diet, exercise, self-discipline, but those suck. And Zempik works to help people lose weight. It's so much easier and faster, but it's an off-label use case. So Bitcoin was designed to be a very specific thing and to solve this very specific problem. But we found out that it's also useful for zapping your friend's plebs lump.
And I think that means that it doesn't necessarily mean that it just failed. I think it's just an off-label use case.
Awesome. Okay, we'll get one more in before you jump, and then we can maybe take it to the audience and have some people come up and start sharing their thoughts, because a lot of people in there are requesting. So last one would be Michael Saylor, plebslop or not plebslop?
I mean, I say yes, certainly.
Yes, for sure.
He's very new, and he often doesn't have any idea. No offense, but he has no idea what he's talking about. Often, and then you notice he doesn't even weigh in on any. He's not there to lead us into the future with his ideas. So it's all fake.
Okay, looks like we lost Bitcoin mechanic, or Google mechanic, but continue.
The one thing that struck me recently, or this year, was when he responded to someone saying that divulging their funds on-chain would be a security risk to them. And there might be various reasons why they wouldn't want to divulge their on-chain address, or trading reasons, or whatever reasons.
But the security reason alone, I think, was a plebslop answer that people ate up, and it was just totally incorrect. So I would say plebslop situations, aggregate, some may come to be plebslop.
It's kind of like saying that closed-source wallets are safer, because it's harder to find the exploits in them, because the code isn't viewable.
All right, so I think that we've come a little bit closer to a definition of plebslop after that round. We lost one of our speakers, and we've been running for about an hour now. And if you guys like, now is a good time to request to speak if you have any thoughts that you would like to share on plebslop.
Perhaps sharing your own definitions. And if no one comes up to speak, I suppose we can wrap it up.
See, we have Jameson Lopp in the audience. It's quite a lightning round of controversy lately. Perhaps you'd like to come up and share some of your thoughts on plebslop.
I saw the Peter, Todd, and Jameson versus Luke and Mechanic. It was pretty entertaining. I don't know who's being convinced of what.
It's sad that we're still talking about this filters thing. It's honestly very simple, and it's depressing that you can hijack the conversation for months by just saying crazy stuff.
We're going on almost a year here straight, it feels like, or at least over six months, I feel like.
I do think that in terms of like origin, I think I was correct. And maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
People's self-identifying as plebs more and more and more really crescendoed around 2019, 2020 with lightning.
And the whole idea of slop getting more popular was really with Dolly 3 and Dolly 2 and chat GBT and stuff, creating a bunch of slop sort of, you know, stuff for people to parse and try to figure out what's going on.
I think a lot of this was just being called slop. Is that fair in terms of the origins of these words individually, kind of gaining recent notoriety?
for people to parse and try to figure out, almost like a tack on time and stuff.
think a lot of this was just being called slop.
it was around a similar time that the lightning became popular, but we saw this giant
wave of quote unquote Bitcoin only companies that were, you
know, these front lines built on top of shitcoin companies and so they didn't have a
compelling product and they wanted to differentiate themselves
from Coinbase. so they essentially were able to a
excited and loyal
customer base by giving them a way to differentiate themselves
from others by being Bitcoin only.
it was like, Bitcoin being this money to separate
the power of central bankers over
essentially emancipate individuals from the power of central bankers.
part
of that being the ability to transact privately,
were able to eclipse that aspect of usher in
KYC, because now it's a against Ethereum and Solana
and Dogecoin. And
so I think that was like really the rise of the pleb in many ways.
was, let's take the plebs, the cannon fodder,
let's direct, misdirect them at something that isn't that important, but they
can feel like they're doing something.
They get the cathartic
And I
think
that's a
that... anyone else hear Richard in the matrix or is it just me?
talked normally.
Oh my god, Twitter.
Oh yeah. Richard just started sounding like a demonic demon.
Like
slow, frequent reward.
That's even crazier than what we normally seem to be.
Well, there you go.
had Portland Hodl in the audience and he wanted to speak earlier, but it seems he's
gotten chai and I would beckon you to come up here.
Portland Hodl, if there's something you'd like to say.
I might need to leave and come back to hear Richard, it almost sounds like he was
saying, your swans and strikes of the world were sort of plebslop use case companies.
Is that kind of gist of what you were saying?
Like the whole idea of like buying every two minutes on strike.
It's like, I'm, I'm doing it, you
I don't know if that's...
Damn, wish... I'm just gonna leave and come back.
Fucking apps. I only had one thing say about, specifically the topic of Lightning being
PLEBSLOP. I think it is not PLEBSLOP in the fact that
it does give an idea of
how individuals want settlement that is fast and frictionless and cheap.
But the idea of don't think it works long term specifically because like if we really
do get this mass migration to Lightning and eight billion people are all using
Lightning to dodge fees from miners, the miners are very
likely, if not decentralized sufficiently, going to literally just start censoring
those transactions as part of maybe a policy or something.
that's just, yeah.
That's kind of far -fetched.
You're saying that mining would be centralized enough to make it where if you're trying
to close
a channel like, no bidder would take it pretty much.
like maybe Mara just goes like, hey, lightning channels being closed,
maybe we could just increase the minimum fee rate for that specific type of thing.
Right, but that is the same exact argument that Chris Guida and Mechanic use when it to
miners being
philanthropistic on taking, like, not mining
transactions, even if it includes a high fee or something like I would just imagine
easily miners would just be like, well, there's a fee here, someone else is going to
take it if I don't take it.
It also doesn't help that
the opening of the channel is sort of anonymous, right?
It's only the closeout, right?
the Taproot transactions.
Damn, did I fuck up again?
we're talking. it was just baffling.
I'm I'm I'm I'm just, just, just, I'm I'm just, I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm
Paul, you're saying the silence is because of I said was so dumb.
No, it was intriguing to bring up mean, I think Taproot is plebslop.
It doesn't actually do anything.
It's a big distraction and even SegWit.
me, Taproot specifically.
Because what
we're doing is we're just going down this road of more address types.
it's these benefits are fake.
Like you have people saying it's a smart contract upgrade.
And most people just don't have a deranged view of what it is.
And it's, it's an illusion.
it's something we feed into people to convince them that Bitcoin
is making progress, which is a illusion.
let me ask you a quick follow -up.
Would you say that the technicals are not plebslop or the technicals are plebslop?
Because maybe we can argue easily and agree that a lot of things in or around Taperu,
especially socially, is plebslop.
I think it's a social question.
Technically, it's plebslop.
Okay, so you don't think it's technically plebslop.
no, he thinks it does, thought.
No, it's technically plebslop.
is one mistake that completely makes Taproot, in my opinion, long -term unusable.
Specifically, the enforcement of a pubkey be on the curb.
doesn't, if we didn't have this requirement that the
pubkey must be on the curb, you could create quantum resistant Taproot addresses.
But because you have no way currently to disable the key path spend, because somebody
wanted to save a byte or stop a few bytes of arbitrary data on chain, you've, in my
opinion, long -term completely obliterated the use case for Taproot.
Yeah, they got on a
high horse about,
if you use like payment codes or if you use reusable addresses or if you use HD
wallets,
it's going to be leaked anyway so we don't care about quantum.
That was like the big meme of it.
The whole thing is all a
bunch of, it's all fashion.
And it is masquerading it.
My point is though, yeah, I agree with one bite that was saved by making sure that the
parrot, you don't have a parity byte anymore, is one four megabyte inscription puts
more just wasted data on chain than four, like basically
basically equivalent to four million of these transactions, right?
And we could have used that as, a nice little flag to, like, quantum's actually a
problem, maybe we can use this, but now we gotta go through an entire software process
to deal with that if that happens, or just revert back to primitive witness pubkey
hashes or something.
I don't know.
So,
I just think
that was a massive mistake.
Similarly, bit 47 where were like universally discouraged by university.
Luke meant that he didn't like it, but then it's like it makes the first transaction
like something like 15 % larger.
then as a result, we never need to use addresses again.
And everyone has like just like an address book that works.
then but
I mean,
thought that Taperu was just sort of abstracting, I guess,
the formats that you use for consensus, just like that whole op success idea.
Like I think that was the main one that they really
made any advancement on.
don't think the actual technical merit of allowing more descriptive
script paths and stuff like that.
mean, I guess I'm thinking of going from SegWit to Taproot seems
more extension blocky.
I'm just saying a lot of stuff.
I
think one thing Taproot does that is very, nice compared to, for example, pay to
witness script hash or pay to script hash is that you don't have to write the entire
script as a part of the execution or the commitment.
And what I mean by that is when you go to spend, you don't have to include everything.
You just include like this, this Merkle root or Merkle path and then this script you
wanna
execute. You don't have to show all of them.
That I think is very useful.
But I think the problem is that it is, it's like developer, perhaps not because
it's all a distraction.
Like, what am I trying to say?
It's like, is nerd
sniping, know? It's like, okay, we have these tiny little details.
These are not really like...
Well, do you think...
Paul, you think BitVM is club slop?
I think that's a good question because the actual idea is
ingenious,
but then you immediately saw a bunch of people with like PowerPoint slides who were
like creating a company or an L2 and then they put BitVM like as a bullet
point.
but I think that it's kind of like, I don't know, in that case, I think the
plebs know so little about
it that it can't qualify as pleb slop.
Whereas, people really think they understand lightning and they really think they
understand what Taproot is, but they don't.
no one knows what a garb old...
Exactly, it's so different that it's almost in like a different category.
It's like pre -slop.
slop pre slop priest pre pleb slop.
It's not it's next year maybe two years from now will be pleb slop, but but what I'm
trying to get at is, you know,
Bit VM wouldn't really be feasible without taproot with all the potential exit paths,
but it's not really I mean, it's
know. I mean, one difference.
mean,
what makes you say it's infeasible?
I'm whether or not something works in the terminal on your computer has nothing to do
with whether or not it works in the real world.
I mean, I guess there is one thing.
you can't get it to work on the terminal, then it's definitely not going to in the real
world. But what I'm trying to say
is, what we're gonna see is, similar to Arcade and Arc, you're gonna have companies
spin up that have these things very controlled and very understood and very like, you
know, well... is...
And Arc will become...
The covenants will be the new Lightning Web Slap.
It's just an attempt to keep Lightning
lightning model going.
One difference I see between all these different projects is that like, for lightning,
seemed like you kind of got other additional research out of it.
You know, like, I don't know, fraud proofs and anything else that are just like hard
problems people would talk about, like they would talk about like the free option
problem or whatever.
And
that all sort of like went away eventually but I don't really see any of type of
discussion for any of other projects that just sort of seemed like I don't know.
That's a good point but I think it's just the core function of the timing like
lightning was back in the earlier time period and was still possible to talk about
things and Now, have to also remember, this is
the best that Lightning has gotten after almost 10 years of deep thinking.
mean, obviously, there wasn't implementations of it 10 years ago, but this has been
thought about now for about a decade.
And we're still sort of, quote unquote, struggling to make a great user experience with
Lightning with
BitVM, don't know how many years that's going to be right before you have any sort of
UX and then downstream sort of problems that get discovered and
then need to be solved.
mean, I imagine you're going to run into those, but it's also kind of like, maybe these
problems don't really exist because you're already sort of saying like, hey,
The problem is that the problem is
that that the problem
the
the
Crowd, I think that even covenants are.
They're now among people who attend UpNext or Tab Conf, covenants are.
Web Slop to me.
Oh, I don't know.
Take from that whatever you will.
Maybe I'm just super arrogant.
sounds like you guys are talking Devslop.
I'm here for the Pueblslop.
I'm not really understanding what you guys are talking about.
Let's go to another buzzword then.
Or whatever. Okay, I got one.
What Bitcoin did podcast?
flip -flop yeah, absolutely he's so proud of the fact Peter McCormick and you know He's
like an okay guy.
He's fine like I Was one thing that was disappointing was that he had this story that I
really believed about how like dark net markets helped him Purchase
drugs basically medicine for his mother who was dying of like
painful disease. And so I thought, oh, this guy's like a real Bitcoiner.
And then he just morphed to format.
he was just proud of the fact that he was doing kind of like a Tucker Carlson kind of
thing. He was like, I'm proud of the fact that I don't understand what these weird devs
are saying.
And so that was full on PLEBSLOP, I thought.
Another thing that's a bit weird with that, and why I would call it PLEBSLOP is because
you give Peter benefit of doubt for X amount of years, but then afterwards it's like
you're expected to
I mean, would imagine it's like, this is your full -time job.
You're actively learning and getting smarter and understanding the concepts better.
You can only play the fool and only act like you don't understand it for so long.
mean, it's kind of yes,
everything is complicated, but if you make it your full -time passion and job and you're
researching, you have the people on that talk about it, you can't, in my opinion,
keep with the same sort of, oh, this is just technical.
mean, the dev stuff is just too technical for me and I'm just a pleb.
just,
don't know. That's the part that I thought was a bit weird.
I think the thing that you guys are missing about Peter, to clarify, Danny Knowles took
over that podcast now.
I think what Peter was able to identify and what a lot of content
creators that you could classify as plebslops viewers have been able
to identify is they're worried about their audience.
And their audience are largely plebs.
Uh, you know, in your sales model, you know,
as a podcaster like Peter was, it's largely based on how much can you convince a
sponsor to give you.
What the sponsor wants to see is the maximum amount of plebs reached.
That translates into how many USDT they're to pay you per episode.
And so for Peter,
he's an actor.
It's a performative thing.
It's not his failing to learn.
Peter's a lot smarter than,
he appears on a show, what makes it a compelling experience
for the plebs to listen to his type of content is he's asking the
the
to do ask the questioners, and the are the
questioners, questioners,
that they might not be aware of something.
this is part of the reason why Peter was so, and has been so successful as a content
creator is he's been a pioneer in figuring out this format.
Yeah, if that makes sense.
I don't disagree with you.
was agreeing with you that it's, like, how long can you go in and this still be like
a thing is what I'm trying to get at where it's like, you have to constantly, like
I said, be acting a fool or something and say like you constantly keep bringing up over
and over
and over. Hey, I'm not technical, by the way.
but it's like, who are you fooling?
just like the new people watching it, I guess.
Well, yeah, I mean, for the show to stay relevant like that,
continue to easily need to find new plebs.
And I think, you know, it shows like what Bitcoin did kind of act as that
funnel. like the Bitcoin standard is
a book in a similar way.
So it's like oftentimes the first stop that people hit on their journey
and
then they get funneled into other types of content and different things in
the ecosystem. Their interests will change.
But the first stop is generally where there's the most people.
And so if you want the biggest show,
show, you want to be that first stop in the funnel to hook people right off the bat
before they start funneling into their older, other separate interests.
Okay.
Treasury companies, Plubslop or not
Pleb Slop.
I think definitely.
mean, arguably you could say when Michael Saylor first invented it, then it was maybe
new and brilliant.
Maybe, that's like I shudder even say that.
But other than that, especially how people copy you now is this is just recycling
something, an idea that's not Bitcoin.
idea that the Treasury companies are selling stock to buy Bitcoin themselves, and then
you're to buy the stock.
It's weirdly the opposite of Bitcoin, yeah, so I mean, I say yes.
but Treasury companies are they're out of favor right now.
So
how could it be plebslop?
That's true. it's fallen out.
It may have fallen out now.
That's a good point.
hadn't thought of that.
It's now sub -slop or something.
It's a sub -slop.
Can you get David Bailey to get that back in I know.
feel bad kicking
you know, it's a pretty awkward stock price for him.
they feel like, you know, you want to be punching up, right?
mean. That's right.
don't want to do that.
him.
I think the...
I'm having a problem now on definitions because now we're saying if something falls out
of favor, it's...
or popularity, it's no longer a plebs swap.
if the plebs now hate it because it has failed so much recently then i kind of think
it's okay got it so and okay that makes sense so you're saying for it to be plebslop
the plebs have to actively be they're like lapping it up it's like getting getting
their dopamine it's like chickens in the chicken farm and they're like eating all the
you know, the little seed.
They're being fed.
So then like a frequency and with which one might resonate, you know, like for myself
as a, what I would say, semi-cynical, I tell myself Bitcoin is hope.
there's Pleb Slop just in that, right?
Because it's an extension, right, of what is
what. And so I think of it more like a frequency.
so if the plebs are resonating with that, then yeah, you're going to feel it.
There's a question.
Well, let me jump in because I think it's really important to understand.
So there's effective and there's ineffective pleb slop.
is very momentum -based.
just because there's conflicting aspects of PLEMSLOP, the PLEMs aren't a monolith.
what the fiat, US government,
Kfabe industrial
Industrial Complex has figured out is one of the best ways to deal with the plebs is
through divide and conquer campaigns.
So you have two competing plebslop narratives and the plebs are just fighting each
other. Red team versus blue team, know, whatever.
We're starting to see individuals,
coming and bringing those ideas into the Bitcoin ecosystem of like,
these users of Bitcoin are conservatives, these users are liberals.
That's been a framing that's attempted to be used in the Core versus Not campaign.
So,
some plebslop goes sour and you got to retire it and you got to come up with a new
meme. It's why the Republican Party or the Democrat Party, they don't
use the same campaign slogans every single year.
They might, they might go back after 40 years and
recycle one, like Trump recycled Reagan's, uh, make America great again, uh,
pleb slop slogan.
Uh,
slop is your yeah, the slop needs to, you know, it needs to feel
novel and different because that's part of what engages
the pleb is they, you know, it feels new and exciting and different.
It has to move them and, you know, they kind of get tired eventually of repeating the
same ideas over and over again.
So you just kind of repackage it as slightly different
for them. But yeah, I mean,
you see a lot of divide and conquer campaigns using the plebs, getting
them to fight each other.
It's pretty interesting to just witness.
It's like weaponized pleb slop is kind of fundamental to what's going on right
now is what you're saying
maybe. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there's harmful or harmless
plebslop and then there's malicious plebslop and I would argue weaponized plebslop.
when you start trying to convince the plebs to be cannon fodder for whatever
your interests are, I think that's
disrespectful. think it's being a poor steward of plebslop.
think plebslop should be used to uplift people and inspire
them. can use it like...
I think the...
Why I don't think the Bitcoin standard is
inherently bad or malicious, plebslop, because I think it's an invitation to begin
thinking about things differently.
It's kind of like a friendly bridge or just an
introduction into different ideas, or what Bitcoin did is kind of like that too.
And I think those invitations are productive because it can help a Plab
grow up and be an adult and begin to use their brain and think critically.
One of the challenges in our society and culture as a whole is we don't
have good examples of how to think
critically. instead, almost every example you see is a bad example.
Like you see Podconf down there in the audience.
what Podconf is,
the podcast conference industrial complex.
what they're really trying to do is they're trying to replicate what we're seeing in
the
Fiat, you know, PLEP slop industrial complex, you know, to bring those guys in and make
it more interesting to them.
Cause it, for them, it's a, it's a money grab,
yeah, I think what the, what the plebs need to hear is they, need to hear and see
examples of what.
thinking looks like, what nuanced discussion looks like, in many ways you can invite
them into those spaces with PLEP Slop.
Because otherwise they might not come and even be interested in
You get the masses in.
It's like, like Krispy Kreme donuts can bring people into a room.
then people can, they're eating a Krispy Kreme donut and they're I kind of know this is
bad for me health wise, but it's really good.
you know, like WWE maybe,
Day, movie.
This is like good Plebslop maybe.
know, it's just like give the people what they want.
know, like Mozart says, give them a good bang at the end of songs.
would just say, you know, going to node.
mean, it's been around for a few
months and it's not meant to be harmful and it's a
metaphor for a lot more than just knots versus core.
It's like you were saying a minute ago, you don't want to just be like a
tool. You want to learn to think for yourself and navigate the journey for
yourself. Because at the end of the day, it is, you are with yourself.
but, you know, not going to know, it's slop, but it's fun.
But it's also true, but it's not, you know, being negative.
It's just saying, you know,
think before you
jump to being divided so easily Yeah, I agree the not like the not gonna know
thing. It's a protest against the false binary
Speaking on what Richard was speaking, you know hitting on earlier about choosing a
side right versus left or a versus B
like you don't have to engage in the fight you can protest the system you can
protest this political system this political war that we're seeing in bitcoin by just
choosing to not run a node and live your life and raise your family and go outside
next block you
It's kind of like the Church of Satan, know, putting up their,
their statue of Baphomet outside the Oklahoma Capitol, uh,
you know, protest of like, you know, like Luke and mechanic,
they're out there, they're trying to wreck the, the 10 commandments.
um, the not going to notice is essentially the same type of, uh,
pushback. It's not necessarily trying to, I don't even know if they say this believe in
Satan, a lot of them, but, uh, they're just trying to make a point.
you calling us Satanists?
So looks like we're talking about like catch phrases now.
so a catch phrase I want to know if you guys think is plebslop or not plebslop is sound
money. The phrase.
mean, unfortunately, now a lot of this stuff has been
stripped, it's become a soundbite, and it has been stripped of its original.
think like, you know, it was originally just supposed to mean, by originally I mean
like, you know, 2012 or whatever.
It was just supposed to mean we have a fixed supply, whereas every fiat currency is
just going to increase its supply, like whenever they want, whenever they have any
pretext
or a reason to do
so, even a legit reason to do so.
So they're just gonna expand forever, this geometric rate and sound money is just like,
know, saying like gold, there's like a reason why the supply
will not increase.
So I thought that that part is perfectly true, but
now it's become...
I don't know, like it's become like a...
When you can have people on stage and you can just say, we believe Bitcoin is for
money, but not for file storage.
Somehow that's like the sound money meme being like co -opted
because, well first of Bitcoin transaction is a file.
So it's nonsense.
it's kind of like why,
I don't know who's against that.
I don't know, it's another case where people know the bullet point, but they don't,
they're not really being fed anything though, I think.
maybe it's not,
slop I really get the I get the the image of like like pigs
eating out of the trough and you're like feeding them so that the pig will get will
gain weight and then you can have more bacon later and
I don't know the sound money maybe it's also legit so I don't
know. I guess I'm not sure.
So what are we saying?
we say? we got to rebrand to like Bitcoin as a sound JPEG database?
It's a good point.
what am I trying to say?
Bitcoin's not sound money like it is.
So that's a good point.
Well, would
argue that Bitcoin is not yet sound money because at least my understanding
of the definition of sound money is it's money that has won in the
free market and has become the dominant money in it.
know, right now it really seems like tether
is on the path to becoming sound money.
And Bitcoin is just kind of the rails upon which Tether might exist on top of,
but there's kind of like a market for...
I think that was like the big story of the Lugano Tether conference
that
was missing
from the general discussion of like,
people are sleeping on Tether.
mean, we're going to see a really kind of fascinating transition here
in the near future where many Bitcoin maximalists
are going to become Bitcoin and Tether maximalists.
I'm excited and just at the prospect of being able to witness such a
dramatic change and shift in Bitcoin culture.
But it's coming.
The plugs are going to, you know, they're going to be very excited about, you know,
relaying monetary tether transactions on chain.
I think
that's going to be sad.
It's like a feedback loop where Tether and folks have made so much money that they
can effectively promote this and do a good job with user experience and all this kind
of stuff. man, oh man, does it really just, in my opinion, feel like it's just taken
away from Bitcoin.
I think
it's going to be super sad.
I already kind of see it amongst a lot of the influencers who are, you know,
accepting money. you know, think Lugano is like paying people nice travel budget, you
know, kind of, you know, they're expending a lot of money to get high quality people
out and people are accepting it.
It's like the question is, can anything stop that train?
know what mean?
Well, as long as they pump my bags, know, if you can't beat them, join them.
like
you're saying, pump your bags, maybe one day, one USDT will be worth two USDT?
Like, what do you mean?
Yeah, yeah. If I got Dp'd, I'd upset.
I only got a couple more minutes, but I'd like to answer whatever
questions anyone
has. You can go maybe like 10 more minutes.
Paul, it's been real.
I will chat with you later.
have to run.
All right, see you later.
Good channel with the module.
You have to say the least plebslop conference
is tabconf and then I'll leave.
I think that's true.
I think it is true, maybe.
What would be the least?
Especially this one was good, this one was better.
Before when you had so much lightning content, I was getting worried in previous
years.
All of it was a super obscure technical
technical problem with 10,000 steps could be fixed if we have convoluted
10 step thing.
I just thought up yesterday that was like what all the talks were last year.
So I was like, Oh, okay.
But we need a different word for that because that's obviously based on what we're
saying earlier, not plebslop.
That's a devslop or something.
It's conference. Yeah.
I can't, you can't call that plebslop though.
It's like no one's, but a technical takes.
the fact that everyone's drinking the lightning Kool -Aid that makes, that makes it
blebs off. Well, I would say this, and this is my, this is my honest to God take.
think just because people have
bad ideas doesn't mean that they wouldn't be able to accept good ideas.
If the good ideas can show some traction.
So I wish you luck and I really hope we can put lightning, sorry not lightning,
your LayerTwo Labs project with Drivechain and however it ends up looking on the
forefront to actually be,
I think that's pretty exciting.
So I would say build it and they will come.
Let's build on it.
know what I'm saying?
that's my challenge openly.
I think I'm really excited to support you.
No, I'm serious, by the way.
all right, see ya, bye.
you.
All right everybody, think that we can start making some, we can close it up.
So thanks to everybody for joining.
Thanks to Michael Tidwell who just left, who is the founder and host of
TabComp. He recently hosted
Tab Comp and has been putting a bunch of really awesome technical non -plub slot content
on his Twitter page that you can go check out, including a talk with our CEO, Paul
Storts. Thanks to Richard, who I'll pass it over to in sec from Bugle News
along with Rod Palmer.
also produce
high signal and humorous Bitcoin content to go check out their podcasts when you have
the time. And I'll pass it over to you.
Yeah, I just want to say, you know, I appreciate Paul a lot for just
having, you know, a contrarian view for a long time.
I
would say he's probably one the more interesting podcast guests on the circuit.
His last interview with All Money I thought was a great show.
I really enjoyed it.
I was driving somewhere when I was listening to it.
Rob Hamilton told me that I needed to listen to it and,
it you know, it really sucked me in in a way that a lot of episodes don't because there
were a lot of differing ideas.
So I just want to say you're a very good source of entropy in the industry.
And I think you have been, you know, crucified in the past for refusing
to engage
in PLEBSLOP.
I don't always agree with you, but that's something I appreciate about you and it's not
something that I dislike you for because it's good to be around people
that you disagree with because it gets you to think about things a little bit more.
And yeah,
Yeah, appreciate the space.
Thank you guys.
Thanks for joining.
Hey, thanks
Should we anyone else everything I say or we're winding it down I learned a lot.
Yeah, do this
Okay, thanks everyone see you guys later See you guys on the next one.
Bye