Transcript 0:00 Did you just try to orange pill your family over Thanksgiving and fail? You're not alone. 0:05 There's probably a lot of you out there who just tried to shill your parents eighty thousand dollar Bitcoin down from its all-time high of one hundred and twenty-six thousand. 0:14 This is how not to orange pill your family over the holidays. [upbeat music] Money will come and go. We know that. 0:30 Most important thing in life will always be the people in this room right here, right now. That's right. It's all about family, Colin. 0:43 We're a family, and we're in this together whether money is here or whether we-- or it's there. And, uh- And in case you were wondering, if you were not watching on video, that was Vin Diesel. 0:55 It was not Sylvester Stallone. They, they seem to have the same kind of garbled intonation. 1:02 But it's all about the family, and the family that you told to buy Bitcoin at a hundred and twenty-six thousand because it was going up. 1:11 It's all about them, this Thanksgiving and Christmas, because they are going to come for blood, and they are mad at you. They are increasingly angry. They're having to take out second mortgages on their home. 1:22 Their children are eating out of tin cans, and it's all your fault. Now, of course, I don't believe that, but this is how your relatives see you when you show them Bitcoin, and then it crashes. Yeah. 1:34 You know, J-I'm just asking for a friend. Can you take a HELOC out on a HELOC? How does that work? [laughing] I don't really know. Is-- Can you do credit cards against a HELOC? Uh, just, just putting that out there. 1:47 I mean- That's like the, the final boss of the cousin shilling Bitcoin is the one who's bragging about taking out zero percent interest credit cards and then rolling them over each expiry period into a new zero percent interest credit card, so they can aggressively stack Bitcoin. 2:01 Yeah. And the thing is, that can work for some people. But, uh, the, the problem with trying to get your family to do it is that it's very hard to escape them. 2:13 You know, for other people who shill Bitcoin too, you can just deactivate your Twitter account and, uh, and close the DMs, but, um, your mom's still gonna come up, you know, knocking on your door and be like, "Son, uh, lost the house again. 2:27 Uh, put it all in the Bitcoin." Uh, not actually. So I don't know. 2:31 We, we prepared a little bit of, like, analysis on how well your previous holidays would have performed had you shilled Bitcoin to your family over Thanksgiving dinner, and then l-- and then how it performed up until the following Christmas. 2:48 But then also, like, we are going to genuinely give you a couple pieces of advice, I think stuff that's worked in our lives for at least orange pilling, 'cause this is a hard job. 3:00 You know, your parents, your aunts and uncles may still see you as that young, young, precocious child who still poops in diapers, and now you're trying to tell them that their stocks and bonds are worthless. So 3:14 just, you know, take, take everything with a grain of salt. Um, so first of all, I think, uh, I'll, I'll point out that, um, here is a article that we wrote for the newsletter this past week, if you hadn't read it, 3:30 blockspacemedia.newsletter, uh, newsletter.blockspacemedia.com. And, uh, basically, 3:37 I took the past t-- uh, thirteen years, since twenty twelve, and looked at the Bitcoin performance, uh, from Thanksgiving Day to Christmas Day of that year. 3:48 And I have a chart, but for the visually impaired or those who are only listening, [chuckles] uh, this, uh, chart basically shows that of the twelve years, uh, the, the, the... 4:02 from twenty twelve to twenty twenty-three, we have six up years and six down years. Twenty twenty-four, believe it or not, was just about perfectly flat. 4:11 So we have a total coin toss whether, based on historical data, Bitcoin is higher or lower the next time you have a family dinner on Christmas. What does that mean? 4:23 Well, if your family, if, if you believe historical precedent does indicate the future, then it's pretty much a coin toss whether, uh, your family will be happier or madder at you by the time Saint Nick comes into town. 4:40 What stands out to me in this chart is really what an aberration the twenty seventeen bull run was. Yeah. 4:47 I mean, if you look at the returns here, uh, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, obviously we're not looking at the full... 4:56 We're not looking at twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, and twenty seventeen in full with this, but the fact of the matter is, like, you had, uh, holiday run-ups in fourteen 5:06 and-- or, uh, excuse me, in fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. And twenty seventeen, I think you could probably put it on the map as, like, the first year of the Bitcoin Thanksgiving talk. Yeah. You know? 5:20 At, at least in terms of it becoming a wider phenomenon in the cultural conscious because, like, that was, you know, one of Bitcoin's most notable bull runs in the sense of I think that was the bull run that really cemented the fact that Bitcoin wasn't going away to a lot of people. 5:35 It attracted more interest. And because of that, twenty seventeen, I think, has also spoiled our collective memory for what bull run should be because it was such a spectacular run. Yeah. 5:44 Um, not, not just the twenty seventeen, but twenty sixteen. The, the entire lead up to that bull run was just one mega leg up. And 5:54 everyone keeps looking back to, I-- in some ways, I think twenty seventeen, obviously in the twenty twenty cycle they did for what was going to happen, and then we still kind of hooked on that for the most recent cycle of trying to look at historical returns. 6:05 Obviously-Past performance is not indicative of future results, and Bitcoin's returns are diminishing over the, you know, over the course of its history. That's not to say that it's not still going up. Obviously, it is. 6:18 But the rate of return, the volatility is smoothing out, right? Yeah. So that to me is, is the biggest takeaway from this is twenty seventeen was really a special bull market. 6:30 They're looking back at twenty seventeen as indicative of what Bitcoin can and should be doing in these bull runs. And it's crazy because I think, you know, a lot of people like to compare year-on-year performance. 6:39 This is basically selecting one month, like basically a thirty-day period. And, um, this is crazy for an- an- any asset to have like a thirty percent... 6:49 Any major asset to have like a thirty percent plus swing in a m- in a, in a month. But that is commonplace for Bitcoin. You have up twelve percent, down twenty-five percent, up thirty percent, down twenty percent. 7:01 Like, this is wild. Um, I'll point out the GOAT Thanksgiving shill year was twenty twenty. The COVID shill- Yeah... was-- is the absolute GOAT Thanksgiving shill because that was when... 7:14 A- again, twenty twenty, we brain hold it. That was COVID year. The helicopter money had landed over the summer, I believe. And the, the second stimmy check was gonna hit at the end of December. So that... 7:29 A lot of people forget like, um, b- back when Bitcoin recaptured its all-time highs of like twenty K in, in-- back in twenty twenty, that happened almost entirely like in that like latter part of the year, in that holiday season. 7:42 And then it went on to run another three X going into the spring to hit sixty, seventy thousand. So like that was the all-time GOAT Thanksgiving shill. 7:53 Another data point I wanna point out is, uh, a lot of people think back to like historically the, the FTX moment, which was when, uh, FTX collapsed in the first week of November. 8:06 So remember, that was like the sentiment all-time low for everybody at Thanksgiving. Like everybody like... I like... 8:13 You know, it, it was like a joke in our industry where like nobody wants to show up to Thanksgiving because like you were absolutely shamed if you were i-i-- not just like working in it, but even just had like exposure to the scam of an industry. 8:25 But twenty twenty-two, FTX collapses, Bitcoin only drew down an additional three point six percent until that following Christmas. 8:35 So it's funny, like Bitcoin was relatively flat compared to like all the other years, that particular year. 8:41 It's really funny to actually step back and look at the real numbers of the holiday performance, um, uh, you know, just vibes aside. I'll also point out that, uh, 8:55 uh, I think maybe the most underappreciated, like bad shill mo- uh, year was twenty thirteen. Kind of predates most people. But 9:06 the sequence of events was Ross Ulbricht got nabbed for the Silk Road that fall, like September twenty thirteen. 9:13 November happens, um, that is-- that's like right after the pico top of the twenty thirteen run, which hit like twelve hundred, thirteen hundred dollars per Bitcoin, and then Bitcoin crashes. Early Q1 2024, Mt. 9:28 Gox collapses. So I think you had one of the longest drawn-out bear markets from fourteen to early sixteen, mid fifteen, and so that was like the worst time to have shilled Bitcoin. 9:39 That's part of the reason why twenty seventeen's bull run was so incredible- Yeah... is you had this immense selling pressure from both Silk Road seizure and from Mt. Gox. You had people thinking Bitcoin was dead now. 9:53 Its primary use case for online commerce seemed to have been completely scattered to the wind by authorities, and its premier exchange was insolvent. I wasn't around back then. I know you were. 10:06 I imagine the sentiment was horrible, and most people thought Bitcoin was dead, um, even some of the true believers. Anyway, that's, you know, it goes to show why twenty seventeen was such a memorable bull market. 10:17 I mean, that was my first one, so maybe that's why it- And it was also ICO year. Like that's when- Yeah... uh, when altcoins and ICOs were really hot. So it's like it wasn't just Bitcoin that year. 10:27 That was the year when actually it was probably most difficult to explain Bitcoin because that was like peak block size war, um, or right after the block size war. 10:37 Ethereum was the, the cool cryptocurrency on the corner, and every dog and their dog is like buying some dent coin ICO, and it's the future of finance. 10:48 And so- That's a really important point I think for that bull run, and every bull run comes with alt picks and everyone's favorite shitcoin, right? 10:58 But the twenty seventeen bull run really was marked by the proliferation of these initial coin offerings. 11:05 All of them were going to apply blockchain to everything, and there were multiple different platforms like Ethereum or Ethereum-like clones that were trying to be the center of finance for the internet, and a lot of these projects were trying to outcompete Bitcoin. 11:22 In fact, if you go back and read a lot of the, uh, white papers from that ICO era, they like take... You know, they're always trying to pick apart proof of work and all these other things. 11:30 But I'm glad you mentioned ICOs because I actually have one clip I wanted to pull up- Yeah... 11:34 really quickly about, you know, if you had shilled ICOs in twenty seventeen, as long as they got out, and they probably didn't, they might have done okay during the blow-off top. Um, let's go back to twenty twenty. 11:47 I- if you were savvy enough and you were saying, "Hey, look at this D- DeFi yield farming stuff," maybe your family got in on that and they did well. They sold before it blew up. 11:55 Um, if you had shilled coins in the last year to your family, though- Oof... they, they would probably be feeling a little bit, a little bit like this. We're at the top of the... No! No! No! 12:11 [screaming]'Cause you think, okay, maybe the losses are done. I haven't lost- No! I'm not gonna lose a hundred percent, right? Please! God, please. [laughs] I'm sorry. I had to play that because that came up recently. 12:28 It was a tweet, it was a tweet that came up on my X by Pixel, and it says, "Bitcoin drops twenty percent alts," and then it shows that video, which is a clip from a, a simulator called Baby Steps. 12:39 Um- Yeah, it's like a... It's one of those, like, uh, futi- futility simulators of you, like, literally manually climbing up Mount Everest, but really clumsy. 12:48 It's like c- it's like a 3D QWOP, if you're familiar with that old school game. So, I think the last thing to say on, like, the back testing the numbers for, uh, 12:58 uh, for this is that, yes, while it's like literally a coin flip whether Bitcoin goes up or down, um, the magnitude of how much happier they are than they are angry with you is a little uneven. 13:10 Be- so to, to, to, to tease that out, um, Bitcoin's average, uh, returns over all holiday seasons is, uh, six percent, plus six percent. 13:20 So, as I like to say, statistically, if your drunk uncle does the math, um, they're likely to be more happy than they are sad if they are happy. So, but the question is, 13:35 let's say you just can't not talk about Bitcoin this Thanksgiving. Let's say you have to do it, and you're like, "How do I shill my parents Bitcoin?" Maybe you've tried this before. 13:46 Maybe you pulled out a whole, like, BTC Sessions video, and you wasted two hours of everybody's time, and you brought... and you told them all to buy Coldcard Mark 3s back in the day. 13:59 Great product, by the way, but I'm just saying, like, 14:02 you know, nobody wants to be, like, three glasses of wine in and, like, filled with tryptophan and trying to, like, figure out how to, like, add a twenty-fifth-word seed phrase to their, uh, weird, uh, calculator device. 14:18 Um- Yeah, like when your, when your angry uncle is asking you, slightly inebriated- [chuckles]... 14:24 why you buy Bitcoin and how you make sure you can't lose it, and what happens if you lose your wallet, and you respond in a drunken slur, "Well, I have my private keys memorized in my head." [chuckles] Yeah. 14:36 Trust me, it's actually not a selling point to these people. Yeah. That's scary to them. They have to think even harder about how to protect their wealth. This is the generation of the passively invested 401[k]. Yeah. 14:51 In a housing market bubble. Yeah. They don't want to have to put any effort into their investments. Yeah, I think you'd be surprised that a lot of these boomers, like, 15:02 remember or still do call their broker on the phone when they wanna make a trade. Guys, they... There were-- This is, it's still, like, commonplace even- You literally described my father-in-law Yeah. Love him to death. 15:15 [chuckles] Yeah. They don't even text their broker. Why would you text, you know? [chuckles] When you can just call. So, so, like, this is the person. 15:26 So, um, as much as, like, I personally want to endorse self-custody, the numbers do not lie. The numbers, according to the River, uh, twenty twenty-five Bitcoin Adoption Report, paint a very clear picture. 15:40 The people who are buying Bitcoin are doing it through funds and ETFs and under business entities. The days of the individual, like, self-custody ownership of Bitcoin are waning or declining, that is. 15:55 There's this great chart, which we actually covered earlier this year when we dove into this report, 16:00 where there's a poetically even, um, net increase and decrease in ETFs holding Bitcoin and individuals holding Bitcoin, according to this chart from twenty twenty-four, where funds and ETFs added five hundred thousand Bitcoin to their, uh, to their, like, holdings, whereas individuals, uh, reduced their holdings, uh, by five hundred thousand. 16:22 Now, it's probably a lot of individuals rolling it into, like, their BlackRock ETF, iBit or Bitwise or whatever. Um, but this is just the reality in that this is where the Bitcoin adoption is occurring. 16:35 This may not be... You may not like it, but this [chuckles] is what Bitcoin adoption looks like in twenty twenty-five. So, like, the, it is probably, you know... 16:45 It may be, may be the issue, listener, is that you haven't been able to get them in the door at all. Maybe they just need to put that toe in the water. Maybe they just need to put a foot in the door. 16:56 Maybe you need to get foot in their door, and they just buy a few shares of iBit just to, like, you know, see it. 17:03 iBit's lower unit price, it's not as scary as five hundred thousand dollars, more like fifty, fifty dollars per share. That's super cheap. 17:09 Well, and also there's an argument to be made that they don't have to commit any liquid capital that they have, and it's capital that's already locked up in an investment account that they may- might not view in the same way as investing ten, twenty thousand dollars that they have in their checking or savings account. 17:25 Yeah. You know, when I was aggressively orange pilling my dad, I mean, he's already orange pilled, but he's, he's stubborn, he's a gold bug, so- Yeah. 17:34 But when I was really pushing on it recently, given the recent sell-off, the thing that really made him be more open to buying right now is the fact that he could roll over some of his 401[k] into iBit or into Fidelity. 17:48 He, he didn't wanna do the BlackRock one. That's a good point, 'cause like a lot of pe- you know, the boomers might have saved, you know, one, maybe two million sometimes is the recommended. 17:57 You know, they're end of their career. They got, you know, somewhere around seven figures in the bank somewhere in total net worth. But, like, that's not in a checking account. Right. 18:06 It's not like they're gonna buy a whole Bitcoin with, you know, a hundred thousand cash they just got on hand. Um, and so it, yeah, it totally makes more sense. 18:15 They're like, "Well, I've got my, my savings with, uh, Fidelity, and I'm gonna-Roll that, maybe put some of that. That's, that's how the boomer mind works. Yeah. 18:24 And if you can just convince them, you know, a modest allocation, one to ten percent or something, 18:32 then to me, that's going to be the way that a lot of older generations are orange pilled or have already been orange pilled. 18:38 I, I think that's one of the biggest benefits of having something like the ETF is, is for those rolling overs. But, 18:47 you know, I, I just kind of talking about this Thanksgiving, you know, we're recording this on Tuesday, Thanksgiving's in two days. Mm-hmm. It'll go out a few days after Thanksgiving on Saturday. 18:57 If the sell didn't work back in the day, why would it work this Thanksgiving? Yeah. Is my thought. 19:05 That's- Unless you're talking about that one family member who listened to what you said, did a little supplementary research, actually started asking questions and looking into the problems Bitcoin solves, and then they're like, "Okay, now I'm ready to invest." 19:21 The... I, I, I consider that investor, and maybe this isn't fair because that's the whole point of orange pilling, but that's a whole different category of, of Bitcoin holder to me- Yeah... 19:29 versus the person whose, you know, aunt-- whose, uh, cousin of son, what have you said, "Hey, buy this thing," and they said, "Sure," but they don't know anything about it. 19:40 You know, I guess those people, I don't really know what's going to convince them this year as they're looking at what happened with Bitcoin's price. 19:47 You know, Bitcoin's price selling off from all-time high, while Bitcoiners might get a little giddy, little fire sale, no one else sees it that way. Yeah, that is terrifying to people. [inhales] So- [chuckles] 19:58 Yeah, I, I am open to any question. Yeah. It, it, um... But counterpoint, you know, it's been sixteen years, and everybody's seen Bitcoin not die a billion times by now. 20:09 Um, there are probably people out there, it's entirely possible that your family didn't realize Bitcoin hit a hundred thousand dollars. 20:16 So they may not [chuckles] actually know it's down 'cause they don't probably, like, pay as close attention to the price. You know, I'm, I have, like, I've, like, run into... 20:26 I've overheard, you know, in coffee shops, people who do not-- they don't speak with that certain crypto derangement that you can tell someone's kind of into crypto, and like, they'll say things like, "Bitcoin's down," and I'll hear, like, somewhere in that them say something like, "Might be a good buying opportunity." 20:47 So it's like, I feel like we kind of won a lot of that battle. It, now the question is, like, it's, like, still really difficult to get someone to actually then make the leap. 20:57 Like, there's the admission that it might be, like- Right... a good buying opportunity, but then it's like, when do you buy? And this is where we're twenty-five minutes in, I'll say 21:11 in total seriousness, the only thing I will actually endorse, like, as a specific strategy, is to dollar-cost average. This is the only advice I've really seriously given for so many years. 21:26 I love to talk about meme coins, I love to talk about equities, I love to talk about goofy speculative things. I don't like, you know, binding myself to the mast of, of even, you know, of touching those things. 21:37 Those are fun, more conceptual things to discuss. The DCA, buy a little bit every week. Buy ten dollars every, every week. 21:47 Buy several hundred dollars every week, depending on whatever your goal is, that is the way that you most reliably and comfortably acquire Bitcoin and become the most armored against volatility and price movement. 22:05 I like to use, uh, like River Financial from the report that we just produced. Um, they're really good, makes it really simple for people, but there's a bunch of services like that, Cash App we often refer. 22:17 I'll actually show you one of my little hacks, Colin, [lips smack] um, that I found this is one of the most effective ways of, uh, orange pilling people. 22:26 River has this, like, text Bitcoin to anyone, like, feature- Right... 22:32 where you can, like, send somebody a text message, and it allows them to click a link and claim that Bitcoin, and they can either claim it directly to a wallet that they create through any, you know, wallet app or through like, you know, the River platform. 22:48 So I don't know, um, River, sponsor the podcast. We love you. [laughs] Uh, but also, like, at the same time, like, 22:56 if you want, like, a brain-dead easy thing of, like, something that I've found to be tried and true to get people out of zero, that is like, has been one of my favorite, like, 23:09 um, easy hacks once I, like, broach the subject of like- I think, yeah, I think that's the easiest way to get most people on board because the idea of throwing, like, ten, even a thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, a thousand dollars into Bitcoin at any one time, a hundred dollars, no matter what it is, depending on the person's financial situation, it could be a lot of money, and the idea of dropping a few grand on something and then it's worth thirty percent less than that in just a month scares people. 23:36 Yeah. So dollar-cost averaging, I, I big agree. I also use River. I've used Cash App in the past. Both of those are really, really solid platforms for that. Cash App's one of the best just because, like, people... 23:47 Like, I really don't like having people install just another app. They probably already have Cash App on their phone, which is why it's the easiest. 23:54 I mean, if they have fifty-five million users, of which the majority are in the US, like, chances are there's several people at your holiday dinner with Cash App. Some might even use it as their primary bank. 24:05 I think, I think I'll close with this, which is the, uh, one, uh, detail I, um, led the, uh, the newsletter this week. One in seven Americans own Bitcoin. 24:19 That means if you have one of those, like, extended family dinners, you're probably not alone anymore. You're probably not the only crazy person at the table. Sometimes it just becomes a numbers game. 24:31 If you can find that other cousin who you don't really talk to, but the one thing you have in common is some kind of Bitcoin or broader crypto interest, ally with them. 24:43 Pincer attack the topic with your a- with, you know, your allies. Or maybe it's your crazy drunk gold bug uncle who, uh, is, uh, absolutely, uh, riding on cloud nine this year. Um, maybe get them involved. 24:58 Maybe they'll, they'll start to feel, like, uh, genius. Maybe they have a few, like... Maybe they'll throw a, a spare gold bar into some Bitcoin this year. 25:06 So- We're a little too teetotaling in the Harper household for- Yeah... 25:10 the drunk uncle, but we do have a grumpy uncle who's never quite understood Bitcoin, and shout out to my cousin-in-law, Joe, and my cousin, Ryan, if y'all are listening to this, you know- [laughs]... 25:20 you know what I mean. And, uh, just going back to the pincer move and all the cousins, we'll have to apply that during our next family gathering. 25:27 It's, uh, you know, Sun Tzu would have probably wrote about it in The Art of War and, um, uh, someone else needs to make a book full of aphorisms called The Art of Orange Pilling. The Art of Orange Pilling. 25:40 [laughs] Anyway, that's enough. We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Christmas is around the corner. Uh, hopefully Bitcoin goes up, but, uh, you know, again- Who knows? Who the heck knows? 25:51 Don't be the person who, uh, gets your, uh, your drunk uncle, uh, homeless this year. But also, you know, if you make any progress, consider that a win. Thanks. Gobble, gobble, y'all. Gobble, gobble. Bye. [outro music]
