I'm a part of a marketing research pool that periodically offers me focus group participation from a wide array of businesses - private, public etc.

They selected me to be a part of 6 people to answer questions about economics (affordability, mortgages, government spending, inflation). It was at a hotel conference room.

It began slowly and broadly but then got very specific to wanting to understand our views on specific issues. Twice, thr facilitator paused and left thr room to confer with his colleagues in another room who were watching via video. He'd come back and then ask specific questions about specific issues. More on this in one second...

I thought very critically about the entire thing. KYCing myself and my opinions, being recorded, etc. But is seemed to be more about vote getting and which policies would do this opposed to anything else.

So I went for it. I calmly and easily defended positions of the actual causes of inflation, not the grocery gouging narrative, how the government ought to encourage or build Bitcoin mining via renewable power in partnerships, how the economic system can't be fixed with policy handouts, how I would be opposed to redistributionism and UBI. Etc.

In our community there's a lot of circular talk and conferences etc... but it's easy to forget the general pop is still so clueless to much of this.

I don't expect the government to change much but at least the people in the room, and listening, had to hear the Bitcoin perspective.

Stay Humble, stack Sats!