TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #143: JW Weatherman & Giacomo Zucco

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with JW Weatherman and Giacomo Zucco to discuss: - Separating people from their State - Overt v. covert evil empires - Heuristics one can use to gauge the severity of COVID19 - much more Follow JW on Twitter Follow Giacomo on Twitter Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

What's up, freaks? It's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with two gentlemen, one of which has been here a couple times, J.W. Weatherman, and another one who's making his first appearance on TFTC. Very excited for this. Sat down with J.W. Weatherman, obviously, and Giacomo Zucco, an incredible Bitcoiner who I've been following for quite some time, have learned a lot about, a lot about, a lot from, excuse me, and was very excited to sit down and get him on the horn to talk about some pretty heavy topics as you may know jw and giacomo are very aggressively

anti-state so we talked about the different empires in the world particularly the chinese empire the u.s empire and in the italian state and how there are different types of evil empires some are more overt others more subversive and we we jumped into those topics how to identify them debated about which are more evil and which are easier to confront and then talked about the coronavirus heuristics that Giacomo and JW are using to gauge the severity of the crisis and yeah so it's pretty heavy topics pretty heavy discussions had a lot of fun doing it and i am still very confused about what's going on with the coronavirus i i definitely think it is something that is sweeping the world and uh killing people is something that should be taken very

seriously but uh the the points that jw and giacomo brought up throughout this discussion certainly made me think a little bit so i hope it makes you guys think too don't be afraid to think don't be afraid of ideas uh this episode of tales from the crypt was brought to you by the cash app is brought to you by the cash app you freaks already know all about them they're helping to Stack Sats, said it correctly this time, sells Sats, receives Sats, sends Sats, and now they're making Sats the standard. Android users should have that functionality rolled out already.

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like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here for a very interesting conversation we've uh we've we've already dove pretty far into it at this point so i had to stop uh and make sure that we hit record before we got too far into it i'd like to reintroduce you freaks to somebody who's been on this podcast a couple times jw weatherman how are you good man thanks for having me on again i've been looking forward to uh chad

thanks for coming on and we have a first timer on tftc very excited for this somebody i've been following for quite some time who i've learned a lot about uh for quite some time when it pertains to bitcoin somebody who's really uh passionate about bitcoin really passionate about defeating the state i'd like to introduce you freaks to giacomo zucco giacomo welcome to the podcast thank you very much thanks for inviting me hi everybody very happy to be here all right yeah so we were we're gonna have a meandering conversation i feel here uh we've got uh coronavirus taking over the world giacomo you're in italy under uh lockdown uh jw's yeah in california under lockdown even though i i assume california's lockdown is not as

strict as Italy's is at this point. Um, so we were just talking about the, the reaction to the virus, particularly, uh, the different type of government reactions to the virus and how we should view those, whether or not, uh, the U S government is, uh, slyly more despotic than the Chinese government. Uh, so I guess let's just start with the reactions. Yeah, let me, let me actually summarize what we were talking about just before um and then i'll let jacomo go because i think he had he had a better point but i'll summarize it um so what we're talking about is that there's there's a there's all kinds of things going on here but one of the things that we want to be careful about is the tendency for for racism and just you know xenophobia just

hating others hating the different whatever right there's videos going around of like um old chinese women you know old grandmas like eating uh birds out of a bird's nest right this This is this is one that's been huge on Twitter. You see this, you know, 65, 70 year old Chinese woman. She's trimming the hedges and there's a bird's nest and she grabs it. She looks at it and you're thinking, oh, she's going to appreciate the cute little birds. She just pulls them out like they're, you know, chicken wings and just eats them just raw and alive. Right. And then goes back to trim the hedges. So that sort of stuff. There's a very visceral effect that that has on us, especially at a time of fear.

And when there's a virus and we're worried about hygiene and stuff like that, it makes us hate them. Right. And that's playing into a lot of a lot of like negative effects of this where, you know, it could possibly even lead to war or at least more intense embargoes, which is just starving people. um so it's not it's not like people don't die over that um so like pushing back on the racism thing and then we started talking about um you know a distinction that marty makes which is important between the government and the people um and i said look we also need to be careful about villainizing the chinese government too much right in context of the u.s government and the other mafias around the world that are running things um and uh so then then jacomo was kind of responding to that concept so hopefully that's a good summary man uh and can get you off on what you were saying yeah i think it's a very good summary of the discussion and my disagreement was

not about the first part of the of the of the discussion so i agree that we should avoid any kind of uh of racist uh racist uh take out of the story uh even because i'm not sure at all that the idea that the virus was originated inside the Wuhan fish market is an accurate scientific certainty. It's a good epidemiological hypothesis, but we don't know very much about that yet. So it's okay to call it the Chinese virus, I think, just because to call some disease a reference in the place where it was discovered, like the Spanish flu or something else, it's just normal.

The habit to be triggered about any kind of stuff, calling it racism, is actually one of the terrible habits of the Western privileged entitled culture. But transform that into blaming Chinese people or culture or food or cuisine for any kind of animal-to-man transmission is very likely stupid. The distinction about people and government anyway could be tricky as well, because as J.W. was saying, sometimes we could have the tendency to demonize and vilify this kind of typically despotic government. So we vilify, I don't know, Iraq or Iran or China or North Korea, and then we give a pass

to something which is done by the center of the Western civilization from the government point of view, which is the U.S. government, which, in a way, it's even, I mean, historically it did something at least as bad as many of the things we go on accusing, for example, I don't know, confiscation of people's stuff under Roosevelt, concentration camps before the World War II, like a little bit of genocide with Union soldiers and Indians. I mean, historically there is some shit going on in the U.S. government history as well. And also at present the U.S. government is one of the single greatest dangers for personal freedom and property rights and free markets on the globe.

But I think that this kind of point may be true logically, but not very effective strategically when we discuss rhetorically. I remember reaction of some of my friends, very passionate about freedom and everything just like me, to some of the writings of the late Rothbard or some of the recent things you can read on the Lee Rockwell website or the Ron Paul newsletters. Sometimes you get the impression that you blame your own government so much that you end up to be perceived as sympathizing with the very opposite of what you want, which is basically some kind of Eastern totalitarian tyranny.

So I'm not really expressing any strong opinion about this. I'm very conflicted. I think it's a very subtle tradeoff. The point is that in the West, somehow we have a tradition of classical liberal thinking that made the government kind of soft, not very explicit when it enslaves and robs and kills, and very good also at propaganda. And so it created a sustainable big government spiral, which is less obvious, more subtle, But it allowed for something more, it was more sustainable.

Being more sustainable, it became bigger. So in a way, it's true that the bigger government on Earth, so the biggest enemy on Earth right now is the U.S. government, not really the Chinese government. But it's tricky, because the point is that when you try to speak among people which is is already very aware about the problems of central planning, violent interaction, and government in general, then people will probably agree that there is something going on about the federal U.S. government which is even worse than China's Communist Party. But when you talk in general with normies, with people that assumes something, then it

can really send the wrong message that you are supporting this kind of horrible practices. Let me give you an example. It's true that many of the things that are going on in Western culture are absolutely crazy. But, for example, deplatforming of people because they don't agree with some take on coronavirus crisis, probably now Google will just take down your YouTube video and Twitter will ghost ban you, and then maybe they will remove your account because what you say is not completely consistent with the official message.

In China, it's very likely that the Communist Party did actually execute a few influencers and a few doctors, probably one doctor that was spreading awareness about the possible contagion when that was against the lines of the Communist Party. So it's true that the result may be even more nefarious with the Western deplatforming. I mean, deplatforming is very, very effective. It's more effective than killing people, but we cannot be mistaken about the fact that killing somebody is worse than deplatforming him from Twitter. So there is, I mean, I see a trade-off there, which is not very obvious to me.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. I think if we take a step back and try to just change the language that we're using, it sometimes is helpful, right? So this is going to sound really harsh, but if we say, look, the central banking system is a system of slavery, right? And so we have America, it's a slave-owning state. We have Chinese, slave-owning state, slave-owning, you know, political class group. That puts it, I think, in a much clearer context, even though it sounds very harsh. And yes, the United States, I would argue, is a more effective, efficient slave owner than the Chinese government.

They're not quite as subtle about it. And I'll give you one real simple example. The surveillance state, right? So we should all be worried when the slave owners are getting better at tracking and monitoring everything that we do and say. And we look over at China when we're in America or Western countries, and we go, oh my gosh, they're doing facial recognition, they're doing all this sort of stuff. The reality is actually not as bad as it appears. If you have friends in China, they'll tell you, look, the Chinese

government is always doing something really ham-fisted, but they don't actually follow through and implement it. So far, at least, it could get worse. I'm not saying that this is something not to be worried about. I'm saying to put it in context, part of the reason that Chinese people aren't as freaked out as the average soy boy in San Francisco about the Chinese government is that the average Chinese person knows that the Chinese government doesn't actually pull off many of the things that they say they're doing, right? So for example, most of the surveillance cameras that they set up don't actually connect to anything and are out of service in a very short period of time. Why? Because there's government contracts, there's

people who get paid to put them up, there's corruption, there's all of these things that result in, you know, a very goofy response to stuff. Now, on the other side, we have the United States government, where, you know, this is, again, it's a slave owning entity. And they're extremely good at this. They're so good at this, that for, you know, decades, or more, they have been archiving basically everything on the internet. And they're not, they're not as vilified for that. There's a small group of us libertarians and ANCAPs that are very concerned that everything we say and do is getting archived and we have these huge data centers in Utah and all that sort of stuff. But they're actually doing it. It actually works. If somebody wants to hear and

index everything that I've said online, they can do that. It's effective. And it's not as in your face, right? So it's more effective at knowing exactly what people are doing when and why than the facial recognition and the hand fists and stuff that those guys are doing. And it's less scary, which makes it even more effective, right? So we don't, what I'm saying is we don't want to look at China as very scary without realizing that our side is very scary as well. And if you're scared of both, then it's fine, right? Then we can talk about who's being more scary in what different ways.

But what tends to happen is when you have your group and their group, your group, your slave masters want you to maximize the amount of fear that you have towards their group. And to the degree that that happens, you tend to become more patriotic, let's say, right? More committed to your group. And that's what I'm trying to push back against, because I'm not worried about the end caps. I'm looking at the vast majority of people that are liberals and conservatives in the United States that are becoming rapidly more statist. And that seems to coincide quite a bit with their willingness to just be flat out like racist and disgusted by these other people. But again, we're pulled out of poverty, like in the last generation, right? So I'm trying to push back on both of those things as much as possible. And I think as long as everybody walks away scared of both sides, then we're doing a good job. But that tends to not be what I'm saying. If you can get people to be scared of the others, you need somebody to protect you from the others, right? And that's kind of the name of the game. But I think your points are still valid. all right i got some pushback here i agree i'm uh i do not like either regime i think both are hindering freedom but i do think one is hindering freedom more than the other and i would argue the chinese government is and when you when you talked about deplatforming versus killing people jacima i mean i think it's hard to argue that the chinese government is like both you can't i can absolutely argue against that concept right i think that's completely false the u.s is not like

let me get let me get let me get in so a couple i'm gonna say my my piece here and then we'll go back to you jw so that deplatforming certainly exists here in america and it's terrible it should not happen but i mean people aren't even given a platform to to speak the way that we can here in america in china you you get immediately uh censored and you can't even look up things like the tiananmen square massacre and then uh sort of the the influence that is exerted by the chinese government is it's sort of censoring the world so you jw spoke of their surveillance system and saying that it's not as bad as uh as we may think it is but people are getting social credit scores and being uh being hindered from buying train tickets and and getting tickets sent to

them automatically for jaywalking so that is implemented and it is starting to get exported to the rest of the world and so like hawaii is a perfect example they had an ad on twitter basically trying to justify backdoors a couple weeks ago a paid ad with an american actor basically defending the right for these chinese companies to backdoor our tech and then on top of that uh you have them sort of influencing american companies too with the nba and you had one mba gm say something bad about the chinese communist party's concentration camps of the muslims and they threatened to pull contracts and so they're starting to censor american businesses too so the the exportation of their surveillance to the rest of the world is bad

with that being said yes here in the u.s we have our problems but i i don't think they're nearly as bad and i think people are are more attuned and to fighting back against this here in america particularly completely disagree with everything that you just said we are worse off here and i'll give you every example you give me um i'll be able to explain it like this there's a ham-fisted way of accomplishing something and then there's a sophisticated way of accomplishing the sophisticated way gets you better results with less political capital spent okay and every single thing that you can point to the chinese of doing the u.s government has been doing and it's been doing it in a sophisticated way and i'm experiencing a good example of this right now on

twitter so people don't want me to get the message out that i'm not very freaked out about the virus right that that that is unpopular it's not something that the u.s government wants out It's very clear from news media that panic is the approved state-supported, at least, if not sponsored, message. So there's two ways that you could do that. There's the Chinese way, which would be if I say something on WhatsApp, I get a message, the police come by and say something to me maybe. That doesn't really scale, but it's not good. I'm not defending that. Then there's the more sophisticated way.

The more sophisticated way is they just tweak the algorithm in the background, and they silently put me in a little echo chamber with Parabolic Trav. For some reason, Giacomo is out of this, but I can talk to Parabolic Trav. I can talk to Armin von Bitcoin. There's like eight other people, a heavily armed clown, right? So my whole Twitter experience went from being able to talk to a bunch of people to very subtly being narrowed down to where I'm only really interacting with a few dozen people at most. And the bigger influencers, they're only people that have been, like, probably using the same hashtag, right? Now, what's more effective? Probably the one that scales, right?

Again, the goal is not to, like, just terrorize people. That's not effective. The goal here is to control the media message and to control the narrative. And in that case, it's far more effective to do the thing that is less scary and less intense and just have me continue to tweet and nobody sees what I say, right? And you can get much more sophisticated with the sophisticated approach over time to where I wouldn't even be able to detect that, right? You could even do something like have me see likes of, like right now I can like things and people don't know that I liked them, right? It's a little hamfisted. How about this?

How about you see likes or you get likes that are just fake likes, right? That's how I would do it. I would segregate people off and I would probably try to simulate the same amount of engagement they had before. Like when JW tweets something, if he normally gets 50 likes on something, let's give him 50 likes. But not 50 people will have seen it, right? We can even show him that he's had more impressions than he thinks he has, right? So the sophisticated way terrifies me a lot more than the less sophisticated way, partly because people get outraged and there's pushback.

And you can see that evolution with Twitter. I think a year ago, I would have just simply been banned from Twitter. Now I'm just silenced on this particular topic for this particular period of time in this particular way. That's what scares me. And that applies in almost all of the examples that you can think. Yeah, but you don't think the Chinese government is applying those methods as well? No, because they're not that good at it yet.

Because the method that I'm describing is the one in which you are silenced and you're manipulated and you're controlled with the minimum of outrage. So, for example, somebody's on WhatsApp and they say Winnie the Pooh. Right now, it's very obvious. Like, it just doesn't get sent, right? And people go, that pisses me off, right? But here, if I say coronavirus, I don't get just blocked. Nobody sees what I had to say. So I can tell you the Chinese are not doing that, at least in that case, because it's the ham-fisted approach, right? Now, I'll give you another example of surveillance cameras and scary stuff. In the US, we don't go out and set up government

sponsored cameras, right? Instead, we sit down with Jeff Bezos and we say, hey, look, you guys got this really nice little project where you have door cameras on everybody's house. How about we give you a little bit of money and you let us plug into the background? Oh, and by the way, here's a piece of paper that says if you disclose that you did that, and I've been on the receiving end of this stuff that big companies like Google. Here's a piece of paper that says if you tell anybody that we're going to use your system, you're going to go to prison, and this could be considered treason. And everybody in the room goes, holy shit, treason is a death penalty offense which one is more effective a bunch of cameras on sticks or

just a very simple backroom deal where you have an existing business model to put cameras on the front of everybody's homes and all they have to do set up some equipment in a data center and they have a direct feed so all i'm saying is both sides are terrifying to me right i'm not trying to say the chinese i'm not trying to make everybody fall in love with a communist psychopathic murderous dictator slave master on either side. But I'm trying to say, don't get so scared of the other that you forget that we are the empire, brother. We are the ones that are ruling the world. We have the central bank. We spend more money on defense than all other countries combined just about. Even still, China doesn't spend nearly as much on blowing people up and being really good

at that as we do. They don't spend nearly as much on a surveillance system as we do. We're better at this stuff. We've been ruling the world for a little while now, if everybody hasn't noticed. So let's not get too scared of, oh my gosh, China's grown at a 10% clip. In X number of months, if we don't use our brains at all, which we're seeing a lot now with COVID, we're going to have China being the rulers of the whole place, right? Well, let's put it in context of our economy is huge and you can grow at a high percentage when you have small numbers, right? So let's be scared of everybody and as a result let's not be so scared of a virus that we give away all of our civil liberties to you know the the mobster in our neighborhood that's supposed to protect us

yeah i would agree absolutely with the with the distinction between uh more uh let's say more cruel methods to enslave others and more subtiles and complex method and i completely agree with jw that the subtile and and complex and sophisticated methods tend to be more effective For the simple reason that they are more scalable, they are more durable. Basically, the super harsh, aggressive dictatorship will basically collapse sooner than the very subtle mercantilist, chronic capitalist pseudo market that can actually last more and more and become bigger. And I also agree that actually it's more effective in order to silence opinions and to homologate

thought to feed you fake likes instead of to send a policeman to your door. It's just more scalable, more effective, it works better. But the point is that I agree we should be scared of both. We should denounce and expose both with the same consistency. But I'm not sure that when you talk and when you explain. So the point is you want to fight against slavery. You want to fight against tyranny. You want to fight against statism.

You can do two things. One of the things is to speak, to talk, to make points, to explain to the bank, to denounce, to criticize. The other thing is actually to sabotage, to break it, to turn around, to create the black market tools, so to actually do something in order to break the mechanism and to put some sand in the mechanism. So I think that when we talk about the first kind of action, which is basically forming an opinion, you should be balanced.

But if you do err, it's better to err on the side of criticizing the most obvious. Because when one of the two strategies is sophisticated, it means that it also-so let me put it this way. You have a family violence problem. So you have a drunk guy who is beating up the wife and the kids, and then you have another family with a very sophisticated gaslighting version of psychological abuse. There is also some physical abuse, but it's very subtle, it's very complicated. So of course, the second one is more scary, it's more difficult to solve, it will take

more time, it can last for longer, it will not explode. So that's the real danger on one hand. But on the other hand, when you want to convince somebody that home abuse and home violence is bad and you have to do something about that and you don't have to tolerate it, then if you point to the second family, you will have two challenges.

One, you will have to prove that home violence is wrong and ineffective and counterproductive for everything. So it is bad. And the second, that it is happening at all because you have to explain why that is actually some kind of violence that nobody is looking to because it's hidden in a smart way. So you have two discussion going on,

all twisted in one, which is a very difficult task. On the second hand, on the first family, you don't have the reality discussion because it's so obvious that the guy is beating up the wife that you don't need to enter a debate to explain that that's happening. You only have to explain that that is bad. So while on the sabotage, let's say, agoristic point of view, if I had to create some kind

of tool in order to fuck up the central banking system or in order to fuck up the communication surveillance system, if I had to experiment with a mesh network, I would not experiment that in China right now because China's is more urgent. I would actually experiment that in the U.S. because in the U.S. you have this sophisticated I mean, sophisticated methods, sophisticated strategies are also complex, so are also difficult to keep consistent. So you will have a lot of spots of these misalignments and stuff, blind spots for the government, because it's complex, it's sophisticated, it's big, it's also conflicted inside.

Sometimes you have Bezos with different interests from Trump, with different interests from Supreme Court judges with different interests from Zuckerberg and so on and so on. While on the other hand, you basically have a very strict hierarchy. You still have conflicts, but you have a more compact hierarchy in the Communist Party.

So if I want to fight the system practically, probably I will focus on fighting the actual empire, the center of the problem, the US, the Fed, the NSA, and stuff like that. But if I want to talk about problems, then I don't only, I don't want to start with, I mean, in the US, you can talk about Waco. In China, you cannot talk about Tiananmen Square.

It's true that if I talk about Waco too effectively in the West, I will be shadow banned and blocked and stuff like that. But it's easier to just take Tiananmen because it's there, it's obvious. We don't have a debate about the fact that this is happening. You can clearly point it out, illustrate why that's bad, and everybody from the Western government will agree, because it's a gang war.

So since you are bashing the adversary, they will agree with you and they will not block you. And now that you do that, you can actually try with some effort to move the same argument with consistency on your own government. I mean, are we better than them if we do this? This is, I think it's an easier strategy. Not necessarily the only strategy. It's interesting.

I mean, I would change your analogy a little bit. And I would say, we're in the family. We're not like outside looking at these two different families objectively. We are in the family where we have very abusive parents that are doing all kinds of manipulative evil stuff, right? And there's a family down the street where you can see them fighting on the front lawn. The problem is, is that in that situation, the people that are getting us mostly to look at the family looking down the street are the ones that are abusing us. And I'm saying, look, if I'm in a family and there's abuse, I'm going to point to that family first. And I'm going to try to keep the focus on that. Yes, that's obvious. Nobody looks at China and says that's okay. Right. And I don't know. I mean, some of this comes down to...

Sorry, J.W., I will let you go. I'll just stop you right here for a second. My problem is that that's happening. For example, I'm in another dysfunctional family. I'm in Italy right now. I work in Switzerland now. I'm back to Italy. And here, people are literally cheering the Chinese Communist Party everywhere,

and they're saying that the Western model has failed and we should apply literal Chinese policies here. They're even discussing the glorious thing. So for me, the problem is that it's not true that nobody is cheating. I hope that's not the things you have to face in California. I hope that's the case. No, no, you're right, man. It is getting to the point where everybody's like, ah, you know, it's fine to fight on the front lawn.

It's good for everybody. You know, you need a little hair on your chest. It's fine to beat your wife. We're definitely at that point, too. um so yeah it's it's complicated and uh i i uh i think that's that's a really good point i think for me a lot of it though is that we have liberals and we have uh conservatives here and a lot of them they don't their government and they're very worried about the chinese government so i think that's probably

why i have a tendency to try to shift the focus on us and frankly i'm way more scared of our own government. But also, I'm not getting on a plane to try to relocate to China, but maybe I would if I was Chinese. I don't know. All right, so let's dive into this, the tendencies in a current environment, a fear-based environment. Fear is at highs I haven't experienced since 9-11, here in America at least. And it looks like states are trying to leverage that to push draconian measures so last week we had the doj come out here in america and say they want the ability to uh basically lock somebody up without any due process uh or any or any um uh court at all uh on top of that we have police departments bringing in drones to surveil citizens who aren't

um, who aren't abiding by, uh, social distancing laws, which themselves are, are a bit draconian as well. Um, so how would you two recommend to individuals out there to sort of one recognize that there's fear in the air and this is usually, uh, the time when, when governments, uh, try to, to leverage that fear to, uh, tighten the grip of their control and, and to what can they do to fight back? I have a real practical thing that I wanted to mention and get your guys feedback on. One of the things that has been most helpful to me through this whole thing has been the way that I look at the news and the way that I look at the data that's coming in. I'll just say, I don't think the virus is that big of a deal. I think it's been way overblown, but I could be wrong.

And I'm going to explain, like, how I've come to that conclusion. First of all, I look at the motives of everybody involved, right? I look at the motives of the media. I look at the motives of government and politicians. And they're all, like, they're all about as trustworthy as used car salesmen, right? So when I'm trying to figure out what's going on, like, for example, trying to figure out how deadly this virus is, I do have to look at the news. but i know that the news is going to be uh i know their motive is to terrorize me right so before i hit play on the youtube clip or whatever i know their goal is going to be to terrorize me and i

know that my monkey brain is going to kick in so i'm already ready to pause it take a deep breath and hit play again i literally have to do that when i'm letting this uh this crazy propaganda wash over me and it's always propaganda right it's propaganda right now it's propaganda six months ago it was propaganda when it was the california wildfires propaganda every time that there is a hurricane coming and uh you know it's going to be the end of the world it's always fear-based propaganda but it's all we have and that's why if i'm wrong uh i'd ask people to you know kind of give me a pass here because it's really hard to get any data it's really hard to get any knowledge and the way that i have to do it is all like a good example is this morning i knew

that there was going to be a lot of news about younger people being affected by the virus. And that's a very key thing for me in how I'm viewing this thing. Is it only sick and old, which means it's basically like a bad flu? Or is it actually taking out people that, you know, that are younger and healthy? So I expect that they're going to try to terrorize me on that. The first clip that I watched today, it's all about exactly what I expected. Young people are dying. I pause it and like all right i hit play and what i'm looking for is i know that the big headline is going to be terror um just like if you know if you're buying a used car you know that the um you know the car salesman is going to explain to you how critical undercoding is right but what you have

to do is you have to let that wash over you and then wait for the qualification so the qualification if there is going to be any truth i think it's going to be in the qualification and so this morning, it was, hey, lots of young people are dying 20 to 40% was the statistic that that was thrown out to me on the news of people that are in critical condition are under the age of I think 50. Or between the 80s, it was something like that. I had to pause it and go, holy crap, this is terrifying. All right, it's probably nonsense. I hit play. And sure enough, this is how they do it in the US because they're sophisticated. They don't they want to throw out the truth. I think they just want to minimize it they say but we don't know how many of those people had pre-existing

conditions right so that tells me that that's the truth the truth is whether it's 20 or 40 percent or not these people are all like in hospice dying of cancer right we have 500 people or something that are in serious condition in the united states how many of those people were already really sick well i'm sorry guys we just don't have that information right now now the way that I deal with that because of years of practice is I go, all right, I'm going to make my decision based on that, right? I believe that's the best signal to noise. It might end up killing me at some point, but it's the best that I've come up with so far. And I mean, I've also really appreciated the way that Giacomo has been trying to parse this stuff. So I'm curious his thoughts

on that. I think that talking about, thinking about motives is one of the key for me as well. what you described is exactly what i try to do uh motives are not always something which is uh only which you have to study only when you talk about very evil and untransported sorry for the background noise but these are the effects of the of the uh lockdown i feel like that's all right you guys put up with it he's making babies to keep civilization on and you can handle a little bit of background noise exactly it's uh it's like the bbc reporter with a with a kid inside the room very fun so the motives are important not just the motives of evil uh used car salesman but even the motives of friends like i have friends working in hospitals right now i i hear what they

say to me i hear i read what they write to me and i also have to think about motives because Because even if they are my friend and honest with me and not interested in scamming me, they still have motives, like they are in panic themselves. They want their work to be taken seriously. They want to express a message and a concern. So motives are literally everywhere. For example, one very simple motive, one very simple agenda is what basically JW already explained, which is panic and terror by the media.

The media literally have to scare you, because that's an effective business model. It's not something which has anything to do with the fact that media are controlled or manipulated or partially funded by government. It's actually an intrinsic mediatic problem with media. They have to scare you, because it's the only way they can sell. The second point that the media have to do is to make, to convey a simple message, a It's a simple message because a complex message is a message that will not go through, will not really have any effect on the general public.

So you have to make it simple. So nothing is happening is a simple message. Everybody's dying is a simple message, but anything in between is not. And then there is the motives by the government, which basically translates to the long-term motives of the universities and newspapers, unions, stuff like that. And basically his motive is way more complex. If I think about Italian politicians, the first politicians or the World Health Organization clowns, their first motive was not to scare people.

Their first motive was actually to keep people quiet, because the point there was everything is under control. You don't have to be scared about your health, because the government got you. The WHO got your back. So just be quiet. There is no reason to panic. This is just the flu. So every kind of official message by government bodies in the West, at least, but even if

you think about that in China, because the first thing that China's government did was actually to censor it and to keep it quiet and to cover it up. So the first motive is nothing scary is happening because you have to trust me. I'm your guardian. I'm good, I have everything under control, just trust me. Then when the shit hits the fan, either because that's actually happening or because they failed to control the panic in the media.

So for example, they're trying to cover it up, but people will share videos of people dying on Twitter anyway. So they failed to control the narrative. So now it's like a pendulum. Now their interest, their motive, their agenda switch to the other side, which is basically, I have to cover up for the fact that I was minimizing before.

So now I have to maximize it, because my new point is, this is not our fault. People are not, I mean, I failed to convince you that people are not dying. Now I have to convince you that people are dying, but because it's not my fault. It's the apocalypse. I mean, there's nothing we can do. This is actually out of any control. This is more terrible than you think, because, I mean, it's not that socialist health care is failing.

This is actually a giant apocalypse, unprecedented, and that's why ICUs are full. So the Italian government organized a campaign which was basically saying that the only virus is racism, and they organized a campaign which was literally called Hug a Chinese. And then a campaign, when people were starting to stay inside in Milan, they organized a government-funded campaign about go out and take aperitivo with people. So the initial campaign by the government was that. Then they have to turn around in one day and switch to, oh, my God, everybody's dying, stay the fuck home, and I will arrest you if you go out, because basically everything

is under control, is out of our control. Then the third narrative is the scapegoats. Right now the government has to make, to convey a simple message about who is to blame. Of course, you cannot say that Chinese is to blame, because the new kind of democratic government, they are anti-racist, they are globalist. So it cannot be China. So it's basically people going outside to run. Runners are the real devils in society.

So people are now like screaming from the windows, and people running there, literally throwing water at people going outside alone to run, because the simple message is, everything you're suffering is for them, it's their fault. It's not me beating you up. I mean, yeah, it is me, but I'm forced to beat you up because that guy made it necessary. So take it up with him. And so they are screaming at the runners and selfish guys going out. Then I'm sure that the fourth narrative from the government will actually go back again, because now that they asked you for the sacrifice they will have to show you the result so that the fourth narrative will be victory glorious winning over the virus so we did lock down now we printed money and now you're

finally safe and they will censor people that will try to create panic about resurgences of the virus because now the message is we are all safe because we the government solved everything so yes to make Take a long story short, motives are essential, either very, very bad and shady and dark motives like governments or pseudo-scientific buffoons like World Health Organization, or on the other side, even your friends and your local newspaper seller or ourselves, I mean, sometimes our motive can be to be a contrarian because we get more attention if we are contrarian. So I can have the tendency to actually downplay when everybody, also probably effective and kind of useful, but that could be part of my motive.

So motives are keys. And the second key I think is not only focus on the new information you are getting, but also all the context information that you are missing. So if I have been told that 10,000 people are dying for respiratory problems, I don't really think that's a lie the problem is that i miss uh the number about how many people were dying of respiratory problems every year and so i read it up and in italy you have 53 people dying of pneumonia in 2019 which is i mean it's it's it's a lot i don't want to downplay the tragedy for that those family or the fact that we can do something maybe to to save some of those life but

But the point is that I was completely unaware of the context. I had these numbers, but I didn't have any kind of context to compare these numbers with. And when you try to search for this context, you see that most of the things that-I mean, even getting back to our previous discussion, you talk about maybe people dying, but under the-I mean, Chinese government killing some political opponents, but then you think about concentration camps in the south of the United States after the civil wars, and you see that basically the number, I mean, not with Mao, but with recent Communist Party activities, the number is basically comparable.

So the point is not just to have the numbers about what's happening now, but to compare the numbers, to link, to connect, to create the scheme where you can minimize double standards, Because that's one of the key weapon that the status culture, fiat culture uses are double standard. You have to be outraged by something right now and that something does exist. Another and then I shut up because I'm talking too long. But another good point that Martin did at the beginning was actually comparing it not just with other stuff happening now, but with similar stuff happening before.

time gives you depth, gives you context. So, for example, right now you think about the virus, you are scared because everybody's dying and this is terrible and there is no vaccine and exponential curve. So everybody is terrorized. But think about 9-11. I mean, to me, 9-11, I was a kid. I was like, I don't know, 17 years old. It was very effective. Islamic terrorists terrorists were everywhere. They were going to take over Europe demographically by making more kills. They were going to cut the throat of everybody in the streets, because that was really happening with Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn in Holland.

I mean, people was literally being decapitated in the middle of a street in Europe by Islamic terrorists. Was that false? No, that was true. Was that a false flag? I'm convinced it was not. But the point is that it's still true today, but we don't make a big deal out of that. We just learn to live with that, just like one of the many menaces or the many dangers

that we have to face. But in the 1911, the agenda setting around terrorism managed to create a whole set of abuses and laws like patrotect and stuff like that. And that's happening all over again. You don't have to think that COVID-19 doesn't exist in order to think that everything which is going on is partially self-induced by regulation and government action, and partially set in an agenda out of proportion in order to do something similar to what happened after 9-11. Yeah, I totally agree.

I think another tool that I want to give people when they're looking at the news and trying to parse this stuff is exactly what you said. And that is, one, know that you need the context. And two, if they're not providing the context, assume the best. That's one of my heuristics, right? So when they said 20 to 40% of people are young in the United States and they're in ICUs and blah, blah, blah. And then they say, eh, by the way, we don't know how many of those have pre-existing conditions. I immediately assume all of them have pre-existing conditions because I know the motives of the media. I've been terrorized by these people for a couple decades now, and I am pretty confident. Now, I could be wrong. This is going to get me killed someday, possibly,

right? But in general, if they're leaving it out, it's not scary. If it was scary, they would have taken the time to track it down because how many phone calls would they have to make to find out roughly what percentage of those young people were already in hospice dying of cancer. Three, four phone calls, you'd get a pretty rough idea. They didn't do that. So that makes me think that they know that it's not scary because I know their goal is to terrorize me. Another example is 10,000 deaths, right? Just like you said, all these people are dying, blah, blah, blah. Well, how many people typically die? Is it statistically significant yet? That's an obvious question. If you're asking yourself obvious questions that the media are not answering, the answer is probably it's fine,

right? So if they say, oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, the hurricane's going to take out and do X billions of dollars in damage. Scary, terrifying, oh my gosh, what's that going to do to the economy? But if they don't follow up with that, with, eh, that's typical, it's expected, the insurance industry, whatever, or this is 500 times worse than a typical hurricane season, I immediately assume, okay, it's typical, no problem. So I think that's a very useful heuristic in general. No heuristic is perfect, but I'm trying to give you guys some stuff that helps me parse this stuff. And over time, I can start collecting actual data out of that. So I'll give you a couple of really good examples that have helped me conclude that this is not that big of

a deal just in the last week. One is that 99% of Italian deaths had a pre-existing condition. That was just a little qualification in the midst of absolute terror, you know, for an hour news broadcast or something. And I think it was even in a ticker along the bottom. I don't even think they said it. That to me, I've hung on to that as a very important piece of data that's reinforcing my belief that I'm parsing this correctly. Another one that was really important to me is that when they first started this narrative in the united states that young people are dying the big push was new york times front page article about a young guy that died this was yesterday or the day before i can't remember um now that article tells you that you know there's this

young guy i don't know he's 25 or whatever uh blah blah blah i think they even mentioned like he has asthma or something right so something very common um that you'd go well that's that's not exactly a pre-existing condition but then you find out if you carefully parse it that he was also dying of leukemia right so i take that and i go all right i can see they're lying to me it matches their motives i'm going to use that and and hold on to that as a key piece of information that they're going to have to pry out of my brain with a you know with a screwdriver right because i i caught them for sure this time and for sure they were wrong and they were trying to terrorize me. So now when I saw today, 20 to 40%, and they leave out the relevant data and there's the

qualification, all of that adds up to me going, all right, I'm not wearing a mask at the grocery store today. Now that again, that could kill me at some point, but I think that in general, these are useful tools to have in your toolbox. Yeah, I'm not going to lie. I've never been more confused about uh sort of a media event uh in my life i've been going back and forth um is it as bad as as they're making it seem is it a huge psyop um do we really have to worry is this just going to be something that we laugh about in six months to a year and yeah i'm not i'm still very confused so these heuristics are are a bit helpful but then um yeah then you worry like you said jw can kind of kill you if your heuristics are off. So here's another one that I think is really

helpful. Zoom out and try to figure out the possible range of actions that you would take, right? Because they're hitting you, they're terrorizing you, they're trying to get you to, I don't know what. I think there's a couple things that they're trying to do. One is like Giacomo said, they're trying to get clicks. They're so thirsty for clicks, their business model has fallen apart. It's been a laughingstock for a long time. Their relevance is fading like you couldn't believe when it comes to the mainstream media. So that's one of the causes here. And I don't think that you have to be a conspiracy. It could be a conspiracy, but in general, if I can explain everything without anybody planning, that's what I assume. I think

it's more logical if you see one ball hit a second ball and that ball flies off, just assume there's not a ball in the middle. You could be wrong, but it seems like a good heuristic, right? So we know that they're thirsty for clicks and that they're naturally ready to terrorize and lie and leave out. It's a joke at this point, trying to get information out of the mainstream media. On the other hand, we're kind of stepping off of mainstream media and we're starting to put our weight on social media. Problem there, and this is not a conspiracy, this is very obvious, if the social media companies are not popular, in other words, if they're not supported by the mob, then they're going to get regulated they're going to get shut down um you know their twitter is a

good example if these guys don't stay with the mob the mob will destroy them like either through uh through the market or more likely through politics right they can they can simply uh start putting more pressure on twitter as being um you know somebody that's manipulating uh manipulating elections and this whole narrative right what's the solution to that to basically destroy twitter's business model right to have regulations that are impossible to enforce that require them to even do more draconian speech filtering and uh awful stuff like that that just makes the platform unusable right so so if you're the head of twitter right now you have really no choice you can either shut down or you can pander to the mob and the way that you pander to the mob

is you know if i was if it was me and i was trying to keep twitter alive which i probably would be because i think in general it's better than the mainstream media i can see myself having to make deals with the devil and say all right we're going to segregate off these people into little echo chambers otherwise they're coming for us baby right so you have you have that and that explains pretty much all of the like those two things can explain everything that's happened but on top of that you have politicians that are also constantly pandering to the mob like giacomo said they were first, it's not a big deal. But oh, man, we're gonna lose so many points on this that we better we better go the other direction. And now people are so pissed off at the economy, we better go

the other direction, right? They're just following the mob and following polls, too. And then on top of that, you have this crazy dynamic, like in Italy. They're a nightmare of a country when it comes to the EU, right? Like they're, they're, they're not Germany, right? I don't think it's a coincidence that Germany, who has, let's say, more money and less of a debtor, is not having a ton of cases. And Italy is incentivized to have as many cases and be as absolutely pathetic as possible. And you have that exact same dynamic in the States, where California, Florida, every year wants to be declared a national emergency disaster area, because there's billions of dollars that come from the federal government to the governor, and then he gets to hand out that money. So you

have this very corrupt system among the politicians and between the national governments and the subsidiary governments where they want they want to exaggerate and uh um you know exemplify complete terror as much as possible because they they get checks written to them for that so you have all of these things that don't require anything but a basic knowledge of people's motives and uh and you know it could easily explain the situation that we're in which i don't want to minimize the situation that we're in because as a result of all of these unfortunate historical moments where media is dying social media politicians are very powerful we have these federal systems where there's emergency funds all that stuff can come together to completely obliterate the economy and

cause major problems which are worth being very sober and looking at but i think it's it's better to go into it uh with clear thinking and having a simple understanding of how these things fit together than one thinking you know necessarily that this is a genetically engineered thing and that you know we're about to have world war three um because again if you make it more complicated than it actually is it's just harder to navigate yeah i do agree especially on this point about conspiracy theories i think this is one of the cases of false dilemmas that we are forced into that we should try to avoid but when we try to understand what's happening and after we think I think we understand what's happening when we try to explain to people what's happening.

People tend to be very binary, so they tend to assume some kind of dualistic polarization which is existing in the debate. And they will try to frame you in the main widespread dualistic contraposition. So for example, either you agree that this is the actual apocalypse, or on the other hand, you are the nihilists who are denying that anybody is dying and this virus is completely made up hoax. So that's one point. Which actually, I really think that none of the two things are true.

If I do search for context and I look up two numbers in some towns of Lombardy, I can see some statistical change which is not as big as other that happened in the past, for example 2016. In 2016 the rate of normal people died for probably some kind of unnamed, and so unlabeled, and so unexplained and unframed kind of respiratory disease. But nobody knew a name for that, so nobody cared, but it did happen. This time it's less serious, but it's still very, very much serious. So it's not that this is not happening, this is happening, this is bad.

Maybe as JW said, we are wrong, and this is not that serious as 2016 now, but it will be double that next month, and then it will go exponential. So maybe we're wrong, so we must be basically cautious or overcautious. I also appreciate some of the first points that Nassim Taleb did about this virus. Now I think it's going completely nuts, but some of the first points were actually reasonable. When you face an unknown about something, your decision metrics, your strategy metrics, your game theory metrics is not really necessarily symmetrical, because if you are wrong by overestimating something, you are better off, often, that you are wrong by underestimating some threat.

So like in cybersecurity, people tend to be overparanoid as a method, as a tool, because that's, maybe you're wrong about reality, but it's better to have an asymmetric, a disproportionate asymmetrical over-caution reaction, because the payoff of the two cases is not symmetrical, it's not the same. So that's a good point, but if you don't agree with the narrative that everybody's dying and this is the final apocalypse, then you are denying everything. The second kind of false dilemma is actually what JW was just talking about, about conspiracy. Either you agree that experts are right and unbiased and accurate and trustworthy, or

You are making up a conspiracy theory, which I mean, conspiracy theory doesn't have to be wrong. There have been conspiracies in history, like a lot of conspiracies, I'm not even going to list them. Like basically every war the U.S. has been involved with was preceded by a false flag. So we're not exactly the least conspiratorial guys around, but without it, just explain it without it. conspiracy you'll find out but it's not relevant anymore it's yeah but even if you go i mean some

of the recent conspiracies will be controversial because somebody will say they'll deny that exists just go back in history and talk about conspiracies about uh julius chaser and and stuff like that okay conspiracies do exist but the point is that uh you can have the hypothesis that people are wrong because of phenomenons like misplaced uh incentives phenomenons like distort incentives, perverse game theoretical situations, or perverse interactions between agendas and incentives, natural biological biases, natural biological instincts, or cultural macroscopic movements that are wrong. So if you have a moment of the human history in Central America some century before the

16th century, and you have a mass cultural thing that the sun is going to shut down if you don't take the living heart out of the chest of unwilling people, then it's not that there is a conspiracy. It's like a generalized sociological phenomenon of people, even very expert wizards and shamans and kings of the Mayan population. I mean, they are all wrong. The sun is not going to shut down if they don't kill people extracting their heart.

But they are wrong not because of a conspiracy. They're wrong because they are all wrong because the generalized culture about that is bad, or there is a general misplacement of incentives or knowledge or methodology. Like right now we have some really fucked up pseudoscientific methodology in which people really constantly uses double standard

and overlook at motives and don't look at numbers in context and assume some candles. Like in science, right now, sociological web of trust, so social heuristics about who is trustworthy are considered more valuable than reproducibility of a prediction and falsifiable prediction. So scientific, the so-called scientific methods, which is very fashionable today,

it's completely broken. That's not a conspiracy. That's a generalized social effect that can actually account for everybody, including the expert or especially the expert being wrong on something. Even because it's not really, I mean, experts will always tell you everything at the opposite.

You can just cherry pick the experts you want, Then there is only one portion of the expert world which will always agree, which are the official government appointed or multi-government appointed expert like the WHO. So these guys will always agree and usually they will always be wrong because they are selected for politics and central planning

and not selected for scientific ability. So they are just political charlatans. So they tend to be always wrong, even without the conspiracy. yeah that's a huge point man yeah we're seeing that play out here with the fda that's one thing that pissed me off here in america everybody's looking up to the fda for permission to go test stuff because they had all the answers and that was a glaring example of people basically succumbing to the to the state's framing of how we could attack this this virus in the united

states particularly oh but the consequences of not doing that are really high if you're a medical doctor and you do some testing that's not approved by the FDA, you'll lose your license. You've probably got hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt and you've invested decades plus of your life to get to this point in your career. And you're going to expect these people to be so selfless that they're going to test you, even though they know that they're going to have all of that cost and they're not going to be able to be at work in a month. So we got to remember just how, and this is why I want people to be scared of the US government. They are dangerous, and they're killing hundreds of thousands of people every year through economic sanctions, through

limiting our ability to just work together and solve problems, just in the medical system alone that is highly nationalized. I don't know why everybody seems to think that it's not, but this is a perfect example of a nationalized healthcare system where a doctor is not even going to do a test that has, we're not talking about anything dangerous here, right? There's no possible negative side effects that I'm aware of, of doing a test for COVID. The University of Washington developed tests on their own weeks and weeks ago. But for a doctor to actually take that and implement that test, he's got to sacrifice his his career, right? He's got to sacrifice his livelihood. And some of this stuff can even go up to jail time, right? You can really, you know,

practicing medicine without a license, for example, that's not just a little fine. That's a serious deal. So with that context, I think people need to kind of realize just how much the state is running things in medicine. And overall, I think one of the reasons that I think we should all give each other a bunch of slack here, right? Like maybe I'm wrong and it's worse. I think Giacomo is being more cautious than i am um but not much more like we're certainly on the uh the lunatic fringe when it comes to thinking how bad this virus is thinking it's not all that bad i think um or at least you know saying hey there's not evidence that it's bad yet um but even us like we're probably going to give anybody that is in a bunker right now a lot of credit like i won't

even i i won't even mock somebody that's a flat earther anymore because the state has such an an amount of control over the media, over the education system, and over everything else, that when I look at the data that these people have available to them, and the amount of lies that they have been exposed to, I give far more credit to a flat earther than homeschools than I give to somebody that thinks, you know, that the universe is set up the way that I do and puts their kids in the hands of the state for 40 hours a week or something like that. So I think we, our information sources are so bad like the heuristics that i'm talking about they're so pathetic at this point in history i'm not comfortable with them but it's the best that

i can do but i think we just need to be super generous with each other as we try to figure this stuff out but one of the heuristics i want to mention after you guys respond i want to come back to it because i forgot to finish the thought is look at the spectrum of actions that you can take and then uh and then figure out like how is that relevant to what they're telling you right now and if it's not then it's probably just to terrorize you rather than to help you actually protect your family yeah the one point about actionability like i think that also i also forgot in my discussion about about false dilemmas one of my favorites which is actually one one that emerges every time i have an interaction with somebody about this virus

situation right now which is yes but what would you do instead are you proposing to do nothing So this is like this question is very, very deep, because the first dichotomy, the first dilemma that they want to pass right now that is very common right now is that on one side you have political interventionism by the government, or on the other side you have nothing. There's nothing in between. Either nobody does anything and everybody just surrenders to the nature and to the fate, or if we are going to do something, then the central government will have to increase intervention and spending and taxing and regulating, which is an absolutely wrong dilemma, because one of the things that is actually proven is that when you have a society made of people that will act more, that will actually take more steps.

So for example, we have different estimations about the magnitude of this contagion thing. And not only that, but we have different strategies on how you will tackle a contagion thing, assuming you know the magnitude. So if you have a lot of people implementing different strategies based on different hypotheses, what you do have is not inaction. You have a lot of action, and a lot of action which actually will be performed by people with skin in the game, with very short feeble looks, so they will be able to learn very fast

what they're trying to do. They will be able to compete among each other and to tell each other, look, I was wrong, you were right, or the opposite. And they will copy each other because if you see that your people, your family are having more sick people than the others, you will either change your behavior or you will assume a new treatment or stuff like that.

Of course, sometimes feedback loops in order to learn are too long to survive. So now I learned something about the virus, but it's too late because I'm dead, which is a problem. I agree. But this problem is not solved by centralizing the decision at the political level. Because if I centralize the decision at the political level, I will still have a feedback loop to learn, and I could learn when it's too late, but it will make the feedback loop actually slower, not faster.

And we'll have people who have no skill in the game, no responsibility, no knowledge, not even a specific preparation. They will only have a short-term incentive to actually get elected the next time. Or like bureaucrats, they will have to stay in power for the next cycle of bureaucratic assignments. And these people, they are the worst. I mean, it's not ideological. Objectively, these are the worst people as far as information and incentives go.

And so it's true that if you leave people compete and do stuff, you will have a lot of mistakes and a lot of people dying for the mistakes. But that gets worse. There is a great, there is a song, a rap song, where the guys impersonate John Maynard Keynes and Frederick von Hayek, and it's a rap battle. There are two songs with a rap battle between Keynes and Hayek. The first one is called Fear the Boom and Burst, and the second one is called Fight of the Century.

The second, there is a beautiful moment in which basically Keynes, I cannot wrap it because I'm not good, but I will just explain it. Keynes basically tried to convince the jury by asking, what do you want to do, Hayek, when people are unemployed? Are you really proposing to do nothing? Do you, I mean, don't you have any empathy? Are you proposing we do nothing? How is that possible?

And Hayek responds, I don't want to do nothing. There's plenty to do. The question I ponder is who plans for you? Do I plan for myself or I leave it to you? I want plans from many and not from the few. So it's great. It's like the point is not doing nothing. The point is who is doing what, with which information,

with which incentive, and which the skin of who in the game. so it's literally doing more not doing less that was very eloquent explanation yeah i think a good example of this i think applies to giacomo and i i don't know exactly what he was doing two months ago uh when there was so much unknown about the virus but i can almost guarantee that he was doing a lot more than most of the listeners i know that when the virus was first happening I was looking at this and I was saying, no, if it spreads that quickly and it's that dangerous, the actions that everybody's taking right now don't make sense. So I went to the extreme measure of having my groceries delivered. I set up tubs of bleach solution and I went out there like a crazy person, right? Like I'm the rich, crazy guy having groceries delivered. I terrorize this poor driver because I come out with the mask and gloves. I'm like, Hey dude, it's fine. I take out the groceries. I give him a tip.

He doesn't know what's going on. Right. He drives off. And now, now I'm the crazy guy in the neighborhood for sure. But I took all the products, I put them through a bleach solution and then I let my kids take them inside after they were dry. And that was the only interaction that I had outside of my house for maybe four or five days. Like I quarantined pretty hardcore because it was so little data.

And I wasn't able to see through and navigate to those qualifications. The qualifications weren't there yet. And the guidance was insane, right? Nobody was doing anything. And supposedly this thing spreads faster than the cold and kills everybody, right? but I that was an individual action I was free to take and I think it was a lot more intelligent and you know maybe I was wrong I was clearly wrong then maybe I'm wrong now and I'm overreacting but the point is that Giacomo is making is that when you have thousands and thousands and millions of people able to parse the information that's available in different ways using the knowledge that they have in their own instincts you have better outcomes on average than if you have one person taking the information that he has and making that decision across the board and uh and i think it's also relevant like another good heuristic when i'm trying to parse this stuff is

the solution to the problem that they're trying to terrorize me with is always more government power so whether it's climate change or whether it's um even even on the uh the twitter censorship issue um on the transgender kids thing like whatever it is that's designed to freak me out and make me a suicide bomber, that solution is always to give the state more power. And when I see that pattern, I immediately disregard the likelihood of this being a real threat, because I know that there are so many incentives involved to creating false narratives around that. So right now, part of the reason that I don't think that this is that big of a deal is the solutions that are being proposed don't line up with the solutions that are realistic, and they all just happen to

coincide with an increase in state power. Again, this may kill me someday, but it's been a very reliable heuristic that I've used so far. And so many of these heuristics are lining up that I feel fairly confident, including people like Giacomo that I think are really intelligent, looking at the same data and coming to the same conclusion. And I got to say thank you to Twitter for that. I wouldn't know you guys. So big picture context, I think things are getting better because 50 years ago we'd have five channels and we would have never been able to find each other so things are getting better even though and i'll come back to the sort of terror of the statism because i think once you once you conclude that the virus isn't that bad assuming that you conclude the virus

isn't that bad the next virus the next terror that's right on the heels is uh this is a conspiracy and they're going to take away all of our freedoms and i'm again i'm sympathetic with the whole spectrum of possible interpretations of this because we are all you know groping in the dark you know in a in a way that i think is maybe even unprecedented in history um but uh but i i think that's another bugger bear i don't think that's really what's happening either i think it's fairly simple what's going on i think there was we we finally had the technology to tag one of these viruses 30 of the viruses that give people pneumonia just like the ones that killed the people that Giacomo was talking about, 30% of those viruses are unidentified, right? So you get

a virus and you die, 30% of the time, we're like, I don't know, you got a virus, you die. What virus? We've never taken the time to sequence it. We haven't identified it. And there's, you know, we don't even know how many of them there are, right? There's thousands of these viruses, tens of thousands, maybe even millions, because there's a huge chunk that we don't know. So you have that fact with the fear that we have over SARS, the central Chinese government doing their big project tendency um it would be completely reasonable especially in this context for it to be found in wuhan right um it's very possible this thing was floating all over the globe and it could have been floating all over the globe for for centuries for all we know

they get a hold of it in wuhan where they do a bunch of this research they identify it from that moment on all you have to do is rely on media uh thirstiness for clicks right so china China tags it. And I could be wrong, but this is my work in theory. China tags it. They do their normal statist overreaction craziness combined with their complete inability to provide basic health care. We know for a fact that they took people and we put them in quarantine zones, right? You seem healthy. You're elderly. Let's put you in a room with a bunch of sick people. We know they did that, right? So all of these things are going on. Then you have a death rate that is disturbing, especially because we know they weren't testing healthy people. We know people are stupid enough to look at a thousand people are sick. You know, 500 of them have died. That means that this thing kills 50%, right? We know that that's not like, I'm just, I'm just putting pieces on the board that we all acknowledge are completely obvious and undebatable, right? So you have that. You have

the thirstiness of clicks from media globally. You have social media that is trying to just stay with the mob. And we could absolutely be in this situation right now without any sort of conspiracy, without any grand plan to pass the new Patriot Act. Now, yes, these sort of things are always in play. They're always waiting in the wind and emergencies are opportunities to push things through that are bad for us. But my point is, there is absolutely no reason that I've seen to think that the virus is very dangerous. And there's absolutely no reason that I've seen to think that this is a conspiracy. So what we're left with is still bad, but it's a whole lot less bad than I think what most people are assuming right now.

Yeah, it's just a weird anomaly. And speaking to using heuristics of motives and stuff like that, I mean, we had a perfect example of that in the House of Representatives yesterday. The solution to this virus has been economic, mainly in America, outside of social distancing and sheltering in place. And apparently to save the economy, Nancy Pelosi and crew had to push through regulations that forced airlines to educate their users about how much gas is being emitted into the atmosphere per flight. They had funding of random diversity funds that really had nothing to do with saving the economy. And it seemed, again, well, probably not as pernicious as the Patriot Act. This economic crisis caused by the virus was being leveraged to push through ulterior motives. yeah i think that's true but i also want to push back on the idea that this is um so i i think when when i had my moment of terror of okay i don't believe the virus is really that big of a

deal um and i immediately thought okay this is we're looking at we're looking at a conspiracy like this is planned right this is coordinated i never really thought they created the virus but i thought okay you know they they knew that this would happen they put all the pieces in place and i did get scared about the man behind the curtain for about an hour until i spent time just thinking through could i explain this easily um easily without a man behind the curtain if there isn't a man behind the curtain yes this is bad right like we we our economy is taking a huge hit i don't know if it will recover quickly it's possible in my mind that it will because um we still have all the same stuff i could argue i think pretty convincingly that um that people

are freaked out right now but terror is a usually a short-lived thing and we're all going to be getting back to work in a week or two it's not going to be no hits for the economy but um you could see a huge bounce back right all things being equal you have a irrational fear followed by a calm, you would expect an extreme drop and an extreme bounce back. So I could see that happening. On the other hand, we've been printing money like crazy. They do have a tendency to take a temporary problem and make it a permanent problem. So I could also argue that we're in this as a recession slash depression for the next two to three years. But again, let's put it in context, man. This happens every seven to 12 years. So we're due anyway. Everybody that thought

that it was always going to be boom and never have any kind of a bust. You just haven't been paying attention for more than a decade. So it could be bad, but it's not necessarily the end of the world. And one of the things that I want to push back on is this tendency to look at Trump's new laws, Trump's actions, Nancy Pelosi trying to push through Bill XYZ, all of the official increase in government power. I don't want people to be too freaked out by that because there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is this is nothing new. They haven't actually gotten any new power out of it. The bad news is they already had all the power, right? The Constitution has been a joke for at least 100 years since there was a guy that wanted to grow some wheat and feed

it to his cows, and the Supreme Court ruled that that was a violation of interstate commerce. It was a joke before that, but it's been an absolute laughingstock of a joke since that Supreme court ruling. We're talking a hundred years ago, right? At that point, it was very clear that the federal government had unlimited power and could use any loophole it wanted to do anything it wanted. And that the constitution and all of our laws are paper tigers. But the good news is that in spite of that, we haven't really had too much crazy. And that's because Americans are dangerous people. And as long as we stay dangerous, we're going to be okay. So a lot of guns, still a lot of crazies. I'm really loving the crazies right now. If you're up in the woods and I gave you a

you looked six months ago at the grocery store. I appreciate your toothless redneck lifestyle because it's keeping me safe right now. So, you know, nothing, in a way, a lot has changed. In a way, nothing has changed. And I think I want to push back on the idea that this is, you know, that we're entering into a new totalitarian state environment. It's possible. Well, another thing, well, with the bill from yesterday, I think it woke up a lot of people to yes i agree that this has existed for a while but i think highlighting what they were trying to push through particularly with the stimulus package really woke a lot of people up tarp is another example i'd like to harp back to but i mean i had my wife who really doesn't pay

attention to politics that much like angry as hell yesterday when she found out uh what was what they were trying to push through and i think the uh combination of the economy being ground to a halt and it being in the dire straits that it is in only two weeks after having to shut down is really having light bulbs go off in people's heads and having them questioned so i guess that's a good transitionary question here like how how do we start to deconstruct the power of the state as people are having these aha moments is there anything actionable individuals can do out there to actually take back their sovereignty and their and their liberty as they're becoming more aware that the the powers that be really don't have as much control uh as as you like to

think sorry i thought i thought jock and mo was going to go there i'll go in case he's uh muted I was starting to have some problems with the connection I see you two as robots. I don't know if you can see me clearly. You sound like a robot if you can hear me. I can see you. I can see you clear. Try to reconnect. Try to reconnect.

Okay. All right. So, while he's jumping off and rejoining, so, as far as actionable things, I think one One thing is that I think if you're not terrified, you're going to do a lot of things that are reasonable, right? And so what I'm really trying to do in general with friends and family and on this podcast is help people not to be terrified because then they're going to do smart things. So I'll give you an example of something that I think is important to recognize.

Yes, they had printed a crazy amount of money. Yes, that makes it far more likely that we see hyperinflation in the United States than maybe ever in my lifetime. But let's take a step back. Don't dump all of your dollars right now. Don't go buy nothing but ammo with all of your savings because they're definitely going to hyperinflate. I would still say keep some dollars. And the reason I would say keep some dollars is that they're pretty good at this in general, right? Like government is not good at doing the things that they pretend to do, but they're pretty decent at doing the things that they actually do. So instead of thinking of them as somebody that's supposed to provide healthcare, for example, think of them as a slave owner that's trying to extract as much wealth as possible out of the healthcare system, and they don't really care or love you. They're providing a really

effective healthcare system right in that context when it comes to money printing yes you know no they're not trying to stimulate the economy yes they're just trying to steal as much as possible because that's the main uh slave owner business model right now is get a bunch of sheep put them in a pen make them use your money print the money but they're pretty good at it and they you know especially at the center of the empire like we're we we do let places like venezuela hyperinflate Even there, though, there wasn't mass starvation, which, man, think about that for a minute. Like, you want some good news. In my lifetime, there has been famines in Africa that have killed hundreds of thousands

of people. We had hyperinflation in Venezuela. And yes, I wouldn't have wanted to live there. But we didn't see mass starvation. Like, the world is so much better in so many ways over the last few decades that we really got to put this in context. No, we did not see hundreds of thousands of people starve to death in Venezuela. That didn't happen.

we saw a lot of people out of work it was a bad thing we saw a lot of people have to leave venezuela to find work i'm not trying to minimize the damage that can be done by hyperinflation but the world is so much more wealthy we have so many more tools so much better technology to fight with nature and keep ourselves alive than we did 20 years ago it's and it's really easy to forget that when we're focused on the slave owners so yes they've printed a ton of money I would definitely say it's more likely that we have hyperinflation now than I would have said two years ago. But on the other hand, the game, the nature of the game is that when people want to run into dollars, that's a good time to print dollars, right? The value of the dollar was going

up because everybody was running out of the stock market. When people start running from the dollars back into the stock market, they'll probably stop printing as much. I don't like it. I'm not endorsing it but i'm saying this is the nature of the game this is how the river has been flowing for a really long time maybe they've got maybe they've pushed it too far now right like everybody is saying that all the gold bugs are saying that but do you have any evidence for that or is it just that the stock market has become more bubbly than before you know and that the amount of money printing is in proportion with the terror on the stock market i don't actually know but if that's the nature of the game and that's how they steal our money maybe they're just stealing our money

and they're just going to keep stealing our money and we're all still going to be alive and we'll still be using dollars in 10 years you know that much closer to fully moving interesting fascinating stuff it's always a an interesting conversation with you jw i'm glad we got to catch up it's been a while it's been like a year um and it is uh no it is i am still very confused which is again like you said using heuristics i feel like that's uh what the motive of of the system is is to confuse divide and and take advantage of um so i don't know how totally so let's talk about let's talk about like what you can do about it right because you don't like i'm trying to get people out of that position that you're in where

it's like i'm confused and i'm very uncomfortable let's talk about what what are the range of possible things that you could actually do, right? And you've already done a lot of this stuff. Like you're out of the city, you're in a much better place if it is really bad. But let's focus on the virus. Let's assume that the virus is like five times worse than I think it is, maybe 10 times worse than I think it is, right? What would you actually do to prevent a virus? Not the stuff that everybody that's trying to terrorize you is recommending, which again, is one of my heuristics. If they're trying to terrorize me and all they want to do is shut down the economy, I don't trust them. I think there's an ulterior motive. I think even these government idiots, if they were actually scared of the virus, I think the quality of their advice would be better. Could be wrong, but that's one of the things that I use. So what would you actually do? You would on the most extreme end, you'd probably have your either your groceries delivered. First of all, you would you'd isolate yourself from as many people as possible. But real practically, let's say that you can work from home.

you'd want to have your groceries delivered or you'd want to go pick them up preferably outside both of those things have been limited quite a bit so again uh doesn't doesn't really add up with with uh people making decisions that are actually terrified but um if you had to go inside you would wear a mask uh and you probably throw some gloves on and you would go buy stuff and then put it in the car and then when you got home you put it through a bleach solution or something, throw away the gloves and the mask, maybe wash your clothes and take a shower. That's a pain in the ass, but it's not that big of a deal. And that's pretty far extreme as far as the measures that you can take. On the more reasonable side, like the side that I'm on

right now, well, that's it. I don't mean the more reasonable side. Assuming that I'm right, on the more, I don't think the virus is a big deal side is what I should say. then what you could do is you could say okay I'm young I'm healthy because the real dividing line here I think is the difference between who who gets really sick I have I believe that we're probably all going to get the virus we've probably already had it we'll probably get it again like every other cold and that the difference between me and everybody else is either they don't think it's going to spread which I don't know what that's about or they think that it kills young people um i don't think it kills young healthy people so what i'm doing is i'm i'm uh i'm just

avoiding old sick people right i have old people in my life that i care about i'm making sure they stay home um and that they have you know that they're basically quarantined um i have sick people in my life that i care about but beyond that i'm living my life as normal but within that range it's not that extreme right so why do we have to be freaking out here like i wouldn't call you an idiot if you're wearing a mask at the grocery store and wearing gloves and, and bleach solutioning your products before you bring them in the house. If you're not doing all three of those things, and just one or two, I might call you an idiot. But if you're doing those things, you know, that's pretty extreme and totally fine. If you're, you know, I hope people would extend

me the same generosity and say, yeah, if you're not doing anything, but avoiding old and sick people, that's not crazy either. So what does their freak out about? yeah as nothing right and i'm checking off that list too i quarantined my myself and my family away from our elderly uh relatives uh in a town a relatively small town we've had our groceries delivered i've been trying to up my immune system just by taking vitamin c vitamin d um some other supplements just stay healthy uh and and yeah just i have self-isolated out of caution but like you uh i'm not as worried about the virus as as the media is making it seemed like we should be um but like giacomo said the the taleb um framing of just

overestimating the the threat and acting accordingly that way there's a lot less to lose if you do that and that's i'm happy with that decision um so far throughout this whole this whole ordeal um but yeah yeah you know the problem with that approach though is that it it's kind of it's a little bit of the scene in the unseen problem in some ways like i don't i don't mind when people are being overly cautious but i don't see anybody being overly cautious that doesn't also have fear in their voice and the reason that that matters is especially in a situation like this if let's say you're young and healthy the major risk factor that you have is going to be stress related right we're looking at things like suicide drug addiction and even

disease that hit you are very much like stress is a huge factor right so if you're you're 30 years old and you're quarantined and you're not going outside like Nick Szabo I think has done a good job of encouraging people like regardless of whether you're under quarantine or not go to the freaking park walk around keep distance from people if it makes you feel better you need the vitamin d you need the stress relief um so what i would argue is that a lot of people that are um and this is again why i'm pushing back on you know this is the end of the world it's a conspiracy we're finally going to hyperinflate the dollar on this stuff which are all possibilities it's far more likely that anybody listening to me is going to die of stress one way or another

that they're going to die of any of this sort of stuff so you know keep that in mind and make sure you get some sunshine and i've been doing that as well we uh we're lucky to be by the beach i've been taking long walks on the beach um when it hasn't been raining and then when it has been raining i've actually been meditating i got back into meditating i mentioned that last night on the podcast um which has been very helpful to catching your breath and getting away from everything and then yeah trying to turn the news off too has been has been super helpful i can't stay away from twitter but when i'm not looking at twitter try to keep the news away from the tv yeah right on okay so that's that's what we would do for the virus right like that range

now let's talk about like what we would do um let's say that it is a conspiracy right so it's a conspiracy. There's a small cabal of people in and outside of government that have orchestrated this whole thing. What are you actually going to do about it? Well, I would say you want to protect yourself from the virus. We've talked about that. You want to protect yourself from government, basically a totalitarian state, and you want to protect yourself from the economic impacts, right? So we've talked about the virus. How can you protect yourself from a totalitarian state um there's not a whole lot that you can actually do that's actionable i think um in general from that like we we as bitcoiners we're always trying to figure out how to deal with that

that's not a new threat for us and it's not a new that's always on the top five list of our nightmare scenarios right if you listen to any bitcoin or podcast you're going to get the impression that we're a little worried about the amount of centralized power and we think it could go south. So we're probably already doing pretty much everything that we can. I would say though, that one of the things that I'm going to do is I'm going to move out of California. I live in the East Bay area on the other side of San Francisco. It's been convenient for me to be near Silicon Valley. I like to make angel investments and it's really hard to be out of that area for deal flow. So it's definitely going to have an impact on my income. But I would

say this has been a little bit of an eye-opener as far as how bad things can get, how fast they can get. My risk assessment's changed. So I'm going to move to an area that's more rural. I'm not going to do it tomorrow. I'm not going to sell my house for 25% under market and panic, but I am going to sell my house. And if the market price drops, I'll take that hit. But I am going to go through the process of selling my house. I'm going to find some property that's more rural and i'm going to move my family out there now that's a pretty extreme measure right like my whole lifestyle is getting upended but i'm not panicking i'm just saying the equation has changed for me like i didn't realize how weird it could get how fast it could get

this weird and uh as a result i'm gonna make some make some lifestyle choices that are different so that's one thing uh you know you can stop carrying your phone with you all the time i think that it's a pretty easy thing um that is something that also has changed on my sort of risk calculation right um so before i wouldn't have been comfortable with my wife not being able to call 9-1-1 um all of my kids have phones right like my cell phone bill was ridiculous i have like you know a dozen kids they all have cell phones not a dozen half a dozen kids they all have cell phones um and uh you know if we go to the grocery store and they're a couple aisles away i know that I can, I can find them with the locator, you know, if they were to leave the store or whatever.

So I've been kind of extreme on that side. I'm going totally the other direction now. I'm probably not going to carry my phone with me. I'm just going to, you know, know that I can't call 911 and be okay with my wife not being able to call 911. Because I think that the I think it's a little scarier now for me. But again, it's not that big of a deal. And, and that's another very extreme uh thing so i think if you're worried about statism there's some there's some relatively extreme actions you can take that nobody's really recommending that also aren't that big yeah what about speaking up that's one thing i like to say a lot in this podcast what if more people speak up and you think that's uh fruitless at the end of the day or do you think there's a possibility that

given a certain threshold of people speaking up we could actually enact change i i totally think it can and that's why even though social media is um is very scary in a sense it's still not worse than five state-sponsored news stations where every single person is listening to those five guys right um and i'm very optimistic about the internet i'm very optimistic obviously about decentralized money uh in bitcoin or secure money um and i'm still pretty optimistic about social media because I think I think that the way that we're able to connect now is incredibly powerful and I don't think they're going to be able to turn that background I think some companies might take a hit like twitter might get regulated out of

existence and we all have to flip over to gab or a gap and the gab will get hit and you know eventually we'll end up on something that's more resilient but I don't think you can put the genie back in the bottle in that sense like we all know how cool it is to be able to connect I've only been on twitter for two years and it was it's been a weird experience man i mean i uh i've been like popular and well known as a high uh like a high person in the hierarchy inside a corporation right and i've had my inbox blown up and that sort of stuff but getting on twitter was weird it was weird when i was like the first time i talked to nick zabo first time i interacted with adam back um it was kind of disorienting that i can just jump on this platform and immediately

interact with people that i think are pretty brilliant and i didn't even know existed three or four months ago i didn't have to like network my way into building a relationship um which is something i've done in the past when i want to connect with specific people right so i'm super bullish on the impact of social media um i think there's going to be a lot of ebb and flow to it and it's not going to be you know an overnight thing i'm super bullish on bitcoin um i don't necessarily think this is the hyper-bitcoinization moment, but the trend is clear, the use case is super clear, the need is clear, and our progress has been clear. And I could say that about so many different things, right? Poverty, destroying the monopoly on the media, destroying the monopoly

on the money, you know, like everything that is destroying the monopoly on public education, Right. The homeschooling movement, you know, my my pet project, MathBot and things like that. I'm super bullish on all that stuff. So big picture, I still think we're headed in a very positive direction. I think us connecting and talking to each other is huge. And I think things are going to get better. Hopefully, you know, it won't get considerably worse. But if you zoom out, even if this does turn out to be 100 years of totalitarian Chinese government sort of global nonsense, you still zoom out. It still works out really well for a very grand reason. So would it be safe to say that you would say that the pendulum is swinging away from centralized state-sponsored control, at least a little bit at this point?

yeah man since world war ii there's absolutely nobody that could argue different right the amount of stuff that the state controlled and the amount of power that they had in all of the key areas of our life um have has decreased drastically if you zoom out that far and that's a global thing poverty has been cut rapidly uh like all of the things that we care about if you zoom out that far are so much better it's ridiculous now that doesn't mean that we're not going to have a bad year right like 2020 could be a bad year we could see the the pendulum swing back a little bit in the direction but i don't think it's going to be um i don't think it's going to be so bad that there's any chance that we can look back on it and say you know from 1940 to 2040 things got worse

it just doesn't seem like it's a realistic possibility um but you know it's possible but i Look, at the end of the day, individuals have been getting more powerful. And that's what this is primarily about, is we want not a few people to have all the power, we want the power to be spread out. And with every new technology that's developed, that makes the individual better able to provide for his family and defend himself. um you know what did we call it i think 20 years we go we call it the democratization of power or something right like that was a big phrase the democratization now it's like decentralization i guess but this has been a major trend for a long time um like the industrial revolution has had an impact on that trend right so i don't see those things going back the other direction um and another way to look at is that we're all just getting relatively more wealthy uh if you're very very poor and you you're you can't even fill your belly you're not a threat

to anybody you can't defend yourself um if you're wealthy and you can afford a hunting rifle you're infinitely more scary right so very basic things like that are uh are a trend that i don't i don't see how that could reverse um and uh you know anything's possible but i don't think it's very likely and certainly not losing sleep over that in the big picture but okay so so that's me trying to like you know be positive but let's talk about what you can do to protect yourself so we talked about how you can protect yourself from the virus how you can protect yourself from the state what about the economic thing because that's legit right like there's no question people have lost a third of their net worth over the last couple weeks or more very you know very hurtful so

I think what you can do to protect yourself there is what I've been trying to encourage people to do for a long time. Do not invest in things that you don't understand. Don't buy Tesla because you liked the smile of Elon Musk. Only buy Tesla if you know more about the technology and you are an expert in how it works and why it's going to be a game changer and make you a lot of money, right? Only invest in things that you actually understand. I picked Tesla because it's, you know, it's one of my favorite companies. But I don't invest in Tesla, even though I've owned the cars and I actually have an order in for another one, because I don't really understand that business enough. When I invest in something, it's a startup. I get it. I get it better than more than a dozen

people in the world. You don't have to go that extreme. I do have money in Bitcoin and hundreds or thousands of people totally get that, maybe tens of thousands or millions at this point. but only invest in things that you understand and the other thing that I would recommend people do is read human action I know it's brutal there's a Bob Murphy version of it that's easier called choice where he summarizes it read that if you can't read human action that'll have a big impact on how you invest and it will keep you from being as vulnerable in times like this not to gloat but I'm richer now than I was a couple weeks ago and that's because I only invest in things that I really understand that's funny that you say that i'm actually making my way through human action

right now it is uh it's taking me um i can't believe it took me this long to get to it but i have i'm very happy that i am and it's good quarantine reading um right on yeah so i mean take those as action items and as soon as you start actually doing anything you'll feel better right like when you're uh when you're afraid and you don't know what to do and your feet aren't moving you just get sicker you get more vulnerable and uh that's a bad place to be um but you know this big fun chess board most of us are not going to die right now and we're going to be better able to play the game in two more years having been through it so just play the game and uh try to have fun with it wow this uh this episode is ending on a much more positive note than i expected when

we when we walked into it so i think this is a good point to end it i know we didn't get to yeti we will do that uh soon on another episode where we can spend more time on that but i think the uh content of this episode is very condensed and and a good package to send to the freaks right now right on me it's been a good time and i you know the the other thing i want to say is just how much i appreciate being able to jump on and do this with you because i'm totally silenced on twitter like like i said like parabolic trav and me are just like talking to each other that's all what's happening so uh it's cool you know there's other this is another example of decentralization right um so how can you not be bullish about this even when you get censored they're the way out

you're in china you can still use a vpn right so we're gonna win we're gonna win yeah they're not gonna uh they're not gonna censor the uh the podcast rss feed it's actually one of the most decentralized uh media technologies out there still hopefully that doesn't get more centralized um as always it's been a great pleasure i've learned a lot uh about the state uh individualism and how you can take liberty into your own hands it's uh it's always a pleasure jw yeah you too man hey we should give a shout out to jacomo oh um he uh he can't rejoin uh he's the the connection is is fighting him but uh you should follow that dude he's been a huge comfort to me and i think he's a brilliant guy i think you guys all agree he's at uh giacomo zucco uh so

giacomo is j or g i a actually you read it man you got it you're better at this than i am yeah yeah so giacomo yes i'm sorry it's remiss of me to forget that so giacomo zucco on twitter g i a c o m o z u c c o uh again like i said in the beginning of the episode uh somebody who has helped me think a lot about these concepts that JW and I go over, uh, when I have him on the podcast and yes, infinitely grateful for, uh, his time while he was here. Uh, he, he said that he's, uh, gonna help with dinner and that's why he didn't, um, he didn't hop back on. So he's being a good family man, providing, uh, contributing to the dinner table, uh, tonight. So I can't, can't knock him for that, but can thank him greatly for, for joining us and bringing some

incredible insights um i think uh i think what he had to say was very eloquent and that's it's a very nuanced topic and i think that's why people are so scared right now is because they don't understand the nuance and i think we cut through a lot of that today right on man always fun all right jw enjoy the rest of your night you too man see ya peace and love freaks