TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #163: Brandon Quittem

Episode Date: May 26, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Brandon Quittem to discuss: - Fungi - Psychedelic mushrooms - Smart networks - Gall's Law - The Fourth Turning - Generational archetypes - Learning what hard work is while young - much more Follow Brandon 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 when you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent, here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Brandon Quittem to talk about Bitcoin, how it relates to fungi, the fourth turning, growing up with boomer parents, growing up with Gen X parents, and a bunch of different things. A very, very good episode, long episode, long rip. We went into a bunch of stuff and I think you guys are really going to like it. If you guys liked the Robert Breedlove episode, this one is a nice follow-up to that, expanding on some of the cosmic ideas

that we touched on in that episode. This episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by our good friends at the Cash App. You freaks already know all about them. And if you don't know about them, let me tell you about them. They're helping you do many things. They're helping you stack sats, send sats,

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set uh set daily buys weekly buys monthly buys within the app um and just set it and forget it with the cash app on top of that they're letting you invest in stonks if you so please i know a lot of you freaks are like why even bring up the stonks marty well guess what optionality it exists and uh cash app is giving you that optionality if you do want to invest in stonks you can uh invest as little as one dollar in a stonk if your favorite stonk is a little too expensive you can't afford a whole stonk put as little as one dollar into that stonk and because cash app investing is or just cash app is directly connected to your bank account it may even be your bank account they're giving out account numbers and rounding numbers you can direct deposit

checks into the cash app directly just take out the banks all together it seems like square and cash app becoming neo banks uh in in the 21st century there's no four to five day waiting periods to stack sats or stack slivers of stonks you can start doing that today cash app investing is a subsidiary of square and member sipc as always use the code stacking sats that's s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s one word when you download the app if you haven't done so already you're going to get ten dollars and ten dollars going to go to our good friends at owls lacrosse that's owls lacrosse use the code stacking sats download the cash app use the code stacking sats when you download the cash app enjoy this episode with brandon incredible dude uh bringing some really

interesting thoughts to the world of bitcoin enjoy You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

probably should be probably should be oh damn it ah it is recording should i should i record by the way no no i got it i got this all hooked up don't worry uh so yeah we're live what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here uh ready right i'm bunkered down in my seat ready to ready to dive into a long meandering uh conversation that is going to go in many directions but i'm very excited i've been waiting for this for a while i was hoping we're gonna be able to do this in person but obviously the lockdowns have uh the lockdowns are we just just uh resigning ourselves to the fact that we're locked down we're gonna fight back ever who knows but whatever we're here to talk with brandon quitt somebody who hopped on my radar

when he started writing about the comparisons between the bitcoin network and mycelium he's written a bunch of dope content and uh we've been talking in dms about the concept of the fourth turning so we're going to dive into that as well today brandon how the hell are you doing what's up freaks i'm doing great uh yeah like you said wish we could have done this in person but you know we can just save that for another time when we break quarantine hopefully sooner than later yeah i think it'll be sooner than later i think we're gonna i think people are starting to get a little restless a little too restless and as more data comes in hopefully hopefully we make wiser decisions maybe we talk about that a little bit because

before we have recorded we're saying this whole instance depending on how it plays out in the next six to eight months like if we get six to eight months from now and things did not turn out the way uh many models said they would it could be fuel on the fire of the fourth turning but we're going to get to the fourth turning later before uh we get into that let's learn a little bit more about you, how you got into Bitcoin and your fascination with mycelium as it compares to Bitcoin. Definitely, definitely. So, you know, like most freaks, I ran into Bitcoin a few different times before it finally made sense. The first time I ran into it was in like 2011, 2012. I had been working at Oracle selling ERP software for a few years. And someone mentioned that you can buy

drugs on the internet and that caught my ear so a friend of a friend was making Silk Road purchases and I started asking all these questions and he's telling me mining you you make bitcoins with your computer sounded like nonsense so I just thought that coin was a way to buy drugs on the internet I personally never bought any drugs on the internet for those three agencies listening and then a few years later I had quit Oracle around 2014 and my girlfriend at the time now wife sort of just gave up the traditional script you know I thought my whole life was built around being this high-powered business person started lots of companies as a kid that's just

what I thought and then once I sort of arrived there I realized that if this is all that life is then you know this kind of sucks and so kind of just rebelled against the traditional script we spent a year backpacking through asia bumped into bitcoin again there at a meetup in bali had some awesome conversations it started to make sense but i was in such a different place like living out of a bag you know country hopping and so it wasn't really the time for me to dive into it really and then it wasn't until 2017 again um you know number go up got my attention friends telling me how much money they're making and so you know i'm not gonna lie it dropped me brought me back in again and yeah in 2017 typical rabbit hole story went in deep you know three three to

four months not sleeping much girlfriend's like what's wrong with you no social life i thought i discovered the secret of the universe that kind of thing um and and to be honest i was very interested in um the ethereum narrative at the time and like blockchain solves everything and it just it's so compelling and i think we actually need to give some credit to that narrative although i think it's wrong it does bring in a lot of people because bitcoin i think is in some ways harder to understand because we don't we take for granted what money is and so the narrative is so confusing it just sounds fake so it sounds like someone's trying to trick you whereas ethereum is like this happy thing oh it just makes everything better and and so i like a lot of people came into that

i'm guilty um then in 2018 um the lady and i we moved to asia again and i was going to lots of meetups in chiang mai thailand like two 300 person meetups january 2018 like peak mania and i came in there blockchaining everything and the local bitcoin maximalists damian and ryan uh shout out to those two guys they just patiently destroyed my questions one after another until i saw the light and yeah that was a huge turning point i started listening to the bitcoin podcast and sort of had to forsake everything i thought i once knew apologized to everyone i told about how bitcoin or blockchain is going to change everything and then i'd say the real fun started um yeah right about there well before we get into the real fun let maybe we

we can dive into the questions that damien and tyler tyler or ryan ryan ryan milbourne damian me you can check them out on yeah oh yeah i met ryan um i met ryan a few years ago um nice yeah great so what if we can help anybody out there it might be finding tales from the crypt for the first time or relatively new like and may have these same beliefs that you did at the time what were these questions that damian and ryan sort of broke down for you and explained why uh yeah yeah that's it totally i think that's really really important because it is harder than we think it is after sort of already making up our mind that bitcoin's important you sort of forget those early things

so that beginner mind and i would say the the biggest thing that made sense to me was that everything after bitcoin was essentially trying to extract a tiny little piece of what make bitcoin awesome let's say uh trustlessness or censorship resistance or whatever any of those principles try to pull that out on its own and apply it somewhere else it's like taking an arm off of a person and then thinking that it's gonna still be a person you know like a blockchain itself does not do the things that we we say it does a blockchain combined with proof of work comprised with, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all together make the system. And so you can call it a cargo call. That's sort of the definition there, but that was really important. And then

the next question was fundamentally that this is more important that we focus on money rather than the next latest tech innovation. I think those two hit home for me the most. Yeah. Me as well. I fell down that 2013, 2014 all coin rabbit hole and before Ethereum was even a thing. And that's I fell for the fast transactions, low fees narrative pretty hard early on in my journey. It is hard to realize that Bitcoin as a slow, dumb, and lumbersome network actually does make sense. It may not intuitively make sense off the bat, but once you dive into why it is slow and a bit cumbersome and hard to change, that you realize, oh, these are important attributes to have

if you want to be sufficiently distributed and to have the assurances from a monetary perspective that actually make it valuable in the first place. But yeah, the Ethereum, I do have to give them credit. The World Computer, the Turing Complete World Computer meme, it was a huge one and it drew a lot of people in. And I mean, it still has draw. I mean, it'd be remiss of us to say it didn't have any attention drawn to it

today it still does even though i think a lot of that is misguided and uh i question their their ability to transition to a 2.0 version uh maybe a classic second syndrome second system syndrome problem that they're running into i have a thread detailing their their uh their failure to launch eth2 or launch pos specifically we shall see but no i think um i agree like it is it is daunting to sort of see everything that's out there and come to the conclusion hey bitcoin may and probably is the the most worthwhile project to focus on and so this is a good transition into why it is a good network and so i listened to your or watched your presentation from the bitcoin magazine live stream yesterday on comparing bitcoin to mycelium and how they're very

comparable and i think this is a good um good time in this episode to sort of dive into number one why are you what how did your your interest for mycelium come to be and how how long have you studied it and when did you make the connection that uh it has a lot of similarities with the bitcoin network yeah definitely um before i get into that i just want to throw a shout out to the the article bitcoin is worse is better by guern definitely my favorite still my favorite piece of bitcoin content ever created and it ties directly into that where it's not intuitive it sounds bad but that you know teasing that out is what makes it so powerful i think i think that article was a subject of the second ever bent bitcoin is worse is better

amazing um yeah so how did i get into fungi mushrooms etc um i first got into this world through foraging and i've always been into food and cooking and outdoors grew up camping and fishing and so I had you know a general interest in that stuff and I'm not sure what motivated me to go out the first time I probably had a friend who found some morels I was like oh that's cool and so I just went to a local park here with a friend and we found a bunch of mushrooms and it was super fun you're out there just treasure hunting in the woods and most people don't believe this but it's really exciting foraging mushrooms you're hiking around looking you find some gold on the ground and yeah it's fun and so started with the foraging then it turned into

cooking what you find then it started figuring out like okay what's going on here which led me to Paul Stamets most people who are into fungi that's sort of their first teacher devoured all his content read the book started learning and I get really obsessive about things and so sort of that learning curve gives me a high and so if I if I'm studying something new that first like 90 percent of understanding is really exciting you're making all these connections your world's getting bigger and then once i sort of plateau and i kind of understand something i move on but with fungi the rabbit hole is so deep and similar with bitcoin there is no end here

and so those are why those two concepts sort of captivate me long term it's inability to be mastered is alluring to me and yeah and then how did i connect the two i was living in bali at the time um again in 2018 right after maybe six months after i decided that bitcoin was the real deal and the rest was kind of nonsense and you know we had lots a bunch of meetups there so i'm in with crypto people bitcoin people all the time and you know had the idea at one of the meetups took my scooter back and just felt possessed for I'm not sure a couple hours just scribbling in a journal like a crazy person ideas coming out of nowhere and I pretty much got out like 80% of the foundational

ideas in that moment and then it took me a couple months to sort of like defrag that madness and piece it together and have the confidence honestly to put it out there because at that time I was not seeing much content related or anywhere like this it was a little bit more um economics or game theory or something like the traditional type bitcoin thought pieces and then dan held published his planting bitcoin series and i was like okay we can get a little out there and i really resonated with that framing and so i reached out to dan and say hey i'm thinking about publishing something about mycelium same concept would you mind looking at it and you know thanks to dan i'm nobody at the time and he offered help gave me great notes and helped me sort of package that

up and get it out there and so yeah couldn't thank dan enough for that one yeah i mean i remember because i myself have dabbled in these psychedelic mushrooms in the past a few times uh i actually attribute them to changing my life and at a weird point uh not a weird point just Like at a point where I was having a similar crisis of conscience that you did at Oracle, I was working at the Man of Tutor's phone. And again, I loved all the people I worked with. I learned a lot there, but that 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and slacks and a button up doing the same thing every day really didn't, I felt a little bit trapped.

Like, ah, is this the rest of my life? Like, is this what it is? and was with a couple of friends on a weekend in Chicago during a cold December night, actually. The weather conditions were probably not ideal for a mushroom trip, but I don't know. I feel like I had my mind open. I tripped a little bit, and it really, for me at least,

and other people describe it this way, it just helped me view the world through a different lens, give a different perspective to how your mind could see and uh and interpret things and actually I think it gave me courage to to seek out other things and and go outside of of what was um at the time to me at least considered normal and the career trajectory I was supposed to be on and I feel you man yeah I mean and I uh I've tripped a couple times since then and it's always been a great experience always when i when i feel like i want to get um grounded with nature particularly uh a little a little trip doesn't hurt now that i have a child i don't know if i'll

be doing that anytime soon but um it has definitely changed my perspective on the world and i think what you write about and talk about with fungi particularly is that it's it's alive and more importantly it's like an intelligent life form and it doesn't have the same intelligence that we have but it does certainly have some form of intelligence so i guess we can jump in there and and why what how do we compare our intelligence to the intelligence of these fungi networks yeah definitely um before i even get there if you don't mind i'd like to just comment on the psychedelic side because i i feel strongly about this subject i don't talk about it too much in public but I'm becoming less shy about it but I think the the whole consciousness thing needs to

be reframed for civilization because we're constantly changing our consciousness there's no such thing as like normal consciousness you have a coffee your consciousness changes you have some sugar it changes alcohol you know you stay up too late your consciousness changes you just work out it changes and so it's much more like we need to just be open to these different changes if you fast, if you dance, if you spin around in a circle a bunch of times, it changes. And ancient man was not obtuse to this. Ancient man explored all different forms of changing consciousness, whether through plants or mushrooms or through other, you know, pain or sitting in a cave. And so it's a very fundamentally human thing to seek to change your consciousness. It's a way

to see the world differently and animals get high all the time and so i think it's just we just need to get rid of that stigma that might have came in with the drugs are bad and dare type period in our in our consciousness sort of a response to the 60s which got a little bit out of control but for healthy adults these are tools to make yourself better they're not scary things they're not party things they're challenging you know and yeah i just think it's an important thing for humans to have cognitive liberty as well if you want to do these things in the comfort of your own home you should be able to in the same way we should have a free market for money and you should be able to hold the assets that you want to hold same kind of liberty in my mind completely agree i mean

and the data is coming out the studies are starting to show it's helping soldiers returning from home with ptsd it's helping people just with run-of-the-mill depression um overcome that and why do you think that is why is why is it helping um these these issues because it does it does open your your mind to a different state of consciousness and does it open us up to like is it a connection with nature does it help us connect with nature in your opinion when you're when you're on that trip yeah good question i think the so two things here number one we're doing our best from our scientific lens to try to understand this stuff right and i'll talk to that angle but the reality

is we're monkeys looking through a microscope and we have no clue but the best science that we have now is all revolving around the default mode network which is from robin carhart harris in the UK there and the default mode network is kind of like the standard arrangement the standard connections of all the parts of your brain you can think like a sled that goes down a hill it makes a groove and then you go down the hill again and the sled wants to stay in that groove stay in that groove stay in that groove and so you constantly have the same type of thoughts and same type of day and then your brain goes okay well this is all we really do so we're going to form a default mode here. And this is your typical waking state. And if you're too over

optimized in that default mode, you would feel anxious, you would feel a little bit laser focused on your own issues, and you know, anxiety and mind wandering, all that kind of stuff. Psychedelics temporarily disassociate that default mode. And so things like operating your phone is hard, right because we do it unconsciously normally but you remove that default mode and now you're sort of seeing the world with fresh eyes as if you're a child and you know through that angle the what's happening with trauma is that they have deeply imprinted experiences and so you hear a loud noise you don't have a response to a loud noise you have a response to a gunshot or a bomb going off so small things set you off and that's built into the default mode network of that person

You temporarily remove the default mode network, and now you may experience a loud sound, so input, but the response to that input is no longer fear. So now you have a new memory associated with that stimulus. And then when you come out of that experience, you're no longer tied to that sort of like tunnel vision dose response that you had. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's fascinating. And I'm happy this is a lot of this is happening at Johns Hopkins university to all these experiments. And so I'm happy, but it's becoming, uh,

less taboo because I, again, just anecdotally with myself, I do think it changed my life for the better and that it opened, opened up my consciousness and, and just had me question, uh, the reality I was living in at the time. And it was, made me realize it was not the only way and gave me the confidence to, to explore other things. Um, which is yeah it's beautiful but we're not here to focus on the psychedelics we're here to focus more on the mycelium and these networks that they create so like one of the largest organisms on

earth is a is fungi right like in the pacific northwest isn't that true yeah that's right in eastern oregon there's a mycelial mat that's like i think it's about 1500 football fields large so a very large organism that's several thousand years old it's consuming a forest in the mountains there and it's quite insane to think about and maybe we should give the freaks a quick background on on mushrooms and fungi so fungi are their own kingdom there are plants and animals fungi etc and there are more fungi than there are plants and animals combined so it's a very large and very diverse kingdom. They more or less foster all the ecosystems. They inhale oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide. We're more, humans are more closely related to fungi than we are to plants.

So a very long time ago, we branched off taxonomically. They have external stomachs, we have internal stomachs. So there's a lot of similarities there. And what most people think about with fungi is the mushroom, which only is about 10% of fungi produce mushrooms. And you can think of a mushroom like the apple on a tree. It's just the sexual reproductive organ of a fungi. The majority of the organism's life is spent underground or in a tree in that mycelium form. And mycelium is kind of like a root structure, a one cell wall network. And very similar to our internet it sends information bi-directionally it links up with other trees and plants and they trade resources and it sort of acts as an immune system for the forest and these organisms uh do

appear to be alive and they do sorry they are alive obviously they do appear to be intelligent and it's hard to say like they probably don't have consciousness like humans do but at a very minimum they have some sort of a simulated consciousness they they're made up of a bunch of little parts that are all exploring and sort of making their own decisions and if it comes across a fork in the road the mycelium will just split and simultaneously explore both paths whichever path's right it will reroute and then re-optimize for its environment so it's sort of like a yeah in the same way like a bitcoin network it's a bunch of individual people all acting in their both their best interest based on the information they have but yet that's all formed to create the

same network and so yeah that that's just kind of the archetype of this fungi that network intelligence and you can think of it like a distributed brain and that same network archetype for some reason appears throughout the universe if you look at neurons they follow the same archetype if you look at the cosmos dark matter and dark energy same pattern and so what this tells to me is that through biology which is sort of this emergent machine that produces life and evolves over time to take advantage of niche it's yeah that archetype persists because it works Nature doesn't doesn't continue the same strategy if it doesn't work. Right. All the organisms alive today have unique strategies that work. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be here. And so this this network archetype that Bitcoin also represents the Internet also represents gives me confidence that we're on to something important here because it continues to persist. um and so yeah that that's bitcoin to me is this decentralized brain network archetype type

species yeah no and i like that you bring up the ralph merkel quote a lot i think i think bitcoin is alive it replicates itself and spreads itself across the world geographically and it sits it may be code and a protocol that runs uh vr computers and hardware but it is replicating itself on hardware around the world and you could cut off part of it and some parts of the world and it will still persist on other parts and that that sort of anti-fragility that's built in uh does mimic these these mycelial networks that you write and talk about so much and it's it's a direct contradiction to the central banking system which is top down you just have one one node sort of dictating everything that goes on for everybody below it and it seems very

unnatural at least to me as somebody who's studied federal reserve and is getting more into complex systems of which bitcoin is probably one and economy definitely is and replacing that top-down structure one node rules the day of the federal reserve and central banking system that we live under with this complex system just seems naturally, uh, like a good idea to me. Definitely. And I, I think a good analogy here to stick with biology is, um, is looking at monocropping versus sort of an old girl forest or any type of emergent forest, whereas the monocrop would be the Fiat, right?

It's just straight lines. It's rows, um, you know, it's centrally planned, it's susceptible disease and it's very fragile and so what that offers is predictability short-term in the farm you sort of like know your inputs and your outputs but that long-term tail risk is very real and so the fiat monocropping thing is a short-term thing centrally planned not going to work long-term bitcoin on the other hand is more like an emergent system a forest and that that's born out of fierce competition and incremental growth. It's sustainable. It's anti-fragile. And when you compare that to Bitcoin, Bitcoin accepts short-term price volatility. It says that's

the reality. But in return, it gains long-term systemic stability, which is a huge difference from what we're doing now. Instead of having 08, 09, and now 2020 financial crashes, each time siphoning well from the bottom to the top um in a bitcoin world there will be you know if if a business is going to go out of business it's going to go out of business but that capital will be reallocated creative destruction moves on and you know a much more smooth business cycle which is much better for the average person and it's also much better for humanity to not go through these periodic points of huge waste you know we sort of like go up really high and then we crash should we overcompensate way down low and then it takes years to dig ourselves back out and so maybe

only you know maybe we're trending linearly or we're trending up in productivity and stuff like that let's assume but it's more like this crazy wave function of of ups and downs and that comes with tons of waste and it's not the ideal system for humanity no and this waste is produced by human hubris right like the thought that we could control these complex systems that we can control these complex systems and how do we let that you were i mean we as bitcoiners probably recognize that hubris and shy away from it by participating in the bitcoin network because it's complex grassroots system but a lot of people are still beholden to the traditional system that is run mainly on hubris and the idea that academics can model out economic inputs and produce outputs

that that actually play out in the real world and it couldn't be further from the truth no it's absolutely madness to assume that a couple old white guys can absorb all the data of everyone in the economy real time and then somehow make decisions it's actually insane And if we want to humble these people, maybe we can look to the slime mold, which I'm sure some of the freaks have already heard about this story, but it's one of my favorites. Some Japanese scientists essentially recreated the subway system in Tokyo, but instead of subway stations, they put little oat flakes, which are a slime mold, a strange organism's favorite food. and now that they mapped out this Tokyo subway system they unleashed the slime mold in this little maze and the slime mold grew really quickly over the course of a day it found all the food and then it reorganized the entire network into

the most efficient process to harvest this food and distribute it out through its network and what the scientists found is that the slime molds version of the Tokyo subway system was actually more efficient and more redundant so just a far superior system and this out competed our Japanese engineers the arguably the smart people there so let's dive into that a little bit like so what were the like the particular design decisions that the slime mold made that if so could it could those decisions be have been implemented in Japan in Tokyo yeah so unfortunately the subway system was already built at the time and so you

know it would have been smarter for them to ask the slime mold instead of the scientists before they architected the system but it was more just an experiment on how the slime mold operates and sort of measuring intelligence and it does simulate intelligence I don't know if it's actually intelligent but embedded into nature they have these optimization protocols it you know it sort of makes decisions that's the most efficient doesn't want to waste resources and it perfects that system over a long period of time geological time to the point where now it's sort of like a biological distributed computer network that's one way to look at a

slime mold each little each little part of the slime mold makes its own decisions it sees some food it goes and gets it and you know then it coordinates and and forms the better network yeah it's crazy to think we could be out out thought by a slime mold yeah right and it teaches us some things right it's not to knock engineers i'm sure those guys were great but it does show us some examples of how pushing complexity to the edge works and how in certain situations that is the right approach and i think bitcoin is one of them or money is one of them right just like the economy cannot be uh steered by the man behind the curtain the wizard of oz which is what that was about for those of you don't know um instead it pushes

complexity to the edge just like a slime mold makes decisions just like bitcoiners make decisions they decide is bcash the real bitcoin or not right we vote with our economic nodes and it's also really important because um if we make a decision on the edge let's say on layer two it doesn't matter right lightning network can completely fail and bitcoin is unharmed and that's really really important for a system that we want to last a hundred or a thousand years is we need autonomy on the edge and that's where we push the boundaries while preserving the the core function of the system which i know you like gall's law but that's one that the ethereans need to reread Yeah, I mean, for you freaks, let's do a little for you freaks who may be newer to this podcast.

Gall's Law is a law I've talked a lot about in the past. It's been a while since we brought it up here. But Gall's Law dictates that any complex system started out as a very simple system. They got more complex over time, basically scaling as it needed to very modularly. And it was not a complex idea out of the box like Ethereum is. and i yeah so i guess bitcoin sort of embodies gaul's law because it's a simple idea of a distributed peer-to-peer cash system run on proof of work with people that run nodes and basically it's just a messaging system that allows you to send you know to find ut or create utxos

via mining and then send them via messages across the network and we humans are like at the end of the day that's all bitcoin is is a messaging network a messaging protocol we we give my shout out to the team at knox we give value to the scarce information space that uh that we get access to on that network and um where ethereum or something similar to that is trying to be a world computer where you're you're able to to write complex uh smart contracts at the protocol level that then have to be um sort of absorbed and copied and distributed by the full nodes of that network and that's proving um hard to to scale and like brandon alluded to things like lightning network liquid push the complexity um to second layers and outside of the core

protocol which is just slow dumb and simple really at the end of the day and enables all complexity but be built on top of it exactly and one thing that comes to mind here is that you know the sort of uh if you want to make something complex you have to start with simple pieces and that's not just true in our convenient example here about why bitcoin's better right that's true fundamentally throughout the universe that emergent systems that end up complex started simple if you think about a human we're made up of organs which are each their own separate thing that do their own separate function they all work together but then if you look at an organ an organ's made of organials sort of organ parts and those organials form an organ and each

organ organule has cells and each cell has smaller parts and smaller parts so the whole universe is built on simple things that build up together and then you get this complex system that we call humans and another thing that comes to my ideas about the simplicity of bitcoin is that it doesn't really matter what the technology is that encompasses bitcoin you know in the future let's say bitcoin is proven to break in some capacity which i don't think this is a very high likelihood of happening, but let's say it does, that doesn't destroy Bitcoin. At this point, the only thing that really matters with Bitcoin is that there is a accounting ledger of who owns what and a bunch of people that believe in it. And we all agree on certain principles like 21

million and who owns what. But if everything breaks, we can just put the ledger in a new system. And that's crucially important for the long term. I had a conversation with my father-in-law, actually recently, who's now diving down the rabbit hole. That's been fun. And one of his questions was, what if Bitcoin 2.0 comes out and it obsoletes Bitcoin? And I always bring it back to that question where the ledger's being backed up all around the world, both on computers and also some hardcore Bitcoiners back it up on hard disks, like physical backup in Faraday cages today. And worst case scenario, we can reboot. No problem. You can't reboot the dollar system. You can't reboot the economy. And yeah, that's kind of an apparent thing right now where Bitcoin, yeah, sure, we crashed on Black Thursday or whatever. And all the blood was let out immediately. And now we're rebuilding and now we're, you know, back into a significantly better place where our economy is just going to be spiraling out of control probably for years.

yeah i don't think back to lockdowns i don't think the people who shut everything down realize the complex system that the economy is and how fragile it was because of some of the centraling centralizing factors within the economy mainly the central banking system and um an bloated federal government which a lot of people depend on at this given point in time but back to bitcoin too and that will bitcoin 2.0 ever take take over bitcoin in the future and the aspect of the ledger the fact that's being replicated and has so much it's got over 630 000 blocks of history now um up to this point i think again the concept of lindy i know a lot of bitcoiners like to beat talebian references to death but this is it's true

So like the more Bitcoin survives and the larger, or not larger, the higher its ledger goes, the higher block height we get to, the more certainty one can have that that is a system that people believe in and actually works and has a robust history that is worth rebooting. If that Bitcoin 2.0 ever came out, like it would have to compete with that history of the ledger, which Bitcoin is currently building. Absolutely. And good luck fighting the inertia that Bitcoin's gathering. It's just collecting revolutionaries and think-for-yourselfers and people who genuinely want to make the world better and feel, and maybe we didn't know what was wrong in the beginning, kind of like the line in The Matrix. You feel like something's wrong, but you don't know exactly what it is. You stay up all night looking on the Internet, searching for it, right? That's the matrix. I feel like a lot of Bitcoiners were in that place. Bitcoin found them and you're like, holy shit, this is the thing that I didn't know I was

missing. This is the thing that gives me some optimism. I know you've talked about this. It's very true for me. But call it five years ago, I was not optimistic about the direction the world's going. and i'm you know finding bitcoin is like okay here's a system that i can get behind here's a system that pushes back on what i think is not working and holy shit there's a bunch of people like me in many ways surrounding it that i now consider my brothers in a in a very strange way

that even friends i've known my whole life i don't relate to as well because we're missing this this fundamental thing and to me that gives me tremendous optimism and now we're sort of getting validation from the big boys like the raul paul and paul tudor jones and all those type of people are now starting to wake up to the fact and yeah it just it's so optimistic for the future and without it shit i think we'd be fucked without it um and that's what makes me sort of believe it's inevitable to a certain extent to his maybe maybe this is hubristic but after a certain point once you understand the system it's a no-brainer it's like this is empirically objectively better than what we have if you believe that the world is built of complex

systems and money is a system that should not be centrally controlled by very few men i guess It's a tweet I sent out in the pen I wrote yesterday that went a little viral. People don't realize, a lot of people don't realize, when the Fed changes monetary policy, yes, there's 12 Federal Reserve banks around the country. There's nine board members, I believe, but there's only five voting members at any given point in time that decide what the policy of the month is.

And so you have five people out of 330 million Americans deciding on U.S. monetary policy, but we have the reserve currency of the world, and that's five people, literally affecting every human on Earth, which is getting close to 7.8 billion people. And I think Alex Thorne, formerly from Fidelity, you might still be there, I'm not sure, tweeted out, like, the U.S., the current monetary system that rules the day

is susceptible to a 0.000000001515% attack, as opposed to a 51% attack. and it's it's insane when you like you do feel like you're neo in the matrix like i just learned kung fu like this is it's insane that i have this asymmetric information seriously man and i i do feel like it's not an easy concept to grasp fundamentally why bitcoin is is as we say inevitable i do feel the same way um but it's not an easy road to come to to that conclusion. You know, you still see tons of blockchainers and whatever, people getting caught up in these crazy narratives that have been here for years, but they sort of made up

their mind too soon on Bitcoin. They never really got it. And, you know, just taking that as an example, I think we do need to be realistic about how slow it will take for people to adopt the system fully. That being said, we're sort of entering a period here where people are asking a lot more questions and in my personal life i should really write the number down but i think i've onboarded between 15 and 20 people in the last month that have never bought bitcoin before and like yeah people are asking questions and the memes are getting out there and the money printer is being known and people have all this free time and they're thinking and yeah in that regard, I think that we're seeing some sort of a period here where we have a chance for Bitcoin to

really accelerate. And it's during that time of crisis where the dollar is weak and Bitcoin is strong and the economic tailwinds here, like we're probably going to run into UBI for the next chunk of time here. I sort of see that as inevitable. And Bitcoin's going to just do well in that environment it's it's it's poised for this moment you know it was born out of the crisis and now it's time to start taking mindshare and it's certainly not ready to be the financial system of the world not even close but it's definitely ready to you know be up there with gold and seen as a real asset and a lot of infrastructure needs to be built but the time is now for bitcoin yeah well this goes back to gall's law and complex systems starting out very simple

and sort of growing slowly but surely over time again that's what i mean i say this on the podcast a lot too pisses me off when people want bitcoin to be everything out of the box and be that today it's like it's not it's not going to happen it's an unrealistic expectation unless you want a centralized system that can provide uh those use cases you're going to have a lot of trade-offs that make it completely unnecessary to even run a blockchain or even call it a blockchain at that point. And it's just slowly over time getting integrated into more systems like what we're trying to do at GAM,

get the energy sector involved and have them sort of see Bitcoin as something that can help them out. And then they've got skin in the game and they're protecting Bitcoin and they see the value in Bitcoin. And people, like you said, onboarding individual friends who are asking questions and looking to learn more about this, like it just takes time. And it is a rewiring of mental frameworks that are persistent throughout the world. People are very stuck in their ways, and they have grown up viewing, going back to states of consciousness and perspectives. Everybody's perspective is such that governments are good, central banks make sense. You have to completely rewire people's brains and have them realize, hey, maybe that isn't so true, and that takes time.

Yeah, and I also think that there's some evolutionary biology here to lean on, which is our programming as modern humans, sort of our desires, the thing that makes us human, that was all created during a very different period. Our biology, our genes, that was all optimized for being hunter-gatherers, which means you live in a group of 100, 150 people, you're doing low-level activity all day finding food, hunting, you're living outside, you go to bed. When the sun goes down, you wake up when the sun comes out. Sort of those fundamental human things. And in that environment, the alpha male, let's say, or the leader of the group, didn't have to be a male, but the leader of the group, you'd think

is sort of the one who gets to pass on his genes and he's the best and he's the leader. But actually what we're finding is that the leader always had a target on its back because the leader got the the best situation. And so the leader actually died early very often. And so instead of being a leader, what actually worked in a hunter-gatherer society was being more of a yes man or a go with the crowd person. You're not the weakling, but you're not the leader. You're around, you're helpful, and you don't rock the boat. And those are the type of people who pass on their genes. So if we take that as true, what that means is there's not that many people that inherently go against the grain or who are inherently designed to be leaders most people are designed to be

followers and so if that's true then okay we have this crisis period or you know the last 10 years or so people are like well the economics aren't working and the instinct again evolutionary biology is to go for the guy who thinks he has it figured out the guy with the big stick you know that's that's what trump represents that's also what bernie represents it's like outsource your thinking to the guy who thinks he has it figured out and so we sort of just fall in line and become sheep and we demand a strong leader in times of crisis yeah it's um it's crazy how much people want to deny that we're animals and we have these like animalistic tendencies as well we're supposed to be superior intelligent beings there's no way i could be a

sheep i'm not a fucking sheep uh it's no way i could think for myself and it's impossible to deny that i mean we saw with the lockdowns right like people basing their decisions off of models that turned out to be completely bullshit like literally didn't make any sense that the code that made up the models was recycled and not even sufficient for a mathematical model once it was actually audited only months after the model was used to to institute policy around the world totally and our sense making ability which is a concept i have been learning a lot from on the portal eric weinstein's podcast which i think is probably my favorite podcast and he brings up a point where there's so much noise there's so much chaos and there's so much

information coming at you that it's really hard to sift through this information and be confident in how you proceed. And so people get paralyzed and they take the easy route. This might mean you just take the side that your political side just automatically parrots, because it's just too complex. I don't want to deal with it. And we can't rely on things like the media, which, you know, it's good and bad, right? If the media was great, it would be really convenient to have five news sources that are trusted, but that's just not where we are. They're all politicized. And so it forces people to go out in the world and find information for themselves. And most people are time poor, number one, and don't have the desire to sit through it. It's hard. And so we just shoot from the hip. And it's either you want to keep the economy closed, because you care about lives, or you want to open the economy up because you care about the economy more than lives, right? that's the conversation either you choose people you choose the economy which obviously it's much

more nuanced than that obviously and yeah and the like how many lives are going to be affected by lockdowns in the long while still a lot of information to come in um but it is crazy how quickly everybody just decided yep this is it this is what we got to do and globally people base their actions off of this broken model um we shall see that's what like i said in six to eight months it'll be interesting to see um what happens looking back in retrospect uh maybe we'll have to have another conversation then like november or december but staying on the concept of like being a sheep or and versus being a leader that's actually you have some early life notes here brandon wrote um quite a few notes before the show

to help to help structure this um this episode but i'm i'm i don't like going by the notes we're not going in order but going back to the beginning of your notes like you i had uh some impactful sort of impressions from my parents one of which with my mom used to always just say to us be a leader don't be a follower and i don't know if that's what gave me confidence to to leave my career in finance in conjunction with the the psychedelic experience but that's always something that's on my mind like am i am i just following following somebody to follow somebody do we do that in bitcoin a lot are we just following imperating narratives that that sort of confirm our bias um always questioning that stuff but you had a like me like i'm i feel like i have a very

uh fuck rules mentality like i i care i'm gonna take miles suitors um twitter bio here i care deeply about human freedom and personal freedom particularly uh what sort of imbued those uh those ideals in you as well yeah definitely so i i grew up i was born in 88 so i'm very much a kid of the 90s And I grew up, fortunately, in a middle class home in the suburbs. And in the 90s, which is a period where over parenting was kind of the mood, America was sort of sick of the Gen X kids, which were raised by boomers. They're the latchkey kids or the bad boys. They're the I can't remember the headlines, but America pretty much said kids are horrible these days and we need to fix that. And so in the 90s, we sort of shifted towards strong parenting and, you know, 13th place ribbons and everyone has an opinion and you're all great and you can be whatever you want to be. and that's sort of the the millennial generation um we're sort of the hero archetype and we come

of age during the crisis which we'll get to and that's very very true for me i would say i was over parented which in a way um you know in a way it made me want to rebel against what i was being given even though i was taught many good lessons one identical to yours which is a thing for yourself i'd like well but all the other kids are doing this and i can just picture my dad yeah well you want to be like all the other kids, you know, think for yourself type thing. And that did stick with me. And same with personal responsibility. It's like, okay, you want that new bike or that new skateboard halfpipe? Great. How are you going to achieve that? You know, you don't just get to ask whatever you want from the world, the world's not fair. And so I internalized those lessons from

a young age, and I probably started, I don't know, the number is kind of pointless, but 20, maybe small little businesses as a kid before i even started high school like i had a soda pop empire in the neighborhood employing the neighborhood kids with walkie-talkies bikes and wagons cruising around to where the construction workers were building homes and we were making hundreds and hundreds of dollars a week as like nine-year-olds we'd go back through we'd scoop up the cans recycle them get paid when the workers weren't there we'd steal their uh scrap wood and build half pipes fun boxes and quarter pipes and jumps in the yards we had this like full cycle going and all because i was told yeah if you want it figure out how to

get it and so yeah i'm really thankful that my parents impressed that in me but also as an adult sort of having like strong parents with stricter rules i did sort of in a way rebel against that once I became an adult and I would notice school teachers who were supposed to be the authorities and like some of these people are idiots they have absolutely no clue what they're talking about and one of my teachers she's a really nice lady so I even feel bad saying this she was really into her dogs okay and she was also kind of a ditzy teacher and I found a way to get under her skin and just derail class where I would say okay well what about your dogs or talk to us about this Miss Forrest and then she would just stop the lesson

plan and we would just spend 45 minutes talking about her dogs and yeah just all the students all the kids would be like dude Brandon Brandon get her on the dogs no one wants to pay attention and oh man i could sleep in this teacher's class and she just wouldn't she just wouldn't mind anyways going off on a tangent there but what what i learned from that was that okay the parent the parents the teachers etc some of them are fantastic but most of them don't know what's going on and you can extrapolate that with the government got into college started watching like zeitgeist videos and all that conspiracy stuff and again realizing that no one has your back besides you. The government's not there for you. They have their own agendas. And for many people,

that's probably a scary thing. So you just shove it away. You just don't want to believe it. But for me, luckily, that was empowering. It's saying like, okay, you have the choice. It's up to you. If you want to build a good life, do it. If you don't build a good life, that's your fault. No one else's fault. And so that's sort of a driving thing, sort of a common thread for me. again makes it very easy to adopt bitcoin with that type of framing once you understand it it just makes sense yeah no i agree very similar upbringing i'm a child of the 90s as well early 90s a few years younger than you but um and i had young parents too which i think really um really had an impression on me too i sort of grew up with my parents they were in their

their young 20s and like very like my mom was 20 when she had me and uh which back in the day wasn't that young but I feel uh in the 90s and certainly today is younger and um sort of grew up with my parents and saw the ups and downs of them going through their 20s and early 30s and luckily they were young parents and now we have a lot of time to enjoy as adults together um but yeah i was i was mowing lawns handing out papers sold hot dogs starting at 13 uh and started working at bars during high school junior senior year worked throughout college and um i'm very happy that got instilled in me as well you got to work hard and nobody's gonna hand you shit uh which a lot of people i mean especially in like the instagram like gen z i don't want

shit on gen z but i feel like a lot of people just feel like again participation trophies feel like they they should have things handed to them that they deserve to to have a better life just handed to them because they went through the the process of going to college getting that degree checking all the boxes and so they deserve everything that that they were promised growing up which is weird it's it's madness and it also points to the fact that when you look at education um you know that's not our school system is not where you learn most things um speaking about business which is what i study i started in engineering and switched to a business degree and i learned a few things in business school sure but really the foundational principles of

business are taught on the job meaning don't go to college go start a business you know i have a memory very distinct memory i think i don't know i was between five and ten years old and i just started figuring out that i could uh charge money for things so i was like washing neighbors cars i was having you know i was i made a i dug a pond grew fish and tried to sell fish out of a pond horrible business but you know whatever i learned a lot and there was one business where i had a I would steal my parents beer and soda. And then I would go door to door and sell it to my neighbors for under market price. And so I'm selling beers to the neighbors for like 50 cents. And they're like, Okay, Brandon, this is a good deal. But your parents know you're selling their beer for

for a loss. And my parents sent me down. They're like, Okay, cool initiative, but you're gonna have to start buying your own inventory. And right there, I learned that, okay, you got to set your price higher than your cost and then i was clipping coupons and buying soda and trying to get a ride to go get a case of pop for three bucks you know it's uh yeah experience that's very very uh ingenuitive uh sort of entrepreneurial spirit there i would i didn't i didn't have the balls to go sell beer uh door to door to my parents friends they'd be like what the fuck are you doing um yeah but it's and it does seem like the pendulum so let's get it's like the fourth turning thing like it seems like we've hit a like you said the apex of the fourth turning

where things have hit a like the far end of the polarization to one end that you can get where we have donald trump as our president blue team versus red team rhetoric has never been louder and more divisive uh things seem to be breaking federal reserve is printing trillions of dollars it seems like we may be at the end of the cycle which is the beginning of another cycle so let's get into the concept of the fourth turning uh what it is what that means for us and what that means for the future definitely so the fourth turning is a book by neil howe and another guy who is deceased now, I forgot his name, but to me, I just finished the book and it felt similarly prophetic as a sovereign individual, which you talk about, I talk about, it's very

much adopted in the Bitcoin community. And if you want to learn more about this, read the book or just go watch the videos on Real Vision. They're fantastic. And I'm going to just break into a couple of the principles, sort of set the frame of where we are today, and then we can look to future and what we can learn from this framing so first of all like a foundational principle in the book is that time is not linear okay we think time and progress is this straight line but really time goes in cycles and these cycles are based on roughly 80 to 100 year cycles and that's about the age of it or the length of a human life and in that 80 to 100 year cycle it's made up of four generations, about 20, 25 years, something like that. And each generation

is defined by an archetype. And these archetypes, depending on what age each archetype is, creates a constellation that sets the mood. And a line in the book that sort of defines it is histories create generations, and then those generations, they grow up and they create history. And so that cycle just repeats. And it's similar to the line, you know, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, and then the cycle continues, bad times create strong men. And so very much in that sort of framing, and the author breaks it down into four pieces. Like I said, those four generations make four turnings. And I'm going to use the the last cycle to sort of illustrate where we are so the first turning is like spring

it's the american high this is just after world war ii everyone's sick of fighting it's time to rebuild this is when cooperation's at its all-time high so you can think of this post-war period as the first turning roughly 1945 1965 then we transition into the second turning which is summer also characterized by a revolution and this is the psychedelic 60s this is about peak individualism this is about going inward this is about sort of rejecting the the structures of society then we go on the third turning which is like fall this is starting around 83 this is where we see it's called the unraveling this is where you see deregulation peak excess in culture lots of debt this would also be the the 20s in 1920s in america where it's sort of like slow dancing

in a burning room we're just like get it while the getting's good fuck it let's go to the party that kind of mindset and you sort of know something's wrong but you can't really put your finger on it and it's the getting's good so nobody does anything about it until you hit that crisis point transition from the third to the fourth turning which would be 1929 stock market collapse followed by the 30s worst decade ever leading to world war ii and so the last fourth turning was roughly 29 to 45 or you could maybe say pearl harbor and the crisis is a period where everything's bad and people all agree that everything's bad so it's time when we can actually make changes peak polarization economic collapse this could

be war this could be financial collapse it could be both and so that's sort of the the four periods and then it restarts and you know then you go back to the first cycle and it's about rebuilding etc and so the each each generation of that four period whoever was born during that one period has an archetype and i'm not going to get into all the details but it's like hero artist nomad prophet those are the four archetypes but the most important two are the hero archetype which is millennials, and also the profit archetype, which is the boomers. And those two are opposed to each other. The boomers are inward individual, the millennials are all about teamwork makes the dream work. And if you look back to the previous fourth turning, the GI generation, so that's the

hero archetype, just like the millennials set rewind 80 years or so they're born in the early 1900s. And then they fought in World War Two. And so they were born during an unraveling third period. They came of age during a crisis and they went to war during World War II. They came back heroes. And then post-war period, they rebuild. And that's a really important time in America. We talk about all the time, either the 60s or post-war America, the great American high. This is when we invented suburbs, strong middle class. We did things like pensions and social security and all that kind of stuff was at its peak. And also a big risk, which we'll get to for looking ahead is that at the time a lot of those GI generations were also a part of the communist

party and so what you see is this desire for teamwork this desire to rebuild which could very easily turn into authoritarianism and we do not want that to happen obviously and that's sort of what's coming up here right now and then let's oppose that to the boomers so the boomers were born during the high, so post-war America, things are great. The boomers were given everything as kids, but it sort of felt hollow. There was no inner life, no spirituality. So the boomers rebelled against everything, free college, you know, everything. And they caused a revolution in the 60s. And then they grew up, they didn't want to have kids. And so, you know, then they parented the Gen Xers who were horrible, and then they sort of changed their minds and we got to

better and throughout each of these different periods history sort of oscillates between really classical forces this would be things like is capital strong or is labor strong right liberty versus equality expansionist or extroversion or isolationist introversion another big one is the supply and demand of order so depending on where we are in these cycles those forces are either emphasized or de-emphasized and I should probably stop there that was a long run before we get into where we are today anything to clarify anything to dig into there no I think you were very thorough and and laying out these cycles right and that's and before we get into

like describing where we are now it is crazy to think about the concept of time doesn't move linearly it moves in cycles and it goes back to like many other sayings like history doesn't repeat itself exactly but it certainly rhymes and um do you think we're at a point in human like is well that that quote alone would would highlight that other humans before us have sort of recognized this but do you think we have an opportunity here with the technology that exists today with the communication technology specifically the ability to share ideas around the world globally with a huge audience are we at a point where we can sort of recognize these cycles and maybe change them moving forward or we sort of inevitably be holding to this sort of cycle

mentality yeah good question that's one that always comes up like okay but exponential growth technology is different the cycle can't repeat and this this study is over 500 years of generations starting before we colonized america to today and the cycle keeps repeating and you could say there was you know the telephone or the car or the american expansion westward or the you know there's all the the civil war all these things were different and yet the cycle still continues and it's not about technology like the technology is obviously different so that will change what happens but it's more about the mood and how we respond to those changes that matter and one way to illustrate that is the third turning, the unraveling, which was like the 80s up through

2008, essentially. That period of time, there was things wrong, but nobody wanted to fix the problems. And no one was willing to fix the problems. And so we just let it continue to go. And now 08 on, we sort of collectively shifted the mood after the great financial crisis, which I believe is sort of the catalyst to start off the fourth turning, the crisis. Now, all of a sudden, people want to change. Obama, hope and change. Before that, it was like, Clinton, just do your job, deregulation, the economy's humming along. Although that sort of created a bunch of problems. No one was ready to face him until the mood shifts. yeah and the mood is certainly shifting i mean that's why like we said very pessimistic before we found bitcoin like i personally think things need to change drastically i think we need to shift our mentality and you you have it written down here in the notes that the civic duty that

exists in the world like like stop being so self-absorbed and ego-driven which i think the 90s and early 2000s were really all about and even to today a lot of pop culture a lot of the culture is very ego-driven you see it on tiktok all the time people doing dumb shit just to get as many eyes on them as they can uh and obviously with the money i don't think it's sustainable to to run a an economy on as high level of debt as at as high level of debt as we are now. And I just don't see mathematically how it can persist. I think MMT is dumb. And to think that MMT is somehow going to fix the capital allocation problem by, again, central planning where that capital goes is just dumb. So in your eyes, where are we now? And how do we get to those

good times? Yeah, good question. And according to this framing, 08 would have started the beginning of the crisis or the fourth turning. And if you add about 20, 25 years, right, that puts us around 2025 or 2030. Essentially, we would end this cycle. And with this cycle, what the crisis is characterized by is desperation. And the population is so desperate that we're willing to change and we're willing to make crazy changes that previously would never be palatable. And we're already seeing that right the democrats want to close borders and a republican administration is pumping out ubi right if you would have said that 10 years ago you would have been laughed at right and that's very characteristic of the crisis and so from my perspective this is really important this is when

the millennials go to war this is when the millennials rebuild and so the next decade defines the next 100 years it couldn't be more important for millennials to step up here And like we mentioned before, the GI generation, our mirror hero archetype from the previous cycle, post-World War II, they built all the bridges, the dams, they literally built everything in America that matters. And every generation after that, they did nothing. But they also flirted with communism and authoritarianism and sterile suburbs and stuff like that. And so the millennials now, talking about socialism, loving Bernie Sanders, that's sort

of the risky part. the social justice warrior nonsense. We want our menus to only have eight items on it so we don't have to make decisions, right? This is all the same. And so now we have that choice. Do we go towards MMT, strong state, UBI, live in a pot, eat the bugs? Or do we wake up and recognize that maybe we need to, instead of getting a bigger state, we need to have a smaller state, go towards sort of a sovereign individual and work on community and teamwork right millennials are about teamwork and that's great we all want to have one single payer health care and we all want to have everyone gets the same pay right that kind of nonsense the motivation there is good teamwork

and rebuild but we need to channel that towards a more productive end because the beginning of a new cycle the spring the high it's not necessarily good it just means peak authority and so instead of going that route, we have a chance to go towards Bitcoin. And I think that's the most important thing here is having a free money. I think millennials are owning Bitcoin, but they're also scared of it because money is bad. You know, you got to have teamwork. You don't want to be greedy. And so I think it's on us as Bitcoiners to help millennials understand what's here and how it actually does align with what they want and, you know, do whatever we can to prevent the bug the bugging bitcoin is the definition of teamwork running your own node doing your part

to make sure nobody's sending uh invalid transactions throughout the network making sure nobody's trying to raise the 21 million supply cap literally getting at like that is and that's the other thing it's so capitalistic and the opportunity is so vast that there's so much room for so much teamwork you can help in so many aspects whether it be protocol development building out software and wallet software lightning network software lightning network games integrating bitcoin mining into other industries particularly the energy industry that has a lot of inefficiencies there's so much room for so much teamwork completely agree it it is it is the most important thing to think about right now and

If we just relate it to the Bitcoin stuff, like the ICO mania, which is just complete madness. We're going to look back on this and be like, so a thousand people just printed money and they sold them to other people and got rich and nobody gave a shit. That is madness. And I'm hoping we transition to a period where, who said this on Twitter recently? I think it might have been Nick Carter, but essentially that Bitcoin is not some new idea. It's just reviving an old idea of sound money. and reap what you sow and a strong middle class removing money from politics that that whole type of thesis is what comes with bitcoin it also maps really well to millennials as long as they don't

you know get hear the siren song of socialism yeah it's restorative technology bringing back sanity to a world that has lost it right and it's and this is if you look at some of the austrian economists that have been talking about this particularly um menger and hayek said we're not going to fix money until we find a slight roundabout way to take it out of the hands of the government um and that alludes to the fact that we did have money right at one time but it was bastardized by the government particularly the gold standard which uh as we know from executive order 6102 got completely neutered and carl menger saying was it menger or was it friedman i think it was friedman milton friedman saying he believes we're getting close to

a digital e-cash and like we won't be able to have a truly capitalist capitalistic society until that that arrives and he predicted that we were getting close to it um so yeah the idea that bitcoin is restorative yes it's a innovative technology and it's ingenious how satoshi designed it to make very uh the different stakeholders sort of work together it really restores the sound money property uh for for the world which is huge yeah definitely and yeah and you talk about like the excess of the 80s and all the deregulation that's when we really got away from like right after the 70s uh like all the that's when the collateralized debt obligations started coming to market and you had i'm trying to think of the

reference of like the wall street bros that were just all about buying ray-ban cell phones and going to the hamptons and getting getting zonked out on quaalids um yuppie yuppies yuppie uh i think there was the term before yuppie somebody will correct me on twitter but i think there's excesses and that was another thing we wanted to talk about i don't know if you have it on the list but we talk a lot about what the fuck happened on in 1971 uh yes we went off the gold standard you'd attribute it to to uh something else that happened uh at the time too it has to do with divorce and the ability to divorce specifically yeah yeah so um looking at what what the fuck happened in 1971 um bitcoiners would like to say this has to do with a breaking of the tether

between gold and fiat money right which it certainly has uh some some amount to do with it is it 100 or 10 i don't know the answer but looking at it from the fourth turning um that period of time is also a period of time where there was a shift in in the demographics and in in the consciousness at that time so 71 was the boomers are more or less wrapping up the consciousness revolution um you know drugs are banned early 70s and so the boomers are starting to realize that okay the consciousness revolution that we made didn't really work and they're sort of going back to being adults and maybe starting to have a family and stuff like that but the the boomers were so selfish and they still are and so they were all worried about themselves and that

meant they they created laws like no fault divorce laws they created that's where the yuppie came from they didn't want to have kids they just wanted to have fun and blah blah blah and so that that yeah that period there was a whole bunch of other factors along with coming off the gold standard that mattered and so i need to probably dig into more about these thoughts to really come up with a strong thesis i still lean towards the tether to gold being significantly overweighted here but there are a lot of things at play and yeah yeah caught up in these cycles but it is um that is i mean again talking about complex systems like all these things have of all these disparate variables have very long-lasting effects

and ripple effects, more importantly, on generations to come. And that's actually something I saw a thread on Twitter a couple weeks ago talking about why there's so much innovation with Chinese entrepreneurs and maybe a product of China's one-child policy where they have a lot more men than women. So you have many men fighting for a scarce amount of women And that leads to some peacocking where the only men that get women are the rich men, and the only rich men are men who are creating crazy innovative tech companies in China today. And so they have this sexual drive to create these innovative companies that just make them a lot of money, and that's sort of an externality of the one-child policy playing out today.

That's super interesting. And you can't get away from how human that is, right? like it's only natural to want to improve your lot in life and men today are mostly measured on our economic output women are mostly measured on their physical beauty right or wrong that's just more or less the rules of the game and so yeah if you have all of a sudden an imbalance of too many males not enough females the males do take more risks and they have to in order to attract and mate. It's super normal. But if we zoom out a little bit, one child policy is going

to have some consequences, right? Because the way our system's built, this fiat money system, is we're constantly borrowing from tomorrow. And the post-war America, we created all these social entitlement programs because we just recovered from the worst decade ever. Financial collapse, horrible 30s, and war. And we didn't want to go through that again. Everyone was tired of it. So we built all these social programs and those social programs only work if there's another generation of young people to pay in for the social benefits of the old people. And China will suffer from that. Obviously, Japan has a huge problem with that now. And America has pretty strong demographics relative to most places, but we might still suffer some of that. And right now,

the baby boomers, you know, most old generations, it's time to give back. It's time to take their family on vacation. It's time to, you know, give up some of their wealth and power, but the boomers are doing the opposite. The boomers are buying their fifth house. They're going on lavish vacations. You know, they're playing pickleball. They're not senior citizens and they're just like kids. Why don't you do it? All we had to do is, you know, show up. And we, we, we had it, we had good and you know my dad delivered pizzas in college he also played college football but he delivered pizzas and that was what was enough to pay for school and now kids come out of school with a mortgage and so you can't really compare the two and now they're not leaving jobs and

they're not giving up wealth and they're wondering why young people aren't having kids and they're not buying homes I also think similar to homes I think we're going to see a return to multi-generational housing. The boomers, essentially post-war America, we created suburbs, and that was the first time in American history, or pretty much history anywhere, if I'm not mistaken, where really small nuclear families would own this big McMansion in the suburbs. And now we're seeing the millennials moving back with their parents, probably mostly due to desperation. Also, we're okay with it as the teamwork generation not me personally um and now if the millennials want to have a life they're going to have to move in with their parents and maybe our our parents the boomer parents will

give their kids money to move in with them and then the millennials just take care of their elderly parents that'll be the trade yeah it'll be interesting to see i um i wholly expect to live in a multi-generational household at some point in the next two decades again my parents are gen x and gen x is like the glossed over generation and they got screwed by a lot of this too like the dream that was fed to them career-wise turned out not to be as lucrative i mean yes it was more lucrative than our opportunity but uh they like hit the height of their career during during the 2001 bubble in the 2008 bubble and had to survive those two travesties of economic destruction and try to recover within a 10-year period um and so it's just interesting to see

the again the ripple effects of all this and i love the boomer hating going on right now any boomers listening we don't hate you individually but your generation uh did fuck a lot of things up totally and i individually i get along great with boomers there's no ill will my parents are boomers whatever but as a systemic generation that's just how it played out um they're not aware of what they're doing uh most of them and so you know that's just the game we're playing and we we read the tea leaves and we can make our best guess on the future and i think that um framing like the fourth turning is a really good situation here and i would like to charge the millennials who are builders by nature to look to the future and say what am i doing right now in this crisis

like how do we resolve this crisis because that is what matters the most right now how we resolve this crisis over the next decade or maybe less defines the next century so fix the money fix the world i think there's an order of operations i don't think we're going to fix much until we figure out the money wholeheartedly agree and if millennials all get rich off bitcoin then And that's a nice situation, right? We're not going to get the money from the boomers voluntarily. We're just going to have the foresight to buy some Bitcoin and they're not. And we'll siphon the wealth through the back door.

Yeah. I mean, but we still got to make it happen. What do you think at this point in time needs to happen to Bitcoin? Or how do you think it needs to progress from here? i i'm very pleasantly surprised with the success of the network to date again a lot of people want everything out of the box and think it's uh not meeting particular use cases but all things considered i'm again very very optimistic about where things are today and pleasantly surprised with how far the network has come and then more specifically just the brand name that bitcoin is

in the world right now like everybody knows what bitcoin is or that it exists they don't know how it works or understand it exactly but they know that it's a thing definitely yeah good question i think the the way i'd like to answer this is twofold one i'm going to relate it to fungi and how these hype cycles grow that's just naturally how bitcoin's built um yeah let's start with that so with a fungi most of its life is spent underground as mycelium and then when the conditions are absolutely perfect the moisture is right temperature etc it shoots out a mushroom out of nowhere that mushroom as soon as it gets full size it reproduces sends little mushroom spores or little mushroom seeds all over the place those little seeds go underground and then

they build their own new colonies they wait for a few years and then they reproduce again and that cycle is identical to how bitcoin's hype cycles and growth cycles go majority of the time call it three years we have this bear mark period two two three or something like that and nobody pays attention to bitcoin it's just the hodler base the people who are chirping talking you know refining the message etc and then the conditions are right and out of nowhere bitcoin comes back into consciousness the price goes crazy a whole bunch of people come in that's the mushroom exploding out of the ground and then as soon as it hits its peak bitcoin crashes again most people leave but a few of those little mushroom spores those new

hodlers go underground they form new colonies and they start building and so that's the cycle of bitcoin and how i see this in our present time i'm very surprised at how fast and how accepted it's become and one way i like to think about this is sort of concentric rings of the hodler base so early on the people that were into bitcoin were very obscure like they were not normal people they did not interface with normal people so it stayed with your cypherpunk cryptographer libertarian type circle right and then 2013 14 15 it's it you know expanded a little bit the people who were more into gold and hard money they were primed and ready to go right from that libertarian base, then called the class of 2017, Bitcoin sort of hit the mainstream

in a way. So you have a ton of people who maybe have one foot in the matrix, but one foot out. I would put myself in that category. And I think most of the people who came into 2017 are closer to the mainstream than earlier Bitcoiners on average. And what this does is it creates an increased surface area of what Bitcoin touches. mycelial network of Bitcoin has more service area that interfaces with the normal world. This leads to better UX, narratives that are easier to understand,

the Hodler base has more normie friends than ever before, and so we can sort of translate a hard tech article into a Bitcoin Twitter digestible article into a personal Facebook page narrative, right? It sort of like gets more watered down down and more refined as you leave that uh concentric circle and so that's kind of how i see the growth with bitcoin and right now the 2017 base added a ton of surface area building a ton of products a ton of bitcoin first products um earning bitcoin the swans the lollies disclosure i work for swan um casa this whole class of of applications is making it much easier and obviously things like cash app are huge and so where i'm at is extremely bullish i need to temper my

bullishness um like in my mind the next phase of bitcoin is already sale the ship sale um what that price looks like 50 to 200k if we're if we're going to go that route it doesn't really matter what the price is but the next leg up is already baked in no one can stop it that's how i more or us feel um after that i don't know it'll be interesting to see especially with the economic situation being where it is today and more and more people starting to ask if if you can just print money why why do we pay taxes what the other side of the next bull run looks like do we have another 80 fall from from the next height do we does this fractal keep moving the same way up the price fractal as it has to date i'm not so convinced that we're going to have

more of these crazy drops i think the high water mark is going to be uh going to have a stronger sort of hodler base below it these next couple cycles up because again i've been saying this since the beginning of last year in the middle of the bear market like now that you can say that bitcoin's been around for a decade like i don't know what it is about round numbers specifically in tens but i think there's something psychological about that where it's like all right maybe it is pretty established it's it's uh it's been around for more than a decade and got paul tudor jones investing in it you got ralph paul talking about it you got countries talking about mining it you got energy companies talking about mining it to

to fix some inefficiencies they have like is is it as uh as cataclysmic as a fall as from from a price perspective as it has been in past cycles we shall see yeah it's a it's a good question like will the the cycle frackle continue and it's easy to say yes because it's done it three or four times um but i think one thing that stood out with what you were just saying is I think what matters is how educated are the hodlers so in 2017 it was very retail based and so the price went from 10 to 20k in like just a couple days and back down to 10 already and that's uneducated people buying fear and FOMO driving the market and uneducated market participants if we have more institutional investors which we could hopefully say is

smarter money or whatever. Do they still play the fear and FOMO as aggressively as just retail hodlers? I have to assume not. And if that's the case, like if Paul Tudor Jones, the Paul Tudor Joneses of the world, if they allocate 22% to this, where's the price fall going to come from? Who's selling? The hodlers aren't selling. No retail is really even participating in the pump right now compared to 2017 i don't know right i think we'll still see massive falls but they have to come down in magnitude percentage wise yeah i think this is one thing bitcoin teen and i are going to hop on the horn to talk about he's worried he's worried that the boomers are going to um we're going to take the millennials bitcoins millennials may expect these

these booms and busts to happen in the same fashion that they have to date he's not so convinced that they will more on that in the future should i uh cancel the call after this with my father-in-law to get him set up on bitcoin is that what you're saying no not at all not at all as long as you're not selling it to him from your cold store absolutely not yeah i've never sold a single bitcoin except for to buy a beefsteak and i bought some masks from uh lixon a couple months ago i spent some bitcoin before back in the day um not in quite some time not in quite some time uh but i think this is again staying on the optimistic tip here yes times are very precarious tumultuous seems like things are chaotic but in chaos and during

these hard times a lot of opportunity uh presents itself and that's what again makes me optimistic that bitcoin exists and it provides these secondary and tertiary effects that people can take advantage of and really sort of try to strengthen their localities and so it is a big topic right now like with the trade war going on between china and the finger pointing over the coronavirus where you can see it happening in real time nations turning towards introversion isolationism or not even isolation isolationism but trying to sort of secure things at the base at home first and manufacturing here in the u.s we just had tsmc announced that they'll be building a foundry in arizona intel's thinking about doing the same and obviously the conversation

around supply chain of personal protective equipment and pharmaceuticals is high on everybody's mind as well so this presents a lot of opportunities particularly for americans and actually anybody living anywhere in the world where they need to sort of tighten up their their fortresses as well and that gives me a lot of optimism same yeah i am very optimistic right now it does seem like people are waking up questioning things and i think that's important I think we need to really double down on America here. We had an epic run exporting dollars all around the world and exporting labor around the world and benefiting from that seigniorage.

However, it's time to fix our home, fix our own backyard. We really did neglect it since the hero generation, hero archetype, the GIs were in charge last. And that is where we are right now in history, the millennials have this opportunity. Look at our education system. a mess like what if education was good what if our universities were what they could be what if they were these bastions of knowledge where kids went they had all the coolest technology and the best teachers and smartest people on the planet gave them education modules and smart people networking starting companies like that's what a university should be it should be yeah just

smashing smart people together and see what happens today it's very corporatized like i cringe at the amount of classes that were basically bought by corporations who wanted to teach us to be corporate jones drones how to write emails how to act in the office how to interact with your co-workers before you got into the workforce like literally grooming you to be a cog in a corporate machine like it was not entrepreneurial at all or actually there was no intent to actually make you a good critical thinker or or business builder you were you were just supposed to glide into the system the way it was constructed for you absolutely yeah our breakout rooms in carlson which is the business school at the university

of minnesota where i went the breakout rooms and the atriums and all this stuff were named after the corporations next door the best buys wells fargo general mills target court medtronic it it wasn't even they weren't even trying to hide it and they all sponsored the career fairs and yeah they're just training drones i fortunately took all the entrepreneurship classes that's what i was studying and so i did get a little taste outside of that and i took one class it was a year-long entrepreneurship class where the first half you come up with ideas you pitch them and you start companies the second half of the year you actually run the companies and then at the end of the school year if the company is good one of the students buys

it and keeps running it and so that's a cool model right that could that could persist in the education of the future i like that same with health care we have the biggest mess on the planet it start over throw it all in the dumpster start from scratch and what if it was good what if it was good or what if we like help focus on preventative health care like these lockdowns and this this virus thing is really like who are the most susceptible old people are out of shape and have vitamin d deficiencies like how about whipping our ass into shape this fat ass country that we live in and actually focusing on things that prevent the overall healthcare costs in the country, which right now it's diabetes, heart disease. Maybe focus on preventing those so we

don't have to treat those so we can focus on other healthcare advances. It's a really, really important point. I think it's Sweden or maybe Norway. They don't call it healthcare. They call it's sick care, right? You go to the doctor when you're sick, but the rest of the work is done staying healthy. And what we're finding now coming out of guys like Peter Attia, who are MDs, who are sort of out of the system looking at longevity and what actually makes sense here is that all of our medicine, including things like cancer, we've been studying it for 50 years. And yet when someone gets cancer, the treatment side, we're only improving them by about 5% on how long they stay alive. That's nothing, essentially failure. Instead, what we need to be doing is delaying

the onset of these chronic diseases. That's the key. Because once you get it, you're going to succumb to the same outcome as everyone else. But if we create healthy people through lifestyle, which is food and diet and exercise and sleep vitamin D etc we do those things right you'll just push cancer way later into life which gives you much more healthy lifespan and much less burden on health care the whole system is captured we all agree about that and so the after you get sick care which is what we should call it is important but that's not the most important thing that should just a subsection of what taking care of healthy people is about yeah it's it's crazy man it's um

that nobody talks about it either i mean when you talk about that is like the orwellian term health care sick care yeah more commonplace like it's double speak that's why like you're like natural exercise like we're both into surfing i'm actually going to pick up a new stick this week and get in the water more and more because i'm i'm going to be on this island for quite some time and i and me personally i i neglect my health a lot um i'm not the best i don't eat i don't have the best diet i'm trying to get better um but it's so easy to be unhealthy the uh the choice the the optionality that exists the ease of just strolling down your phone and checking twitter constantly instead of going outside for a walk it's there but it is um it is something that

there should be a lot more focus on in my opinion 100 the the future super achievers will be the ones who can resist the vice the vice of the internet which is the best thing ever but it's so powerful that we need to temper it from us and things like sugar and fast food and you know dopamine hits all throughout the day those things are extremely powerful and we should keep them but it's up to the individual to try and figure out a way to live with them so they're not just a dopamine slave yeah yeah it's uh it's hard especially being like the generation that was thrown into it head first right like we that's one thing as a 90s kid like i remember i've said the story on the podcast before too but i remember i downloaded aol uh for my family in the mid 90s

late 90s and then growing up with aim napster just seeing the evolution of the internet from simple html css landing pages to social networks and gaming sites and forums and everything that comes with it we were just fully fire hosed all that over the course of our lifetime 100 it's like uh and it's like talking about like pace of change like how like are we like like i would imagine that we've been experienced more change than even gen z right because we have one foot in the semi-analog world and just thrown completely into this digital world so like has there been any generation in human history that has experienced the pace and amount of change that we have since we were born like late 80s to like when cell phones were were the

size of like three bricks put together to today where you have a supercomputer in your hand yeah it's a hard question because recency bias sort of taints our perspectives here right um but i would say compared to gen z you know taking peter teal peter teal's approach like really nothing innovative happened in the last 10 years and i kind of agree with that it if we look at the corporate corporate sector they got cheap money and they just bought their stocks they didn't reinvent anything they didn't build anything they just optimized taking money from us through advertising through better marketing through stock buybacks through accounting tricks so no real innovation comes like that because money is cheap there's no incentive to do so look at our

generation we had similar excesses we definitely saw the rise of the internet which i think is huge but if we go back through other generations like I think it's called the lost generation they came of age during World War one then they experienced the stock market collapse and then when they were ending their lives they went through World War two right and so that would be a pretty rocky period of time maybe more interesting than ours yeah yeah it turns like adapting to technology change right like what what were the technology at the time that changed like they maybe transitioned from a half horse and carriage car lifestyle to a full-on car lifestyle combustion

engine of factories proliferated more yeah yeah the world war one started on horseback and ended with tanks that's kind of a nice one but i i think you're right like the ubiquitous knowledge connection aspect that really does hack a human. Like we're not supposed to be able to go on Instagram and know what 10,000 people are doing yesterday. You know, we didn't evolve to handle that type of thing. And I think you're right as our generation sort of straddles tech and you know, we remember a time before the internet. I think that gives us a little bit more perspective um i think it's hard for boomers actually because they they experience this technology later in life and they never really had to go through the cycle of adopting and

rebelling in the beginning and they're so addicted to technology it's it's terrifying it's crazy man yeah and the young people don't know any better and so that's a whole nother thing i don't know i don't understand the young people very well to be honest neither do i as somebody with an infant child it's like oh my god how do i raise this kid what do i put in front of them when how much screen time right it's hard too i mean i think just seeing my cousin's kids my nieces and nephews they're that are young like as much as you want to limit their screen time they're going to go to school and everybody else is gonna like their parents aren't gonna have the same exact

rules that you have and they're gonna learn about paul patrol and pj mask whenever the show is out there from their friends and want to watch it i'm ranting here i don't know just the uh totally man the ramblings of uh somebody who's got to raise a child i feel that i grew up with a in a household where my parents said like Sprite was okay but Mountain Dew is not like something with the sugar and so fine I grew up not drinking soda that's actually a very good thing but I would go to my friend's house and drink like seven Mountain Dews to compensate and so it's like one Mountain Dew a day at home better than every three days going to friend's house and playing video games for 10 hours and drinking all the mandu i don't know yeah you survived though you turned out to be a

good kid something like that that's a good thing like we're uh we're very adaptable too so we're able to adapt to this change at least up to this point i think so i'm talking about change we have a big civic change coming like how we organize at a local level and getting back to the topic of this podcast like i talked about this with brian harrington last week organizing at the federal level and having rules dictated to us from the federal level does not work anymore we're seeing that with the polarization of the politics right now middle america and the coastal elites have completely different ways of thinking of the world and that's okay um but it is um we're coming to notice that maybe it's not advantageous to have one one side views forced on the others

and vice versa so that's another big daunting task we have is reorganizing the structure of our communities and our society at large and that's why i'm drawn to bitcoin number one and then the sovereign individual thesis number two is like i think it does drive home these points to worry about your your immediate environment and how to make that as strong and resilient as possible and then move outward from there definitely and i think we're already starting to see the signs of um people sort of relocalizing starting with with corona stuff you know you sort of saw socially the people who were your friends because they were convenient sort of just dissipated your real true friends form tighter bonds at least that's what i experienced that

many people said the same thing. And so we automatically were forced to relocalize, check on your neighbor, check on your friends, deliver food, who needs help. And so that's sort of like a trial run to a future state where we are more locally oriented. Now there's food issues, the farmers and the local supply chains are being restructured.

You see California and the West Coast talking about fracturing, Texas always wants to fracture off. And so I think all that rumbling is starting to pave the way for a potential future where smaller states are the move. I couldn't pretend to know how that would play out, but it does feel like the beginning points of that are happening. And I think that people will actually feel better about it. This like vague nation state leader thing, we get all fired up about it on the Internet, but it has almost no impact on our lives. and I think running through corona that a feeling I think a lot of people are going to feel like they felt more alive because they had smaller groups people they care about and sort of like

back to basics and I think as humans we were sort of like disconnected head from body like we're we're out in the clouds we're on the internet we're go go go chasing money and yet we neglect the basic human body things like get sunshine exercise de-stress all those just fundamental things that make us healthy and happy you know have a good people around you who care about you don't be isolated in your tower in New York City like you're surrounded by everyone but you're still lonely like that whole thing I think this shook it shook it up I think we're going to see some sort of a homesteading movement pick up even more than it already has i think we're going to see local food have a resurgence i hope we redo health care and education if we don't we miss an

opportunity but yeah i'm optimistic about all those things i think it will serve us we'll still use technology but we do need more freedom more localized decision making and that's going to be good for everyone except for the people who are abusing the system now yeah are they going to give up that that freedom that power or not give up that freedom are they going to bestow that freedom or not even bestow we're going to take it from them or give ourselves that freedom um they're not going to go down without a fight but bitcoin again provides this unique opportunity too because if we are able to build these local networks that's the beauty of bitcoin is it's borderless like even though we're thinking of our localities and our immediate communities you can interact

with other communities outside it's not like world trade is going to stop like it actually probably enables more trade than exists today or is possible today just because you don't have to ask permission to send money uh via the swift network or worry about who's on the other side or whether or not the government's looking at who's on the other side of that trade with you. It's hard to, and I'm still trying to, reconcile the two ideas in my head. Yes, I want a very hyper-connected, localized community

when I do settle down outside of New York City in the coming months to years here, but I also want to have access to the outside world interact with it and trade with it definitely yeah I feel almost identical like I would like to have the ability to be in multiple places throughout the year I'd like to spend most of my time outside of dense population centers surrounded by close friends and family and then head into the you know the deep end of the matrix whenever I need to and whenever I want to and other than that the internet makes social life pretty easy exchanging ideas and work pretty easy for someone of our skill sets so that's great

and i also see bitcoin here as a defensive technology right cryptography is about defense more than it is about offense which maps the sovereign individual thesis quite well but i see a world where if we do fracture like there's never been a time at least that i'm aware of in history where there's been a state fracture into smaller pieces without bloodshed Right. Like Catalonia tried with tons of issues. And I think that the only chance that we have now or I should say we have a chance now to succeed peacefully because what are they going to do if money is in Bitcoin terms and you can't confiscate the money and there is enough defensive military technology to defend ourselves through 3D printing guns and drones and all this other defensive tech. that's going to make it really hard for some sort of a standing military to come in and enforce rules and what do you do when you enforce rules you actually end up taking their money that's mostly what war is if you look at what hitler did throughout europe he just went straight

to the central bank and took all the gold and they shipped all the gold to america to keep it safe and that's how we got our privilege and so if bitcoin is money and you come in and you take over a city or a country you're not getting the money and so the incentive the cost to go try to steal the money or enforce the rules those incentives start to break down and so bitcoin does open up a world where fragmentation or balkanization or however we want to look at that is more possible and hopefully peacefully so if you're listening to this and you don't well most people already own bitcoin but i was going to say join the peaceful revolution already right and it is a peaceful revolution and

it's a revolution without any volition the right word i'm looking for nobody's being forced into this it's a it's a natural yeah you're using your own volition to to make this happen like it is you are exiting the system if you think it's shitty and you want a way out this the system's being built in parallel and it can provide you more defense against the kleptocrats that run the current system the current dominant system and hopefully provide an optimistic future um yeah man it's been a fascinating conversation

what else do we have to hit i think we hit on everything didn't we yeah i think we hit on everything um what i was going to say is in our time now there's a lot of uncertainty and even if you don't believe in a sovereign individual balkanization or any of these sort of out there ideas that may not have a high percentage chance of coming true let's say you don't believe any of that and you're looking at the world right now and you're saying money printer is going um things feel like they're changing a lot of uncertainty jobs are lost probably never going to come back and you're concerned. Bitcoin offers a tremendous amount of optionality here that I think cannot be overstated. And I think right now is the time to paint Bitcoin as the optionality button.

It's the freedom button. It's the if you're unsure, just get a little bit of this worst case scenario. And I think that that narrative can really play strongly right now for the average person who's just a little bit unsure hey look here's the thing it's yours worst case scenario it's still yours and yeah that makes me optimistic and i think a lot of people are waking up to that right now based on my own personal experience yeah i agree and no i mean i've been getting all the calls and texts too my favorite texts are like people not even asking me to help them with bitcoin just being like hey i bought bitcoin just thought i should tell you because you're so crazy into it i'm like boss boss um and it it is uh it's exciting again talking about like the fourth

turning and uh tumultuous yet exciting and exhilarating time because there's so much opportunity to build like bitcoin anybody who has the wherewithal and the will can help build in many different facets whether you want to start a podcast if you can write protocol code if you can help people understand it in in unique ways like comparing it to mycelium there's many ways to contribute the easiest way to contribute is start stacking stats to help uh add to the numbers of people that are that are joining this revolution and the more the merrier because it's harder to shut down the more people that are involved and have some skin in the game that's right man once that hodler base the weekly humble sat stackers that that's

the key that's that is the key that number gets bigger the price floor gets higher the rest takes price brings in new people the rest takes care of itself yeah i think we're doing it i think we're doing it we're almost two hours in here brandon um i gotta get back i gotta get back to helping with the kids i'm probably going to get yelled at but is there anything any parting notes any information that you want to share with the freaks where can we find you yeah sure i think the best place is twitter my handle is b as in brandon last name quittem b-q-u-i t-t-e-m if any of these ideas sound interesting especially on the fungi side or the fourth turning side i'm probably going to write about that next come say hello let's smash some ideas together

If you are curious about a way to set up an automatic savings plan with Bitcoin, an auto stacking plan, I do work for Swan and we have a product where you link your bank account, you set up, let's say I want to buy $100 worth of Bitcoin a week or whatever you want, set it up once, we auto buy for you with the lowest fees for the service and then you can auto withdraw to cold storage. you literally set it up once and you're done i've been onboarding a lot of people with this friends and family if it's a noob this is the perfect solution because they do it once and there's no emotion they're not going to sell on you they're not going to get scared and we also work hard with education and so new people will be in good hands bitcoin only lots of education coming their way we're aimed at the newer people with that education tone and so i think that's the right way to do it otherwise my writing's on medium and my personal website brandonquittum.com come say hello bang bang brandon thank you for your time this afternoon it's been a fascinating

conversation likewise appreciate it marty appreciate all you do with the tstc love you freaks peace of love freaks