TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #194: Junseth

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with the affable Junseth to discuss: - America's Culture War - Are we in a Civil War? - When did the Civil War start? - Miners are Energy Pirates - How mining companies should manage their balance sheets - Art - Digital Art - NFTs - Literature - much more Follow Junseth 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, immense, immense pleasure of sitting down with John Seth, a Bitcoin podcaster OG. Talked about a bunch of things, not only Bitcoin, we talked about the current state of the U.S. and the polarized politics within it, the essential rights in the Constitution, We hit on art and NFTs, which I said away from Twitter this weekend, but looking over some of the discourse that has happened over this weekend, it seems like a pretty interesting topic. I'm still not completely sold on NFTs. I don't know if I'll ever own digital art. I prefer the physical stuff, but I think JonSeth makes some compelling cases towards the end of this episode.

we talk about on top of that uh miners as energy pirates and i'm not going to describe the whole episode to you freaks as you're about to listen to it after you listen to it make sure you go check out our good friends at the motherfucking cash app if you haven't already right the cash app is helping us do many things they're helping us stack sats send sats receive sats and sell sats if you so please we're saying sats sats sats sats sats because sats can be the standard within the app if you don't want to buy fractions of bitcoin you can change it to a sat standard and buy whole sats on top of this uh you can dca into sats dollar cost average you can set it and forget it you can buy daily weekly bi-weekly within the app you set it and forget it uh get that peace of

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Download the Cash App Enjoy this episode with JonSeth Take care You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free If 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. All right, we've already been having a pretty good conversation. I'm liking the vibe so far. Freaks. we're sitting down with the legendary john seth somebody i've uh been following in this space for for years one of the he runs the worst podcast in in uh all of bitcoin and cryptocurrency and i run

it poorly have you put out an episode anytime recently we haven't put out an episode in months i mean mainly because like well i was gonna make excuses it's just laziness yeah i'll blame it on sean he's really lazy well it seems like you're running a successful business so i'm sure yeah yeah but the podcast is uh is more fun right uh but yeah i mean the pandemic and everything else kind of put up you know put a kind of a stop and everything made it a little bit difficult to schedule stuff and you know i'm i'm a fat guy so i didn't want to like get stuck in the crossfire of like coronavirus so and i don't trust sean not to get it and we kiss a lot so like it's just not gonna like it's not gonna work for me to have a pandemic that's spread through kissing

while we're recording what uh what is the corona vibe like in florida are people spreading it at the beaches oh they don't give a fuck like i i feel like i mean florida is a place i feel like people could be running down the beach and yelling i have covid and everyone would be like oh okay another day in florida i mean you probably run a bigger risk of getting stuck in the in the ass with like a heroin needle yes and like injected down on broward uh than you do of getting covid i mean like i'm sure that happens 30 000 times a day too yeah people paint him as a as a bad person a bad politician but i've from what i've seen been pretty impressed by rob desantis's uh handling of it at least in the back i would say if the entire media apparatus

nationwide has to turn against you in order to try to turn you into like an evil disgusting man you're probably pretty good at your job right yeah that's what we were talking about before uh before we hit record the the news of uh it's coming too late about the brianna taylor stuff yeah oh we were just talking yeah um i mean the whole story that we've been fed for three months is bullshit and that that blew my mind i like i i had bought it and you know i it it it appeals to the sort of libertarian or anarchic you know nish that still exists in me um i i don't like no knock warrants i think they're bad i think the idea that someone can come to your door and knock it down um because you might throw like four balloons down a toilet filled with cocaine

i mean if if that's the amount if they're coming and executing uh on a drug warrant wearing you have so few drugs you can flush them all down the toilet in three minutes i mean that's that's a problem that's stupid they shouldn't have been there in the first place i agree uh and yeah and and you know like we're talking now like this woman apparently she was sleeping in her bed and they execute a no-knock warrant and they go in her boyfriend and this is a story i've been told uh believes that someone's breaking in and grabs his gun and starts shooting well i think it was an apartment right yes apartment so for me the story's always kind of had some questions number one if it's an apartment it's pretty small so like where did

he keep his gun that he just had it to instantly start shooting the guys coming in the door i've been i've been trying to figure that one out he didn't like come downstairs from upstairs after hearing a creak like an apartment small so like was he was it on his chest and he was like sleeping with it and a gun sock and he was like a teddy bear or was it like in a safe and he's just he sleeps in the safe or was it maybe like he has like 12 ak-47s sitting around the house i don't know but it never that part never made sense to me but apart from that i was willing to basically accept that there's something i don't know and that you know a no-knock raid is a no-knock raid and those are bad so generally like i'm okay with having that discussion but then we find out today

that it wasn't a no-knock raid they knocked several times nobody answered then they breached the door and brianna taylor wasn't sleeping like we were told so i mean the whole story is bullshit yeah should we be surprised though we got duped again i yeah i'm surprised that i keep getting duped because like it's it's a new level because i i i don't believe okay i've been trying to i've been parsing what i what i think about all of this because i strongly believe that police need reform in this country i've begged i've begged people i know not to become police over the years because i think that there's like there are systemic problems in police departments now i don't think that they're racial i think that they're largely uh having to do with things like militarization

i think police buying these mraps after uh after the war and giving them like army clothes i think that those are all like problems i think when you give civilians power and clothes and vehicles to go and act like Rambo, you're going to have some problems. And I think that that's, I think that that's what's happened over the years. And I think that that the problems have manifest not along racial lines, but along power complex, power complex lines. And I agree. Like I want to be out there protesting police brutality. I would like to propose problems and solutions. I would like to propose solutions that are beneficial to everybody who has to deal with the police and not just black people or just white people or whatever it's clearly not a racial issue

and that data backs that up i thought it was for years until i went and actually grabbed a data set and ran the regressions myself to see what it was that police were doing and whether i was right about whether racism is a problem in police departments yeah that's uh taboo to say these days but i completely agree it's a it's a it's a power complex thing you're giving people who may have been picked on in high school or want power over other individuals getting into these positions of power and then again to tie it back to the militarization the uh the equipment and uniforms that they're getting uh coinciding with the the lack of training that they get compared to the the military personnel that previously owned that

equipment is astonishing uh yeah absolutely and and you know the thing is watching these riots erupt i've never felt in my life except until recently that police need mraps and now i watch these riots break out and i'm like you know what they need tanks right well are these spontaneous riots are these authentic grassroots well that's the thing if in fact they're not spontaneous and let's say they're coordinated by chinese dissidents or russian dissidents or whatever it is well i mean then they really need tanks because we're at war not just internally as a country but we're literally at war like externally it seems like trump is on to that tip he uh he designate new york city portland and seattle as anarchist zones yeah but that's that's

different it's not so much that they're not willing to uh or that they are in a state of anarchy or that they are being influenced by like foreign dissidents it's a state of it the the acknowledgement is that they refused federal help to quash the riots and they commanded their police forces to do less than high quality policing in order to allow the riots to happen so i mean perhaps uh at the mayoral level there's coordination with dissidents but i don't think so I think it's just these mayors have sympathies that are politically problematic. And by the way, when it comes down to it, I've tried over the years not to have a political ideology for the most part. And I have very few principles I care about.

I care about fiscal policy. I care about the First Amendment. I think that you cannot have the First Amendment without the Second Amendment. And I fervently hate Marxists. And that's it. I hate commies. That's it. Those are the only things that I believe, or that I strongly believe in.

I think it's a very simple political ideology to hold, and I feel very similar. I like the Fourth Amendment, too. I think we were talking with Brianna Taylor on lawful search and seizure. Why do we have the drug war to begin with, and why does it enable no-knock warrants and stuff like that, even though this wasn't the case, but bringing it back to the riots and local governments and mayors. And did you catch that last week

when, who was it, Newt Gingrich was trying to bring up George Soros? I saw that too. Funding district attorneys. I mean, it's ridiculous because there's plenty of evidence that he is funding attorney generals, attorneys general, attorney...

District attorneys. District attorneys, districts attorneys, all over the United States with like millions and millions of dollars they're pumping millions into these campaigns uh and it's weird i i mean i don't have a lot of it might not be george himself but it's organizations that he controls and uh you know i mean i've i've read i've read biographies of george soros particularly his autobiography i'm pretty sure i read that a few years ago and he's he's a perfectly interesting guy he's made a lot of money doing things that you know

bitcoiners hate him for but i think the thing that people don't realize is that george soros has also failed a lot like what he did in london i think he also tried to do in like the philippines and wasn't successful and he's tried to do it a number of times where he's tried to collapse economies or you know he's invested in the collapse of economies and it hasn't always been successful so i think people need to understand he is not god but he himself and those that know him say that he has a bit of a god complex and he's a little bit obsessed with his legacy uh and so you know i don't think it's out of bounds to bring him up and i think i thought that was a little ridiculous that they couldn't even have a discussion about it right no so i

come from a city where it's becoming apparent that he funded the district attorney of philadelphia and krasner whatever his name is and just speaking with people friends and family at home they're like this dude's completely fucking up the city and when uh they're like implementing the the san francisco law of we're not going to arrest you if you have quote-unquote petty crimes of breaking into cars and robbing people isn't it it's fucking and i've been fucking robbed in san francisco like three years ago went to wine country my in-laws my wife and we went to golden gate park to go to an aids memorial in which my mother-in-law's brother his name was on it we went to go find it was a very emotional day we go she's wiping tears off her eyes we get to our car

windows broken everything's stolen was did he graffiti his name on it or is he an aids guy he's an aids guy okay yeah my name on a memorial too you're gonna get me you're gonna get me in trouble your parents don't listen to the show remember um but no i mean yeah it's i think i think like there's a lot going on right now politically and it goes against my sort of ethos that everything is always like getting a little better and it's all right but i mean i think that the united states is on is on tenuous ground right now i think that the first amendment is under attack i think i think that that the uh i think that you know to your point i think all the amendments i'm a fan of them

i just don't care that much about them because i think all of them proceed from the first and i think the second exists to protect anything that proceeds from the first so i don't think that you have any amendments without the second and i don't think you have any amendments about the first um i think that you require the right to free speech and we're really the only country that has that and understands it and it is unequivocal i think that that is the thing that particularly foreigners don't understand and the other thing that's been interesting to me this election is that foreigners don't understand what's going on in the country in america right now they really seem to think they have a good handle on it and you'll talk

to them you're like do you know you don't have any idea that like a huge portion of this country believes that donald trump rented a hotel room in moscow and peed on it with a bunch of naked women and like and asked them to golden shower him and that's like the basis of a lot of the political ideology as it exists today and you ask people this and like of course he did that we have celebrities literally tweeting and looking for the tape and you know this is this is the basis of america's political uh like revolutionary spirit right now is that donald trump got peed on by a bunch of ladies in a hotel room that barack obama once slept in it's that and then it's uh they don't believe it when you tell them that by the way they're like yeah okay bullshit yeah

it's the same thing with the uh the mexicans are always sending rapists and drug dealers they cut that complete quote out of context but it doesn't matter i mean just like the fact that like half of america right now believes that there are uh russians hiding under every rock and that donald trump is like calling putin every morning to get his like directions i mean i i would say it's about half of america i've been having this discussion with a bunch of foreigners they don't believe me they really do not but like i hear it i hear it every day from people that donald trump is a stooge of putin that putin is uh that you know putin is directing america that he's a manchurian candidate etc yeah i hear the same thing uh come from a family that leans very uh

very left and they believe they believe this but yeah you bring it up to people and it gets to the screaming match and uh i've just resigned myself to just shutting up just you know what you'll find out one day well so yesterday on conservative twitter i noticed there was a there was this article being passed around uh from the new york times a long time ago where the new york times did an article on people that believe that they're being followed do you remember this uh no so there's there's this phenomenon around the united states where mental patients believe that they're being followed they're being stalked by somebody they don't know who's doing it but they believe it strongly and uh yesterday a bunch of conservatives were tweeting this around being

like this is what's this is what people like believe about the uh the nazis all over america this is everyone believes that there's all of these nazis and i've never seen one and i'm hearing this all over the world that like right-wing fascism is sprouting up and i'm like i just where people will point to charlottesville that's usually the go-to yeah one guy right now there's many men with torches there were like there were like 80 others yeah it's all of them yeah no i mean i haven't so that gets to the point like are are we being not us uh particularly you and i but uh the country is being divided on race lines for a larger nefarious plan by

who whoever it may be the people around the media banks whatever it may be power structure of the world well i think that's the difficulty of this is that like it's very difficult not to respond to what's going on right now without also becoming a conspiracist right and that's i think that's a difficulty is because like well the the easy response to any critique of it is like oh you're a conspiracist you're ridiculous you believe in also you know you must believe be one of those people that believe george soros is funding all of this i hear that kind of thing all the time and i'm like okay um no i'm not uh you know conspiracy like you know whatever i'll believe in whatever conspiracy i'll get that off the table fine but that's not that's not you know

i'm trying very hard to like be rational about what's going on but as in america i've seen this like descent into chaos so fast and it's inexplicable how like neighbors have turned against neighbors and literally literally believe their neighbors who they were best friends with last year are now nazis right it's crazy and it's like so going back to conspiracy theorists i'm up here pulling up a dave colin tweet my favorite tweet about conspiracy theorists ever i'm a conspiracy theorist i believe men and women of wealth and power conspire if you don't think so you're what is called an idiot if you believe this stuff but fear the label you will call your or what is called a coward it's like they use that term

to just shut down any conversation you're not like nuke indrish like perfect example last week wasn't allowed to bring up george loris for any reason well the conservatives have have not done themselves any favors like that's true a lot of these things for example george soros thing that's sort of what sucks too is you're forced to defend people you don't even like in the first place yeah well i mean the thing with george soros it has a grain of truth george soros does fund a lot of shit and he also gets blamed for funding everything but the left has their own bogeyman as well like the coke brothers are the bogeyman of the left and um you know there's there's all sorts of like right-wing like rich

people that they love to say are very you know influential and changing elections but you're not allowed to like point at the ones that they got but i mean i don't think the right side itself any favors by sort of attributing all malice to george soros but there are things that george soros has funded and i think it's okay to point them out yeah i also think that this is a particularly egregious time like i i don't see i see the i see like this sort of communist thread throughout a lot of these protests and riots and the symbolism's all over the place yeah but it's it's more than that like so here's the thing like i again it's another one of those things you want to you want to refrain from saying hitler had a dog and you have a dog

therefore you're hitler right so you don't want to say like the maoist revolution had x and this revolution has x and therefore it's a maoist revolution but i see these similarities and i think it is more a more like a chinese revolution than say a russian revolution i see these very very striking problematic similarities and i've seen this over the years like the children uh being raised up against the adults which is very weird i remember like david hogg uh you know taking a place and and uh and saying all you know he can't wait till the next till the old generation dies and i i saw that i remember during wall street the uh occupy wall street i would hear people say like anybody who's rich needs to be killed which is you know it's it's

smacks of cambodia i see these sort of very communistic phraseologies coming coming into parlance and people just kind of like we're in america people brush it off like oh that'll never happen that's just that's just a thing the kids are saying but it does happen and i i don't i i don't know the extent to to i don't know how far this will go and the reason is is because i'm astounded by certain claims being made that three years ago you could have stood up against like let's say i say uh black people are more often killed by cops than white people it's just a false claim a few years ago you could have called it a false claim well now i'm watching people who i know a guy who wrote a book a few years ago about uh how college ideologies are a problem

like these sort of like woke ideologies it was a good 15 years ago he wrote this book and how if it you know makes its way into the mainstream that would be a big problem you know college students need reform at the university etc well he's a full-on woke leftist now this is part of antifa really yeah and i i it happened in the last year and i don't understand it there's like a brainwashing going on and i hear people say the same thing about people that like trump that they're brainwashed and i'll talk to them about it and i can't the trump they describe the trump that i describe is this guy who's kind of buffoonish oafish and stupid and seems to have a pretty good uh a pretty good sort of inkling of the zeitgeist and somehow is able to navigate

he's very good at navigating sort of in a chess-like way situational political situations where people try to corner him. He seems to be able to squirrel out of corners. He's a rhetorical master when it comes to that. Yeah, but he's a rhetorical moron. That as well. So it's really weird. And he seems to have a pretty good understanding

of what the media will and will not bite on. He's like a fisher of men. A fisher of media. So I give him that sort of credit. I think he's, you know, fine. I don't think that he's Superman. I don't think anyone is. i would want to attach my reputation to anybody in case like he actually does

plot a gun and shoot someone on fifth avenue uh so i don't want to like attach my reputation to it but you know he seems fine but then i hear people describe the trump that i've seen and it resembles nothing like the trump that i've seen or the trump that like anyone else i know has seen and i've i'm fairly at the moment politically engaged so i'm trying to figure out what they're seeing and it's nothing like what i'm looking at it's like we're literally i've heard people describe it as two different movies but

i wish that i wish that people could be here to understand what that's like to literally hear somebody say something that is a complete lie and to stand by it even when you show them it's a lie right like i've seen that in debates but never in sort of the public dialectic where you're like talking about events like and then he was going 30 miles an hour well how do you know here's a radar gun no he was going 60 this is the radar gun it says 30 it was 60 believe me yeah it's trump derangement syndrome it's real and people vehemently just don't want him to be correct or have a semblance of success or what others would deem success well how did you get here though right how did you get here like how did how did we go from being reasonable and able like i think

of 9-11 i mean i don't know how old you are but i imagine you remember 9-11 yeah i was in fifth grade i was i was 10 at the time wow yeah so what are your memories of that like uh the day the day of i i was a class of teachers want to tell us and i was that little asshole was like hey can i use the computer was like back when the internet was just getting into schools and i went on like cnn.com and saw it and then my mom picked me up she's crying um had a lot of had a few uncles working in manhattan didn't know what was going on with them but then in the uh yeah the aftermath i remember freedom fries i remember uh them invigorated every american every american no matter who they were had a flag in their lawn

yeah no they really they really uh drummed up the nationalistic fervor in the schools it just it was americans are very proud people and and it was like you know they got they they put those prisoners sewing the flags into overtime and like every american went out and bought bought those little uh vinyl pieces of plastic and put them in their lawns and they paid hundreds of dollars for them and they they showed their american pride i don't know how we go from there to america is a systemically racist system everything's broken and we need to tear down the system and i i have a feeling it's it's to do with the fact that millennials seem to believe that like history started in like 20 or like 2006 yeah well that's another good point and we're going to rehash a

conversation we had on block digest a few months ago whenever the fuck that was but the managerial class and, uh, what's the term I'm looking for? You basically have a managerial class, excuse me, the executive class. I mean like now the, uh, I forget how it'll come to me, but basically you have this class of people that were able to, uh, separate themselves from the working class via, uh, via salary. You go to college, you get your degree that affords you a better salary higher income and then you could look at the welder down the street the plumber and say hey i'm making more money than i'm smarter than that person that used to be true yeah and now with the the flood of people being forced into university system to get degrees as a millennial

sold that dream you have to go to college to be successful in life and you have these people who are expecting to go through the university system get their degree uh and then be able to materially separate themselves from the working class via income they're also a i mean look there there's a lot of problems i have with college and i i ask this question everybody first of all in discussions of college everyone ignores supply and demand right so like you you think about degrees and if you think about you know way back in the day only a few people graduated with degrees it was a way to distinguish yourself well now everybody gets a degree so like you have plenty of those and actually this relates later on to the discussion we'll have on bitcoin but you only need

so many uh bachelors you only need so many masters of engineering you only need so many phds to fill professor slots slots so when you have enough like you you no longer have these sort of like stratified career job you know career goals or anything like that you end up like with things like on the job training right so like you want to raise your salary forty thousand dollars well you need to go from like low level employee to manager and and maybe you work at ernst and young or something like that to get to that level and you as you go up you increase your job opportunities at other places through on the job training and maybe you went to college to go to ey the term is elite overproduction is that is that the uh is that the getting too many university degrees yeah

Yeah. You have people who assume they're going to be in the quote unquote elite class and they're overproduced and pricing each other out. Whereas you have plumbers and there's not that many people who want to be plumbers. And if you want to make a lot of money now, you go be a plumber. Right. And you know what? You're not going to earn $100,000 more when you retire than when you started. You're going to always earn what $80,000 is today. And maybe if you're really good, you'll earn 120, which means in like 40 years, maybe you'll have earned, maybe your earning power will be up because you know, inflation and whatnot, but like you'll have earned approximately

80 to 120,000 a year if you're good. And, and you'll retire with a few million dollars, enough money to retire, like in the Midwest or anywhere that's like a reasonable living price and have a pretty good living standard. So, I mean, you're right. That is what it is. Elite overproduction. And now I see people like they graduate from college and what do they do? They go work at the Apple store as an Apple genius, or they go to work at Starbucks or they go work, you know, other places, but you know, never McDonald's, right. They couldn't deign to work there, but they'll work at a, as a high class barista for the exact same amount down the road at Starbucks. And that's, that's all we've done is instead of stratifying income, we've stratified

sort of job signaling, like sort of this like economic signaling through the fact that you're able to get a job at Ruby Tuesday. You don't need a degree for that. No. I mean, or at like a Starbucks, you don't need a degree for that.

What do you think these people really would be working at these places? They think they should be writing philosophy tomes that make it popular and make them a lot of money. And I think that's what... I mean, you can do that now too, though, on youtube you can these people go not all everybody goes to the university system is so motivated right right but it's the ambitious it's the ambitionless class they go to university with

no plan and i mean here's the question i have for you and and like i ask this question a lot to people because it it kind of blows their mind because i mean i think they've thought about it but they've never really asked the question so when you get out of university with an engineering degree how much do you make let's say you get an engineering job presuming uh what type of engineering software engineering so you build bridges uh 120 000 something like that that seems reasonable uh as a starting job and then maybe eventually 250 300 right there's like pretty big leaps in engineering 120 000 but that's that's like one of the bigger you know uh and and let's say you go to a mid-price school how much do you pay for that four-year degree

i'll just go at the state school and stayed out from pennsylvania penn state you would probably pay 80 grand for four years okay so let's say that you want to go and you know how much do you think a starting job would be for let's say uh i don't know a women's or a fem studies major 60 grand i think that's high but let's call it 60 yeah how much do you pay for that at the same school same thing 80 grand why because you were told you need to well i mean but why why why is it that a job we know that the jobs on the other end are x you know like it's just that people are mispricing the risk they're taking on right they're taking these jobs that they're paying the same amount as a university engineering grad to get but they're they're they're taking these

degrees that set them up for like 45 to 70 000 jobs whereas the engineering students are taking one that that sets them up for 120 000 i think that the universities have some culpability there but i also don't understand why it is that people are willing to pay these exorbitant amounts for these these titles and these degrees that literally they come out of university with with no earning potential well do you think a 17 year old is cognitively competent enough to make those type of investment decisions at that age and do it and it is an investment decision by the way yeah that's the thing people don't quite understand is that your degree is uh your ultimate investment decision it's the first one you make as an adult yeah now it is well just as

a millennial uh went to an all guys preparatory high school went went to an expensive university in chicago and that was the goal throughout grade school middle school high school and the parents feed that right they're like hey you got to do this you got to oh they absolutely do i mean it's it's a cultural norm at this point and it's very interesting to watch because there's no there's no reason for it to persist and this is the thing the normal course of things would be for people to evaluate it and be like universities don't work and then to stop going yeah my brother universities don't work my brother i'm going to harvard next year my brother universities don't work i'm going to the university of minnesota next year right universities don't work where are you going to

university i mean like nobody stops yeah why is that i i don't know i think it's because they still they still they view it as this thing that's supposed to work i don't know it's like when i was a kid i was uh i was raised in the church and i was told that nobody was having sex before marriage and i felt so super betrayed when i found out that everybody else was having sex before marriage well when i was younger i was like oh everybody was doing that i grew up going to catholic school I didn't say that they said you know they said if you had sex before you get married you're going to hell so it was different there you go and then you find out that all of your like you know classmates have been you know hanky-panky and you're kind of you feel betrayed and I think

that's kind of you don't stop necessarily doing you know doing what you're doing you somehow justify it or whatever and I see that same sort of phenomenon people are like well it college doesn't work but it should work and so they keep doing it and I don't understand why that is I don't understand how you stop that cycle i i think the university should be complicit in like you know making sure that these kids get out and actually have jobs that are reasonable i think that i think that degrees should be priced for the risk that you're taking on i think that like if a if a university if the doc if there's a lack of doctors in a country i think i don't know maybe they should lower the price of becoming a doctor for a few years right like i don't see why the

the price always has to go up i don't see why there's no price discovery so none of that this is why me personally i i put more of the onus on the government and the universities more not onus but uh blame on the universities and the government the government's offering these loans the university's like all right we know these kids are gonna get these fucking loans let's just jack up the prices they're being told that they have to do this so they're gonna take out the loans right we're gonna get the money so maybe a way to stop that cycle is to stop giving out loans from the government yeah it's clearly exploitive but at the same time like you know i believe strongly in personal responsibility so you at a college like i mean generation

before this one and i think you and i are probably part of this generation um but the generation before this one and every other generation has said like you know you get to a certain age And you kind of go like, OK, I've made some mistakes, made a lot of bad decisions. I'm going to pick myself up and we're going to move forward. Right. And this generation just doesn't seem to have that ability. Oh, I mean, it's been written about and talked about for years now where the the participation trophy generation, we expect everything to be handed to us. i think it's not every millennial obviously um but uh collectively it seems to be the theme yeah and i think that's a i think that's a sad state of affairs but uh but anyhow enough about

the university stuff i i do i do i i do lament sort of the the way like these riots and things have gone because i thought there was a real opportunity going back to all of this police stuff i thought when george floyd happened there was a real opportunity to have a conversation about things like police brutality militarization police behavior etc etc etc police unions i started seeing liberals talk about police unions which was fascinating to me because like that's been a conservative issue for 40 years yeah and to watch them kind of come around like okay okay maybe there's some like reform that can happen here but they turned it into this partisan racial like bullshit so quickly that i've never seen anything like it i've never i've never watched

something that was so close and yet completely the opportunity completely and utterly squandered well they beat up trump supporters that showed up to these rallies to march with them yeah and it's it's weird how quickly once they I don't want to say they once the narrative was race once it quickly became that

how quickly things like critical race theory hopped in and started being talked about more particularly in government agencies and got to the point for that though I mean I've been hearing things from government agencies saying that people are a little bit afraid of talking

internally they're afraid of saying anything because they've been they've been doing these like transgender trainings and everything else for like a number of a number of years like this is a thing that leaked out of the university it used to be that these ideas were ideas that you played with in university like play-doh and they just they didn't leave like you went into the real world you're like okay i had a lot of really interesting years of thinking about the weirdest things and that was fun and it really expanded my mind but that's not what's going on now yeah have you ever read up on like the the leftist bombings of the 70s and the homegrown quote unquote terrorism that that happened there the weather underground and such yes i actually don't

know a lot about it but i mean have you uh yes i've read i mean i haven't read books about it i've read many articles about it and it was very interesting as these people were bombing universities government buildings uh kidnapping people at one point they took over a hospital in the upper west side and were mandating that the hospital operate in a certain fashion and it turned out they were all just taking heroin up there just using it to get heroin and then so some of these people got arrested and spent good time in jail uh but like lawyers associations and funds which is actually funny because that's becoming another thing now with the uh the riot arrest and the the bail funds similar things back then and some of the some of the worst uh

at or some of the worst aggressors of the violence of the 70s wound up trickling into the university system and not only the university system the ivy league like cornell columbia harvard and they've been running these departments for five decades now or well they probably got out yeah you know What's funny to me is I've been watching this sort of discussion that's been occurring with people like Jordan Peterson and such. And I've been very frustrated by watching the academics come out on this because I've been watching it for 30 years. Camille Paglia started talking about this in the early 90s. Great Philadelphia. Yeah.

And she's been talking about it since like 91, 92, maybe even in the 80s. and nobody else joined her until it affected their lives and that's that's what i think is really really interesting about all of this like jordan peterson likes to talk about how you can't know whether you're a good man unless you're presented with the opportunity to be a bad man you know and that's actually that's true but why is it that these guys didn't say anything until it affected them why is it that they weren't early it was obvious it's her mentality it's mentality it's easier to just go with the hurt right but then you have these people like the weinstein brothers who are gaining popularity and they didn't say dick until evergreen right

but here we you know here we were 20 years ago could have prevented it it's funny how selective they are too like camille paglia very strong woman voice why can't we get behind her uh someone why is she completely ignored and shut out of this like sort of movement she's the one that started talking about it the earliest yeah and you know she's also the only one of them who's smart you know you i don't know if you've ever read any camille paglia she's a cultural critic she's phenomenal you read her books uh she she does you know critiques on poetry and critiques on culture and art and they're they're insightful and interesting and she's a thinker yeah it's a modern day philosopher i catch more of her her recorded interviews that's why i like to consume

some of her content i can't read too good so uh yes but that's that's probably the way the words are going through her head yeah it's uh i really like her and that's but that's been the thing i've been i've been reading camille paglia for 20 years you know 20 25 years and and it's uh most people gonna hear this conversation i have no idea who she is well yeah and they should right uh and she's she's been sounding the alarm and that's the thing she's shut out she's shut out of this because you know you have a bunch of i mean this this is the the white male privilege uh the reality of it like if it exists it exists in that space because camille pagley has been saying stuff for many years and like when this all occurred like everyone's giving jordan jordan peterson the

credit and the weinstein brothers they didn't do anything until it was too late you know camille pagley was the jesus she was the one that was like sitting there telling us that like you know the kingdom of heaven is here we can all have it or or we can make this world hell and uh and everyone was like okay crazy lady go do your thing go get tenureship and just like shut up but like we'll let you say it because you're pretty good at like cultural critics you know stuff like that she's she's very much like a noam chomsky type figure uh but but the opposite yeah and he noam chomsky's not even good enough anymore he almost got canceled this year it's it's absurd yeah yeah yeah but i mean even noam chomsky contributes largely a lot to this i mean like

the old guards of uh of intellectualism are you know what i've liked about them over the years i mean noam chomsky is a good example the beauty of noam chomsky is that noam chomsky is sort of like encompasses both the devil and the angel he's good and he's bad he says a lot of you know he likes yeah he likes to weigh in on foreign policy i think he's a idiot when it comes to foreign policy but you know what like his book manufacturing consent and all of these other things that he's written about sort of how society and elites like build narratives and use them for their own ends i think that stuff is genius and the kind of stuff that like you read the book and you're like oh that's what's going on and he's been saying it for longer yeah he came out i mean

and he's been consistent too that's the other thing that's what i look for in people i try to respect his consistency throughout time and yeah i mean i like that noam chomsky is consistent he's principled i don't agree with him on everything but like i think his insights on certain things are very worthwhile and i think the same i mean camille is the same way and it's it's very it's interesting to me how we've sort of sloughed off these individuals who were early and given this entire movement over the counter movement if you will to wokeism over to these newcomers who don't really know what's going on who speak

in platitudes and who weren't brave enough to do anything about it until it got them fired yeah that is a very good point I never put that together but yeah and it's freaks if you haven't read any of her work or watching interviews go check out some of Camille

Paglia's work it's incredibly insightful and it's actually incredibly ironic that she does it all from Philadelphia one of the most liberal cities in the world yeah i mean she she really is great and you know but that's that's the thing i think about a lot of this is that like i i'm wondering where if we've crossed the rubicon and if like there's no going back kind of thing well that's when you bring it back to block digest and the conversation we had

there the second amendment like i like that you like the second amendment i like it too um that and you i think you described it as that emergency button in the back of every gun owners minds like hey we'll take so much of the ship but a push comes to shove we have we have guns right that's why i promote amin bundy for president because i think he's the only one who's ever successfully put together a militia right but uh yeah exactly i do think that there's the beauty of america is that we have the nuclear option and i think that that's a thing that's like far underestimated by these foreign entities that are trying to like you know so dissent is that america has a nuclear option and i don't think that anyone ever wants to use

it but we haven't and that's that's a thing that prevents a lot of what like these fascist regimes actually become what about kyle rittenhouse right but that's that's why the left has been so interested in trying to convince everybody that the people that have the guns are fascists right so that's a question that's been lingering in my mind uh based on conversations i've been having the last month particularly after the kyle rittenhouse event and then a couple weeks later when that trump supporter was just murdered in cold blood in portland i think are we already in the midst of a civil war and can you only pinpoint when a civil war starts in retrospect yes and yes and i know when it started i mean

i i can tell everybody when this all started and and you know no one's gonna think i'm right for another 10 years but i i've been saying this i mean you can listen to my show a long time ago and i'll i've been saying uh that we're on the verge but i think i'm wrong about that i think we've been in it for longer and i think the beginning of it was gamergate really yeah that was when all of the stops were pulled and if you started looking at gamergate i mean first of all games are a form of art and they're a form of dangerous art because you know they they really can challenge assumptions and change minds and they have the youth they got the youths and uh and during gamer gates you saw this sort of like weird narrative built and you they started doing

this thing the media generally where they would do an interview with somebody and they would then write the article and the article would be filled with nothing that the interviewer was questioned about all sorts of lies fake things and just this complete sort of like depraved new type of journalism that i've been watching rise and i think this is the thing that people don't understand i've the news has never been good but there's been journalists before and you can find them and i can point to articles by these journalists there's a really good article uh that i read it the other day from uh new times and it's about uh john mccain and whether or not he's a war hero all right so they follow this kind of nutty guy who has been campaigning against john mccain's status

as a war hero for many many years he lost his son he thinks his son's alive and that he's a pow and the government has been you know preventing getting these you know going and finding these people uh you know he's the miapow flags if you remember those and he's one of these guys who really like wants to make sure everyone knows that john mccain is not a war hero so the journalist basically does this thing where he goes through and he has a guy tell him what he believes and the journalist writes it all down and then he goes and he finds people that disagree with it and he writes all of their contentions down and explains why they believe him to be wrong the journalist never interjects what he thinks he never does like you could walk away from the

article thinking the journalist provided a bunch of evidence that he's not a war hero or you can come away with the evidence or with the from the article saying that like it's very clear to me that john mccain is a war hero and that's what journalism was it used to be this thing there were journalists who were out there who would just go and look at like things and say like i don't know the answer at the end because there isn't always an answer you can't know things like this idea that john mccain was a war hero is is a objective an objective belief uh that we have because you know a lot of people have said he was and he said he was but there's people that disagree with it and it's not saying that like you should give as much credence to them you should at

least evaluate it though you should put that into your like information chamber and decide whether any of their information is credence and maybe it changes your mind maybe it doesn't yeah no that's a good point if gamergate was the start of that and thinking about a couple of the topics we've already talked about particularly crime stats right and and what gamergate did too is it pushed it pushed the right into this weird corner where they became antagonists right so gamergate turned right wingers and people that weren't really right even just like left of center centrists into antagonists who you know do the okay symbol and stuff like that and and in fact made the okay symbol you know a white nationalist symbol uh they themselves

seeded the idea and then they proceeded to do this just for like just a fuck with people fuck with people and and it's funny the antagonist sort of uh jester place in society exists and i'm glad it does but we we came like it used to be that you could the reason that you could have arguments with people is because you aligned enough you believed in things like objective reality and when you have a whole class of people who suddenly and it is sudden rejected the idea of objective reality like you you can't do anything and that's why the left can't meme the left doesn't understand archetypes they don't understand that like and you can see it all throughout like this pandemic shit uh the karen meme is a great example incredible the left believes that a

karen is someone who doesn't wear a mask right they don't even get it right but like that's not the case and and a karen is just a way to tell women to shut up and to say that they like don't have an opinion worthwhile which is funny ultimately but it's even more funny when leftists are using it right so a cell phone if you will yeah yeah it's it's very funny because like they don't even understand the irony of it it's just a sexist meme and it was funny when it wasn't serious but now they're like look at that karen telling everyone that she doesn't want to wear a mask like no karen's tell other people what to do they don't they don't tell you what they're doing like they're not going to obey like that's different than get me your manager you're not

bang me yeah it's the uh yeah the picture of the woman in the cell phone calling the cops on a barbecue as we had to imagine right yeah the left yeah so i mean you know it's it's very weird and i think it's probably i mean like your show is going to have a lot of people i'm sure you have a lot of international listeners yes and uh and to all of you international listeners out there like i know you guys all have opinions on what's going on in america trust me you don't know it's weirder than you think it's so weird because it's it's dismaying too it's like as an observer uh are we the last bastion of freedom of speech uh gun rights true freedom bastion of it like that's that's the great thing about america it's the first place to codify those

his rights i mean the idea of america is that those aren't rights those are things that god gave you so we just put them on paper so that we can remember them yeah that's the experiment is like can we maintain a society where we maintain god-given rights uh and and live together and so far the answer has been yes but that's because we've all had an objective reality we can agree on yeah well you can transition into bitcoin here like do you think bitcoin gets us close i've been saying recently that bitcoin is the greatest preservation of natural rights natural law since the constitution bill of rights uh yeah i mean i could see i mean like bitcoin bitcoin embodies within it a lot of those uh things the self-sovereignty stuff is i mean i think that

I think that liberalism generally the idea and by liberalism, I don't mean liberals, I mean the idea that the individual is sovereign. And that means a lot of things. Number one, it means that you own your mistakes and it means that you own your successes, right. um but the the idea of individual sovereignty is a fundamental god-given reality like there's nothing that you can you can do about that and i think that that's always like the beauty of america is that we've recognized sort of the liberality of the person we recognize that as sort of a sacramental truth that people are people and they are individuals and they are responsible for their rights and their wrongs and uh bitcoin extends that and says and you're responsible for your property and it's a little bit different than property previously because it's actually yours right right and

so does bitcoin help swing the pendulum back towards uh a freer society that respects the individual of course i don't think so no i see here's the thing i think that libertarians like it um i think that certain political philosophies are drawn to it but i think that i don't think that there's like i think that the way that society tends to work is that there are these things that society has to contend with right and bitcoin is one of those things it's a thing that society has to evolve with and contend with i don't think necessarily that you take these sort of like hard logical constructions and then put them into a puzzle piece and say like society is going to reflect this hard logical construction it's more of like here's a hard logical construction

that society is going to have to adapt to and society will surround it and it'll take whatever philosophy communism capitalism socialism whatever the hell you know fascism and it'll it'll figure out what bitcoin's place in that world is right but i don't think that bitcoin itself confers any sort of philosophical uh you know advantages what it might do is it might allow people more mobility so they can opt out of bad philosophies but i don't think that you end up inherently becoming more of an individualist just because bitcoin trying to say that people are there are rational people and there are irrational people and they don't become fundamentally more rational because they have bitcoin or because they have plato's

republic in their hand right you give an irrational book you give a rational book to an rational person they're going to get something very different on it than you do and that's how you get california women who believe that crystals you know cure cancer like we know that that's not true and yet there's a sizable portion of the population that will tell you it is yeah so i think a good way to describe it is bitcoin does not make people more rational it's a tool for the rational if they want to uh want to put into action their beliefs right and and you know here's the other thing like there's that famous xkcd comic where you know the libertarians that are like i'm hiding my private key and then the next like panel is a guy beating his like knees and

saying well it's your private keys and he just gives them up the idea being that you know your your private keys are in your head until someone bashes you over the head with a baseball bat then going to give them right up right like they're not it's not it's not so secure because it's in your brain like you can get shot like you can have a communist government rise up above you know around you and come and take your guns and put you in the gulags you might still have your bitcoins there but like you know what good is it at that point you know there there is some sort of truth to the sort of maslow's hierarchy of needs there's some sort of truth to that where like you you certain things become unimportant if you don't have the other things and if you're in a

gulag you're not going to care that you have 3800 bitcoin waiting for you to get out you're going to hope to get out yeah but before it gets to the gulag could you agree that bitcoin's a good defensive technology uh in the world in which particularly financial surveillance is becoming more and more prominent it can be uh again it's another one of those things you have to know how to use it it's like monero people use it all the time and if they don't know how to use it well or dark coin or any of these others um the dark coin uh has dark coins still around dash yeah um zero coin or whatever it is uh you have to know how to use these and you have to know how to use them you know like you're you want to hide your monero transaction that's totally fine

until, I don't know, an FBI agent comes and transacts with you and then gets you to do something illegal. You're as safe from the society you're in as you are willing to opt out of that society. And most of us really aren't willing to do that. And particularly, people criticize nationalism, but the thing is, nationalism is the glue that holds a lot of a lot of this together and people don't leave their countries when they

become fascist because they they think that they can make it better and and it's brave and wrong and we all believe it because we don't want to believe that that we did this that the country we love i mean america is a great experiment i'm not going to abandon it because it turns into a fascist government like i don't think that that's where we're going right now but like i would like to stay here and change it i would like to fix it and that's that's what we all want unless you're roger veer in which case you opt out and you like you run like a pussy right well i completely agree with that and that's the way i feel like what is veer's importance going to be what will he have changed uh what will he be remembered for what will he have done that's

brave like this is again the peterson thing like what what what hardship will he have encountered that he like overcame and made the world a better place and it's not bitcoin cash rogers so shut up you know like it i think it's i think it's hard as if you watch society collapsing around you you know you might have obligations if you have a family or kids or something like that but like i you i'm sorry it's up to us to make sure that this society somehow comes out of all of this weirdness uh intact i completely agree and even as somebody with a wife and a child now like i feel even more compelled to protect what i believe is important in this for your kids i mean this is the bastion of freedom you know america is the only place that that freedom looks

like this america is the only place where you know free speech looks like this you know it's it's statuesque and it's brilliant and it's amazing it's ethereal it's this sort of impossible standard that we've held ourselves to and or that we've not necessarily held ourselves to but we've tried you know like judea the idea of like a judeo-christian philosophy one of those very interesting things is that in christianity you have the figure of jesus and and he's a sort of aspirable person to be you can't ever be that perfect because he fucked up when you were three years old but like you you want to be like him it's something to emulate and america has always been that sort of city on a hill that everyone looks to and wants to emulate the success of and

wants to emulate the you know the fervency and the and and and the population the the just the fact that americans work their asses off and sort of like american way of life people have always wanted to emulate that the fact that we retire when we're what 55 or 60 and don't do anything else for the rest of our lives except drive trade winnebago's around america and sleep in walmart parking lots like that's the dream of a lot of people throughout the world and we we are the bastion of that and it can be made better but we have this ideal that like we try to hold ourselves to and we fail and we will always fail because it's a perfect ideal but like i as an individual am not willing to watch people railroad and derail that sort of

belief system that there's something better out there for us to strive to and you know you don't tear down the whole thing to get there you get there in small incremental steps and you do it through consensus and you do it through hardship and some people die along the way and some people as a result have much better lives along the way and i mean there's there's things coming right like we've talked about the ai revolution many times uh how that's going to work i mean i don't know how that works but that might free up a lot of people's time maybe joblessness is a good idea in that world maybe people are going to be doing other things i don't know but like what do you do when you know you have these people here in america who basically fund the entire projects

of nation states to get people vaccinated right phil gates practically put polio to polio off the map practically not quite i brought it back in india yeah well i mean america had a lot to do with that actually really yeah uh a lot of the polio resurgence in india and pakistan is the result of the fact that we were running polio vaccination clinics in order to try to collect dna so we could find osama bin laden lovely what do they expect him to go get a polio vaccine or to find his family well they wanted to find his family and i think that might have been how they did it yeah um that was one of the ways so in pakistan and india being a vaccination specialist uh from one of these agencies that goes there and does that has become very dangerous

because they generally assume you're cia yeah that's it's a pretty bad situation but going back to america like are we really is i feel like we've been getting further away from the ideal at least in my lifetime patriot act uh the the central banking system there's always steps there's always steps back but i don't think i don't think that we've and i think we're gonna have to rejigger along the way but no we're way more free today i think than we were 50 years ago um i think that there are really there are i think so you can't walk to an airport without getting put through a scanner you can't well you get put through a scanner i get my balls touched so you're like i'm free to pick the

massage um but that eats up your time right you're yeah there are restrictions on freedom and they change throughout time but like they're they're different there's just the restrictions on freedom are different than they today than they were then and there will always be like this difference and some of that stuff will go away i mean i don't know maybe at some point the nsa surveillance goes away because i mean a court did just rule it was unconstitutional right so you think about like the apparatuses that are built that like cause less freedom and a lot of those things eventually get deconstructed and the question is when it's all gone when the when the chink is blown away what's left are we more free or less free and i look at these things like

that like i don't feel like you know when i was a kid i could go straight to the through the airport and look out the window well you know we had some terrorists get on planes and fly them into buildings there's some like levels of freedom i'm willing to give up as long as they don't like interfere with other areas of my life i do fear things like the coming surveillance state type stuff um i fear the fact that like a lot of these social media companies seem to be sort of deconstructing the social credit system i fear that but i also have faith in the system to sort of incrementally deconstruct those things and to make me in the long term more free and that might be a flawed belief but i i don't think that it's it's unproven i think that it's

been happening over the centuries life is better and better here it's true if you look at the data life expectancy uh crime rate death i have an ipad you have an ipad ipads for everybody like for the most part life is much better and like i you know i fear things i i fear a maoist revolution right and and during the period that that's happening if it does happen americans are less free but it's i view these things as temporary blips on the path to like the ultimate goal of you know the perfect balance of freedom and like government control yeah and the thing is i know it and you know it that is not a feasible reality there is no perfect balance it changes the beauty of america is that america has enough sort of tenacity and friction in the government

to both one change quickly and two remain stagnant which is they're two sort of competing are realities that that that make america really able to uh sort of work slowly towards that goal and i think the internet poses some problems because like i think that laws don't really know how to catch up to it i mean that brings us back to bitcoin right like the law doesn't know what to do with bitcoin they have no idea and we see that like ethereum is apparently not a security oh okay well then we have now these defy tokens which kind of they're like we are decentralized financialized finance like what does that mean it means we keep everything in a server in our office did you see did you see the drama from last night in the defi world no what happened

uh there were some screenshot leaks of i think a token called few uh of ethereum influencers talking about dumping on people and and all that stuff so that was like a huge kerfuffle last night i mean that doesn't surprise me i mean the reality is i mean this goes back to sort of the millennial stuff like millennials think that history started in 2006 and they're unaware of a world and i i can empathize with this it took me a long time to get my mind around like roman history because it wasn't modern history and i was like it didn't it doesn't exist i can't understand like a a pre-josh a pre-jun seth era right it's difficult in my brain to like put that on the timeline and i think that's the same thing millennials have a lot of trouble with

that and so like we come to finance you know all of the non-millennials rejected bitcoin they're like fuck that and we're like this is awesome so we played with it we bought it we have it i don't have any um but we have it and uh and we have built a financial system great okay well what is what is part of that well we have these things called i don't know like stable coins in in the real world those are called you know pegged assets right stable we changed the name because we invented it it's the same thing defy is literally this like world of finance that has complete corollaries in the real world but that nobody wants to acknowledge the corollaries exist and it has

laws that exist already governing it and they'll find that out eventually uh and that we'll also see that a lot of people get very rich by making a lot of really stupid choices just like they did in bitcoin and ethereum i mean like the reality is that these things generally don't work um i don't i haven't seen much innovation that that i find interesting in the defy space uh granted i'm not super familiar with most of the projects but i haven't seen much from what i have seen of the projects people telling me are really excellent i like them but that's stupid right but i've also seen enough in this space to know that like you can have a really stupid idea go on for 10 or 15 years yeah no i've described defy as an expedited cdo uh there you go explosion at some point like

yes that's what it's just layered layered risk well it's layered obfuscation and obfuscation is risk right and risk comes with the cost and so like you're increasing your risk you're getting standard returns whatever they are um and you know like what have you accomplished a product with bad risk return right like i mean that's that's like the risk adjust returns on defy are going to be bad which is you know whatever these these things exist to rich enrich the founders yeah they don't exist to enrich the users or the people that are holding them especially were you the one to popularize this blockchain blockchains or war yes so i guess we could transition into what brought us to this conversation which was your thread

about bitcoin maximalism and mining that's yeah and if somebody so one interested to go through that thread and two interested to get your thoughts on miners it seems like you may have like a little disdain for mining no i don't have any disdain for mining actually i actually i admire miners i think they're great um why do you think i have disdain for mine a little start there uh your quote tweet from of steve barber the other day city's gonna hire me to poison the water and i've heard and people reached out uh miners reached out saying that you've seen that's what i was like i don't think he hates miners i think he may uh hate some actors in the mining space who are shady in the past i don't i don't even hate them i i find so here's the thing i think

that there's a lot of people who don't understand what's going on with mining and mining is pretty simple mining is where you turn a computer on and suck energy out of the universe and convert it into pure entropy and heat and stick it back into the universe and uh and you get bitcoins right yes and and this is this is how it works miners uh mine up to the point of non-profitability right that's that's obvious you want to go all the way to where marginal cost equals marginal revenue that's that's just rational all right so what that means is like i i don't i don't hate miners i love them but they're energy pirates they go into a place and they suck up as much energy as they possibly can that is profitable and then like they have no vested interest in the place

right they're there for the energy so they don't care that it's in washington or that it's in like olympia or that it's in shakopee minnesota or that it's in bangor maine or you know like bumfuck florida they don't care they don't have a vested interest in the community you look at like they buy they get a big warehouse they'll have one maybe two people run the whole thing and then they like they they mine as much as they can and then when they're done they're gone interesting there's there's no there's no vested interest like they can literally own the place live in texas and suck energy from florida and bitcoins are a little bit like diamonds like in the way that you have diamonds like in the ground in africa right bitcoins exist where the energy is cheaper

yeah i mean you're talking to somebody who works for a mining company in great american mining we go to like so to push back on that uh well i would admit we don't care about middle of nowhere north dakota no you don't we do care we do care about america and energy independence so yeah yeah but and and there are some legitimate uses for mining in that space like i think that for example energy transport is hard um you know i think of like the possibility of like a country having i don't know some lake somewhere in the middle of nowhere and they're like well what do we do with this maybe they could build a dam and they could use a hundred percent of that dam's power to mine i don't i don't know how profitable that would be i mean i just i just think it's

interesting but there are some legitimate uses for minors but my my thing is like cities that invite minors in are hilarious because they're they're it's like inviting blackbeard the pirate to come and like be your police force like you you call up a minor like hey um you know we have we have this thing called energy which every town has do you want to come and suck ours up and there's only there's a limited amount of it in any location and generally the cities that are asking this are the ones that have excess energy number one and number two they often have subsidies right so like niagara falls will have like you know some city near niagara falls will be buying cheap energy from canada or whatever and you know there's so x number of megawatts they're purchasing

and miners come in they eat up the whole subsidy so like they were doing it for the benefit of their town and then all of a sudden all the residents are getting like 13 15 14 dollar per kilowatt hour power bills and they're like what happened and i'm sitting there laughing my ass off i'm like you invited miners in i mean what did you think i told you i told everybody that would happen before it happened the first time i was like this is what will happen they're going to mine to the point where marginal revenue that revenue equals marginal cost which means that they will mine the entire subsidy away they have to it's rational i don't have a problem with that but like what i do think is funny is that energy like miners the the mining exists where energy

is cheapest energy is cheapest where subsidies for energy exist so if there's a subsidy for energy miners will show up and i think it's a great egalitarian way to bring sort of parity to the global price of energy i think that's that's exactly what's happening but and i also don't blame miners for anything like they're not dirty people talk about how like dirty bitcoin is because of all the energy wasted and like you you got you got the wrong enemy man you should be advocating for eliminations of subsidies like mining operations can be smaller like we could if if energy prices were you know twice as high then the blockchain is equally as secure with what half as much mining yeah well that's why we're focused on off-grid stuff and like modular

container like we don't want to compete with the grid because then they kick you out it's like yeah i don't i don't i don't care what people do i think that like you know finding ways to mine and mine profitably are one hard and two commendable and uh and so i don't have any disdain for miners uh any miners listening you should know that i have no disdain for you i think you're doing god's work but i also know what you do so don't like pretend like you don't energy pirates and that's fine i think that there's a role for that i think that bitcoin is is a hilarious answer to subsidies because for years governments have been subsidizing without consequence and it's cute like because there has been no no consequence and i think that's

what's funny libertarians always talk about the consequences of subsidies and they're stupid libertarians don't know what they're talking about the reason you subsidize sugar is because if you don't subsidize it then you have to get it from brazil or something like that so brazil can make sugar at i don't know two cents a pound or something and if america's stuck doing it for you know 85 cents but we can make corn for like three cents why not like i don't know subsidize sugar with corn money and you can kind of reach a little bit of parity in that like it's not necessarily great maybe maybe the argument could be made that maybe america doesn't need to grow sugar cane or something but a lot of this stuff is actually important from like a national security perspective

you want to make sure that you have all of these things you want them in balance you don't want sugar to cost 85 a bag you don't want corn to cost one dollar a bag so like find some parity you know move this money here and make sure that this one costs a little bit more in this a little bit less you know that's to me somewhat reasonable i do think that like a lot of our farm policies get a little bit ridiculous but that's it is what it is um and i think that some of that could change but that's none of my business i don't have a whole lot of knowledge in farming but i do know that that there's like some problems there but when it comes to like energy subsidies and liberal libertarians will talk about the subsidies generally having these grave consequences

being completely inefficient etc and generally you know the state of the world is such that there really are no consequences for subsidizing except now with bitcoin and energy the consequence of a subsidy is that you literally can now like find energy in china that is cheap mine it steal the subsidy and send it to the united states without consequence it's fucking nuts that is awesome right yeah but you're pirates yeah i like being a pirate it's fine i admire it like i think it's awesome i think it's such a cool job i think that mining itself is awesome i don't you know So the idea and this is what we were talking about, the thread that ultimately you and I had like, you know, bonded over this week, you know, all of these blockchains, they're going for the same resource. And that's I mean, that's the reality of like the thread that I wrote was about Bitcoin maximalism and what it actually means.

And the reason I wrote it is because Bitcoin maximalism has this people have this idea that people are religious zealots. and uh being i think uh one of the first maximalists um the the entire like i've thought long and hard about what it is because like early on like metallic wrote this post he actually argued with me and chris in skype got really annoyed and then the next day had a post up about bitcoin maximalism so we've always said that that post was about us and i'm pretty sure it was um and that was where bitcoin maximalism was named and the idea was that it was these like religious zealots but it's not like i have believed for a very long time that there's not a lot of value in shit coins and i've spent a lot of time trying to figure out

how to articulate what it is that the problem with shit coins is and i've got a few answers number one other blockchains don't do anything different than bitcoin agreed okay we agree on that other people disagree y'all who disagree you're pretty much wrong like it's you're just wrong like what do they do like what does ethereum do that bitcoin doesn't a virtual machine touring complete different scripting language but again it's it's a but you could build that onto bitcoin it would be exactly it's an order of operations things too like you could build it in layers too if you want to yeah so it's expensive you guys have an expensive blockchain okay what is what is dash do that bitcoin what does the narrow do that

bitcoin doesn't privacy apparently but privacy at a cost these are expensive costs and and so like that's you know like on bitcoin for example the developers haven't added privacy they're working on it and the reason is is because privacy is expensive and by expensive i mean it's got a lot of load and uh and it's hard to it's hard to do cheap privacy it's hard that's and then again going back to order of operations is that the highest priority right now well it's for some it is that's the beauty of open source is that you can have people for whom it is their highest priority yeah yeah bitcoin is heavily researched and they're trying to do different things to make privacy uh as cheap as possible because it comes at a cost you cannot add something to a blockchain

at for free all right so there has to be some complication but the goal is really to reduce complication in these things so you have a narrow you have dash you have all these projects fundamentally they're all just blockchains they all use energy to run they're machines they're global machines global kind of businesses they're just they're just machines and they run on energy and they run on exactly the same kind of energy and you know we're talking about competition with bitcoin you want to eat up the entire subsidy somewhere well if you eat up the entire subsidy that actually means that you can't have ethereum miners in the same location profitably don't they exist in the same location now so that's so that's so that's my biggest question

about your thread like what is the are you are you taking it to its logical conclusion and assuming everything from there or what i'm saying is this is that like every miner has the same incentive to mine to the point where marginal revenue equals marginal cost right and they're all competing for the exact same resource a resource that's limited so the point at which that resource is eaten up you know you don't have the ability to like make more energy yes you can't use the same molecule to mine bitcoin anything right there's there's only so much so like maybe you could do side chains or something like that whatever the hell it is but like once the energy is eaten up it's eaten up so the question is going to be for miners uh what what is the most efficient

the most high priced coin i can mine at any given time with this energy i have and what what has to happen eventually is essentially like all of this excess energy is going to be eaten up it just it will and it's got to be eaten up by something and you know miners are going to have to make a choice about what the most profitable thing to eat it up with is and i don't think there's a world because like it's an asymptotic function it when you start mining a coin it starts way up here it's you know price per mining is like very high and as that as you go down the timeline it becomes closer and closer because i also believe that mining is perfectly competitive right so a perfectly competitive space in economics is going to mean that profits go to zero

yes and uh if they go to zero right that means that essentially you're covering costs you're paying employee salaries you're paying executive salaries you're paying anything that you can and at the end of the day there's no like dividends farming is pretty similar to that right you you have x amount of field you're going to end up being able to like pay yourself a salary decent one feed your family you know whatever um so if mining is perfectly competitive and all of these things are trending towards zero in terms of profitability like all of the chains are competing for exactly the same resource they're doing it at essentially the same time and they're all i mean i don't think that they're really competing i think they're just the same thing

they're all representations of energy spent and burned and eventually as bitcoin goes down to zero like i don't understand why like you know ethereum or dash or any of these others won't eventually because like the zero dollars reflects all of all of sort of the risk right to to run the business to mine to like operate the chain chances of chains failing chances of hacks etc etc all of those risks are sort of combined into one to reach this like eventual zero dollar profit and if bitcoin hits zero and ethereum starts to trend and hit zero and dark and all or dash and all these others start doing that same thing eventually one of them is going to be zero and the others are going to be below zero in terms of profitability so at that point what happens is miners are going

to pick the one that's profitable yeah and that'll be bitcoin i mean i i don't think that it can be anything else because bitcoin really is the one that has removed the complication from itself mining is not competing for algorithm it's like like who has the best mining algorithm it's competing for energy that's what it fundamentally is the algorithm is nothing more than a way to prove you spent uh spent energy on the operation of doing that math problem that's it it is literally a proof of burning energy that's the one thing about your thread that i loved is it articulated something i've had in my mind and haven't been able to articulate as well as you did in that thread which is just looking around the physical infrastructure mainly via asics and uh the power

generation equipment used to run those asics and bitcoin specifically is far beyond any other chain and most people like defy like likes to use software and thinks it's software tech innovation and some financial voodoo innovation that's gonna be the product market fit but they're severely discounting the amount of physical infrastructure investment that's been outlaid for bitcoin specifically and you compare that to other chains just it's not even comparable uh yeah by far bitcoin is the most impressive engineering project uh and will eventually go down in history as probably the most impressive engineering project ever constructed uh by disparate entities and and that's amazing and and i mean the thing is like to the point like

mining is not complicated right like you can literally do the math equation on a piece of paper uh and you're spending energy doing that and time etc etc so like you need a global way to basically say that you have paid your way to like the solution that's and the hash function requires a certain amount of energy to do and those that can do it for less energy make more money but you have to expend something to do the hash and that's what's cool about it is that everyone has the same opportunity to do this hash and that's why it's 100 commoditized but what happens when we get proof of stake chains yeah like show me one that's not like uh had problems with things like transaction ordering uh most proof of stake chains have a proof of work element

that can be used to game uh things like transaction ordering and whatnot to make people more money and can you know influence the nonce and such like every single stake chain that exists has a place in it where work can be applied what do you mean by that like like start off proof of work mining and then transition to proof of stake no no no no so like if you have let's say uh i mean like ripple for example for a long time the transaction order influenced the nonce on ripple so what you would do as a ripple miner as a validator is you would spend a lot of time running proof of work to basically game the transactions such that your nonce, a nonce that would select you,

would pop up more often. So you'd work on transaction ordering on your side and then you would start to like, sorry, you would take the work that you did and you would basically stick it into the chain and influence the nonce to pick you more often. Yes. And proof of stake invariably has an area

where proof of work can then be applied to influence it and break it it's just not directly in the protocol somewhat outward right and then what they do is they further obfuscate it it's further and further and further down the value chain that you do that and maybe at some point it's unprofitable to do any work on it but like i just don't buy that i don't buy that and fundamentally like a proof-of-stake system incentivizes you know it it doesn't disaggregate the risks of things as much so it incentivizes holding holding huddling um it incentivizes holding the cash the bitcoin or the whatever coin it is rather than spending it whereas with bitcoin you have this disaggregation

of the function of use and the function of creation right so like you're not picked because you have a lot of it you're picked because you you spent a lot of money burning power so like there's a fundamental disconnect because like the the better money is the money that has no use right it can't be used for anything else if one of the things you can use your money for is getting more money like that has an use that's that in itself is fundamentally problematic because it disincentivizes you from using it i mean like i need to buy bread today to eat but if i buy bread i will make more i will make i will hurt my earning potential that's it's absurd yeah it's crazy that's why we have we we in a in a robust capitalist economy

where risks are disaggregated which is what you want you you have separation of these risks and that's fundamentally the biggest problem with proof of stake is that proof of stake combines the risks and it it it puts the risk on people that shouldn't be taking on that risk it's a perversion it's unholy and it's also uh it's also like a nice carrot on the stick to keep narratives and narrative funding going right like it's well yeah and it's a way to just incentivize people not to spend i mean like every day that you spend your money is the day that you get you earn less in the future like you could do the math on it but like the incentive for something like an ethereum is

probably to never ever spend it ever and then 100 years from now have like a quadrillion trillion quad zillion dollars like it's it's just if you have 500 ethereum today or 10 000 or a million or whatever the fuck you have like you should just hold it never spend it eventually what will happen is every single person in the ecosystem will be down to like one or two ethereum and that's all they can afford because they're $33,000 each or something like that. And you will have a hundred million and you'll just, you'll, you'll like, everybody will get picked at some point. But like, if you think about that in a proof of stake system, you'll get picked that many more times than everybody else. The exponential growth of your money will so far outpace everybody's that

it's going to be the most unequal system ever created. And I'm not really one to care much about inequality but in a proof of stake system you didn't do any work right well you you worked to get the capital to get the token to then stay no you didn't though you like once you've done it's not it's not like windows you don't buy the software and then like get to use it forever and ever and ever in in that way right like you don't like it's not 40 today and 40 tomorrow it's like with ethereum i don't really actually know what that analogy had anything to do with anything i got lost but like with ethereum you know if you have a million dollars today and you just keep it a million dollars eventually it'll be a hundred quadrillion million dollars you know

and uh and and now like like every day with your spending your i don't know you'll earn more money than anyone in the entire earth has yeah just because you you just never spent it but hey hey it's an altruistic project they're going to be spending it they're going to be using oh yeah yeah it's an altruistic project where the early guys just get given by the network lots and lots of money because they have a lot of the thing hey their initial pre-mines getting diluted day by day there's more supplies coming to the network right i mean it's not a great way to have like a circular economy it's not a great way to like incentivize spending and uh and healthy growth of an ecosystem right it it's it's a weird a weird issue so like when ethereum goes proof of stake

it's going to get really strange because they have a lot of people that have been mining on this thing they have miners out there i mean i anticipate a big split if they ever do it they've been promising we'll do it for you know five years now i don't think they'll ever do it i don't think they will either yeah i yeah i'm actually very confident they won't be able to like the coordinate like the coordination to make it happen so yeah you just described like you're gonna have a split the miners have bought this hardware could probably point at another gpu chain i'm not actually sure i'm not very well versed on ethereum specific gpu mining script but uh on top of that like you have to transition all these apps being built on eth 1.x or whatever

the fuck they're calling it to eth 2.0 like the coordination effort to do that alone just seems like a logistics nightmare well i am right and i'm wondering when i mean how long do you think before they come out with ethereum 3.0 right i'm probably already thinking about it the precedent of being able to come out with a new blockchain car every few years that they're setting is is the funniest precedent i've ever seen like there's a presumption among bitcoiners and blockchainers generally that you can make an announcement like that and that just everybody will upgrade and that this will just go on without a hitch and that everybody who uses it runs a note is on reddit and speaks english like that's just not how this works and you know maybe the

networks are small enough now and by small i mean like they're not that big you know let's say 11 000 or 12 000 nodes at most some of these when you get the whole world's economy on one of these things which is i mean that's that's the pipe dream for a lot of bitcoiners and ether ether rights if you get the whole world's economy how are you going to coordinate that like how are you going to how are you going to coordinate an ethereum 6.0 upgrade you're not i only think they're going to coordinate the 2.0 upgrade so right which i think is i mean bitcoin's the most interesting thing here with like the fact that you know this critical software just doesn't they don't upgrade it the way that people do the way that people think of like a software upgrade

they don't have to coordinate it it's like you can keep running the old software we don't recommend it but like you can until you decide not to yeah that's this is a good microsoft analogy here in this case yeah and the uh yeah and so back to like the mining thread like what i found interesting is that you you think the point of the thread where you said miners should sell everything they mine and then individuals within that mining company should get paid out in fiat decide if they want to buy bitcoin yes that's interesting thought well i mean again i'm i'm all for disaggregating risk. And I think companies, I think, I mean, look, people who run companies are generally very bad at running companies. I mean, myself included. I think that

there's, people don't do sort of the risk evaluation. What is it that your company is holding risk in, right? And if you're selling hamburgers, that's great. Your risks are limited to the selling hamburger industry. Like you don't see like a burger joint like McDonald's also getting into like jet engine manufacturing right they might have very competent engineers that could do that but they don't generally do that you know because their risk is very specific to what they're doing and they might they might have a holding company maybe their holding company diversifies away things with jet engines i don't know but they themselves do not engage in that risk and a business is a very limited set of like risks miners have a lot of risks like uh you know

the luck the luck of an algorithm and all sorts of other things and like a company ought to be taking their risks in fiat because that's just sort of what we like measure risk in like they're not also a trading corporation they're not there to like save they're there to exist and pay dividends that's the purpose of the company they're there to profit right but what if all the stuff becomes more de-risked over time hedging products uh longer asic life cycles more dependable uh well i mean hardware there's things i could keep in bitcoin for like if they're buying asics of bitcoin you might as well keep some in bitcoin right but it might not maybe not also because maybe like maybe bitcoin fluctuates enough and

you want to make sure like essentially selling to dollars is a hedge what happens when we get on a bitcoin standard though yeah you know i'll live in that world when it happens you know like i'm not going to speculate that we're near that world or that we're heading towards that world i live in the i live in the world as it is today and if you're on a bitcoin standard then risk will be measured in bitcoin and that'll be a different world because bitcoin won't be volatile to the effect of like dropping 100 or 50 in a week and rising 100 the next one so like in that world you shouldn't hold it like your your risk is too high but if you as an individual who have paid your taxes and done all of your other things want to then also invest in bitcoin that's a different

situation like you can do that without harming the company but like as a company as a corporation your risk needs to be your risk you need to articulate what that is and miners their risk is not um you know what you think it is it's not like it's it's not holding the bitcoin it's not what they should be you know the volatility of bitcoin is not what they should be risking their business on yeah that's a very good point but yeah like so dividends pay dividends like why would you want your bitcoin held in the company instead of you holding it that that violates the entire sovereignty that's that's a good point um my company has bitcoin great like i mean when people tell me their company has a million dollars in vc funding i'm not like boy

you're worth a million dollars no that company goes that money goes to the company yeah to spend in the company like that's the company's money and that's the same with the bitcoin that's that's not your money that's that's the company's money right paid dividends is no that makes the most sense i mean you can pay out and you could pay out in bitcoin if if like you were like you know what i want 30 of this dividend to bitcoin like that's actually a perfectly reasonable thing for a mining company to do i would think given if it's legal because like they already have them so like pre-sale you say like every two weeks we pay dividends um and or we sell the bitcoins indicate how much you want of your dividend in bitcoin i want 40 of my dividend in bitcoin okay

and then the rest goes to cash yeah that makes a makes a ton of sense but yeah salaries and cash you know or or bitcoin if you want because you always have a bitcoin coming in like a minor a minor has inventory right and it's a product the product is bitcoin the goal of someone holding product is to turn it over i have alarms i have three houses worth of alarm systems in the back closet of my like office right like three hundred thousand dollars or something like that some absurd amount of alarm systems i don't want to sit and speculate on whether alarm systems are going to become like are going to come to a shortage like bullets and are going to be worth a lot more tomorrow i want to get rid of them get the cash buy more turn it over buy more turn it

over make three percent on every sale twelve percent whatever it is you know yeah and just turn them over as fast as i can yeah it's a that's interesting conceptualizing bitcoin as an inventory system as a miner right like yeah and that's what it is yeah yeah it's uh it's fascinating so how how how volatile do you think bitcoin's price is moving forward like do you think its volatility is arguably even getting lower um i think it looks a lot like it's always going to look for at least a very very long time i used to think that bitcoin would be like eventually get to a place where it would be much less volatile but you know i look at gold gold is highly highly volatile and i don't see that bitcoin has to be more volatile or less volatile

than gold you know it's a good point but it will finally evolve i mean like look like look if it becomes a bitcoin standard it has to suffer less volatility right yeah that happens but again i don't live in that world right now and in the world i live in bitcoin acts more like gold and it's going to have a big old market cap like gold and in my opinion and if it does that it acts volatility just like gold like i don't see that it has to be any different i think it i think that it serves its function even then and you know that's the thing like you look at people using it like we're using maybe for nefarious purposes where previous to this their standard was like i don't know it's a 40 reduction so they'd make a hundred dollars and then you know the friction

of moving it would cost them 40 bucks right well now bitcoin they move it and the friction costs and 20 bucks you know because just just because of the volatility you know that's that's a lot better deal for them and there's a lot of transactions like that that have these like high friction costs very fricative um you know and people are willing to kind of give up a lot of money to make sure that they go well so maybe there's a world where a drug dealer can get money from chicago to mexico for free basically where they lose nothing you know there's no cash out on the other side and bitcoin's so stable they just keep it in bitcoin there's no atm or anything like that involved maybe or maybe not yeah well okay i mean and how how much do external factors

like central bank policy and fiscal policy play into that like so that's what again going back to the beginning of the conversation the the strife the the riots going on the uh the way we're feeling that it feels like it's happening in america right now i feel like do you agree with me that it's driven by uh central banking policy predominantly and can they continue doing what they're doing uh especially considering what they've done uh this year particularly it's an interesting question i mean like is bitcoin driven price wise by central bank policy um i think that that's probably a factor in it but i think it's a small factor really yeah i i don't think look let's say that let's say that tomorrow uh the dollar collapses

right the central bank is gonna you know they'll declare the end of the dollar they'll devalue it and then they'll come out with a new currency and they'll just start managing it again So, like, Bitcoin lives in this world where governments exist, fiat exists, and governments make some bad decisions. Sometimes austerity measures cause societal collapse, etc., etc. Bitcoin just kind of exists apart from that. You know, that's very different than, like, you know, the fact that central bank policy can be good or bad. I mean, I'm sure that Bitcoin is going to reflect certain aspects. So, for example, if inflation goes up X percent, that makes the dollar this much less valuable. So that would make Bitcoin this much more expensive, maybe. I'm sure that that effect has something.

um but i i think that it's uh i i bet it's i bet it's fairly negligible i bet interesting yeah i mean there's a lot of central banks in the world bitcoin exists among all of them i mean bitcoin is what it is and i think it like i think that america would see a trillion dollar bitcoin the day that the dollar collapses but i don't think that's saying anything interesting other than that like bitcoin is priced in whatever currency is local and if the dollar collapses we price it in a ruble or something like that and that would be a very expensive bitcoin in a world where we have you know ten thousand percent inflation those expensive bitcoins already exist around the world right price they do yeah but i i just i just like and

i think that those are interesting but i'm just saying that like i think bitcoin exists irrespective of like fed policy and while i do think that like a million dollar bitcoin could exist in a world where a dollar collapses i don't think that's actually saying anything interesting about what like the price reflects so i guess we got to hone in on purchasing power here what do you think right i think that like in a world where bitcoin is stable and you can actually price things in bitcoin that'd be interesting um i mean a big a big thing with bitcoin is that like menu changing costs are going to be very strange until volatility is under control because i mean what are you going to do have like a digital thing at the fruit counter that like updates every 10 seconds

yeah like now oranges are 37 cents but now they're 28 you know 0.00002 bitcoin now they're 0.000023 bitcoin you know like you can't really run a grocery store where someone picks up an orange gets to the counter and it's like a dollar or like half of you know half 50 percent more yeah i mean we bought it picked it up this is like stories out of argentina of people racing to the grocery store after getting a paycheck well you you want you want grocery stores to have like price parity for like 24 hours you want them to have like consistency for at least a short time so that you can like walk out of there with what you thought you're getting you don't get in there have to go you know spend five minutes because if you leave in 10 minutes

it'll be double the cost you don't want that um so bitcoin's not great for that yet maybe it will be i mean we'll see but that goes to your thesis you think that volatility will cool down a little bit i think well right because if you just assume that adoption keeps up in the pace that it has up to this point you're going to hit a critical mass at some point um and at that point ever got there yeah i think so then why is it so volatile it's been it was it had a very long period where it wasn't too volatile yeah bitcoin does too though right like it bitcoin will go two three years within a thousand dollar band yeah i'm talking centuries though uh zoom in on those centuries yeah i mean maybe i mean that's true gold was used as a currency but that was largely

because we didn't have like markets you realize right like gold is pegged i'm trying to think i'll give you a great example like the free banking system of canada in the 1800s that existed for a while so i don't know a lot about that uh the free banking system of canada i should read about that but like i can tell you back in uh you know isaac newton days gold was pegged in england and it wasn't pegged in france right so what was happening is people were clipping coins in england going to france selling the gold and then coming back to england with french money and buying more gold coins and then doing the same thing and it was a perpetual motion money machine until england realized that something like i don't know 60 billion dollars or

something like that had disappeared from their economy i i need to read up on that that's fucking fascinating yeah and and so like that's the thing like the world has had like stable periods of gold because like we pegged gold america pegged gold too yeah so we have to peg bitcoin are we getting pegged here at some point yeah we're getting pegged we're prison prison coin um i don't think i think i think the era of pegging is over i don't think you'll be able to like peg assets like that anymore so just have a free float volatile i think that's the only way the world works at this point like that's how we that's how it works people call in their especially the internet like things are so quick right so you can't like remove the peg

right you can't have a peg legitimately and the internet will just allow for like a black market to exist like in a second yeah that's what happens in these countries is like they'll peg their dollars to something and they'll say like our dollars are worth one big mac at mcdonald's you're like okay um but look at the like real price over here like there's an internet website that you know tells us the real price it's the blue value or something yes yeah this happens in argentina exactly john says what does the future hold will we preserve freedom that's true it might be a long time but like you know the funny thing about life is that we all work really hard to make the world a better place

in our own little way and then and then we keel over and give it away and and we do that to the day we die we like you know i think men are particularly guilty of this um insofar as they just want to work right it's it's inherent and i think that like we just work our asses off until we no longer can and then we keel over and the future i think that everybody does want a better world and i mean like the near future i think things are going to get pretty bad in the us um specifically here but i'm praying that there's not this like new new world order kind of thing that really like illuminati like thing i'm really hoping it doesn't and i'm really hoping that like we as americans are able to like pull us pull ourselves back from the brink and uh and

to save save our country the great reset is coming are you ready for global communism uh it might i mean i mean the amount of spending we've done the acceptance of mmt is like a sort of you know position of the fed uh i mean i could see it i describe i describe mmt as yeah it's fed policy but it's just trying to you randomly manipulate the flows of the created funds more yeah i mean the reality is that the printing of money i mean governments have a couple of ways to raise money one is print it one is tax for it right and in some ways like we've never really done the printing part like i think libertarians disagree but we haven't not not like we could have um mmt sort of the the reification

of like this other alternative to taxing and it's a it's a big power the government has and it can be very dangerous um but you know it's one way to raise and maybe it's a way that like america does it to lower taxes or something i don't know uh but it's it's you don't think we've ever printed money i know we've printed money but not to the degree that we are now like money you know we've kept inflation at around three percent per year oh i thought you're arguing that we're not printing money right now i was like uh no no we're printing money but like we've kept it we've kept like real money down you know to a nominal level yeah the fed's balance sheet was what 800 billion 2007 something like that yeah and what is it today

five point something trillion i think maybe so there's a big difference um and you know like i that the fed can raise money you know in a couple ways and i think printing is printing is a viable alternative to taxation i think that like libertarians don't want to acknowledge that but it is and i i think i i think that like there is some level of printing that is okay and then there's some level of printing that pushes you over the edge and like all states eventually go bankrupt they devalue their currency i mean england's gone bankrupt most countries have only a couple have not yeah yeah i mean it's arguable arguable that we're bankrupt right now we're just trying to you had the decision of direct default or default via inflation the beauty is that uh and i think

this you should read a book called fishing for fools or no this time it's different it's called by ken rogov and he talks about like the history of defaults national defaults it's a very interesting book and you know he acknowledges that like inflationary default is considered default and the fact that people don't think that we've committed inflationary default means that we haven't which is a weird reality you only know you've defaulted when you well if you can you can know it because like you do something absurd like actually you know get like print so much money that like you have to print a trillion dollar bill right this is before he started pushing cashless societies um rogoff's been on that for a while

uh he's a his book on money is real stupid he has a lot of chapters on ethereum uh he's very very like excited about like ethereum it seems like in particular really yeah at least in his book i uh i've had the pleasure of seeing larry white and ken rogoff debate at the soho forum well it's not very convincing yeah yeah i've had a i've had a couple exchanges with ken over email trying to get him on the show um and you know he's a hard one to pin down he doesn't seem like the type of guy to be open to that i think he really likes female journalists really i might pretend to be one did you i might do it june just june right i mean yeah right like june june seth june seth my last name's seth first name's june hi kenny

i'm very interested to learn about cashless societies learn you know um but i would like i'd like to get him on the show but like you know he's he's got he's had some very good books i think that that the default book uh is absolutely phenomenal i think everybody should read it it'll it'll teach you a lot it should reset your like libertarian thinking on stuff a little bit like a default is a thing that like happens and you can't say like we're really bankrupt and we're just like slowly you know whatever because it's not real like you're bankrupt when you cannot pay your bills tomorrow it's a state can't really go bankrupt because they can print the money to pay their bills tomorrow right just the amount of money that'll be needed to pay those bills will

differ sure um and maybe that's really bad but like a state can't really go bankrupt so it's not really the right concept or word for a state and a state can default and that happens and they can default through inflation and but we haven't done it yet like the united states has not been recognized as a country that has defaulted yeah and i mean this week alone the dollar has been strengthening pretty pretty aggressively against other currencies.

Nobody wants to be in the dollar. Right. It's hard to make the case that we've defaulted or that we're bankrupt when the dollar is

strengthening. Yeah. That's a good point. So what I don't think I'm a libertarian. People like to say

I'm a libertarian. I don't know what I am. What. What do you think you are. I don't know. I like your

description beginning up so I like the First Amendment. I like the Second Amendment. I hate Marxist. I hate Marxism. You could be an anarcho-milliner-ish.

I don't know if I'm going to... I mean, I like the Second Amendment, but I don't own any guns. No, you don't like guns. No, I like them, but I don't own them. Nobody owns them. Really? No, you got a license.

I have Bitcoin, zero. No, I mean, that's the thing. like yeah i i think i think it's okay i will say you are free riding a little bit by not having guns am i i mean a plan on getting one at one point what kind are you gonna get i don't know i'd like an ar-15 that's a good one you should do that yeah go to marvel find one let me know if you do i am in a uh you can't find them right now i'm in a second amendment sanctuary county within new jersey so i live up here i live up north where guns are very very frowned upon Lived in New York for six years.

Pennsylvania is actually more lenient, obviously. Yeah. Philadelphia, not so much. An AR-15 is a good choice. I mean, you know, like, I think as a first gun, that's a good one to get. Yeah. But, you know, I do think that, like, a lot of people do, like, free ride. I think it's good to have your own.

Like, frankly, because, you know, you never know when China invades or Russia does something real stupid. And the other thing is, like, it's good for home defense. You know, it's pretty simple. but i think as an american like it's important to have one so you have a vested interest in the second amendment that's a good point all right i'm gonna go buy a gun tomorrow let me know if you do i will there's uh they're still hard to find they're so hard to find right now there's a range right off the uh the island i'm on that's yeah i'll come up there and shoot

with you sometime hey if you're ever uh in the area let me know i love it i mean i'm bummed uh last year's north american bitcoin conference i did not make it to your beat up that you had i know we were supposed to you sent a surrogate yeah yeah yeah they had a lot of fun that night to surrogates they were reading about it yeah that was a blast I told them to tell tell tell you I was mad that you didn't come I know I had a first face-to-face everybody so like I'm looking at that Marty I didn't actually know what he looked like yeah this is what I look like just some white bro pretty handsome my uh i'm sorry if i'm dragging here at the end my son woke up at 4 30

this morning i'm like fucking beat um but no i've been waiting for this conversation for years having uh been a been a fan of your your initial foray into podcasting with the rose and uh your take i mean i think your blockchains war our war take and the your description of ethereum on your website which is still front and center is what convinced me that this fucking doesn't make any fucking sense yeah i mean there's there's just a lot i mean i've been here a while i've seen a lot of this stuff i mean i think the reality is and i said this earlier about the millennials not realizing that history existed before 2006 all of this stuff is just corollaries to things that have existed for 100 or 200 years and i think that there's a lot of things i mean like people

should learn the history of markets and understand how we got where we are like the idea that companies are split into tiny little shares that you can buy in an open market that's not old that's not that old no it's like 1400s it's old to some people well it's old but like it's like you know there's there's many older things that we do and you'd think that that would have been like we take that as such a thing that you know for granted like well stocks and shares like people don't realize that like stocks and company have value because the government says that when you own a stock you own part of the company and they they hold you to that so like now as a company owner you can sue the board of directors for fucking you over you know you can make speeches

at their like shareholder meetings yeah um you own a percentage of that company small one but And these innovations are on the same timeline as us inventing tools in agriculture and putting it in the context of that. Right. Rhetoric. No, that's why I was fond of, I took Latin for six years, five years.

So I was forced to translate a lot of Roman history. And so like learning just how like rhetoric came to be, like the kind of line conspiracy, like dissecting that and understanding how cicero called out catiline and methodically destroyed his attempt to dethrone him right i mean there's i mean there's so many things i think people don't realize like even even in the modern day like i think that we don't realize how many opportunities there are for invention i mean literature the the types of literature we have each of those i mean think about it there was a day when you know fiction wasn't a thing and then someone wrote

you know did something their first fiction novel there was a time when non-fiction was was not a thing um truman capote is is recognized as the first guy who really ever wrote sort of a narrative account a long book form account narrative account of like a news story so that's recent well this could transition us into a final topic which i wanted to touch on of digital art i don't get it at all is it innovative like is it like why would i spend money for a file on a computer and yeah that's a good question i mean art why would you spend money on it why would you spend money on any art uh art i think there's i think there's a lot of questions about what art is and i think people don't understand how it works and you know this

actually goes back to sort of bitcoin uncensored i always viewed bitcoin uncensored as an art project it was an art project and the entire purpose of it was to enter into the dialectic and like force people to ask questions that they wanted to ask themselves right i don't think that we did a lot of telling you what to ask um unless there was like some emulation but like for the most part it was like supposed to be two idiots sitting in a chair asking hard questions that they weren't supposed to know the answers to and sometimes did and sometimes just like you know But mainly just people would kind of fall all over themselves. And I always viewed it as art.

And I took that entire project as much as I could in sort of this artistic direction. And the reason it worked is because it was such good dialogue with people. People were able to participate in the dialogue. It changed the way they thought. It changed the way they argued. It was a school of sorts, right? And it was timely. I don't think you could do Bitcoin Uncensored today.

and you can't be hosting episodes in a bathroom anymore right and it was cultural right like um we were making fun of an important of an industry that really thought of itself as like it was starting to think of itself as stodgy and we the entire purpose was to show these bankers who were showing up in suits that they can come they just got here and we're the 16 year olds who know way more than they do all right right so here's our so fuck you um hi hi blithe masters uh nice to meet you you just got here shut the fuck up go to the back of the room right right so there were there were it was an art project and that was the purpose of it was to like spark dialogue and teach and teach through you know sort of the socratic method asking questions and getting people to ask

themselves and to follow like our train of thought and to like come up with their own sort of trains of thought and uh and to just really spark dialectic um i don't think it always did that but i think that was the goal and somebody who watched that show it certainly sparked some of those trains of thought in my mind right and also to be non-judgmental the idea being that like you should be able to think any thought you want even if it's a fart joke uh and i think that's important like the open-mindedness is important and and that's what art really should do art should question the status quo it should push norms and push the status quo and make people think and ask questions so like the very question why should i pay for a digital token is is a pretty funny one

and it's it's a question of art uh i do think that there is i don't know i i think that the art market has a very strange place in the american financial industry right now it it basically acts as a store of value for very wealthy people right so like you have a picasso it goes for 150 million dollars the guy hangs it up above his i don't know table uh he doesn't care that much about it doesn't really know anything about it but he he did it because he knew that it was worth you know to the next guy 100 million dollars and so it's a good like way for him to just have 100 million dollars hanging on his wall and then eventually if he wants to get it in cash right pretty simple uh so it's acted as a store of value but like now there's a new store of value

like bitcoin can serve that function yeah so i could see the top the top art market i could see bitcoin be highly disruptive to it and i also don't think that like i don't see there i think there's any reason to think that like physical art is going to be what people put on their walls I mean, like, if I buy art, I'm buying, you know, a $2,000 or $3,000 piece to put on my wall. That's the same as, like, a TV screen. So, like, I mean, if you could figure out a way to display art that you actually own on a TV that is the art that you own, I mean, it's no more ridiculous than Andy Warhol making screen printings of, like, The Last Supper. Yeah, well. each one of those is the same

they're not any different than the other ones I guess the point is how much effort was put in I wouldn't consider pop art or modernist I was forced to take art history class in college like Jackson Pollock forward predominantly I wouldn't consider any of that art

what about Jackson Pollock's early works not as well versed on his early works I started learning about him when he was fucking splashing canvases and putting cigarette butts out you'll find out that he was a competent painter was he very yeah I mean that's the thing like I look at Jackson Pollock and I think to myself like Jackson Pollock is sort of the like final Monet like you have you have Monet's who start to like do these things on canvas we have photography at the time perfect representation coming out on film so what do we have we have the development of these schools of art that are a

little bit more abstract right and so now you're like doing sort of this abstraction and you're painting a lily pad or something like that and it kind of looks like a lily pad it can make it out and then you have the further and further like experiment in the abstraction of things you know and in some ways art became this like sort of pure abstraction where like you're painting the soul of the lily pad right you're not painting the lily pad you're painting the soul of the lily pad and i look at a pollock and like the splatter paint stop highly experimental um sort of the final abstraction the final version of this abstraction it's as far as you can push that medium right and that doesn't make it good it just means that that like is part of the

conversation of like what art is like i find pollock to be very pretty i find those things to be very appealing to the eye and i i actually think they have like a very important place in the dialectic of art in the movement of art because they do push the medium as far as it can go now maybe it's worthless to you visually but it's sort of like hey guys here's the bumper and what you end up with is the result of pollock is you have people who like de-abstract and then you come up with some of this like street art um you have shepherd fairy and you have all of these other people who are kind of pulling back the abstraction a little bit right and then going the other way where like you have shadows of people you know with uh what's his

name the famous banksy banksy thanks to some of the shadows you know and those that's very different yeah but it's got like give me one give me one second take it jump test answer and call my podcast i wonder if his mic will pick up this phone call uh no he's not sending me a file i'll be coming from zoom i hope your freaks are still listening it's a very interesting conversation all right back all right everything okay yeah so anyhow like i think that there's this the the idea of like sort of abstracting and then de-abstracting the art i think like art art is a continual thing and they're like artists are always trying to push the boundaries and figure out what they can do

and as much as i like you know very real uh photographs of people like those sort of arts are that art is taken by cameras right you don't need the like here's an exact representation of my face anymore someone doesn't need to paint that you can now have someone do a little bit more abstraction and bring out something else in in in the painting and such so i guess we have to in my mind separate between abstraction and absurdism right like uh having lived in new york been to moma particularly in modern museum of modern art it's gotten to the point where people walk through that museum and they don't even know what is art like somebody could drop a fucking glove on the ground they're like oh somebody thought a lot about this and it's like

an unmade bed can i point something out though like these these things where people take bananas or or like a phone or whatever and they put it on a stand yeah and people go and start looking at it i got news for you that is art what's that like how much effort does that take like should art always about ever i always said this i said this to chris back in the day i said every artist wants to be so proficient at their art that they can take a shit on a canvas and call it art and sell it for a million dollars that is every artist's dream and uh and that is that is what you want like that isn't that dairy does uh like urinal isn't that what that is um that's that's literally his commentary on

effort and like what art is yeah ah is art subjective too obviously right but he's Duchamp that's it not Derrida Duchamp but like that's that's the thing like art is a conversation and Duchamp pushes it one direction and it's commentary right he says like hey guys the arts getting stupid here's a urinal yeah

okay well it's art that's commentary and it might be bad art but it's it's it's interesting nonetheless and it's worth a lot of money because Duchamp touched it what about uh what about beautiful things so we don't make too much of beautiful art is beauty subjective as well then too well there's a lot of that i mean art is the thing is

you can find beautiful art um there's plenty of art that is that that exists as art for the sake of having beautiful art there's not a lot of art that exists as quality commentary and i find the art to be that if you want to look at the art that withstands time at least now i mean i think the commentary is what's more important i think banksy is important for that reason his art is commentary what do you think of south park south park is high art right yeah um i mean i think commentary is the highest form of art and you know i'll stand by that like i i think it's the hardest art to do i think it's the the hardest art to make and i think it looks the least like the lowest effort art yeah that's a good point i go back and forth and like bringing it back to

non-fungible tokens like rare pepes and stuff like that i've never understood the like why people would spend money on an nft but i do funnily enough like respect the fuck out of people that are like we talked about joe looney before we recorded you obviously talked about rare peppers in the past theo goodman makes me laugh all the time uh yeah i uh best ironist in the space right but but just last thing to put on the art like you're talking about about an effort and i think that i mean we've all heard the story and i think it's probably apocryphal but it's a good story nonetheless for illustrative purposes where uh you know ford needs someone to come and fix a generator and a guy comes and he like he puts an x on the generator and he does something

for five minutes and uh and then he turns afford he's like that'll be a thousand dollars he's like what you what that was like five minutes and he's like you know or he goes how am i like something like oh you just draw an x he's like oh the oh god i'm fucking the story up what is it i haven't heard this one yet was it drawing the x is free knowing where to put the x was a thousand or something like that um but like that's that's the idea is that like he spent a lifetime learning where to put the x and there has to be sort of an art equivalent of that right where you show up you draw an x and people are like oh well that's art because he did it he did it in a certain way and i think that's the duchamp urinal right duchamp worked very hard to be able to put

a urinal in a gallery and say that's art and it's art because you know everybody knew why it was art Because people respect his commentary. Yeah. And it took a lifetime to get there. So maybe that art was low effort, but it's because he spent so much time. He spent 40 years making that art. Interesting.

And before he got to the urinal, was Duchamp the guy who made the white sinks? He might have been. I mean, he did a bunch of them. I think Duchamp also did the spindle inside of a three-pronged stool. Like just a spindle, like a bike wheel. yeah a bunch of those and i i mean i i don't want them in my house but i understand why the

moma has them and i understand like what they like what period of history they occupy you know and a lot of these things are interesting too because like they they have historical meaning like the cia got involved in the creation of art on some mk ultra shit or no no no like they were trying to like fight russian propaganda and so they were it was sort of i mean it was cia but it was art commentary basically on like what on the limits of being able to push art i mean it was frankly i think it was probably during pollock's time i wouldn't be surprised if pollock was one of these artists um but there's a lot of artists who were making art basically at the direction of the cia particularly of the abstract stuff yeah and i guess this gets to a good point

is the arts a reflection of the current condition and if you want more beautiful art maybe fix your condition maybe some of the most beautiful art comes out of the hardest time all right look at books who's the best who has the best books um obviously the russians if you say anything else i'm gonna punch you in the face the russians have the best books they have the best fiction and they also have some of the best non-fiction i mean russian literature is on another level and i i don't know how they do it when i read a lot a piece of russian literature that thing is like it's commenting on a world in a very how you say like non-participative way it's like the person's observing even of himself kind of like a dream he's floating above the scene he's like

floating above himself and like i i don't know how they achieve this but it's it's a remarkable way to write and there's just no question in my mind the russians have the best literature i read it and i'm in awe of it uh and it's unique in aspect and it comes out of hardship so i mean i don't think that that's necessarily the case i think i think maybe beautiful art can come out of anything but good art can only come out of maybe hardship that's a good point that's a very good point i need to read more russian literature you got to read as much as you can i mean it's such a delight where would you recommend one start if they need to get into russian literature i mean russian literature i mean you could start with the plays of uh like like this like the seagulls

and stuff like that um was it cha cha what's his name chai kov uh the seagulls written by written by chekhov chekhov chekhov anton chekhov um anton chekhov is a perfectly good read like in fact it's shorter too it's just plays right so you can read that you could read Dostoevsky or

any you know any of the just the big ones just start with any of them and what's funny is when I talk to Russians they have like all sorts of other other authors that you've never heard of that they that they read and I'm sure that those would be delightful too

I'd be wondering to see how how well the uh the english translations are i think is it even more beautiful if you read it and understand russian yeah i don't know i would like i would wonder how it like comes off in russian uh but like all i can say is in reading in reading russian literature i mean uh chekhov's plays are are very good but just the the like the fiction itself and and even like the non-fiction stuff they have is just it's phenomenal yeah and it's just worth it's worth everybody's everybody's time and i would say uh second best literature comes out of france which is weird but i mean a lot of the great literature of that day is literally out of the

french revolution yeah a hard time victor hugo and such right yeah and then third i'd put america and i think that's probably just more pioneering like people building building america and writing books moby dick uh is a great example uh heart of darkness which is written by a guy who you know conrad spoke like four languages like english wasn't even his first language but you know americans uh grapes of wrath and whatnot um are just absurdly good writers yeah bitcoin sign guy would love that you mentioned uh moby dick oh yeah i'll be tech fan yeah is that what he named his no um i i i yeah i i think art but but anyhow back back to the sort of final point i do think that there's like a place for digital art i don't know exactly where

it occupies the market it might be that art the art market falls because of bitcoin right i could very well see bitcoin putting a like like being the death knell for high cost art but it might be that like there's a huge place for digital art such as like you would buy at marshalls or something like that you know those like 80 pieces so that everybody can have something very nice in the house and that might be the kind of thing it does i mean there's i don't like i said i don't think it's any more legitimate to have digital art than to have you know a screen printing of an andy warhol interesting will there be supreme like demand for some nfts who knows i don't see what not but maybe not also but i think it's i think it's a worth a worthy exercise to think

about that because like it's not really the function of Bitcoin but it's interesting and it's it's it's like it's asking questions I think they need to be asked well which is what it does well thank you for sitting here and asked answering my dumb questions tonight they're not

thank you for thank you for letting me fart on your show oh you can come and fart on my show whenever you want they smell great this is it's been a pleasure I'm really pumped to be able to do this we should do this again and hopefully we can be in person can i do the sign off yes you can all right hey everybody this is john south chunking up the deuce the south the masses end to go in peace saint catherine pray for us