TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #282: River adds bitcoin mining, the Metaverse, physical landscapes, and the CIA with Alexander Leishman

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Alexander Leishman, CEO & CEO of River Financial, to discuss: - River adding mining services - What does the future of bitcoin exchanges look like? - The Metaverse - The physical world - The TSA - Federal travel mandates - Population domination - The CIA - Engaging in politics; how to do it - much more Follow Alex on Twitter Check out River Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App Unchained Capital Braiins Compass Mining

What is up freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt from my outdoor screened-in porch studio where I'm being protected from the rain. You may be able to hear it in the background. Let me give you a few seconds. It's pouring out, but I'm dry. Got my warm clothes on. I'm here to introduce you to this episode that I recorded with Alexander Leishman earlier this week on Monday. Nice Monday afternoon rip. I think Alex and I are kindred spirits.

One of my favorite guests to have on. It was only his second time. Maybe his third time. I can't remember. It's not our first conversation. Building on conversations we've had in the past about Bitcoin, River, the chaotic world around us, how best to get through this chaotic quagmire we find ourselves in

as we continue to transition into the digital age. We talked about a conversation we had on Twitter over the weekend about the metaverse The future of technology and humanity And how they're going to coexist We need to get back to making the physical beautiful people I truly believe that I think the metaverse is a sick and evil And dystopian, nihilistic view of the future

You want to live in your pod with your goggles on eating your soy sludge eating the bugs living in this perfectly depicted digital world that has been set for you you didn't build it

you may think you are very dystopian I don't like it this room is brought to you by our good friends at the motherfucking Cash App Cash App is how you

stack sets, send sets, receive sets, and sell That's if you so please sats are the standard. There's a hundred million sats of one whole Bitcoin cash app Makes it easy to stack sats. You can DCA into sats. You can get sats back if you have a boost card At restaurants you go and you get five percent sats back up to a limit every once in a while Cash app can be your bank account. They're offering account numbers and routing numbers. I Think they're gonna expand their Bitcoin product suite That's all I'll say if you haven't download the cash app yet

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custody model it's a two or three multi-sig you hold two keys unchained holds one you always have control of your bitcoin but if you need uh unchained to be that second in the two or three multi-sig setup they are there for you they have a white glove concierge service that's going to walk you through this product it's going to walk you through multi-sig through their their volts specifically they're going to get you hardware wallets going to help you set those up teach you how to secure your seed phrases how to back up your derivation pass for the multi-sig wallets and then they're going to dump a thousand cuck bucks worth of sats into your vault at the end of the day if you tell them that tftc sent you you're going to get fifty dollars off that particular

package again it's a white glove service they're going to hold your hand through the process if you don't want to buy the the uh the package outright you can have a free one-on-one consultation where you can learn a little bit about it more first uh they also just announced yesterday that they've released a a after you get your vault set up and if you want banking like services private banking like services where you have dedicated uh individuals who are going to make sure that you're as comfortable as possible with your vault set up and with your services at unchained they're offering that now for two thousand dollars a year if you want that white glove private banking like service unchained is here to be a partner they're not a product

they're not an app they're a partner they're here to help you take care of your wealth your bitcoin wealth and to secure it properly and make sure that you have sovereignty over that go check everything they have at unchained.com this rip was also brought to you by good friends at compass mining compass mining is here to get more individuals into the hashing game they want distribute the mining layer of bitcoin a bit more and the way it works you go to compassmining.io you can buy a miner all right you can have that miner sent to your home and they have an at-home mining support team that is there to help you figure out what the hell you need to do it's not trivial all right if you get these miners especially the top of the line miners these days

you're gonna have to have very specific electoral infrastructure set up wherever you're plugging your miner in the compass team is going to walk you through that process what you need to do who who you need to hire, what electricians you need to look into, what amps, what voltages you need your setup to have. And then they're going to teach you how to connect to your miner's IP address and point it at a pool and then get those stats streaming to a wallet of your choice. If you don't want to go through all that, they also have partners on the hosting side with competitive electricity rates. You can buy a miner on Compass and then pick a hosting facility to plug it in. And I think I heard yesterday that they've got a big partnership with a large power provider

up in canada that is going to increase their their available rack space significantly at some point later in 2022 all right go check out everything compass mining has going on at compass mining.io last but not least this rip was brought to you by good friends at brains brains is the team behind slush pool they're the team behind brains os plus firmware which helps you stack more sats with your a6 let's talk about the firmware for a little bit okay The firmware basically goes into the hashing chips on your hashing board and figures out the higher frequency chips and the lower frequency chips and focuses the energy on the higher frequency chips, thus producing more hashes, which thus produces more SATs for you. You're going to get more bang for your buck out of your ASICs. If you have an ASIC that has the ability to have Brains OS Plus downloaded on it and you're not using it, you're leaving SATs on the table.

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If you have an account and you have multiple people associated with that mining operation, you can get percentage splits to make everything easy. So you're not sending multiple transactions yourselves. What else? What else they're hiring to if you're a Rust developer, system admin, or you work with hardware and you're looking to work for a quality Bitcoin only company, highly recommend checking out Brains. go to brains, B-R-A-I-I-N-S dot com or check out their Twitter page at brains underscore systems. Enjoy this rip, freaks.

I know I certainly did. Tiki! You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. 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. I need a fact checker. We need a fact checker to find out if Joe Biden shit his pants at the Vatican earlier this week. Talking about the big questions. Talking about the big questions with Alex Leishman here. They're going to lock that away in the Vatican vault. yeah with uh with all the other weird stuff they got down there

we're starting right into vatican conspiracy theories is the pope a satanist who knows i don't know it's a good question yeah i'm not gonna get an eternal question we're not going there right now i actually got yelled at somebody this podcast has the opportunity to be a great bitcoin podcast marty talks about well i'm not catholic so let's ease into it alex let's do it welcome back to austin it's good to be back And it's good to have you back when we're gonna have you here permanently. That's the question You know, I asked myself that a lot. I

I've been here probably what four times in the last year. So I'm always looking for a good excuse to hop away from sf for a bit I've seen you three of those four times Uh, yeah in april And then a couple weeks ago now this week. Yeah You're on a bit of a road show, dude. You uh, what's going on at river? Well, we got a lot going on. Um, we just launched this this mining product recently uh i heard i saw it yeah it's been off to a great reception

we you know we started the company with the idea that people wanted to buy bitcoin and hold it and then we're we've been realizing you know pretty quickly that people there's a lot more people want to do with their bitcoin uh and a lot more people want to do just related to bitcoin and um you know realized our clients all really wanted to mine uh and it's an exciting new way for them to get into a Bitcoin position and we realized we could make it a lot easier than sort of any of the other options out there because of the way we built the company

because we are a financial institution so we can integrate the mining directly into their river account and the Bitcoin just shows up there and they own the equipment and we abstract away as much of the complexity as possible. All right. There's a few rabbit holes I want to dive down with this mining product specifically.

first let's dive down to like the mechanics rabbit hole like how does it work do you guys own a facility are you co-hosting with a partner how's that going yeah so so we we announced the product it's not live yet but we've been um selling pre-orders for for miners that will go live in q1 the way it works is uh the the equipment is brand new uh bitmain s19j pros They're going to be hosted at one of a few colos that we're partnering with and managing the relationships with, sort of utilizing our economies of scale to get our clients solid rates and operating the machines in these colos. Our clients, though, actually own the actual machine at the end of the day, so if they ever wanted those machines, they're theirs for the taking. We could take them in kind. Exactly.

Yep. And, you know, there is this one machine that maps to their name, right, that their machines are kind of earmarked exactly. Yeah, they come with serial numbers and all that stuff. Yeah, they'll have serial numbers, and our clients will, you know, know which machines are theirs, and it's their property. Hell, yeah. So we're not, this isn't cloud mining in the kind of scammy sense of the,

you know, where historically you could, you know, pay 10 bucks or for 15 minutes of hash rate and hope you came out ahead, you actually are mining and we're just making it easy for you. Hell yeah. No, I think that's going to be a great value add. It looks like we have our coffee being delivered. I might be ready to go open that door. I got it.

I got it. Yeah. My beautiful wife was kind enough to bring us coffee. We're at the outdoor studio. no Alex brought a bottle of maker's mark coffee it is uh it is 12 15 on a Monday I'm not gonna be drinking any maker's mark yeah no me neither yeah uh oh god that actually sounds terrible the drink maker's mark right now you know when I went to buy this bottle um yeah I asked them to give me something good and they were like well we can give you all sort we can let you

taste everything i was like guys it's a little too early for me to be tasting whiskey right now just give me something good that's the uh the low-key uh added benefit of in-person interviews i guess we'll start bringing more alcohol like they did in the early days i don't drink as much on this podcast as i used to yeah well i mean you got a kid now i think last time i was here we we definitely got maybe half a bottle of whiskey deep yeah but um yeah we ended that show on a fluoride stairs yeah we'll probably get back there in this sober reptile um but back to the mind it's like in there so that's a couple of things like are you worried about these co-location facilities rug pulling you or are you able to like lock in these long-term deals with them

so we have long-term deals yeah um that's important to us uh we do a lot of vetting on our partners and only stick to high quality partners um we're not you know we're not hosting in um bob's uh mining shed and you know backwoods wherever um we're trying to keep it with really high quality partners where we know the contracts are solid they deliver what they say they're going to deliver and um if anything does go wrong we know we'll you know things will be covered hell yeah in this recourse and are you guys mining at all for river the company like are you going to get access to hash rate yourselves um so we probably will do some self mining uh but that's not our focus at the moment uh you know as a as the ceo i want to accumulate as much bitcoin as i

can on our balance sheet of course but um uh you know it's just uh sort of a different business trying to scale up our own self-mining operation but likely we will uh you know a fraction of the hash rate that we are acquiring um in the machines we will just keep for ourselves no i love that which leads me to like the other rabbit hole i wanted to jump down and matt and i discussed it on rhr on friday is that again we we're big fans of river and the company you're building because and we said it on friday we think because of your focus that you're able to do things what many bitcoiners would deem is the correct way but also gives you a competitive advantage in the long run as everybody's focused on the noise in the space and the quote-unquote crypto space

and that's always been a theory of mine uh particularly in the last like year and a half i've been working in like very interested to hear your thoughts on this like i think i've become convinced that exchanges like river or brokerages like river are going to need access to mining infrastructure i have to have skin in the game of mining infrastructure to get access to liquidity is there any like do you think like a decade 15 years from now like do you think there's any truth in that theory or when you say access to infrastructure what kind of infrastructure Like actual mining, like having equity in a mining operation or self-mining yourself. Oh, so kind of vertically integrating.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think there's truth to that. I think there's a few ways it could play out, and I don't know exactly how it's going to go, and we're trying to stay somewhat flexible. They're sort of getting really big-brained about it all and saying that the only people, like, long-term, like 10, 20, 30 years out, who will be able to mine profitably will be, like, energy companies. um but i actually don't think that's necessarily the case i think there's always going to be uh this this breakdown in the market where the lowest cost energy providers don't only want to self-mine um they do want to just take some like have like these predictable um sort of recurring

revenue streams from from other and sell their their energy to other people who want to mine with it um and so given that future um what does that mean for us well we have to make the decision long term do we want to be our own energy producer or do we want to partner with energy producers and only run mining infrastructure and i don't know what the answer there is um but uh it's potentially a little bit of both yeah um we just we just have to see the thing the thing is though you know mining is a very capital intensive business it's very different than the software business that we you know software and sort of financial institution business we've been in historically so it's something we want to be very thoughtful about um doing over the coming years

and we're still thinking about it yeah no i mean this is exactly what i've been thinking about the last two and a half years at great american mining is all right like what is going to happen is the bitcoin mining industry going to become a bunch of energy producers as well are the energy producers going to come become iners or are people going to realize the division of labor and the benefits of specialization just have these partnerships um and that's how things evolve in the future i think we can see a mixture of all three um but i do think what you said like the energy producers at the end they do have a shit ton of energy i don't think they have the capital to build out the mining infrastructure themselves to to consume all the energy that

they could potentially produce like they're going to need partners to to fill up that that rack space yeah and i also see sort of things coming in cycles it almost seems that self self mining is great for these energy producers or these big colo facilities in a bull market or when profitability is really high but just being a seller of energy and having more predictable recurring revenue streams letting other people take price risk um you know is something that in many ways the more conservative institutions will probably be much more open to doing until bitcoin is totally totally mainstream so i think it's going to be somewhat heterogeneous and that they're going to be institutional operations that just want to self-mine and accumulate as much

bitcoin as possible and there's going to be the big players that would rather just sell energy for a fixed price and let someone else take the Bitcoin price risk or the mining profitability risk. Yeah, yeah. Regardless of what happens, it's going to be fun to watch play out. I mean, we're seeing here in Texas specifically, particularly in Houston, I think the energy and oil and gas guys are,

it seems like a lot of them are falling deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and the mining rabbit hole specifically, which is like another hole, another rabbit hole we get into. It's like ASIC availability. Like, we have a shit ton of these well-capitalized family offices that own a lot of oil and gas assets that want to get into mining. And it seems like there's going to be a flood. It's like, can the manufacturers keep up with the flood that's coming? And if not, how crazy, like, are these ASIC prices going to get?

Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I don't know what the answer is. Right now the bottleneck seems to largely be just the hosting capacity because of this glut of equipment that came on the market from the China ban. But, yeah, I think long-term it's likely going to be fab capacity. And, I mean, we have a bunch of fabs coming online in the U.S. over the next decade. I don't know if they'll be able to produce at the same sort of level of quality

or sort of node size that the TSMC plant in Taiwan can. yeah but it's going to be an interesting dynamic as north american fab capacity grows yeah if i'm recalling correctly i think tsmc's arizona foundry that they're supposed to be building is seven nanometer and then samsung's austin facility will be five nanometer so it'll be interesting i'll be keeping an eye on the samsung foundry particularly here yeah whether or not like and like that's the other question but by the time that ground is broken and the the foundry is finally up and running in a few too many years will the sick uh advancements be below five nanometer that's up for debate um yeah and it's i don't

know the answer i i wish i knew more about semiconductors um but all i one thing i do know is it's it's it's obviously incredibly incredibly challenging to manufacture these high quality semiconductors because if it wasn't you would see the most valuable companies in the world vertically integrating you know google apple microsoft and none of them have yeah because and that like if apple doesn't want to vertically integrate into this you know that's that's interesting yeah it wasn't i mean and then you have an example of companies that were somewhat vertically integrated and have failed like intel wasn't intel vertically integrated to a degree intel was fabbing their own chips making their own computers aren't they or no well they so

i've actually been reading this book recently it's called measure what matters by john doer he was early at intel um ended up sort of being one of the vcs early in google he was talking about his time there and it sounds like i'm not a expert in the history of intel but my understanding was they they missed the pc revolution from uh um from the standpoint of vertically integrating and actually developing their own like consumer computers like they missed that trend of my um apple sort of uh beat them to that and as did others um and so they kind of were stuck just making the chips but i forget who the ceo was who was smart enough to at least sort of put the put the intel sticker on on all those andy was it andy grove at that point i think it i think it was i

don't know if it was still andy grove by then okay possible um the like the pennium stickers that we saw on all the computers when we were kids well that's probably why i think they got in the computers i reckon i remember the stickers yeah particularly yeah so they didn't make those computers but they were self-aware enough that they could still build their brands um without manufacturing the computers themselves yeah but that's another book about intel if you haven't read yet andy groves high output management um yeah for anybody listening to this yeah it's one of my favorite books you get a peek into how he basically divided the labor and kept track of everything at intel when they were an extremely well-oiled machine yeah he was a world-class

manager yeah very world class yeah yeah it's a shame like that intel has fallen behind like the tsmc samsung's of the world in terms of like quality chips studying companies is something i've been doing a lot more of recently because i was over the last year rivers transitioned from a startup to a company i would say i mean colloquially i think people would call us a startup but i think my definition is sort of when when you're a when you're a founder of a company versus when you're a ceo of a company okay like when you're a founder it's still a startup but when you have to become a ceo it's more like more real at that point you have you know uh this this group of people where it's big enough where it's not trivial to organize anymore and really requires a lot of thought and

deliberate planning to orchestrate this group of people towards a common purpose and if you haven't done it before like myself it's actually a pretty steep learning curve it's a lot different than going and raising a seed round and getting three engineers to build an app so it's a topic i've been thinking a lot about recently and trying to look at the people who did it really well and learn from them well let's dive into it right since the last time we spoke You guys locked down a headquarters in Cleveland? So our H2 is still SF, but we're opening an office in Columbus. In Columbus, yeah.

And that's going to be done here in the next month. And really excited for that. A bunch of the people in our SF office were actually there temporarily with the plan of going back to Columbus. And so we'll be scaling up our operations there. I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up being our biggest office within a year. Okay. Yeah, I wouldn't assume like Columbus is like the Bitcoin broker hotspot, but I love it that like you're giving Columbus some shine.

We kind of like, I don't see opening an office in Columbus as a gamble, but we like doing things a little differently and we're not scared to sort of do things that others haven't. So Columbus is actually a hotbed of talent in the financial services world. So, like, J.P. Morgan has their back office operations there. Tons of financial and insurance companies have a lot of big offices in Columbus. So, there's a huge talent pool. And most of the jobs that they have are boring and legacy. So, opening a cool office in Columbus, opening an office in Columbus actually allows us to get the top talent in Columbus

because we're one of the companies in town doing something novel and different. As opposed to an SF in New York, you're competing with every other big tech company, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Columbus is sort of a frontier that those companies haven't really tapped yet. Yeah, and when you compound that with the rush out of cities like San Francisco and New York and other similar cities, it probably seems like a good strategic move. it's also very culturally um i think it's culturally healthier there as well yeah um you know community seems a bit tighter um from a from a company culture perspective it's aligned where you know we want the ethos of our company to be and the types of people that you know we want at the company and um want to definitely be careful about being being too overtly coastal yeah yeah yeah that's that seems to be uh on its way out as a as something that you want to market

these days it's being quote coastal it's not that i mean i've lived on the coast my whole life but um i think there is something special the midwest brings something special every region the country brings and it'd be silly to you know to not take advantage of it are you guys going to get a browns boxy uh you know we it's funny we talked about getting a box in columbus because getting boxes in sf are insanely expensive for anything um but in columbus is actually decently affordable so who knows we'll see we definitely have some maybe maybe osu um no you got to go cleveland browns you got to get baker uh sponsored by river uh and then uh he's a great salesman his uh state farm pitches are our top notch if you will yeah i'm pumped for you guys too like again like back

to transitioning from a founder to a CEO again obviously coordinating messaging to a large company or a large employee base what's been the hardest part for you personally so I think the hardest part for me has been um figuring out what's important to focus on uh as a ceo um and getting smart about because because really there's there's an unlimited number of things you can be doing at any given time um from from the day-to-day sort of operational things that are high urgency right fixing this fire there um making sure this gets taken care of there um but that but no but then knowing like how to really um block your time so that you can focus on the very important high level questions that you need to answer to give the company

clarity about exactly where it's going. It sounds sort of easy on the surface, but when you actually get into it, there's just so much there. Like, how do you take a clear vision and strategy and then break that down into things that the rest of the company can execute on while at the same time also building an organization where the innovation doesn't come just from you, comes from everybody and you know bubbles up uh converges into a clear strategy and then bubbles back down right um all those things are are easy to talk about in theory but um require a lot of deliberate um uh work to actually execute in practice so are there any lessons uh from adding this this mining product that sort of highlighted any of the like the bubbling up that you just

mentioned uh yeah definitely um you know this mining idea was was sort of sort of the result of a few different people in the company sort of bringing this up talking about it um you know we synthesized the idea into something that we thought would be a good product and then just executed and so um at the end of the day uh what really has allowed us to level up as a company and execute on these things has been just bringing in really really good people and really good leadership and at the end and you know i've always heard you know entrepreneurs talk about having the right people having the right people um but you know every day you know i just count my lucky stars and and and realize how great how lucky i am to have such a great team because

there's no way um shipping new novel things like this could happen without without those people yeah no i fucking love to hear it because again you guys are doing it again if you haven't listened into the first conversation with Alex and I dove really deep into the concept of being a Bitcoin only company and focusing on that, um, zigging while everybody's zagging into the, the shit coin casino, uh, revenue stream moneymaker, um, like being focused and actually focusing on Bitcoin, the Bitcoin stack and providing your clients and users, uh, the best Bitcoin experience that they can, uh, have, uh, compared to everybody else on the market. And so it seems like you guys are executing on that very well. Yeah. And there's something Zen

about it. Um, I'm, I mean, I've been through all the bubbles, so, you know, I kind of know how to stay focused. Um, and I think where, where our vision converges with sort of what I'm learning about running a company is distraction is bad right just period yeah um you have to have you have to be very confident in your strategy and focus and always of course like know how to adjust when new information comes along but um you know for me i just feel very very confident that bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency it is very quickly changing the world and there are so many opportunities for things left to build that have not been built in this space, especially for a company like ours trying to make, you know, trying to make it easy to invest in Bitcoin and do more

with your Bitcoin. There's a whole world of products nobody's built. And the reason I've sort of come to this conclusion that building novel things on Bitcoin is both technically uh difficult takes longer more deliberate methodical sort of protocol level um uh work uh you know deep technical research and it doesn't have an immediate massive cash payoff right um so for example in contrast to that um imagine you know developing a new coin or a new token or uh, Dow on, on Ethereum. Um, one, it's a lot easier to pull off because the primitives are all kind of there. Um, you know, a JavaScript developer can create a new sort of financial, you know, institution on Ethereum and, and if in a month and, you know, launch a coin and make

tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. Um, but the long-term potential of building these hard to build things in the Bitcoin space, um, is much, much greater. So, so the short-term payoff is small, but the long-term payoff, if you're focused and dedicated will be much bigger. And that's how we think about it. So, um, so yeah, you know, it's just more being, being willing to see those short-term, you know, returns go to other people and focus on the big fish at the end of the day. Yeah. And I, again, obviously i philosophically align pretty perfectly with that vision as well it's a long a long game that we're playing uh there's going to be a lot of short we've seen it being through many of these

bubbles there's a lot of short-term gains to be made uh in the altcoin world but nothing ever seems to stick for too long um and i think so you have the broker service you have lightning enabled now you have the mining service beyond that like what do you think is there anything you're willing to discuss on the product roadmap so there's uh there's a lot of ideas that we have baking um on the product roadmap different ways that you know to allow people to do more with their bitcoin um i guess all i'll say is i think that we've only scratched the surface of ways to put bitcoin to work right there's this whole world there's this whole sort of like digital world expanding whether you want to call it the internet whether you want to call it

the we can we can talk about this the m word the metaverse we'll talk about it um you hopped in my this weekend i didn't forget oh yeah um uh we're looking at you know where like where's the puck going right where are people going to want to put their bitcoin to work um and i think the nobody knows exactly um but we have some ideas and uh not ready to talk about them today um the first one is mining um but i think that's just the tip of the iceberg okay i'm just gonna i'm just gonna throw out what i'd like to see i'd like to see river become a dlc oracle maybe like a dlc platform um big on dlcs these days if you're gonna tell dlcs are very interesting yeah chris uh chris uh stewart just swung by the office last week from sherd bits oh he did yeah so for

for anyone listening if you if you want to learn more about dlcs he's uh sure bits is doing some really cool stuff there yeah and he was just on the podcast last week so go look for that really oh awesome i mean last week alex and i are having this conversation on monday november 1st um i think this will be posted next week so two weeks ago if you're you're listening at home to this episode uh that's that's where you can find the chris episode uh yeah but yeah i i completely agree that we've only scratched the surface and like especially when you think about like the total addressable market of the internet stack being energized by bitcoin or supercharged by bitcoin however you want to describe it and use it um which i think dovetails into the metaverse

conversation so i i had a a buzz i gotta stop tweeting when i'm buzzed i think that's um that's what gets me in trouble it doesn't get me in trouble but it's just like wake up like would i do this was unnecessary not that it's unnecessary but like that the whole metaverse meme i mean the the ethereum crowd's been pumping it um obviously facebook has completely pivoted their business and going all in on it uh and i don't know people are like cheering it on and to me the notion of a metaverse is really pushing us into like a matrix like where all people live in their pod they have their ar you know the br goggles on they just don't enjoy the beauty of the natural world and and and with that being said as well like i do recognize obviously

we're transitioning into a digital age and people do like these experiences but i think there's a the attention and the enthusiasm around these experience experiences is driven by an escapism that is caused by the the sickness that the fiat standard has sort of injected the world with People are just insanely desperate and disillusioned and not optimistic of the future, and they'd rather go into the quote-unquote metaverse where perfection can be coded and you can live in that digital world. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think one interesting question to dive into is why do people want to escape and how much of it is driven by the fiat standard and sort of the second order effects it has on our culture and how much of it is driven just by human nature and the general fact that, you know, a lot of people just don't have a lot of interesting things going on in the real world. And has that always been the case? i don't know the answer and i completely agree that the ideal scenario is the real world just

gets so much better that humans love reality right and and and love humanity and want to see humanity expand and grow outward instead of going inward and escaping into just this this this invented digital world where everything is just so easy reality is so much a fake reality is so much easier to to contrive um that you know everything just gets sucked into that um at the detriment of those productive resources in the physical going into the physical world yeah like there's a bunch of people like we're going towards ready player one i'm like have you fucking seen that movie that sounds terrible or like snow crash right like have you read snow crash right like yeah yeah um is that is that really what you want um so yeah well so so i guess

i think maybe so i i so i i tweeted out something that was in support of the rebrand for for facebook and i think some people saw that as my endorsement of you know this metaverse idea at all and like you know facebook controlling it um it was actually more just like an objective analysis of facebook strategy and i think i think it's just objectively a good move for their company whether or not i think it's good for for facebook or sorry whether or not i think it's good for the world yeah um i very much believe that you know humans should be focused on outward growth outward expansion and that a lot of the internet um driven things like like the metaverse social media are sucking a lot of productive human time and attention away from um quality like outward

expansionary activities but i think there's also a game theory here that it's important for people who do believe that to acknowledge which is i think we should at least acknowledge this is probably happening like virtual worlds are probably just going to keep getting bigger because it's like catnip for humans um and the people who are able to effectively capitalize in those trends uh will have larger power in society and so to shun it completely i think would be a mistake um as opposed to you know trying trying to like thoughtfully strategize and play out okay well if i really want to see humans expand outward but i also believe this trend is largely inevitable how do you how do i need to position myself um to like extract capital

back from this fake world into the real world potentially it's sort of like one sort of thing i've been thinking about yeah just trying to to leverage the inevitable to to get what you want in the physical world and i can see that to an extent too but i think it's important as well i do i mean it's hard you can't deny it and you just look at gaming you look at um vr and all that it's objectively getting more popular there's numbers behind it like you can't but that's part of the reason why i sent the the buzz thread over the weekend is because i think they're i think messaging is powerful again like bitcoin's in the middle of a meme war i think that we can get ourselves out of these things like me i've been on a vendetta against

esg and i think i'm not gonna say me personally but i think a collective of people speaking out against and highlighting its hypocrisy has successfully uh sort of given esg a black eye it doesn't look good right it looks like a terrible strategy right now like people and you have larry fink taking a step back and even admitting that maybe we're going too fast in esg he's like the father of esg and similar with the metaverse me personally i agree with you i think we should be focusing our efforts and improving the physical uh space that we live in and not uh incentivizing people to escape into a digital world um i think if you message that like hey like we have the opportunity yes things are extremely uh fucked up in the world right now they're like

opportunity in the physical world has diminished i would argue due to the fiat standard and just the way we've uh completely bastardized our economy and our financial system um however that does not mean we can't fix the physical world like i i want to stop people from like saying the metaverse is inevitable and that's like the whole future of economies and stuff like that and push people back towards the physical like hey we've got shit to fix out here like and we can fix it now that we fix the money so let's focus on that yeah i mean i i agree um i think i do think though if we actually you know if we if we look in the mirror um and we look at what's allowed us to get our messages out there and to grow our influence and it's it's been this digital

world oh yeah and then we get into a semantics game right like what is yeah what is the metaverse yeah i see i see the metaverse is like literally putting something over your eyes and escaping like into like gaming maybe is like a a 2d version of it um but once you put the goggles over your eyes you go in the pod and escape to the metaverse so like twitter uh like somebody was like you're tweeting from the metaverse like what is twitter i'm like well did we fucking say when people are sending telegrams between each other in the 19th century that that was the metaverse no it's communications technology right and it's just a it's a new medium to communicate i i completely agree and and actually though i i wonder if like this the scary thing is when the communication

technology and a potential metaverse sort of become one in the same um which what which is like sort of being in this reality is how you communicate to others sort of in this world um and one of the interesting things i've actually been trying to explore this concept by by being more hands-on so i actually started playing roblox recently um i've just seen kids talking about it and people talking about it sort of for the last few years and i had i just like i was very confused by the whole concept um i've never been a huge gamer so so i downloaded roblox on my phone a few months ago and sort of playing around and like i honestly still don't completely get it right it's still i don't really completely understand why so many people especially so

many kids like find find this that fun but one of the things i realized was um a lot of them use it to just hang out with their friends yeah and uh what the what's happened over the last year over the last two years with with covid and this pandemic has like almost forced this entire generation um into these metaverses of sorts into these virtual worlds um just to just to satisfy their desire for socializing yeah um which is in the second order effects of this i think you're going to be very perverse um yeah this is what the world economic forum wants they want you in your pod socializing in this fashion exactly um and then it becomes very easy to control the message and um it's it's concerning for sure and i don't know what the answer is

we make the physical world more beautiful we don't force children to socialize on the internet number one i think you we should allow them to oh absolutely i mean sure at a minimum right but like why why is why society been so willing to go along with all of this i think there's an underlying cultural issue here especially in the united states i mean maybe it's because i live in san francisco so i see the extreme but um you know people have been so willing to cover their kids faces up and, um, and just completely changed the way they live for, you know, for something that just doesn't merit that. I mean, yesterday I was, I was flying here. I was on a plane. I had, there were three kids like in rows near me and the flight attendant

kept like, these kids were maybe like two, three, four years old. And the flight attendant kept pressuring the parents to try to get these kids to wear their masks and the parents were like don't make me do this and you know the flight attendant would be like no you promised to get your kids to try to wear masks and the kids would start crying it was just like this whole thing and it was just like making me so angry at the state of affairs i was like what like what is going on here right and how do we get to this um and yeah i don't know it's i mean not to like rehash a conversation i'm sure we've all had a hundred times but like what is going on you're gonna bring marty jones out exactly no i mean yeah i mean it's it's a product of decades of

light nudging death by a thousand cuts whatever you may be like it's yeah we have a docile massive masses are docile and have you ever heard of like the fabian society have you ever heard of fabian society i think so but the fabian society is i think it's a british um so it's a british society focused on sort of bringing sort of my understanding is worldwide socialism but fate but fabian the name um comes from a roman general that hannibal fought so when hannibal um crossed the alps to to uh attack rome um there he he completely he completely basically yeeted uh you were telling me about this on our hike in april oh was i oh okay okay but keep going so the freaks know yeah so he basically like yeeted every you know roman every army like rome sent at

him um and just like you know rome was like freaking out right and there was this general fabian um who his strategy was very different he didn't go at hannibal's throat he didn't try and directly um attack hannibal's army um he basically stayed on the outside and just sort of tried to make hannibal's life really really really hard um and just like year after year after year and the romans i think there was like a lot of pushback saying like you know why aren't you why aren't you um you know fighting him directly and he was saying well no it's important this is the strategy the strategy is just like wear them down um and so the fabian society is basically this long-term sort of like cut by cut by cut like demoralize anybody with a sense of individualism

um to bring like worldwide socialism and um they're willing to they're willing to wait you know a hundred years to do that and when you have an enemy uh playing that game um and and you're not aware that you're even in a game you're not even aware there's an enemy or there's a game yeah you're gonna have a bad time and one of my one of my biggest issues with the the the groups in the united states that would fight back against this um whether you want to call them the right or um libertarians or whatever however you want to label them they're very very bad at painting a picture of what the future should look like and all they focus is on um it's very reactionary and pushing back against uh sort of the latest sort of onslaught which

inevitably always fails there's no strategy there's no big picture vision of like what what the future should look like i would argue bitcoiners actually are the one group that actually we're the best at we're the best at it and which is why it's so alluring why which is why it's such a fast-growing group of people um and and and increasingly i would say bitcoiners are full of a group of people that were historically aligned with other political movements that now sort of laugh at them um because they realize libertarians is a big meme now exactly um because they're not playing to win no and so i don't know that was just a bunch of random thoughts no but i think it's relevant no i think it's very relevant like we are in a game freaks

and people are you conspiracy serious marty like just fucking look around like they tell you straight up we're gonna build back better we're gonna get you off fossil fuels we're gonna get you off reliable energy i'm gonna make you bugs you're not gonna own anything like they're saying this shit out loud like that's part of it too like once they normalize these absurd ideas and they're trying like the build back better meme alone yeah broad coordination across the globe build back better build back better and they're just trying to get that three letter three word excuse me phrase in your head so you just accept it and you know i think one of the reasons people sort of call this this way of thinking conspiracy theories is because they they sort of assume that

we're saying that there's some like one guy at the top you know like pulling strings controlling him and you know if there was and like why can't you point to them right and why are all these people going along with it like what do what leverage do they really have and i think the reality is it's actually more of like an emergent um there are people obviously like like pushing this forward but why are they right like why are those people pushing you know socialism on the world and i've heard some interesting theories and one of the more compelling ones i heard was that power will just easily um accrue to to um groups of people that sort of promise things to the historically disenfranchised right um it is just the most sort of addictive thing in the world to not feel

enfranchised and then see some someone promising you something that would give you relevance give you more power in the system um and so so so you basically have this world where you have a small group of people who historically were you know civilization builders who are very like independent focused build like explore the frontier build the future you have the vast majority of people who really just aren't like that and basically that this collectivism is a very compelling vision of the future for a lot of humanity effectively and so then if you think about sort of you know you know at the at the sociopath tier of society you know there are smart people who realize that and see that and and and they often come from like a history of

civilization builders as well but they know that if they sort of align themselves with this more collectivist thing that's actually the best uh prospect they have at accruing personal power and so the incentives i think are just there for this to always be a force in society yeah that's how i see it agreed i mean that's why aoc is where she is it's a why a lot of these socialistic politicians are gaining popularity but again going back to like bitcoiners are the best at painting a optimistic vision of the future going the other direction i think again going back to something i said earlier messaging does work and it's powerful and i think we can win over at least a good portion of the masses by leaning into the things that just make logical

sense like again it's bitcoin standard really driving home the concept of time preference and the lowering your time preference and saving capital to deploy in the future being actually pivotal to advancing society is massive number two like the the human rights aspect of the network side of bitcoin and the fact that it's p2p like leaning into that i mean like hey this is actually like you don't want the handouts from big government and that's backed by the big banks and big corporations they're actually the ones that are helping craft the policies that create the inequality that you're angry about and i think we're very doing a very good job of painting that picture as well and then mining like we're going to beat them on

every narrative just because we have the truth on our side that's again i think going touching back on the metaverse and all that like we live in this anomaly of human history because we fucked up the money so bad we have the ability to fix the money therefore we have the ability to fix the world and it's just percolating the message and i think we're hitting a point especially when you juxtapose the bitcoin message with the uh dementia riddled president that we have the build back better plan all the money printing it's like all right i think even some a lot of the masses are like beginning to question like what the fuck is going on here yeah and i think one of the i do think we still have hope in the united states i still think we do have this

culture the culture is on our side and like most people regardless of sort of how they vote do have this um i think do share this desire to to live free and and prosper by the fruit of their own labor, to have self-determination about the future for themselves and their family. I think the Bitcoin movement, the sort of ideological movement associated with it, is the hope for a counterbalance to this very radical left-wing agenda, which to date, before Bitcoin, was the only thing painting a picture for what the future could look like right free housing free health care free education for you and your family right there's very clear things and you look at what republicans were saying it was like not that no

just just no it's just like not that yeah right um it wasn't you know like reagan i don't think since reagan like we've really painted a real picture like america is like the shining city on the hill right um and and weirdly i think the the bitcoin movement is just this counterbalance uh and it is the one thing painting a picture for what the future could look like for america and the world where we have a country full of people who um have self-determination over their own future think long term help other people um and and like build beautiful communities and you know that's why i do this yeah same i mean you think about the uh the infamous bitstein tweet uh hodl bitcoin lift weights eat meat like simply like again all having to do a

low time preference like hodl bitcoin it's low time preference because it's gonna increase in purchasing power the longer you hold it um lift weights like take personal responsibility take care of your health eat meat it's in that same vein like bring back uh grazing cattle we're going to lower our time preference so that we can build beautiful buildings and like you said we're going to have strong communities strong towns and bitcoiners are really heavy on localism and and nuclear families which is another cornerstone of society like building beautiful buildings is one that i think is it's not just buildings too i think it's streets yeah i think i've i've gotten the rabbit down the rabbit hole on this somewhat recently

there's a really interesting youtube video about something called strodes um and how america is full of strodes a strode is is uh is neither a street nor a road um the definition being a street is something that's built for the pedestrian right it can facilitate a car but it is built first and foremost for the for the pedestrian for humans um and a road is built for cars it's a high It's like a high-throughput, fast thoroughfare for cars to get from A to B. A strode is something that has sidewalks and lots of things that you pull in and out of, like strip malls and things like that, but it's also full of fast-moving cars. It's like the typical thing you see in most American cities.

You came up here on a strode. I came up here on a strode. right and when you actually think of it in those terms you're like these things are abominations yeah and um are truly terrible for culture um and for building communities um they don't bring any joy uh they they divide communities they physically physically um which has been a big issue in the united states i mean historically even like racially these these like these these awful um like like drug ridden so i know what you're trying to say and i highly recommend all you freaks go listen to the mo facts with adam curry show where they dive into trap music and

the emergence of trap music out of atlanta came uh due to like a large highway infrastructure project that divided the communities they called it a trap house because the house like uh at the end of the block was literally a trap like you get trapped down there yeah easy for the cops to come but like the way the highway system work it uh divided these communities and created the ability for these trap houses to pop up like they'd be like the worst uh worst valued house in the neighborhood and so just naturally due to that you'd attract um low value individuals who are selling like crack and shit like that and that's that's how the trap house started it was due to physical infrastructure that divided a once like bustling community yeah and a lot of

this is you know i think stems from car companies sort of capturing political power in the united states and pushing for a lot of this um but i think a lot of americans until my when i first heard these ideas my initial reaction was oh you're just like a hippie you know this is stupid you know i love cars and after like over the last like three to five years i've become utterly convinced that um like car first like strode type sort of um things throughout america is actually extremely detrimental to our culture and our future yeah i mean go read strong towns if you haven't yet freaks like charles maroon like it's fucking he and he he dives into like the economic sense of it too like uh value per square foot or revenue per square foot or revenue per acre

um in strong towns that have streets for pedestrians the the value per square foot is significantly higher like the economic density in a town like you would see in spain like sevilla or something like that is extremely high compared to these suburban strip mall communities that that are have like walmart's and a bunch of like fast food chains in them yeah absolutely and then And on top of that too, the, it's not only the economic sense, but these physical spaces affect our mental state, right? Like ugly buildings, ugly roads. I think that they do a lot to erode our mental wellbeing as well.

Yeah. These brute, like brutalist, you know, government buildings. I mean, they, you know, they, they're built to dominate the human spirit. And force us into the metaverse. yeah yeah and i think i mean this gets into a bigger discussion about like art and stuff but i i think like you know a lot of these art leaning communities whether it's architecture or other things sort of got like went off the rails um and sort of just trying to like impress each other uh at the at the detriment of you know our society right architects no longer seem to try to um bring hope and beauty to humanity they they seem

it's very self-masturbatory yeah oh my gosh yeah i mean which is weird it's like why are you getting off to this ugliness like is it like the race to see who can build the ugliest thing or it can make like the most absurdist design and implement it or do these people actually think these are like beautiful buildings at the end of the day i don't know yeah i don't know neither do i that's why i like this house this house was born in or made in the 50s before we went off the fiat standards stood the test of time it makes you happy to walk walk in into its its you know yard and it brings good emotions yeah thank you okay i love this studio i hope like we can just do this

outside like in the winter that's what i'm waiting i'm waiting to see my first austin winter yeah um i'd like to be doing this i mean it's november 1st we're doing it starting to get heat up it's a beautiful day we're getting towards 80 degrees here yeah um yeah man the world's fucked but and what do you think do you think people are waking up i mean obviously the flight attendants aren't um yeah i don't know i think the jury's still out um i think we'll see this next election because weirdly like i kind of i tend to believe generally presidential elections aren't that big of a deal but the reality is just the like federal travel rules right now

um around sort of like vaccines and masks and things like that even before that the tsa like Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, yeah, no, that was the first example of the federal government taking advantage of a, of an emergency to dominate the population and force us into a permanent state of subservience in, you know, one new way with this TSA, which is just, you know, ridiculous. And then, and this is, I'm worried this is a new one, right? I'm worried this is like a new TSA. Like we're always going to have to have our faces covered whenever we're in a public, you know, publicly designated like transportation, whether it's an airplane, a railroad car or an Uber or a subway. And it's just one more way to to make everybody that much more subservient and standing up to it becomes just more of a burden. right yeah i myself i used to like not i used to purposefully say i don't want to be scanned in the tsa and after about a year it was just kind of like whatever i'll just do it now

right and um i stand in the scanner at middle birds just like to voice my displeasure nice i like that yeah i always get a pat down after that yeah it's just um so i i think what really I think what really has to happen is this liberty-minded group of people needs to truly gain political power and get rid of some of these things that we thought were permanent, right? And keep asking and making people realize that these things don't have to be permanent fixtures in our society. Things like the Bank Secrecy Act, things like the TSA, things like the Patriot Act, things like... Financial Action Task Force. Yeah, exactly. Things like these COVID restrictions, all of these things, like Milton Friedman put it perfectly, you know, there's no, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.

lots of these things were sort of put in place as a reaction to something that happened and then they just become permanent fixtures of our society because the inertia of government is you know so much bigger than any one group of people can change and you end up with these apparatuses that you know just complete become become completely unremovable unless you build up a very very very significant um a group to to undo it and we i think people just have to put in the work yeah exactly i think that is something that people a lot of bitcoiners to uh discount is work hard work and building a lot of bitcoiners are under the impression like oh you just buy bitcoin hold and we'll fix the world that way which is like bitcoin's a tool you know it's

buying bitcoin and hold it does have its advantages but you also need to get that tool and create more utility around it as well you got to talk to your and you've got to talk to your politicians i mean one of the things that i did not realize until recently was how much influence it really any one person can have if they just try to reach out to their representatives i mean it's i i actually i think it's similar to being in college and like you go to your professor's office hours and you And you're like, here's this world-class expert, and very few people are actually showing up to talk to them in their designated office hours. But if you show up, you can spend 30 minutes talking to this person about really cool things, whatever you want. And they'll listen to you, or they'll talk to you and teach you.

And so I think government's like the same way. I think everyone sort of just assumes that they can't have any impact. And through voting, I agree. voting is like you know mark like you have your voice is equal to everyone else's but if you're willing to actually put in work to write um to write to your representatives write to your congressmen to try to even meet them in person go to town halls like they will listen and i don't think people realize actually how much influence they can have if they're willing to just um put in the work to try and try and make things happen i i agree and this is something i've gone back and

forth with so many times over the last few years but the last year particularly it's like and it's still undecided pun intended in my mind um like is it worth putting in all that effort to do that or it doesn't matter at the end of the day like or should we just build this parallel system and render it completely uh impotent and obsolete i think it's important because i don't think it's like saying you're going to build a parallel system is great in theory but in practice like what does it mean when you have the world's biggest military and government sort of like right there when you and potentially willing to be changed right um why not try i guess it's like why not try and i think i'm being convinced of that argument i mean and just me

personally too having had conversations uh via great american mining uh particularly uh with representatives in many states uh helping them navigate energy policy and bitcoin mining and actually highlighting to them like bitcoin will make you more energy efficient is actually like a boon for your state from a tax perspective from an emissions perspective from whatever it may be And I'm happy to report that I was able to make significant progress with a lot of individual representatives and Congress people. I mean, like you had, like Ted Cruz was educated. I didn't personally educate him about any of this or his advisors, but like he was pretty well educated on Bitcoin mining as a boon for the energy industry. Yeah, at the Bitcoin mining conference in Austin, he had clearly done a lot of research and put a lot of thought into this.

And I think many other politicians and political leaders across the United States are going to do the same thing. Because I think the reality is Bitcoin just gives people hope for the future. And it is going to be a useful political tool. Yeah, and I think the highest leverage engagement with the political system is at the state level, right? Because there's a lot of states out there that don't like the federal government as well. If you help them realize that Bitcoin provides a network and an asset that can eventually, if they are able to get some, give them leverage with the federal government saying, hey, we actually don't need your funds, that's powerful as well. it dissolves the power of the federal government to an extent yeah and i think i think a lot of

people in this space just forget that you know one dude maybe or maybe a group right created bitcoin right they single-handedly did one thing that changed the course of human history but they're not the only people who ever do something that changes the course of human history like you can do that too right like one of my personal objectives in the next 10 years is try to get the bank secrecy act repealed yeah i'm not saying i will be able to necessarily achieve that but like i 100 know if i don't try then it's not gonna happen yeah right i mean more people need to think like that if not me then who exactly if not me then who like if there's something you want to see happen just make it happen right because the reality is there's very

few people who actually care strongly enough to really do something and if you are that one person you can make an impact yeah all right how are we going to repeal the bank secrecy act what's our plan because i want to do it with you i want to help out in any way i can well i think like the so the first time i actually ever even um brought up the concept was at a compliance conference and everyone in the room just laughed when i asked the panel like can we try to repeal the bank secrecy act and like it was it that that that moment sort of just seeing the reaction from everybody because i and i knew they would laugh by the way but i did it because i wanted to test the waters and see if it was a a meme that or like a concept that was um something

people had really thought about and i could tell from the reaction in the room that it wasn't like it they saw the bank secrecy act like they saw gravity yeah it's just something that's there and we can't change it um which i thought was actually great news because that meant that no one's really tried yeah for a long long time um and so i think so so i don't have like a crystal clear action plan but um i think that it i think that actually oddly bitcoins rise to prominence and bitcoins increasingly political we can leverage bitcoins political support um to try to make this happen uh and i do think there's some like thoughtful analysis that needs to be done because one of the biggest the biggest um hurdle to overcome is convincing both the right and the

left that this isn't going to open the doors for terrorism and you know awful crimes right um so uh basically the case is going to need to be made to to congress that that this isn't helping uh prevent significant crimes and it's just hurting law abiding law abiding citizens across across the political spectrum right so let's let's dive into this why is the bank secrecy act bad like particularly what does it force individuals and companies like river to do that that is detrimental to their well-being so basically the bank secrecy act weaponizes or weaponizes american financial institutions and forces them to serve as as arms of law enforcement for the government um now in many ways it's it's not totally crazy basically

anytime a company sees something sketchy right they're forced to report they're supposed to report it right um at its core that doesn't sound so bad right um but the the issue then becomes you know companies then basically say well okay i'll just report like anything that looks a little bit odd because then it becomes kind of like a cover your ass sort of thing um which actually like these big banks really like because they can just say oh well we reported it yeah and rarely anything comes of any of this stuff but you have this massive just flow of information just like siphoning like you know flowing into the federal government right it's a massive like surveillance dragnet um that that will be weaponized against the american people um

and it's only a matter of time i mean it probably has in many ways um already but and and and one of the challenges is is it also forces american financial institutions to sort of act with suspicion towards any customer right like you are guilty until proven innocent when you go to an american financial institution because they're they've been told that if you screw up right you're on the hook and so they're forced to then treat everybody who comes in as this potential risk uh and i think the second order effects of that can be seen you know that we just put up with it right like oh your bank account gets shut down and you can't be told why right or um uh you know your limits this you know you can't take out more than this much from

your bank even though it's your money right so um it also it also uh has this this really perverse effect of making it extremely expensive to start a financial institution so larger companies actually like it because they just have these systems where they you know you know send in the data and they have to have this huge massive compliance operation that they know like no small company you know can compete with like just to start river um you know we need to raise millions of dollars in in venture capital so we could cover these costs the real costs like you have to pay real people you have to pay real consultants and real lawyers to do all this stuff for you and um it blocks out competition yeah it creates a natural moat creates absurd business cost and

again the the investment in those compliance costs does not return like in like the grander scheme of things any like actionable prevention of money laundering or terrorist financing or anything like that it's like the tsa it's like the tsa it's like the tsa for money it's like the tsa for banks it's annoying for everybody and does very little to actually prevent anything really bad from happening um and then it gets worse with time especially when you factor in inflation actual inflation like the barriers to to collect and report more information keep getting lower and lower correct like what is it the ten thousand dollar limit specifically and these things are so reactionary too right i mean before 1970 was america um some crazy den of just illicit

activity and lawlessness and terrorists were just sending money all over the place and trafficking children and after 1970 with the bank secrecy act that all just stopped right i mean same thing with you know tsa it's like well we weren't blowing planes up nobody flew a plane into the world training center before 2001 before the tsa like why do we need it now right they're like these band-aids on like deeper social things like we should be asking ourselves the deeper questions um why are why are we creating terrorists in the first place well exactly where are these terrorists coming from where are these school shooters coming from everyone wants to talk about banning guns but like you know a 16 year old could buy a machine gun from a magazine in 19

you know 13 and nobody was shooting up their school yeah right um so like you know we're focusing on the wrong things in this country yeah maybe you're forcing kids into fucking indoctrination camps and it drives them fucking crazy they start shooting up their classmates like yeah yeah maybe maybe you've created a fucking society where the the outlook of the future is so dreadful that people would rather go shoot their classmates than than actually be civil productive members of society nobody thinks that way no because i because it's too abstract and there's no easy solution whereas there's an easy band-aids are easy to conceive of and to put on things but actually like looking inwardly and saying how do we fix our own society

there's one it's not something a single person or a government can do right um and so they kind of just grasp it what they can and you know they can implement things that would make society healthier but um very few people will see the the cause and effect uh and understand why it would be important to do that yeah oh now i'm getting all pissed off like particularly about like the war on drugs that's tied into the bank secrecy act as well and the quote-unquote solution to what is perceived as a drug problem is to just go all-out war on that quote-unquote drug problem and basically target i mean the cia fucking brought crack into inner cities and charged inner city minorities with sentences that were they're vastly longer than the white

collar crime of doing cocaine it's the same exact drug just in a different form like and then then the externalities of that is that you destroy the nuclear family in many of these cities where these minorities were were targeted and that has generational effects moving forward that makes the cost of fixing that problem more expensive and then you just compound it with more and more like nobody ever says maybe the drug war was wrong maybe we don't need to even worry about drug laundering if we just make drugs legal and let free-willing adults make decisions for themselves maybe drug use will actually go down because uh people it's just like not something bad that anti-authoritarians uh just are naturally drawn towards yeah i think it's i think we have a

um i think we i mean the world has always been but probably even in modern society even large more largely plagued by um self-righteous fixers right and it isn't just one one party it's it's both parties and like these self-righteous fixers or people who um there's like the c.s lewis quote is like you know kind of paraphrasing um people who torment people who torment us for our own good are the worst people because they will never stop because they do so with the permission of their own conscious as opposed to you know some evil robber baron who just wants to make a bunch of money, like at some point his, um, his, his, his greed will be satiated. Right. But the moral busy body, um, that always wants to, uh, you know, tell everybody what to do, um, is going to plague us

forever. Yeah. Um, Leanna, when a chick from CDC, Oh, Anthony Fauci said, I don't know if Anthony Fauci, you're describing to that or something like completely more evil. I don't know i mean i would i would argue yes right it's it's a group of people who've been educated who are educated and they they deeply believe that they know better than everybody and it's their job to it's a paternalism right um it's their job to fix and and fix the masses and tell them how to do things um because they they don't know any better and and these fixers have good intentions i think um but again they they create a they create a hell on earth um in the endless pursuit to satiate their own self-righteousness yeah uh and i i think it's like an unfortunate

outcome of our really we do have a very good university system like we have these great minds who come out of American universities, and a lot of these people are very, very smart people, but they have this attitude, right, of moralizing and self-righteousness, and that's just the word, it's very bad for everybody. Yeah, it's the last two years

is very starkly highlighted. I heard a funny sort of quip once, Harvard was built to train Puritan ministers and still does. Because if you actually look at, if you there's there are a few interesting books about this one is called albion seed it's a it's a book about sort of the different nations in america um culturally and there's like america has these different nations that sort of culturally come from different regions in in england i mean

like we are at the end of the day we are a british we are our our nation is is defined by british culture right our language our political system our sports are like every single aspect like you 90% of our culture is defined by this, regardless of where waves of immigrants afterwards came, right? Like, you know, my great-grandfather was from Syria, but, you know, this country is not built on, like, Syrian culture, right? It comes from the founding, and the Northeast was the Puritans. And they got some things right. They're very hardworking. They're very focused on being sort of modest and thinking long term, saving, being humble, but they're also very, very moralizing and have no problem telling other people how they should be living their lives and punishing them if they don't live their lives a certain way.

um you know if you were in a puritan society and you broke the rules you got punished if you if you dressed the wrong way or you didn't go to church on a sunday or you played a sport on sunday or you know god forbid you know you um you're a woman holding hands with a man um after a certain hour right things the witch trials things like that so we still have that and so that's northeast east coastal elites right um and that still i think plays the pure the puritan sort of culture still plays a very um strong role in how people from the this part of the country like views their role in society yeah no that i that was another book we were talking about in our hike in april as well and that that when you mentioned that to me i was like holy shit it's

true like yeah yeah um the book there's another book called american nations that breaks america down into even more regions but um you know the the four main ones this book talks about are so there's the northeast puritans there's the uh like the cavaliers of the south like landowning aristocracy um starting in virginia going down yeah exactly um like often a lot of those people came or they were originally in bermuda i believe um and had their plantations there and brought it to the united states very aristocratic very okay having like this very stratified class system They're like the land-holding gentry from southeastern England. And obviously that had its own very sort of perverse aspects to that society

with slavery and their complete disregard for anybody below their social class. Then there were the Highlanders, people from the Scottish Highlands, who settled sort of the Appalachians, where my family's from. west virginia um and that region and those were basically the rabble rousers and people who are hyper independent and didn't want anybody to tell them what to do about anything um somewhat dysfunctional but also very very much um anti-fragile anti-fragile exactly um they weren't going to build they weren't going to create the next um you know they weren't going to put out the next leonardo da vinci's um but they also weren't going to go anywhere and come rain or

shine or a nuclear war they'd still be around yeah uh and then the last group i you know i i don't the last group was more sort of like expanded westward um i forget where in england they came from but anyways i think it's a very interesting way of viewing our country as like this group different different nations actually that have cultural roots in england from different regions yeah i mean just having myself born in philadelphia lived in charleston south carolina for a bit lived in chicago lived in new york and now living in austin texas like it's undeniable that there's these different sects within our country um south first northeast first midwest first southwest now i mean it's it's a very clear

delineation between the different cultures and their values specifically yeah like i experienced that that southern cavalier culture um how you described to charles i mean that's how charleston still is till this day like there's still a bit of an aristocracy yeah and i was just there last week and it's southern fraternities and sororities you know they dress up it's you know it's i mean it has its own like cool sort of flavor to it but it has also sort of weird roots as well yeah oh yeah everybody's got their weird roots oh yeah i mean the appalachian the highlanders they were like they were the scottish highlanders they had just came from like centuries of of war and strife um and just loved fighting yeah i mean that's what like we were actually yeah while i was at

my which is which is interesting because well i was at a family wedding in charleston a lot of my family split split between like the northeast philly area and the south in charleston myrtle beach and that's what i always knew both sides of my family came directly from iran but i always forget i never knew why my mom said yeah like my great-grandfather on her side they and my great-grandmother emigrated here after the potato famine um so we've got that irish blood that's spread between the south and they moved to mississippi first at least my grandmother's family did and then they spread up north interesting um i don't know what that adds to the conversation we just have it's just a little family history there it's pretty cool

yeah that's irish lots of irish irish here i like the irish i like being irish i'm american i like my irish heritage if you will what are your thoughts on the cia what's the deal i think we need to to break them into 10 000 shards and spread them into the wind i'm gonna get shot tomorrow for saying that art do you think the cia is a group of very highly competent effective um uh actors or is it like any other government agency that's sort of a mix of just like a lot of very a lot of incompetence a lot of bureaucracy and like old inertia and can't really get anything done i kind of sort of like the eternal question um because i actually kind of go back and forth on that well now we now we get back to like the first line of the uh

the podcast about satanism how did the cia start i think i mean people got to go back and go through the history of the cia the cia was started by nazis that the government fucking like brought over operation paperclip yeah brought over and they had nazis start this agency like right after world war ii literally i guess it's historic it's you can freedom of information act this stuff like it's out there yeah and then like one of the leader of the cia alan duels whatever his name was like about satanist and like i don't know if it's still run by satanist and nazis today but like just that is literally verifiable you can go verify this don't trust me go verify it it's in the roots of that agency and if that's in the roots i don't know if i trust it that much

yeah you know it's one of those things where i'm like well on one hand if i was running a country i would want an agency focused on collecting information about other countries and given that we live in an adversarial world where we need to make sure that we're protected and our you know we're doing that we're doing what we need to to ensure our existence in our future i would want something like that to exist but on the other hand it seems like ours has kind of gone off the rails yeah i mean it's it's it's been off the rails for quite a while i think jfk realized that i think that's why he got his head blown off um for trying to vocalize that to people um and then yeah he

Was it RFK or JFK who was responsible for stopping the proposed false flag of the airline flight that they wanted? They were proposing an airline be filled with CIA agents and their families and fly to Cuba, veer it off course, and then blow up an empty one to make it look like it was shot down. Yeah. um and they nixed it um i think jfk nixed it or rfk yeah um and then they had the gulf of tolkien i mean the thing that pisses me off these days is like uh it's like we go out there we're like we're gonna stop nations from uh meddling and i'm like the russiagate stuff like they're meddling in our elections like that's literally all the cia does is like go meddle in elections and fucking place who they want to be uh the rulers in these particular countries and the rulers

typically fuck things up like i'm a pacifist i just i don't like war i think if we're going to go out there and try to lecture people about meddling elections we shouldn't be doing it at all like if we are doing it we have no moral authority to go lecture it's just fucking nauseating seeing the american political class go lecture when the cia and the fbi frankly are going out there and doing covert operations to yeah to manipulate elections of countries that should be sovereign just leave everybody the fuck alone please um be nice would be nice it's fuck man yeah it's like how do you i mean it'll be interesting to see oh shit that tucker carlson thing documentary on the january 6th stuff and the fbi informants the worst attack

on our capital since since 9 11 9 11 or so that's the thing that gives me hope like their their narratives are so fucking dumb it's like all right you guys are getting lazy and incompetent so like i do think there isn't there is a two plus two equals five marty yeah i think there is like they're getting there's certainly maybe they've gotten so confident in their ability to successfully wage these psyops and covert operations that they they think they're infallible um but it's becoming obvious that these agencies are getting sloppy as all hell yeah i mean but you know it's interesting actually though these absurd statements like that um these absurd statements like that are I read a quote recently

I forget the exact quote but effectively absurdity is a much more effective organizing tool than the truth if you can get a bunch of people to say 2 plus 2 equals 5 it's almost like a uniform like I'm part of

the party and people who say 2 plus 2 equals 4 you know they're not with you and so so sort of saying these things right like you know this was the worst attack on our uh on the nation's capital i think it was like since the civil war like something some something like like completely not even remotely like in the realm of yeah true since the white house burned down what was under john adams or something like that yeah 1812 or something it was like what like

um and uh you know those things are really good ways to identify who's on your side and who's not um and you know i i don't know it's just sort of something i've started paying more attention to um saying absurd things and making things that aren't truths truths uh and see who agrees with you um is how you sort of continually both move the move the narrative shift the overton window shift the overton window redefine sort of reality but also identify who you need to deal with yeah um they're gonna try and deal with me please well why can't i just think that the cia and fbi are bad and like point out like these objective truths and well it's not really useful for identifying people who you already know aren't on your side right but like

imagine sort of like on the left right you have you know the you have the moderates and then you have sort of these very sort of powerful sort of um very left-leaning factions and they've effectively been able to sort of capture um more and more moderates and it's actually odd um sort of how many previously sort of middle-of-the-road people will sort of like go along with these narratives because they sort of set this um the left is actually very good at this it's sort of like yeah formula you're either on the board like yeah like redefine sort of say two plus two equals five um if you don't agree with that you know you're racist or something right um and uh and you know excommunicate those people to set an example for the next time you say two plus two

equals six or three plus three equals seven um and it's a it's a very good formula for getting a very uh very good very uh loyal you know political uh political following um and i think it's something very worth paying attention to it's it's it's yeah it's dangerous but effective yeah it can be effective right well so that's god i know you freaks don't like me talking about like the vaccine stuff like obviously the meme of the uh pandemic of the unvaccinated was going around a couple months ago but now it's becoming like we're already talking about like fifth boosters or like fifth shots or third boosters oh i'm already a number 10 marty gotta catch them all like pokemon i got all the i'll get the pfizer the moderna

is that why you got that lump in your neck it means it's working marty but like that like i think a lot of i know personally a lot of people were like completely fine first dose second dose even like all right i'll take a booster now it's like all right you're already talking about a fourth booster it's less than a month than this excuse me less than a year since this vaccine program started like we're already like on double boosters like i know a bunch of people who were just like willing to get the first two shots to go back to normal life. That's what they were told. That's the other thing. It just keeps changing so quickly. They keep shifting the narrative. It went from two weeks to flatten the curve to not a single

person can get COVID. And we can't even go back to normal until children who like factually and statistically are not at risk from COVID with 100% certainty and verifiability and verifiability. according to cdc statistics um we're we're doing all of this now for the children like what yeah i mean everyone who wants to be vaccinated is vaccinated there is no good argument for forcing anything on anybody at this point anymore and the vaccines are effective they like are and so anyone who wants it temporarily effective they're sure they're temporarily effective but like if you're scared of covid get a vaccine and you'll be fine go for it right yeah some people die with it but like some people get sick and die i mean it's just like humans like i think i think what

we see is like we're seeing how um we're very divided in our country around sort of how people react to new risks new long tail risks and um some people are just okay with a new risk and because they value their independence above all else and they're willing to just accept new risks um some people are completely unwilling to accept new risks and will do anything and everything they can even if that means oppressing an entire population to make sure that risk you know doesn't exist anymore and we saw this on the right with september 11th right um actually it was kind of saw it across the board i mean it was more like just unilateral um or not the neocons the neocons certainly leaned into the neocons leaned into it yes um and now this with

this one we're seeing it's very much on the left um it's very much become i don't understand like there's nothing progressive about this which is the weird thing there's like literally this is they went from my body my choice to fucking take your second boost or your they went from my body my choice and help the underprivileged get better educations and help support their parents so that they you know they don't they can go to work and not have to worry about where their kids are too children cannot leave their house people cannot leave their house their parents can't go to work because they don't have anyone to watch their kids and now only rich kids will get good educations because their parents will just hire tutors um while poor kids have to sit through some zoom

class they're definitely not going to be paying attention to uh and there's chaos at home like i mean there's no absolutely nothing progressive about anything that's happened in the last two years and has created further extremes and inequality so it's just very confusing to me um why the left actually is the big pusher push of this and i think it's really just because it's i don't think they've ever really cared about minorities or equality they always cared about control again going back to that moralization they're the harbored puritans who think they know better yeah this was also sort of like the the science's time to shine and take control like you know i've been slaving away in a in a biology lab for seven years complaining about why i don't

get paid enough and this is my time to finally like tell everyone how it should be right um and which is that that lifestyle that particular science is driven by the way the fucking medical industry science industry has been built up like that the incentives of whether it's pharmaceuticals or just like science papers and like getting your paper into a journal it's very politicized and the incentives aren't really driven by the quote-unquote science the whole term science has just been completely bastardized yep yep um so yeah it's uh i don't know but at the end of the day i think it's important to just be um hopeful for the future there's a book that i really like um that i reread again recently it's called good to great

by jim collins um it's really about companies how to build a great how to take a good company make it a great company um but in the book he actually interviews somebody i forget the guy's name but he was an admiral uh he served he was in he was in vietnam as a prisoner of war for i think it was eight years um and one of the things that stood out to me about this interview was he's um jim collins asked the admiral so you know certainly some people like in the pw camp didn't make it like why did some make it and some didn't and he said the optimists didn't make it um and so that and and you know digging into that he said yeah the guys who said that we were going to be home by christmas and christmas would come and we're still there the guys who said then they'd

say oh we'll make it to easter or and we'll be out by easter they're going to come rescue us easter comes they're still there oh you know we're going to be out by next christmas you know next christmas they died they died of a broken heart they they just they didn't make it and being optimistic was was was bad now with the guys who did make it was always believing it would work out in the end but being brutally honest with themselves about the current reality in the current situation so i kind of think about that like in in our own sort of like fight for sort of building a better future building a better country we keep being optimistic i used to always say like i'm optimistic but that interview kind of made me think like well optimism isn't necessarily

the right word um always believing deeply that it's going to work out in the end confident confident is very important but also being brutally honest about the reality of the situation today yeah is just as important if you ever want to actually win i agreed right i mean i think part of the reason i moved to texas is again i'm confident that we're going to fix things but i had to be real like being in the new york philly area was gonna not be the best situation for my family which is a bit hard to say because we actually had to move away from our family to do that and it's like i want to make sure that my son is not wearing masks when he goes to school and daycare for the first time he's gonna he's hitting that threshold two years old and i don't

want him to wear a mask and up there he's gonna be forced to do so yeah my wife and i will not be allowed to go to restaurants when we go home for christmas because we don't have vaccine passports and we both had covid and we had the antibodies and we're like we're not compounding the risk when it's completely unnecessary i'm not just gonna do it so i go to dinner in philly over christmas it's fucked but yeah like again confidence i am optimistic as well yeah yeah now you have me wondering should i even be saying that anymore i mean it's not i think it means the word means different things to different people it's definitely the way he framed it in this interview was certainly something that made me think yeah yeah like i don't have a timeline

for the transition to a bitcoin standard and that's beginning to just build better buildings and we should just take that term build back better that's a that's our that's ours now it's hard we're building back better we are i mean well objectively like we if we're successful bitcoin successful and beyond bitcoin we're successful in lowering the time preference of a critical mass of individuals like that is a better future objectively i think it's apology who has an interesting um take on things and apology has this this idea that bitcoin might act like is sort of potentially underrated as a political sort of um as a political force in the united states um and and just kind of similar to what we've

been talking about like might actually actually is poised to potentially become a very material um political movement um single issue and that single issue is driven by a lot of financial capital yeah single issue well capitalized and unlike any other political movement other than sort of extreme sort of progressives um paints a picture for what the future would look like which i think is the absolute key yeah um if you don't have that you don't have a strategy if you don't know what you're building towards you don't have a strategy um and uh yeah i very much strongly believe that i mean what we're getting right is painting a picture for the future yeah and again like we said earlier i think bitcoiners do that far better than your libertarians your

conservative right-wing people what's the libertarian vision for the future what's the what's the republican party's vision for the future i couldn't tell you either could i i can tell you i i i'd actually if you have to ask me whose vision for the future could i describe the best it would be the democrats right yeah it doesn't mean i agree with it but i could at least describe it yeah which says a lot if you think about it yeah they're gonna print money and try to give people free health care free education uh yeah and forcibly uh decrease the divide in wealth between the the poor and the rich and again i get why they want to do that and i get why they think that'll be a good thing but i think us being bitcoiners i mean advocates of the free market

understand that no matter how much you try and like you cannot micromanage these complex systems which the schooling system health care system monetary system all are absolutely and and but the problem is that the reaction historically to the the the democratic sort of more radical sort of left agenda has always been criticism of it and why it won't work and that is extremely um unappealing yeah there's nothing interesting to the vast majority of people about criticizing somebody else's vision of the future and not proposing your own yeah and that's why bitcoin it's like hey we can help with the wealth and the quality gap we can help with education we can help with healthcare actually to fix all these things you need to fix the money yeah it's a purse

incentive that starts from the monetary layer that has produced the the gap in income the gap in wealth the gap in quality health care services and the gap in quality education right so yeah i mean for anyone listening to this podcast you know i i think that there's a lot of work left to do to make those narratives digestible to people because because if you really because we take for granted that this will make our country better right because we've dug deep down like and how sort of certain economic incentives have second order effects that will lead to healthier um you know will reduce costs for important things like health care and education will increase quality um but but uh there's a lot of work to actually make it this more digestible

to to the public and make it very clear that this thing will make your life better if you support it and and why right um there's still a lot of i think contents to produce there and deep thought to put into how to make that narrative digestible because it's it's um it's actually not obvious for the vast majority of people why bitcoin would make their life better this is a super confusing concept it wasn't obvious to me for for quite a while exactly so if we want that to happen somebody's got to you know make that make that make that happen yeah it takes effort you can't just buy and hold i mean you can but i don't think it will usher in the future that we all really want i think we're lucky to have alex here doing uh

doing it on many fronts in terms of building a company to get more people better access and to bitcoin and then once they have that access better utility with that bitcoin and then yeah i think your efforts to abolish the bank secrecy act and really think deeply about how to attack the political realm of things is extremely valuable yeah it's i mean it's a the thing that's great is having all of us working together towards the same the same goal you know it's great to be in good company it is and like uh to throw one more uh neg at the metaverse like i think if you come down here and we coordinate meet space and we're able to just drive uh down the street down our strode excuse me to uh to meet up and coordinate in person it'd be much

more effective so you need to get your ass to austin definitely definitely hey man i've been browsing zillow these these housing prizes keep keep going up man you gotta gotta do something about that yeah yeah i guess i shouldn't wait i guess that's a reason to just exactly by now yeah no let me buy just rent i read it just right can i can i camp camp in your backyard you can we have an extra bedroom too you can sleep inside if you need to um it's been a pleasure as always i love the in-person interview so much better so much better right so much better so much better um it was worth flying in for hell yeah what uh what should we lead the freaks with here

i think the thing just to hammer home one more time if you want something to happen make it happen if not you then who yeah and or anybody sitting at home listening like uh really me though yes you yes you i mean a lot of us had super random backgrounds and we're not doing this before and if you read some of the most incredible people in the world's autobiographies it wasn't obvious from early on that they would end up doing something great they decided to and put their mind to it and um we have the chance to redefine history yeah i mean it's a once in a civilization opportunity sort of an opportunity don't live your life having let it pass you by freaks i was unemployed for the two years before i started

writing event i guess i'll leave you i was i was an unemployed loser couldn't get a dog walking job if not you then who how things change how things change peace and love freaks