TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #296: Messianic Bitcoin with Erik Cason

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Erik Cason to discuss Messianic Bitcoin and other cosmic topics. Follow Erik on Twitter Subscribe to Crypto Sovereignty Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Ben here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Eric Kaysen, extremely based Bitcoiner, extremely passionate Bitcoiner, and somebody who's bringing some incredible ideas to the space. You guys are in for one hell of a ride. Enjoy it. This report was brought to you by good friends at the motherfucking Cash App. You can do so much more with your stats now. They just upgraded their rolling out Lightning network payment ability on the Cash App this week. I got

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this river jordan it's a hell of a conversation you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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. Eric Case, and what the hell is going on in the world right now? You know, every day it gets crazier and I have to wake up each morning and have a cup of coffee

and think to myself, somehow today is going to get dumber than the day before, even though I didn't think it was actually possible. Well, how's that happening today? Today, I think the world's getting a little smarter than the day before with Boris Johnson coming out saying they're they're finally gonna rip off people's mask and and not go forward with the vax mandates that was a little nice thing to wake up to today i in all honesty i saw it and i and i thought i was like oh this is like fake news i gotta i gotta look through to see if and i saw it like two or three more times so it's like maybe maybe it's actually happening and and and i think right now is the most interesting place because like their narrative clearly

isn't working anymore and some are dropping off so it's like the music stopped and some people are still dancing some people aren't so i'm really interested to see how it plays out i am too is this the epic blunder that people like us have been waiting for an epic blunder from the the regime the davos class if you will that that finally shakes people out of the the existential crisis that we found ourselves in the last two years i don't know um i hope so it feels like the the expert class has been delegitimized pretty pretty handily the last two years but i think just uh my nature bitcoin or nature is to be a bit more optimistic about their downfall they always tend to survive longer than um we expect

yeah i mean to me this is kind of part of the acceleration of that you know there's this class of people that they uh this is all about authoritarianism like they don't they don't actually care about what the the outcome is it's just as long as we're making sure we listen to people and uh yeah as it accelerates i'm just kind of afraid that i'm going to find a whole series of people um just unavailable to the actual thinking for themselves and logic and it's pretty scary because i feel like this pandemic was such a great preliminary method to really test people on that um and so i'm i'm still pretty scared it's nice to see that the uk is scrapping it but until we're out of these state of emergencies and everything i'm

going to be beholding my breath i'm optimistic but but i i just don't expect the state to roll over so easily particularly after staking so much on on getting to roll out these biometric ids and all that stuff yeah i don't think they're gonna roll over easily too you see these these headlines Boris, ending the lockdowns and the mandates. But that's just like one little piece of catnip. They'll always drag you back in. And it is, again, it feels like we're in a struggle for the soul of humanity, if you will, right now.

Like what path are we going to take? Are we going to continue down the path of biometric data collection and certification to get into particular things or even spend money um or is bitcoin gonna win are we gonna get freedom are we gonna free ourselves from the shackles both mental uh and physical that we've sort of put our put on ourselves over the last however number of decades um like how i mean we're we're at a really radical break point and it's really important to understand uh in my opinion this is a very unique moment in human history very different from any others before because if we get caught

in this biometric cage like there there's no extricating ourselves from it uh and i think it was really interesting that chamath you know said his horrific things about not caring about the uyghur people when understanding the uyghur genocide is is super important because like this is the first instance of a genocide where it's not just about killing out the people and destroying their culture it's about hollowing out the people entirely obliterating their culture so there's no remnant of it you can't even remember it or be connected to it and now you're these vacant empty bodies to be pushed about uh and like that that 100 is absolutely what communism wants and it wants to make sure that everybody is empty in that same way that there is no god you don't have a soul

that you're an empty vacant husk to be moved around you can be monitored all the time watched by anybody have that information access by any corrupt agent of the state and we can't escape it you know and i really want to emphasize that point because all other things before this there's usually been a capacity to escape it uh but if this thing gets implemented i have a very hard time seeing how we destroy it and i feel extremely hopeful that like bitcoin is this gem that we have that we can kind of build around to resist all of it and at the end of the day you know like the the truth the freedom the liberty that that we ascribe to and strive for uh that's like an infinite cause of generation from ourselves whereas like the totalitarian that they represent

it's uh it's pretty limited because it's based entirely on a fear predication uh and about threatening people and their livelihoods in order to get compliance so i think in long term you know we're going to win. It's just going to be pretty magnificent to see how it all unfolds as it plays out. Yeah. I mean, speaking of Chamath, specifically Chamath, Ray Dalio, two very prominent billionaires here in the United States over the course of the last few weeks alone have made very interesting comments, as you mentioned, Chamath with his completely apathetic, I don't even know if that's the correct word and framing of the the Uyghur uh the way the situation of the Uyghur people within China and the fact that they're uh they're uh being put in concentration

camps and sterilized and women raped and stuff like that and Ray Dalio saying that he thinks that the United States should try to emulate the the equal prosperity um theme that the China the communist chinese party specifically tries to imbue on on its country and it seems like and we've seen similar things like this in the past the nba specifically daryl morey at the time gm of the houston rockets comes out in support of the hong kong protesters in late 2019 adam silver lebron james and uh everybody who has a lot of financial interest in the nba slapped him down put him in his corner and uh apologize to the chinese government and it seems like in the west there's a lot of the corporate and institutional capital class that sees the the growth of the

chinese economy as an opportunity to exploit to produce yield on on capital that they want to invest and they are willing to sacrifice and maybe they never had the principles but But there are American individuals and companies that should be ascribing to the ideals, mainly the right to freedom, private property, sound money, and bodily autonomy that the founding fathers set forth hundreds of years ago. Yet they're looking at this potential profit that China could potentially provide them, and they're throwing out those ideals too. appease this authoritarian regime which is quite sickening to see yeah i mean i i don't know if they ever had the ideals to begin with but it's clear if they did that they're they're extinguished at this point in time uh and what upsets me the most by this like this is more the same bullshit fiatism of this short-term thinking because yeah sure you

can sacrifice all these core values that that are fundamentally the principles that make market-based economies work and function the way that we know and understand them but sure sacrifice all of that for going into the totalitarian panopticon getting five years of profits from the chinese based on horrific distortions that don't make any economic sense and when this all crashes and and you know the most profound and horrific crash that's obviously coming globally it's like you know the it we're clearly in the precipice of the second great depression uh and when that happens you know uh i have a very hard time seeing and understanding how china is going to avoid conflict other than through extreme totalitarianism uh and general ruthlessness but frankly like you

know i'm a free market guy if these guys want to fuck up and go participate with the chinese that's their own business i'll never do business with them i'll talk shit about them uh chamath also like i i hope we don't encounter each other in person like i have a list of of people who well i won't go any farther but he's on it and uh when i meet shitty people a little further with that look like uh i think when we meet these people we have a responsibility to say hey like dude did you know like you're the bad guy and you know he'll do all this bullshit i'll be like no i'm gonna hold you accountable like everybody walks around sucking your dick and telling you that you're the greatest guy ever because you have a bunch of money but i want you

know you're an absolute piece of shit and you really need to think fucking hard about saying what you said particularly with you saying that your family fled from these same sort of circumstances that you should stop shut your fucking mouth and think for a minute and instead of celebrating how rich you are and making that about how great of a person you are why don't you stop and think about what you just said how fucking wrong it is and maybe try to actually do some work to change the world in a positive way because that's what you represent what you want to do right or are you just another fucking liar and sycophant because i actually think that's the real answer so uh you know i mean if i was to encounter somebody like like kissinger i would

just kind of beat him to death in the bathroom because uh yeah well i hate these people that say they represent american values when they're just fucking violent totalitarianisms that want to use the military industrial complex and solely our good fucking name it really upsets me it upsets me as well i love your passion right now again and chamath specifically he's always been And the guy, like, oh, I was part of social capital. I'm a seed round investor in Facebook and all these social networks. And they're doing evil. And the one I think LARP's about that.

Like, my kids will never use it. But he's still reaping the financial benefits of those investments that he made at that VC firm. I'm mad, man. Because, like, fuck him. The fact that there are real people out there that are suffering under horrific conditions from the fucking Chinese communists. And he says, it's below my line. Fuck you, man. it oh it just it outrages me like they're real human beings and they're below your line fuck you

yeah sorry no no i i don't like to get really worked up but like that makes me really angry these are real human beings they're they're not some fucking fantasy that lives in metaverse bullshit okay and and you know and i feel particularly because i i visited china in early 2004 and i had a uighur man take me in and explain all his culture and it was really beautiful you know and i i'm i'm not in contact with him nor was i afterwards but i just think about him and and it scares me to think that he might be dead at this point just because of you know who he is and what his religion is it's fucked up and it's wrong but below his line well it's very wrong especially if you consider the history we've been taught as individuals here in the united states

too i mean world war ii obviously the holocaust is is high on everybody's mind who grew up in the last 30 years went to school last 60 years like never again and it's happening today and people that's the thing that really i wrote about this in the newsletter a couple days and we're getting to this point in america like the chinese and american economies are so intertwined and interdependent that like we're at the point where we need to hold the mirror up to ourselves and start asking and answering these hard questions. Do we want to be associated economically with a trade partner that is engaging in all these totalitarian and genocidal actions? Obviously, the United States, the military-industrial complex, which you mentioned earlier,

we're in no way innocent ourselves. But at some point, you do have to begin to measure and engage these actions and try to say, hey, are we actually doing the right thing here? Well, I hope we're coming to that place. And I think Bitcoin is a big part of this as well, is because holding that mirror up and looking at it, you know, there's an impossibility of like, how can we challenge or change any of this stuff? You know, when the financial system is so corrupt, it's so embedded, blah, blah, blah. But now we have Bitcoin. And with Bitcoin, like there's a way to actively resist this there's a way to rebuild our economy that's based on these substantial ideas of freedom there's ways to use bitcoin and then integrate it into the legal

system directly so that you know we we withdraw the power of the purse and like my great fantasy is this idea of various american states making bitcoin into their legal tender that causing for competition amongst all of the states hopefully it'll cause a lot of problems for the federal government so they'll have to pull back in retreat start you know the process of self-healing america from all the screwed up shit that we've done in addition to the fact that now there's an established legal regime in the united states for a free form of money that is bitcoin uh this can push out into the global economy in an extremely powerful way and essentially it produces a neo-mercantilism that I think is the best hope for a Western classic liberal society to be able to thrive

and have this digital economy and digital space available to us while still protecting our freedoms and liberty. I don't want to say it's a long shot because I feel like it's almost inevitable it will happen, but the way that this builds over the next, I don't know, 10, 20 years, it's going to be really fascinating. And the truth is, I think it's going to swing into a pretty dark place for a while. I hope not. I'm always optimistic that it'll go smoother, but it's hard looking down the pipeline and not seeing some pretty dark stuff needing to happen in order to kind of wake us all up. In your mind, what are some of those dark things?

Well, the digital panopticon, first and foremost. It's grown so much more powerful since the pandemic had started. And now we've conditioned everybody to listen to the government, be terrified of everything. And once we get those biometric IDs integrated into a system that we can start refusing people. To me, this is one of the most interesting places because, you know, talking about the Holocaust before, I feel like the American version we get is this really, really shallow surface level of that. Like, hey, there were these people that were different and they put them in cages and then decided to kill them all. Like, never do that again. But then when you talk to people about the idea of, like, a national healthcare policy and the idea of discrete eugenics and saying, hey, like, this is where Nazism started from, most people are like, oh, no, like, that could never, that could never happen here.

And, like, wow, like, we're watching these steps actually happen. uh and so like i think the other dark thing is states unilaterally using the state of emergency to make pretty much anybody they don't like an enemy combatant to provide to deprive habeas corpus from really whoever they want and uh i have a very strong fear that they are going to do that to bitcoin you know so you and me will find ourselves enemy in this state labeled as enemy combatants that will not be allowed a trial by a jury because of our belief about holding bitcoin and i think the state will eventually get there and it's a dark idea and i hope that we preempt it by having states protect our rights but uh it is a deep fear of mine

mine as well i've almost resigned myself to the fact that i'm already number one on the list number two will be physically plucked up somewhere because i'm on that list for being a bitcoiner but ah it is it is a bit daunting but like what would you say like just look at the state of these people leading us like look at the world economic forum look at biden look at all the leaders of the world they are just so visibly out of their depth they're old they're they're completely disconnected from the average joe the common man out there they they cannot relate to the common man at all. And on top of that, we have the communication tools today, this podcast, being able to video stream, chat apps, social media apps, whatever it may be to get

better information out there. I think for me, particularly what I, what I try to think about is like, how can we better organize these independent information resources, these independent, whether it's independent journalism or small media companies or alternative media companies and really just turn up getting the distribution of the quality information the signal that highlights the hypocrisy and the abject evil of the the incumbent regime and try to change hearts and minds that way that's something like i can't stop thinking about like we have the tools how can we not figure out a way to leverage them to prevent the the dark the darkness that you just described from being an inevitability

i mean it's funny because uh i've felt so strongly for so long being committed to my individual anarchist ideals of just not wanting to engage in the status politics in any way shape or form because i feel like it's inevitable for failure with that being said uh this technology is really new unique powerful uh you know the the fact that joe rogan's getting 10 times the amount of viewers as cnn i think is a great testimony to that you know the broad and depth that your show needs for for bitcoiners and i actually think the truth is is uh we're like moving into the phase of a recognition of the inherent the political that exists within bitcoin and uh i get this concept from carl schmidt of the there's a there's a division between the idea

of party politics and the political and party politics is about like how you in how you try to have a liberal democracy integrate everybody and play in a really friendly way and not like oh you're a republican i don't like you but like if you get elected i'll i'll obey and like that'll be okay and i think what we're realizing with bitcoin is that there's this way to reactivate something that's truly political and that it creates deep anonymity with the other political classes and that we regard the other political classes as enemies and we don't want to integrate or play with them. And what's substantial about Bitcoin is that we can do this in a completely nonviolent and peaceful way. I don't think that that's been possible before, because if you did

try that, you could easily be disassembled. And so I actually think what's happening is we're starting to move closer and closer to actually starting a political, like the political movement that's about reclaiming American republicanism from these deeply corrupt powers. And my deepest fantasy is we, you know, we create a foundational orange party that has the explicit purpose of kicking both parties out of the American political process and putting all these people on trial that have clearly corrupted the law endemically. And then clean shop, you know, because I think unless we actually hold these people accountable, you know, the fact that Nancy Pelosi has made these absurd amounts of money over decades ripping off the american public by being able to make

these trades that she knows she's going to make money off of um it's disgusting and despicable and i think it's about time we finally talk about both sides are corrupt and if we don't have some totally new political idea that we're going to continue to suffer under this um with that being said i i don't want to be responsible for any of it i'm not interested in in really having those i'm just not interested in the conversations like if if you want to if you want me to convince you of bitcoin like go talk to somebody else like uh we can have a conversation once you're here and you want to talk about some of these crazy esoteric things i'm into if not you then who are yeah but it's it's also yeah if you don't get it by now like i don't have time to to explain this

to you come back to me when you're ready but how would an orange party something like that get implemented in your mind like i again going back to states right so does it have to start at the level because i'm very much in agreement there i think bitcoin's acceptance at the political level is going to happen at the local politics level at the state level at the county level i think we're already seeing that wyoming texas kentucky a number of other states beginning and particular counties within states beginning to posture i think they they want to be accepting of bitcoin miami obviously a city uh and that's been like one of the most bullish things in relation to bitcoin in the last two years is all these states beginning to compete for bitcoiners

i think we need an energy resource state like texas wyoming louisiana west virginia tennessee kentucky ohio to create a what alaska did with their oil permanent fund but do that that with like a bitcoin mining fund um that's what i want to see is it's a bitcoin permanent fund somebody make it happen yeah that and furthermore like uh as messy as this system has been like the the american system i think is so great because of the way that it has these state rights that are like sovereign states like outside of the power of the federal government which is what we really need right now and so how i think it happens is actually uh and this is funny because this was like something i got really hung up and obsessed with before bitcoin

but it happens to lead right back here perfectly is uh the idea of using an article 5 convention in order to be able to force an amendment to the united states constitution to end the fed and make bitcoin into legal tender and article 5 specifically because this circumnavigate this gets around everything in the federal government because you go through states directly and so the idea and this has never been done either so it'd be interesting to see if the supreme court stopped it which if they did that you know to me that's kind of the the move to show that it's time for true revolutionary action uh but essentially if 35 states pass an article five resolution to their through their state legislature saying that we ratify the u.s

constitution with this amendment after it passes 35 state legislatures it's supposed to be like it becomes an amendment to the united states constitution at that point in time uh but as i said earlier this hasn't happened in u.s history before so that there's a real question that the supreme court would stop it which i think they would be to the risk that it has but to me this is how a whole movement kind of gets activated and we really lean back on state solidarity and reasserting the 10th amendment in a very radical way to essentially ram back all federal power and go no like you guys are not a sovereign entity in this state the state of texas has sovereign rights here wyoming or whoever else uh and i think it has to come through states in that

specific way because of the way the federal government is just too far reaching it's too powerful it's too unavailable it's too susceptible to corruption um another nice thing is you know as bitcoiners we happen to have quite a bit of money at this point in time so if we need to start bankrolling this stuff uh you know the these people are are spineless you know willy people that are going to easily capitulate over you know what ten fifteen thousand dollars let's do what we say which like by the way like how like how gross is it that like you can buy a politician for like that that little money it's very gross it's very gross and it's i mean it's just a example of how corrupt the system is how rotten it is like how

like is this one it's a big conversation going on right now so paul graham i believe tweeted um something something about like the quality of life is the best it's ever been and a lot of people are complaining about the the plight of the world and the existential dread that exists and he made the argument it's the best time ever to be alive if you're a human which i mean it's hard to deny obviously we have this technology we're doing there's something there's something culturally that's missing there's a cultural aspect yes we have all this gdp growth we have this technology we have these capabilities but the culture is is very sick if you if you take the time to observe it dissect it and understand the the values that it's espousing

on on the public well i'm like i i just hate this viewpoint like look you have the internet and tvs like you should be happy oh you're right like it doesn't make any sense why you know the the 18 to 50 crowd is is killing themselves in record numbers and overdosing on drugs in record numbers well yeah we're happy you know i'm like i i just i i have a really hard time with these really rich guys spouting off about their shit because oh yeah like best time to be alive if you're human right Uyghur people like Jesus fucking Christ like it it just really drives me crazy that these guys think because they made a bunch of money that they they have the answers for everybody else in life um and to me again like this is about how deep into the corruption we

are like uh words almost fail us at this point in time to convey what's even happening because people are so locked into the hypnosis of this spectacle that uh they'll believe that stuff you know and when you talk to them about the idea of like do you have a soul is there an afterlife is there a purpose or meaning to this world like what what is our being what does it mean to be human what does it mean to try to live an honorable life uh they almost laugh at these kind of questions you know and uh it's really sad because like they they have this real perspective that you know you don't have a soul there's nothing beyond the world other than material stuff uh this is your one chance to get all the crap that you want so you should do it and if you do

it that means that you're a great and wonderful person who obviously has made great choices in life um and it's just it it's just wrong you know it doesn't it doesn't have empathy it doesn't have support it doesn't have understanding uh and i i just i really struggle with it and it's really hard because you can feel crazy a lot of the time thinking that there's something wrong with the world and i mean i think uh i'm not sure about your experience but my experience before meeting other bitcoiners was pretty difficult and for a long time i just kind of thought i was crazy about bitcoin and then when i like met these other people that kind of saw it too i was like oh shit like i'm not crazy uh and it was just like such it was such a helpful uh understanding

that like not only am i not crazy like i just see the world in a pretty different way maybe a more classical way uh and i just had to find other people that see and feel that and i think connecting with those people uh really helps you start to to clear away kind of how corrupt and crazy everything is and start to see you know what we value as people what we want to build together what we want to create uh and it's really wild that bitcoin is acting as this global shilling point for like everybody who cares about moving past the nihilism of the contemporary society uh it's just it's fucking awesome and i also think like we're just like a couple years into it because i feel like the signal was put out everybody started to congregate and we're like

oh shit this is real so like what's next and i feel like that's exactly where we're at right now and it's super exciting it's very exciting it feels very real i mean for me personally i was very angry before i found bitcoin again i was 30 years old i was senior in high school in the great financial crisis happened obviously before that 9-11 happened when i was 10 the iraq war in afghanistan more than more than the middle east happened a very impressionable point in my life it followed up immediately with the great financial crisis my dad was in finance he got beat up from that stuff i was just like a very angry 18 19 20 21 year old and found bitcoin i was like all right this is the solution to this problem i mean i couldn't identify exactly what

the problem was at that age but i knew it had something to do with the financial system some with the money and bitcoin came i was like ah but then yeah i found bitcoin and i was that that friend uh and family member just like annoying people like hey this is very important when that click happened for you did you kind of did you kind of lose it for a little because like when after i read the white paper i felt this thing like slip in my mind where like i just felt like I had smoked meth and crack at the same time and I was like, Oh my God, this is it. I was like running around crazy. I'm like, look, put the money in it. It connects the points and it's going to save everybody.

And it's like, Jesus, but money. And people were like, okay, calm, calm down, calm down. And I'm like, no, you don't understand. It's good. It's going to change everything. And they're like, okay, relax. Yeah. Um, I was working. And it's awesome. Oh, my bad. I was going to say, was working at a fund at the time i was an analyst i was like literally sitting at my desk i was literally the personification of the meme like i got fired from work because i didn't get fired from work because i was just like reading bitcoin stuff but i was at work just like reading and

consuming as much bitcoin content as possible and then like take my headphones off like look at my co-workers like we got to be looking into bitcoin they'd be like shut the up it's uh i'm like it's gonna change because we were trading currencies commodities i think this is gonna to change our business we're gonna be able to settle this this global currency to do energy trades we don't need all these fx pairs anymore we got we've got a distributed uh digital currency now like we should be thinking about this they're all like shut the fuck up dude like please shut up it's like 2014 yeah yeah that i was 2013 i was at a bank same thing wasting all my time on reddit trip like trading writing about it thinking about it uh and i remember i had a

meeting with the ceo to talk about like how we're gonna advance tech at the bank you know i was real excited because i was like you know thinking about pitching bitcoin all this other stuff but uh i go into the meeting and it's just about like adding ipads and all the branches and everything and it was funny because after we had that meeting i i literally walked immediately back to my desk wrote my resignation and gave it to him um because also like i was talking with with olaf at coinbase at the time and he was like come on board we like need you and i was like i don't know like joining this insane bitcoin company over my cozy job at the bank but yeah after that i was like fuck this nonsense this isn't going anywhere so happy i made that decision it worked out really

well for me um but yeah it's interesting because early on i i was working in the bitcoin industry people like it was this fun thing but it didn't have any of the air about it today and i actually feel like we had to go through the block wars in addition to getting shit pointing to kind of like help focus bitcoin in this way where it is today and i also think that that's why kind of everything has been initiating over the last three years as opposed to like the last 10 years which is pretty interesting agreed because i think if i recall correctly and just like going back my experiences and my memory of how i was consuming bitcoin content and what bitcoin twitter it was crypto twitter back in the day it was just a bunch of traders sharing charts um you had luke dasher

and lop and john carvalho back then and uh shinobi on twitter mr hodl as well um talking about like core development, stuff like that. But most of it was, from my recollection, is traders sharing charts. And it was a lot about the gains and the what, but not about the why. And I think what you're getting at is the last four years particularly are getting to the why. I think the Bitcoin standard was a big catalyst for getting people to think about the why. Why money? Why particular forms of money? Why is it important? Which is the number one thing we should have been focused on the whole time because that is the problem. The money's broken. People don't understand. People don't even understand why we use money. I mean, they get that you give somebody

a dollar bill and they'll give you a good, but they don't really understand the technical underpinnings of using a medium of exchange to exchange and store value over time, which I think the last four years we've been getting into the why, not only why money, but why from a value perspective too why should we lower our time preference and and decide to invest in things that are that are more worthwhile than the ephemeral consume culture that we have today yeah and i think uh i think we needed all this scaffolding at first to start experimenting with it seeing if it was possible you know like we i think because we're so deep into this like we don't have as much appreciation for the fact that bitcoin just became a teenager you know i'm like

uh that care that it needed to kind of get it through you know and the nurture it needed in order to help cultivate it growing i don't i don't think it was possible to really think about these much bigger and deeper why questions until it started getting powerful enough that we could feel confident that it couldn't easily get crushed out in addition to like i think uh there's something really substantial about sitting with the questions contemplating them taking them seriously uh and then also like having that inflect back upon us i i find it really interesting how the question of you know like what is money uh there are these two levels to it there's a real surface level one that most people understand of like oh it's the thing i use to exchange like by

other objects and like that's how it works uh and it reminds me very much of heidegger's idea of being like you know we all understand who we are as people and what our being is like i'm me and And I'm Eric. And that's my being of who I am in the world because I'm me. But when you start to dig a little bit deeper at the question, you realize that there's all these really complex aspects of it that you'd never really thought hard about before. And I think Bitcoiners have been picking at that with with money. And that's essentially been developing a rabbit hole that's allowed for people to go deeper and deeper and deeper. And it's hilarious, too, because, like, you know, you show up for for a number go up. And like, as you dig, you're like, like, what about my soul? Like, who am I as a human being in the world? And like, what do I want to do? And it's just super funny that like this, what people thought was just money in their approach into coming in it was really this induction process to contemplating what value is at a much deeper level.

And it's very important, particularly where we're at in a world that presents itself to offer unlimited materialistic pleasures. Yeah, which is a perfect comment to segue us into what I actually have as like the title of this episode. I just threw it up there because I was on cryptosovereignty.org today and rereading some of your old pieces. And the last one I had up before I came over here to speak with you was Bitcoin is messianic. Has it been bestowed to us by God to save humanity from the sick consumerist culture that you just described? Yeah, and I think it's interesting because I think so many people probably read that and they go, oh, and like immediately walk away. um and like i i want to empathize with that i understand why someone would have that perspective but i really want to give you an opportunity to read it because with this state panopticon thing

that's getting deployed the way that they're regarding people the internet uh property in general uh it's pretty clear to me that the state's acting like a god at this point in time uh and that's like a pretty bad uh aspect to have going on if you want you know like freedom and liberty to actually be parts of your society and so i think bitcoin's messianic because the way that cryptography protects us is unlike any other institution or thing that's existed before and it's really hard for us to wrap our head around that we can enter into a free relationship with bitcoin utilizing its core cryptography to protect our wealth and that like there's no exceptions to that whatsoever. If you have secured your Bitcoin properly and appropriately, it doesn't matter if

the United States government and the Chinese communist government are working together to try to extract that Bitcoin from you. They won't get it. And that truly is messianic in a world where the state has given itself the right to extract property and wealth from anybody for any reason it chooses fit, particularly under a state of emergency. You know, and this is where my work goes really starts to go really deep is because i focus so much on schmidt and the idea of what the state of emergency is and how the sovereign exception can essentially destroy the entirety of the law i think we're essentially at that place with money because it's really clear there's no sort of legal standards at this point in time that are actually governing the way that

we issue money we have this board of governors there they have some bylines that they account to but the the fact that we have several board members of the board of governors resigning because of their unethical behavior and the fact that that despite the fact that's unethical behavior not being legally punished for it should really highlight um how much we're in a space that like this actually has very little legal aspects about it and that's deeply troubling you know we all use money and it goes back to the same thing that that because people don't understand this and how dangerous of an aspect this is and how much power these individual men have, we really can't address it in addition to the fact that there isn't any particular process right now

in order to try to renew money in a meaningful way through the legal process. And it's deeply disturbing, and this is essentially causing for the collapse of the world as we understand it because of how, you know, the fact that gasoline prices have doubled over the last year is really, really wild and very concerning and alarming. And I'm quite shocked and surprised that more people aren't more upset and alarmed about what's going on. Yeah, well, I think it's not going to be long before people start complaining about all rising prices, not just gas. I mean, inflation does not seem to be transitory at all um and so and there is i think in 2022 going to be a social tipping point where people begin to get maybe not even angry but just scared about how

quickly prices are arising i mean like in the stores and here i was at heb here in texas over the weekend and there was a lot of empty shelves like it was actually pretty jarring like walking through um the heb here that there was a noticeable amount of empty shelves and whole foods i was there a couple days before that everything was full but you see these little signs begin to peak in rising gas prices rising food prices empty shelves it's like oh shit things have really gone awry but back to your comment about the fed governors and the unethical activity they engaged in with their training as well like and that is another thing that people really have to realize about the monetary and financial system that we are currently forced to live within um at

this point like it is inherently evil like we talked about overt slavery with the Uyghurs earlier but I mean you have arguably like a humanity a global level debt slavery that people until bitcoin was created have not had the option to escape unless they wanted to do like some some gold deals with each other behind the scenes but like we have a global debt slave class that is as brie love says having our life force suck from us via the inflation tax that nobody agreed to or opted into and these people that are in control of the monetary spigots too they're out there and they're they're taking their privileged access to the the spigot of monetary of money and they're overtly benefiting from it financially,

personally, and they're not getting in trouble. This is evil. There is no justice with this stuff and people should be angry. And that's the most disconcerting part, for me at least, of the overarching conversation of inequality today. People are completely arguing about the wrong problem.

The money is the source of the problem and nobody's talking about it. outside of Bitcoiners and Austrian economists. Yeah, and I mean, that goes back to this problem of people not understanding what money is at all. And so, you know, I'm like, I had the same, when before I was a Bitcoiner, when I was a far leftist, I had these same harebrained ideas, like,

oh, let's just like steal all the money from the rich and like willy nilly, like we're good to go, right? It's funny because I really realized that like not being an entrepreneur and like not engaging in any sort of process of building capital really like gives you that harebrained idea and it's funny because recently i was talking to a far-left friend um you know and i got got more of this harebrained stuff and it really occurred to me i was like oh like you can have these perspectives when you don't have any money because you don't have any money you don't

understand how to make it you didn't struggle to get it you didn't take risks to to get that you know um in addition like i have a family member who you know like when i complain about taxes they're like oh well like you didn't do anything to like make your money you just got lucky you know and it's really upsetting that that you take them on a risk in a particular way you you uh dedicate the capital uh whatever you do to build your business and then these hair brains come along who just want to be like well you didn't do anything for that um and i think this is really important because this is a component of of actual evil is not being able to think logically about part of a process and actually come to to true conclusions about what is happening

there um and it's pretty scary because i think another big part of this is like we've lived in this world where evil's been purported for so long continually uh to me like this is why we live in a world that uh you know i would call nihilistic with that being sort of a false understanding of who Nietzsche is and his work and that like people don't believe there is evil or there is good or any of these things in the world because they've been subjected to it for so long uh and now that we actually have an opportunity to get a seat at the table um the thing that I've noticed the most is that a lot of people don't want to engage with most of this because it's it's a real struggle it's really hard to think you know like why are they giving us these vaccines if they

don't actually work like would somebody actually do that like would somebody do that and and like hurt people that bad and the answer is yes and you and i understand that but most people when you present to them look they're they're giving you shitty vaccines because they're going to make a lot of money uh they're like most people like no like how how could somebody be that evil and like this is the problem this isn't a conversation we can have with somebody who's engaging in this all you will get is prattle and excuses out of it there's never a point where they go oh my goodness you're right i'm evil dang um you know and so to me this is much more of a question about what do we do now that we see this going on we acknowledge it with each other and we

have a tool to fight it and essentially like this is where this political gets activated is by us finding each other and saying yeah we're going to put all of our wealth in bitcoin and we're going use this as our means and mode to resist this at this point in time. And this is this sort of what we would call a non-political aspect of Bitcoin that I think is the most political thing that there is. The fact that I can take my wealth and put it in a system that doesn't participate or reward their system in a meaningful way. And frankly, by withdrawing my wealth from their system and putting it in this other one, I'm both making their system weaker and empowering my system. And one of the things that's the most exciting for me is, you know,

Grimsham's law has taught us that Bitcoin is, you know, our subjective storage of value. It's a one way street. We'll never convert to anything else. And there's more and more people joining us every day and dropping out of the other system. So like this is all just a question of time and how quick we can do it. You know, is this going to take five years or is it going to take 15 or 50? And I don't have the answer. And I think a lot of it's going to be both about how much the system accelerates and pushes back against us and how much we greet that and raise the standard of how we want to approach it.

Like I said, again, I'm not an organizational guy. I'm not interested in creating the orange party, but if somebody wants to take that on and ram it forward, good luck, man. I hope it works. I think we have intellect on our side. I mean, I don't want to sound too pompous or confident. And having been in Bitcoin and met more Bitcoiners and interacted with more Bitcoiners and worked with more, and they're truly some of the people that think the most critically that I've ever met in my life.

And I think if you have that on your side, it's at least a massive benefit. Obviously, we have a massive enemy to defeat in the state, and not only this state, but a massively bloated state. with a lot of weapons but i think i think we do have the the critical thinking and argument skills the rhetorical skills to actually defeat this um i think we can win the hearts and minds i think we are and uh when you were mentioning earlier too you're basically just describing like people don't want to think that these people can be evil and again that's the greatest trick the devil ever played was making people believe that he didn't exist right and that is people don't believe the spirituality you're describing nietzsche god is dead like he's been driving out

of of society and therefore the devil has too so people just don't have the concept of good evil on top of their minds anymore they it's like it's been normalized evil has been it's pervasive and it's been normalized for many decades like you mentioned and similar like the monetary system i was born in the 90s i was like oh and the dollar existed and for most of life i was like oh this is money this is the way it should always be until i found bitcoin well i'm like with with this death of god like so so god both moves away from us but it also frees us in this way like oh like science is this tool that we can like randomly play with and because these guys don't have any consideration of evil they like build an atomic bomb and they're

like oh shit like that like killed a bunch of people you know and and i think we have a lot of this same thing you know with uh quote-unquote scientists with the virus you know like they they they play with this gain of function thing the potentiality of it to escape from the lab happened you know i'm like they end up participating in the destruction of humanity uh and it's not like because they're out there like ha ha ha i want to be evil no they're just fucking dumb and like they're not thinking about this stuff at all um and to me like one of the most revealing things about this i remember early on at coinbase we used to have different people come in and lecture and we had this ai startup come in lecture um you know my team's full of like a bunch of paranoid

anti-statist people so like they're they're automatically getting to questions about you know like like uh like autonomous kill bots and that kind of shit and so they like ask a similar question about this but like you know what happens if it gets autonomous and goes rogue and like he wants to kill a bunch of people and i shit you know the guy was like you know i've never really thought much about that question and it's just like holy shit uh and i and like same thing like I think these guys are out working for Boston Dynamics, like, creating kill robots. You're like, hey, like, what if people start using this to, like, kill humans? And I think they'd just be like, oh, no, people wouldn't do that.

And, like, that's just the end of the fucking story for them. And the same thing goes with finance, like, with all of these things that you would think people would think harder about this. Like, I very sincerely think if you got to go into the Board of Governors and sit down with them and be like, hey, guys, like, you guys just. printed an absolute fuck ton of money like could this is it possible that this could have effects that are longer than transitory inflation i almost guarantee all of them would be like absolutely not no possible way we can control it i mean it's all hubris and again getting back to the spiritual nature of it bitcoin has pushed me and very been very public about this on this podcast like closer to christ i can grow up catholic called the diddlin forced me away from it but now it's like

we need we need these types of forces of good in our lives and and the hubris that you just described whether it be via financial engineering via engineering of ai or or robotics or gain of function viruses like the gain of function virus like working on gain of function like thinking that you can be god that you can change genes and do that not have repercussions and negative externalities is mind-blowing and scary like vitalik buterin yesterday tweeting about uh synthetic uh wombs that that to create uh pay with wage equality between men and women women should not give birth anymore we should have synthetic wombs instead it's like how is it just we're being dehuman dehumanized in in real life uh but again i think it's a yeah i would call it an evil

force yeah i don't want to deny it is an evil force i what i'm trying to point out is that the individuals engaging it they can't recognize that you know i'm like it's just prattle and that's why there's like never this moment of like deep confession and them like coming to understand what's happening and that's that's the banality of evil like it doesn't have the ability to recognize itself uh and i think it's really funny because guys like vitalik are such a perfect representation of it because like all the shit he said about the womb like he believes that and like he doesn't even consider these like tertiary affects that could happen from it um and i had an interesting exchange with him a few years ago about he was talking about like living

forever and how like how great that was and i think i really just like postulated the question of like don't you think that there's some like pretty serious problems that could happen from a class of people that like live forever and you know like new people are trying to be born into the world you know and same thing just like no like no not a problem at all uh and yeah it's this hubris you know and like uh it's really important to understand like even if you're the most intelligent person in the world and you have this hubris that you believe that you're absolutely right about something you're now precluding the possibility that you're wrong and you know frankly this is how a lot of our governments operate and how uh at least in my experience working with

engineers a lot of times engineers can think that they're not wrong about what they're doing um and actually really funny like working at a bitcoin company uh on the operational side dealing with engineering like this was a pretty common thing that would happen i would have a conversation with an engineer about some sort of bug or a problem that was coming up and being produced and they would just kind of deny that it was possible because of the way that they built it uh and i find that same line of thinking gets applied to a lot of these things in the world that that we find are evil and a lot of times it's because uh there's this dislocated process that doesn't allow for them to actually think in any kind of an ethical position uh and it's

really dangerous and i think there's now a whole class of people like yourself and myself that are not only awakening to that but the way that like yeah it's ontological because like we're we're asking well like how does bitcoin have this value and how does it proposition itself and why does it do it that way and like how does how do these things reflect on me and why is it important to me and why do i want to give these things to other people uh and i just find it so fascinating because it's clearly unlocking this extremely powerful and potent aspect inside of each of us and making us not only more powerful and more valuable to the world uh but like we sit better and more right with ourselves so much so to the

extent that like uh you know i think if you and me found ourselves in cages in prison by the state for our beliefs in bitcoin uh and like you know we're essentially to stay there and or die for it i i don't think that that would be the worst thing for us to happen and i actually you know at least speaking for myself uh it would be a sacrifice that i would feel content with myself that that is how i would move on from the world um not to say i would meet it with with courageousness and bravery i hope i would but it gives me something that i care enough about that i i would i guess i'd say i would die for it you know and i say that because this is extremely important to me for my children i demand that they grow up in a world that is better than the

one that was offered to us and that we at least are fighting back and pushing back against these unilateral evil forces and what they represent uh and that's worth struggling for um you know i was talking to my wife about this before is that like stuff is fucked up and it is hard uh it really is but it it it's kind of exciting though and like and it's exciting because we we have this we see what's coming down the pipeline and it's not to say that there isn't scary shit but it's more of that like we can stand up and like lift our shield and there's other dudes like next to us to the right and left who are like yeah like fuck these unilateral you know world economic form asshats that want to implement this shit like let's fight together

and fight back uh and it's just beautiful you know particularly like uh you know like when i met gg in miami it was just like an immediate like hug and like all right like we're here to do this together and like fuck it it was just like an immediate recognition like yes we we are one in the same for our cause and what we want to do um and that's just it's exciting it it it has created this force of um i don't want to say unlimited energy but like i feel like i can keep reaching down in this thing and the way that it rejuvenates and nourishes me to like keep going and i assume you probably get the same thing for for you know each time you fire up the podcast and that you listen to these great points

where you're just like, fuck yeah. It just nourishes you in this way that you're like, I'm ready to go back for more. Yeah, I mean, exactly what you said. I want to leave somebody with a son sleeping in the room right behind this monitor and I'm pointing past another child on the way later this year.

It is an imperative. I would die for Bitcoin too. I do think it is a cause worthy of self-sacrifice if it ever got to that point. I do not want to die for Bitcoin. I will make that clear as well. I don't want to be sent to a cage

because of my activity in Bitcoin and my advocacy of Bitcoin. I do want to be a free man who's able to enjoy my life with my family. However, like you said, I mean, if it does come to it, it's going to suck in some regards.

And I hope I do have courage and bravery and some composure if it ever does happen. But I would not like it to happen. But yeah, I mean, this is bigger than all of us. I don't think people really grasp that yet. That's evident in the fact that they don't grasp the severity of the federal government and the Davos class overreach into our everyday lives.

don't understand the problems with that how could they understand the gravity of of bitcoin um as a tool to to fight back against that impending doom uh it's like you said like vitalik and people filming the robotics they just don't ask the hard question they don't even think about these things vitalik with the the synthetic feed or a synthetic uh womb tweet yesterday like just speaking on on behalf of all women saying oh yeah they like this better like and knowing my wife she's five months pregnant right now and she's developing a relationship with the baby like she has a very chemical and emotional connection with the human growing in her womb right now like if you were to just have the hubris to think that you can replicate that with a synthetic womb it's

like people are fucking insane well in the the way he just like completely dismisses of the idea of like what it means to be a mother um like like i i find that astounding but you know like perhaps there's a reason that like a baby literally grows inside of another human being who like loves it profoundly deeply maybe that's maybe that has something to do with the human condition i don't i don't know you know oh no like you know i'm like uh well it's a part of like just the idea have a baby growing up in a tube isolated by itself like i just don't understand how you can look at that and be like yeah that feels all right well i mean it's well it's already being normalized in other areas like we're growing lab meat like it's another thing of hubris like oh yeah we can

just grow our uh our meat in a petri dish and we'll get the same nourishment there's it's we figured out nature we can we can engineer it which is my dad invested in in this beyond meat shit and i was like what the fuck are you doing and he was like oh well it's like great for the planet and healthy and and i was like dude like you so you sincerely believe that growing whatever this shit is in a lab and like all of the testiary processes around that that production you know all the lab equipment all the plastic like everything that this is somehow better than a calf being born and eating grass and then us slaughtering and eating like that's somehow better for the environment and it was just like yeah and to me like this is the shit where it's just like okay um so we're

very deep into plato's case you think that the shadows on the wall are absolutely real and when i present to you that they could be shadows on the wall you guys like laugh at me for a garbage okay um shit and in all honesty like i think that this is part of this astrological process of building is that like as we get stronger the state's going to push back harder they're going to demand more things from it and it's just going to keep building and building and building eventually to this place that like uh for me like i realized like i just can't talk about anything political to my mom anymore because like we we just we don't have words or language to be able to get past anything and it's and it's really painful because i feel like we like fall into

these ruts that the mainstream media has created that like i don't have any way to like escape from the dialogue and like as i try to escape from the dialogue to like oh like you're saying like all of the far right crazy people stuff and i'm like no oh god um and i just really emphasize that point because it's really scary and i think it's very true that like we're we're gonna find there's several relationships that we have where people uh are going to be unwilling to move forward with us anymore um and for a long time that was really really painful for me but then i like met other bitcoiners and it was finally like oh thank god i don't i don't need these other people in my personal life to understand all this stuff about um and yeah i think as i think what we see coming

down the pipeline it's all going to happen and like we're in the lifeboat we're going to be good We're going to create our Bitcoin communities and citadels and, you know, take care of each other. But a lot of people out there are going to suffer really profoundly. And I hope we will, you know, keep positions open in the life book for them, keep building our content and education. And furthermore, you know, it's pretty clear to me that we're part of this vanguardist part of Bitcoin and that our job is to be educating and creating content and helping people. And that's just going to continue to get more powerful and better. And I really think that as it progresses and moves forward and escalates, each encounter is going to push us and drive us deeper into the direction that we're going. And I think it's absolutely inevitable because of how there's this other class of people that are absolutely willing to participate in the state's terror and totalitarianism campaign. And they don't see anything wrong with it at all.

No. I go back and forth with this too. So do you think it's necessary to have direct conflict with the state? And there's a Bitcoin side. Have you read the Benedict option? And you see about how back after the fall of Rome, where the Benedictine monks started, they went out to the woods,

they created essentially like citadels and they just ran parallel societies as Rome fell. And inside the monastery was life was good, quality of life was good. And that people were getting back to like low time preference and good values that were completely driven out of Roman culture by the end of the empire there.

I think that's what's happening now with Bitcoin. You can describe it as the Benedict option. We're going, taking the ball and just playing over here in this parallel system. Just leave us alone. Others would describe it as like a digital cult's cult. Is it necessary to have a direct conflict? Is there a possibility in which we make the Bitcoin network

so robust so resilience and then build a distributed economy on top of that where it's just honestly a better product where the the zombies who have been lied to and lied to again and again by the state and the political class and the corporate class the media class in the incumbent system finally just see like hey it looks better over there why don't we just go play over there i i honestly think that there's a whole segment of people that like like literally as they're getting like kicked into like open aired fire pits that they burn alive in that they'll still look over us to be like bitcoiners like they're getting kicked into this this ditch um and yeah i think the benedict options the best you know like uh me and one of my good

friends like we're essentially trying to like work on like uh like a private key liturgy that's like executed through a group process with people to try to secure your Bitcoin, essentially like through an actual religious practice that you would do with a group of other Bitcoiners. Who knows how long it'll take me to develop that. But I think running this parallel society is really our only hope. In addition to the fact that I, I think that's also where we cultivate like all of the good shit inside of ourselves um and i think uh conflict with the state's inevitable not because we want it but because uh like this is what the state does it like identifies enemies and like labels as an enemy and then tries to destroy it uh with that being

said you know the article 5 option that i put forward before uh and with states integrating it directly inside of themselves as legal tender i think it's probably the best option for transition um and i think that also essentially kind of recreates the world so that like we get cold war 2.0 uh you know electric bitcoin is the the subtitle for that and and it's going to be essentially about you know who is on a bitcoin standard who is on a fiat standard how this neo-mercantilist global economy is going to play with each other uh and obviously fiat's to lose because of what it represents and how it is produced in the world but it can probably last for quite a while well that's i mean the economist macro analyst to me is like how how long especially

if this inflation isn't transitory at what point i can describe earlier as it happens at this point this year where you have a social tipping point right because the inflationary events are two parts obviously money supply and expanding is certainly part of inflation but there's also the social part of it too where especially if you're running a fiat currency the confidence in the efficacy of that currency is supreme supremely a prerequisite for it even being functional like if inflation stays high for the next six seven months and we see the biden still can't speak jerome powell doesn't have the answers uh nobody has the answers like two people because it is inevitable like fiat is going to die there is going to need to be a replacement for it

and that's why i think bitcoin has actually had a supreme advantage here because it's had 13 years it's a teenager that's been able to position itself like hey we sort of called this um and in the meantime now 13 years in the bitcoin you have all the central banks of the world and governments around the world, particularly beginning to posture like they're going to launch CBDCs and they're going to try and transition from the fiat system that they've erected and run for the last however many years and just create this new hyper-controlled fiat system. And so it's positioning Bitcoin like, hey, Bitcoin's been around, it's been successful, and it is directly in confrontation with the fiat system that's failed. Are you going to

continue letting the people who created this failed system push you into another one or are you going to opt out um that was just like a weird ramble i mean i would really hope that we would be like hey check out our track record over the last 13 years and people would be like wow yeah like okay um they're so good at spin though i'm pretty sure what's going to happen is they'll be like hyperinflation is here and like it's all the bitcoiners fault because they want to waste energy on their system but but guess what because the government loves you we're gonna give you 500 a cbd coin for free and this is how we implement the new system and we're gonna give you your allowance of 500 every month now because we love you um and people will be like yeah and

like fuck those bitcoiners they cause for hyperinflation and they're stealing all of our energy and they're taking all the meat uh and like i i just think it's inevitable that we wind up as the enemy here because in the exact same way that the wealthy class always ends up as the enemy to the communist class that's what's happening um and with that being said i i think that there's a number of both governors and you know state leaders that are going to get what's going on and make the choice to move to a bitcoin standard and like that's our exit and those are the places we have to go and the economies of those places are going to have real growth they're going to be on a bitcoin standard they're going to be

export-led economies that are absolutely killing it because they've figured out how to do it and meanwhile elsewhere in america you know you're going to have uh you know like trains are going to to be ransacked and like you know every other car is going to have a security guard with a shotgun and i actually think we're going to descend into like some pretty nasty shit in cities where uh there's just like roving gangs kind of stealing stuff because that's okay at this point in time uh and it's scary but you know like i'm happy that i'm out in the middle of fucking nowhere so i'm i'm good but uh i fear for my friends that are still in cities and places and yeah i i and i i really appreciate how much more hopeful you are i i just i think after 10 years of doing

this and how many people i've tried to convince like uh people that really should get this you know and i'm telling them about it and there's this thing about actually making the subjective choice to have bitcoin be your savings that like it's like accepting christ as your lord and savior like i can tell you about how fucking great he is and how much i want it for you and how much you're welcome but if you don't want it i i can't i can't force you yeah but that's maybe because that's you know i i feel this as well but maybe as humans are so fucking weird we're so social and maybe that's just because we're telling these people they're like fuck you marty fuck you eric like you're my boy you're the crazy cousin you're the crazy family member like i'm not going to

trust you maybe they need somebody like a jordan peterson coming out up here uh polyver how to pronounce his last name up in canada rogan when do you is there i think i think like once you get like the athletes uh start pumping it too it just becomes like normalized and then uh acceptable because you have the culture telling you that it's acceptable which for some reason or another normies really depend on that that social cue from from people they put on pedestals i i i hope so it's funny when you're talking i realize that like i've always lived outside of the overton windows i don't know what it's like on the inside and so it makes it you know and like i really hope that 20 years from now like you know i'll be talking to my kids and they'll be

like wow dad like you got in on this shit early and like and let their question will be like how did you know it dad their question will be like how is everybody so fucking dumb and i'll be like oh well you know like when we get in these big groups of people and we like lie to each other constantly like you just believe the fucking lie and i'll be like that's weird man well it is weird like think about like most humans are living lie and that's it that's the other thing too I think that's part of the inability for people to be receptive to Bitcoin. Their whole life's been a sunk cost fallacy. It's been built on that.

Yeah, well, it's really hard. It's really hard to look at that and be like, oh, shit, I'm the baddie. Let's just put that away and not look at it. Well, it's not even that I'm the baddie. It's just that I truly don't understand how the world works. And I think I've been around for decades now, and I just have not understood the nature of the world and mechanics of the world, the economy, the political system that has been erected around us that I was thrust into. I've just been passively playing along as I've been getting played my whole life. People don't want to admit that.

I mean, we're seeing it right now with the vaccines. like fourth fourth yeah i mean the vaccine is the best but yeah we can see this throughout society i mean college degrees is another great one uh you know god damn the list just goes on and on and yeah it is a total sunk cost fallacy of that you know i i'm a smart person i got this master's degree in art history and i should be an art historian making lots of money now because that's what i was told about the world but it's just not true um yeah and same thing goes from our politicians we've been lied to them for so long and so consistently about everything it's i'm just really alarmed that you know like i i have these conversations with people about the

vaccines and vaccine passports and about government overreach and uh i have a hard time just not flipping out at this point in time because you know like my my my bachelor's degree is in history and i specifically studied european history in world war ii so very well right on the holocaust uh and i and i just like freak the fuck out when i start talking to people about this and being like yeah like you know the united states is has never told people they were giving them vaccines and was actually like injecting them with toxins like that's never happened and they're like yeah and then i just scream like no i'm being fucking facetious you assholes look at the fucking experiments that happen you know i'm like let's let the list keep going on and on

And I think the honest truth is, is that like what we're talking about is horrifying. It is so, so, so horrifying that I think the moment people start looking towards that, they have to look away. It's too hard, you know, and to me, like this is part of what like woke liberalism is about, is about one soft and nice and kind to everybody and modifying all of our behavior to do that. uh but there actually being a very very deep insincerity about not understanding or looking at those things in a more critical aspect it's much more about how we feel than what the truth is which is again making the sunk cost fallacy even worse because you're just you're just compounding the lie there and you're not getting to any sense of of reality at the core of what like the woke movement is i think you're that's the thing like the woke movement is a communist

movement at the end of the day because it completely eliminates the individual you're a black person a white person a bipoc there's no room for individuality and in that um in that worldview if you will which is actually extremely racist when you think about it it is and i think it's so funny of that uh we're just at this really fucking weird place uh in the development of society where like um like specifically here in the united states we have this really weird amalgam of like uh like a corporal communism uh and it's just it's really strange and the way that the left latched on to i found like fascinating you know like coca-cola with like their they're like gay

bottles and stuff and like all you know people are like oh my god like coca-cola like loves gay people like this is great i'm like yeah it's fucking great like it totally makes up for them like uh killing union workers in south america right like it just makes it better and they're like uh are you i don't understand because this is good and i'm like okay like now that you're with me like do you think maybe that they're presenting that they love these gay people as a way to wash over all the other horrific shit that they did and people like um no no that's not it um and to me like this is the place that it's constantly disappointing is that you well and even better what specifically with the woke stuff like i find it hilarious like the the left is just

getting absolutely fucked on the standards and things that they think are valuable you know like what you know wealth disparity like really big problem we should actually be focused on it uh like you guys are so focused on uh the pronouns that i'm choosing that you guys forget that like wealth was redistributed from the bottom 90 to the top 90 to the 2 to 2.3 trillion dollars over the last two years but you know i i i'm making sure that you feel comfortable with whatever pronouns I'm putting out there are. So I guess we're winning, right? Yeah. I mean, we've got a transgender health minister who looks very unhealthy. We've got a woke military now. We're doing okay. We're solving all these hard problems. Hey, the Coke's going to put a rainbow flag

on their cans as they kill gay people via diabetes with their end product at the end of the day. I think it's a very sick society, but it's right. That's the other thing that pisses me off. Again, Going back to the hypocrisy of the world, like, and obviously, you know, I've been a big anti-ESG proponent. I don't believe there's a climate crisis. I don't believe the world's going to end. I believe humans being able to harness energy is one of the things that has gotten us to where we are today. We can only live stream this conversation to the internet on multiple platforms at the same time because of humans' incredible ability to extract, harness, and turn energy into electricity. It's a beautiful thing. Yes, we should be as environmentally conscious in the sense that we should not waste anything.

We should not pollute anything. However, we should keep continuing to produce more energy and electricity for humanity because is that is what uplifts people from poverty. And it's hilarious that like the woke who care about the poor and downtrodden, uh, third world countries are pushing a, an overt, an overtly, uh, reduct or like the energy policy that are putting forward is going to revert us back to pre-industrial age society in terms of the ability to harness and leverage electricity which hurts poor people people in developing countries the most like they are the most affected by this this terrible policy and that is like now i'm thinking like if you can't recognize this like

it's making me very pessimistic too like they're they're they're going to continue to double down on all the stupidity i and i mean like it it's the hubris again you know like it's uh they can't consider that maybe their approach to how they're doing this is just all wrong from top to bottom uh and it's just it's really frustrating because when these because you know these conversations obviously direct themselves towards me and pretty quick on like the bitcoin idiot list of questions it's like but but it wastes energy so like it's bad right and like again i want to rip all my hair out and scream because i'm like okay like what's good energy and what's bad energy like how do we make this assessment who makes this assessment like if we're so concerned about

energy like why aren't we building more nuclear power plants for like clean energy in places you know like and it's just really frustrating and difficult uh because to me like i keep coming back to this conclusion that like this is really just about authoritarianism and like the people that they liked told them that this was the correct answer so they move forward that like this must just be the correct answer um and and it's frustrating because yeah like this obviously is already hurting people like look at energy prices in europe at this point in time they're literally people that are freezing their ass off right now because they can't afford energy because of the policies that have been implemented around this um and again like i'm not some person that's

like let's go out and destroy the world in fact you know like i live in redwood forest i'm working on purchasing a large portion of redwood forest in order to protect it at this point in time like this is something really important to me but if we're not approaching this stuff from first principles using actual logic and again just going back to what feels good we're inevitably going to run into these same conclusions and problems where like we're not actually addressing what's going on um and it's it's really alarming because this is how i think this whole thing escalates and i think it's it's it's how it rips its mask off the end and all this becomes astrological because i think at the very end it turns out it's just raw and pure authoritarianism

state of emergency enacted do whatever the fuck we say because we have the power and we're telling them to period um and i think as all of this plays out like bitcoin is going to be this only way that we have to actually escape you know uh i saw on twitter that you know bitcoin bowl has been helping a lot of canadians sell their houses and get their get bitcoin so they can get out uh if we brought that up five years ago you know like people say that that's that's pretty that's crazy that would never happen in a place like Canada. And lo and behold, here we are. And let that be a warning to Americans as well. Yes. Let's not turn it. I mean, many parts of America are just as bad as Canada right now. I'm in one of them. Yeah. But it's like, so how did we become so detached

from logic as a society like do you think do you believe in the the methodical overt action taken at like the the education level of things in an american society specifically that there has been a concerted effort to dumb down the masses via the curriculum so that they can't critically think so that an authoritarian overtaking is is much easier because people are are willing to take what an authority figure tells them and run with it oh i mean that that's a key component but like there there's just a a whole constellation of things working on us all at the same time and so like education is one of them but uh the decline of culture you know like the the lack of fathers and household you know it's an amalgam of all of

these things together um and it's really dangerous because this has created an ideology where essentially the state is our caretaker and in more extreme circumstances the state is god itself um this is why we have to listen to the state this is why people believe the state has what's what's right for us at their core um and i think also that the extrication of any sort of uh sort of spiritual thought i i don't know like it it's all like a very very sick process because like the hubris has so much to do with it and the being able to try to assert and force yourself through things um the desire to try to please others to be nice uh to get all these good feelings um but you know like my kids don't go to a public school and they never will

uh and yeah like it's really dangerous what they teach there um and like one of the things that like one of the reasons i made that decision is like i never wanted to have a time where my kids came home and asked me questions about things where i needed to like backpedal and have to like explain myself and like why i'm i'm i'm somebody that's not doing all of the right stuff or listening to the right people um and it's really scary because that that happens to a lot of people or their kids are turned against them um and you know that like it's funny because like you know my kid missed a bunch of school last year because of the pandemic thing he's missed a whole bunch this this last year uh he's a really smart kid though he's reading super well

you know we go out and play in the forest all day he can identify dozens of mushrooms and trees you know can tell me about all kinds of stuff and so like i'm no longer concerned with him getting like a quote-unquote education i realize he's just a smart kid who's going to be able to figure the world out uh and i think it's really important if you've got kids to like insulate them from that stuff like you you would be horrified to see the kind of shit that that uh is being pushed out to kids through the public school system as this great thing that they need to know about you know Like I, um, yeah. And like, there's nothing wrong about like explaining how kids sexuality work and the

differences between them, but it's really hard for, you know, to have a kid come home and, and ask about, you know, the intimacy between two men when you haven't even gone over the intimacy of a man and a woman. Um, and furthermore, like not trying to create a space or a place for people to actually have a thoughtful conversation about that in their own family. um and i guess ultimately you know bringing back to the question of about education uh when we try to just frame education as this like holistic thing that anybody can get of course you're going to get this this fucked up authoritarian response of

the answer to things is the correct one that you've been given to the teacher as opposed to actually seeking out the truth for the right answer. And so, yeah, I think it starts really early. And then I think literally everything in society wants us to respond to it in this way, as opposed to self-sovereign and thoughtful individual. So I think it's really inevitable that we descend into a place where raw authoritarianism sort of replaces critical thought on a whole. And it's pretty scary because, you know, trying to recover that uh is extremely difficult well it's particularly scary in this day and age because it seems like it's happening on a global level in many instances in history's past where similar

situations have arisen it seems to be at least somewhat isolated to um the empire of the day if you will but what we're experiencing today minus a few parts of the world is is pretty global it seems which is yeah very frightening thought like a globally enslaved populace that is just subjected to this international supranational authoritarian blob that has been forming be it like nato g8 whatever the fuck it's called these days world economic forum those those types of entities yeah and i want to highlight like that's that's the unique proposition of our current age uh and it's extremely dangerous because like it is unique outside of any other time in human history because it can capture everyone and once it captures everyone there

isn't going to be any possible way to extricate ourselves from it um and again like this is why I believe that Bitcoin is actually a messianic because it seems to be the only thing that has the possibility to actually fight back and break the back of this thing. And it's not just because it has only that potential, but as you and I have both experienced, the way that we reflect on it, the way it changes us, the way it makes us better people, and the way that it wants us to create community and build together and thrive together is, in my opinion, the much more important inflection on it. You know, and it's not so much, and I think I have this quoted from Walter Benjamin, like, the Messiah does not arrive as the Redeemer, but as the vanquisher of the Antichrist. antichrist like again i get these uh are are daunting prospects but i look at this global

panoptic biometric id system that seems to be the antichrist and it seems to represent unitary evil in a way that uh i i actually can't think of anything that captures the idea of unitary evil even better uh and i think it's really important to understand how absolutely dangerous it is to try to have a global identification system that all states have access to like you know it it's really important to understand the relationship between technology and the holocaust you know and and the way that uh the nazi regime was able to label and identify all of the jews through the explicit data sets that they had and you know not just the jews but the romans the gypsies the gays the you know all the people that they wanted to eliminate

they did this with data you know it wasn't just them going out and finding random people and throwing them in prison then explicitly identifying them through censuses and all sorts of other modes of data they were able to gather you know and the fact that they did that a hundred years ago should be pretty alarming about how much data they already have on everybody else and what they're eventually going to do with it um you know and i i know we're probably preaching to the choir here but i guess one of the questions to that we should ask ourselves for moving forward is how do we how do we truly electrify this in such a way that we activate the political that clearly lives inside of bitcoin that's waiting uh and like again i'm not saying a political party

i'm not saying an electoral process but this idea of a movement that's already started and really cultivating it so that uh we become a powerful force in the world and we can recognize other people that are participating in it and we can continue to build on that together because i think we're very close to it and i think it's really just a point of asking the question and going deeper with each other on how we'll build that i think it's happening i think we're in the it's the process is well underway like you mentioned uh i mean just me personally on the mining side i've advised again i'm really pushing this permanent fund like two states like i've talked to people at state levels like who have a lot of resources and states that are

particularly not fond of the federal government and their ban on new mineral leases on federal land they that materially affected a lot of economies in the united states and they're trying to figure out how to do it. Bitcoin permanent funds. So if I'm having conversations with people at this level, there are many other conversations from other actors in the Bitcoin space happening. So there is at least the beginnings of influence and the influence only being conversations and putting the ideas forward at this point in time. But I think there will be action against it. And think energy is the most important part that's why i've decided to focus a lot of pun intended at my energy on the mining space and the confluence with the energy sector because i think once

again the energy sector even though it's much maligned right now because people are stupid and don't understand how we've been provided this quality of life that we have today um i think once bitcoin gets integrated into the stack of an energy company it's game over Like energy is the base of our modern society. And if you go to the energy producers and you say, no, you can't use Bitcoin, but they're like, no, it actually really helps us do what we do best, which is deliver energy to market. It's going to be hard for politicians to try to shut that down. i mean like i uh i'm more excited about the changes that are going to come to the mining sector than i have been about anything else in bitcoin thus far uh just because it's engaging in a true schumpeter in creative destruction that like it's not just trying to make the energy industry more effective or better at what it's doing like it is striking at the core of the way

that we understand how energy production and dissemination is done and that's so important because like this compels and drives for the ability for us to have access to greater amount of energy and it turns out if we want to actually be a society that makes it into space and utilizes space technology in a meaningful way we're gonna need an absolute motherfuck ton of energy and the only way to get a market-based response to develop that is going to be through bitcoin And it's just it's really, really exciting to see that space happening. It's also really exciting to see how absolutely brain dead blind most people are to it. And that's the thing I get with the POW conversations over and over again is just how there is absolutely zero understanding for how energy markets work. And furthermore, how there's an absolute relegation of responsibility and authority to understanding that to talking heads that are beyond clueless and are just parroting talking points that they're given by the WDF or whoever else. So I'm happy that you're spending your energy there and that more and more people are focused on it, because to me, like this is where the Americanism of what Bitcoin can be comes into play as well.

The state's using it as ways to shore up their treasuries. They're being competing in laboratories of approaches to it. And ultimately, I hope that this can contribute to a Soviet-style dissolution of the United States at some point in time, where instead of us having a really nasty fucking civil war, we're able to just say, hey, you know what? It dissolves. The federal government is bankrupt. They're going to sell off all their assets to the various states, and the states will make the decision about what they'll do moving forward. I'm very bullish on that.

I mean, I think we're seeing the beginning process of that play out right now in the last two years with the exodus out of California, New York, Illinois to Texas, Florida, Montana, Wyoming, wherever it may be. I think it's happening. And again, I hope it happens this way because that's the most peaceful revolution.

And I sort of think, I'm bullish on it. Again, I'm seeing more, I'm optimistic today. I'm feeling optimistic. I'm just optimistic that you just look at the motherfuckers. look at the people look at klaus schwab look at biden look at nancy pelosi they're old and decrepit and dying they're skeletons it's like they're going to die soon and i don't see like outside of like pete buddha buddha ted we have beta aoc obviously the core four or whatever it's like a few of them and i don't see like a very galvanized uh upshoot political class that's

it's going to be replacing these these incumbent skeletons that are completely up the the world right now i think i think i think it dies with a dud they just like people are like literally we can't listen to you because you have dementia and you're you don't you're not even making sense right now and you're just like go back to i mean states rights it's funny it's really funny that that like this is this is how dislocated and wild that we've gotten if there's like an actual man with dementia like running the united states and like there's all these other like 80 year old geriatrics who are probably like secretly wearing diapers because they can't control their bowels anymore and that like they legitimately represent like you know more than a

half million people for the most powerful country on the planet um yeah it's absolutely wild uh and i really hope that that's true but i'm afraid if we don't have some sort of a political response that like this shit can just pile on top of itself because you know the the zombies will be replaced by other zombies um and and it scares me just because they it's such bullshit conversation in addition to you know i'm in california uh yeah everybody boo it it's you know i i and i live out in a very isolated place on the coast i really love it here uh and i keep looking down the barrel being like i fuck up like my am i gonna have to flee that my state pretty soon here um and i don't know the answer to that you know like this is my home it's where i grew up it's where i love

and i'm gonna do everything i can to fight for it but uh california has some pretty pretty serious problems and it keeps moving back into authoritarianism as a way to solve it uh and it scares me you know because like i have businesses here i i like i said i have my life here i own my home here um yeah and i do think that the i could totally see the state taking away from me for any number of reasons and meeting the fleet of texas and then i'm sure i'll show up in teguma will laugh at me and be like haha i told you that you were going to come here anyways um so i hope that that's not true but you know if it's how it has to play out it does um but yeah we're obviously winning and like we're getting powerful every day you know and

people convert to us and it's a one-way street they're never going to go back and like you said they're getting older they're dying uh you know and like yeah like when we really zoom back out and look at all this on a 20-year time span i mean shit man like the the fact that you built this show and that all this stuff has happened in you know the last three four years and then we think about what's going to happen in the next 20 years and we're both young guys so you know 20 years from now we're still going to be we're not going to be in our prime but we're still going to be moving and doing pretty well and the fact that we're this far out already i mean that's super exciting um in addition to you know like we're so far ahead of this wave you know like we've like

swam up and we're like already catching it and on our board waiting for the rest of the force to come through and uh it's real exciting you know like we're gonna take our place in history and uh you know i really think like our great great grandchildren will like look back and be like oh man you know like do you like great grandpa uncle marty was like a huge part of like people taking on bitcoin in the united states and he like created all this crazy bitcoin mining stuff and you know like he was one of the core people who really helped this stuff happen uh and like it's just so fucking cool that we like get to put our hands into this apparatus of history that can like allow for us to participate in it in a meaningful way on the right side like that's super exciting

um and i feel so blessed and privileged to be part of it i do as well and here we are getting to an optimistic tune here and thank you thank you for uh gracious compliments from my future great-grandchildren that uh it is weird i don't even i don't like to like venture into that like thought of people thinking of us in posterity um like that but hey it could turn out to be true if bitcoin continues succeeding but like let's paint the picture for people obviously we've beaten the the dead horse of authoritarianism that's surrounding us and seems to be ever encroaching i do think we're going to win in our lifetimes i think it's going to be quicker than many people think but what does that look like when we do win actually in your mind what like

how does society settle around the bitcoin standard um i think the augmentations to society are going to be pretty dramatic uh i think localism is uh going to rise up super powerfully just because people don't understand like it's always it's always blowing my mind talking to farmers about just how much they get absolutely fucked on the processes of how they distribute and disseminate food. And so I think a Bitcoin standard is going to radically change sort of the framework of how we get our food, how we get a lot of things. I think we'll move away from high consumerism much more into a much more digital world. And I actually think what changes the most is the feeling of things. I think you'll get into conversations with people and you can get

kind of into the these edgy topics there's no longer this uh self-censoring tenuousness that people have um and i also think like all these other really interesting things start kind of unfolding from it because of the way that there's this true honoring of the liberty of the individual to like go out and create and do things on their own and i think that that's going to have such a huge and powerful impact on development in a way that we don't really understand and i think like the the best uh equivalency i can point out is if you look at the sort of innovation and development that happens in china versus the united states it's so stagnated and stultified because of how chinese culture you know through the ccp has approached things and it's really stifled any

sort of creativity or thoughtfulness or ability to play and i think we've had that same atrophy in america because of you know how authoritarian things are getting so i think moving back to bitcoin standard is going to cause for this sort of uh cambrian explosion of creativity and innovation because of the way that people are going to be much more free to interact and do things on their own in addition to to moving to deflationary currency i think uh you know we're going to see a vast improvement in the quality of life of people, changes to how people do education. I think, again, it gets localized. It goes much more smaller. Hybrid models of digital education start happening. But I think there's just this really kind of radical opening

that looks very similar to the United States with the Great Reformation in terms of there being a spiritual zeal kind of being recreated and inaugurated in people. And people talking about it with each other and sharing and uh yeah just conversations really quickly kind of moving past superfluous bullshit and people being able to hit it deep with each other just because they want it they're attuned to it they're available to it and i think uh being thoughtful towards money is sort of this initiation process towards it and that it's it's not just because they're thinking about money but they're thinking about value they're thinking about wealth they're thinking about uh long-term investing about

you know all of these things that i feel like have gotten forgotten about because of the radical uh fucking idiocy that like is theodism and the like it's so hard to convey how deep this idea of theodism has affected us um and i think like as we sort of extricate that from ourselves there's going to be this really deep process of healing that's about building community together again um you know and like one of the things that that i truly feel about bitcoin is one of the reasons like us interacting like me choosing to exchange bitcoin with you are you choosing to exchange bitcoin to me like this is us deeply honoring each other as individuals like i want and demand

that you use a form of money that i don't have any possible way of stealing from you and i want you want to demand that back from me and with us having respect towards each other as individuals in that way and then us offering that to society as well as saying i want to love and respect you as an individual human so much that i can't steal your wealth or life force from you uh i think that's going to open up a really really beautiful new world that people are really hungry for and is really going to speak to them in a way that they've never been spoken to before. That was beautiful.

And I can definitely see that coming because think about the, again, going back to like the existential dread that exists today. Like I think I still know people that are like grew up good friends. Maybe we're not in contact now, but like I see what they're doing

via social media from time to time. I mean, it's like people in their mid thirties are like in an office job, nine to five all day of the week, every day of the week doing shit they hate. Then Friday comes, they just get fucked up and they get fucked up. They get fucked up, you know, the same bars. And it's like, ah, you're going to wake up, you're going to be 45. You're going to have a midlife crisis. You're like, what the fuck did I just do with half my life?

This is a lot of people in society right now. There is no actual greater calling or purpose, if you will. It's just go do your desk job, get your paycheck, get fucked up on the weekend, and do it again. You'll have Monday off every once in a while. You get a few holidays and enjoy it until you crawl into the grave. That is a lot of our society right now being driven by this fiat world. um it's and like what what profound suffering that is you know to to think about the possibility

of what we can do and you know like i speak to this also as an alcoholic as well i thank god i i got a handle on my problem but like that is that is how i approached the world before bitcoin uh you know and luckily my sobriety came right around bitcoin as well but that's how i approach the world is i was suffering i would get myself shithouse drunk wake up the next day hung over as fuck repair myself throughout the day engage in the process again then i go back to my nine to five you know i'm like this is a slave's existence this is this is what it is you know and like we look back in history and we go oh look at these fucking losers they were they were slaves and they couldn't decide anything about their own lives yeah and then like we

immediately turned like all right off to work for like nine to five we're like hey bobby you like want to come on a vacation with us we're all going up to the lake for a week and oh no i gotta work time off but i'm free and it's like well maybe we want to take some time to appraise that maybe you're not as free as you think you are um you know and to me like this is why this is all so important it's like the money part's cool don't get me wrong but like the the freedom and human agency that like i so desperately want a world where that is given to people and where people remember that you are a spirit of light and love and that you have this profound power inside of you that you can create in the world if you ask yourself to do that and you know for for me part

of taking on that risk of bitcoin was making that affirmation of a statement of i i love you enough that i'm going to take a risk on this even though i don't know how any of this shit's going to work out i trust the 21 million units is actually going to to stay and that the supply will be stable and that this thing works as it has told me it is because fiat is radically different from it and making that choice that break from the rest of society to say i love myself enough to try out this bitcoin thing because i want to have savings i want to be protected from wealth seizures i want to be protected from inflation uh it induces a process of what it means to care for yourself what it means to to value yourself beyond what fiat world tells you you know and uh i'm not sure

about your experience but my experience of making the full conversion to the bitcoin standard and putting all of my wealth into it people just told me i was crazy they told me i'd lose everything they told me i was destroying my life they told me that i was making poor choices and it turns out they were wrong about all of it and i think it's really important that people get that these perspectives that were offered from people out in fiat world that's their truths that aren't related over here you know um well their their truths are full falsehoods right now my experience was very similar i got yelled at i think my in-laws for the longest time i think thought i was crazy and thought my wife was insane for for marrying me and they love me i love them but i do think

they're they're like what the hell is is marty doing with his life uh his professional life specifically but now they understand all right you have a respectable uh business that you've created and uh our daughter's comfortable and uh you're able to raise children so we're okay with that but going back to like did they ever like acknowledge that for you though no not overtly but I think there's less questions in the background these days but the Fiat life too that explanation you just went on

reminded me of something that I'm very lucky my dad really instilled in us in an early age you're in control of your own happiness nobody's going to make you happy but yourself you have to take control of your life and build a life of purpose

so that you can be happy and in the fiat world i mean bitcoin has given me that happiness that purpose and building this media brand and everything else i'm doing in the bitcoin world is giving me a purpose i don't work i wake up and i'm invigorated to do what i do and the fiat life like happiness people are told what to be happy about like join this fantasy league go to this dollar beer night like you need to get this degree to get this job that is what will make you happy like again it's it's the system saying all right if you check this box this box this this box you'll be happy uh this way everything's portrayed and i think that's uh the driving force behind the existential dread that

exists today is that people are like all right i checked all these boxes and i'm not happy so i'm just going to continue taking ssris uh i'm gonna end my own life continue drinking like that like the fact that the two leading cause of deaths in america between the ages of 18 and 45 the prime of life is overdoses and suicide is insane we live in a sick culture and I think it's because people aren't taking

control of their own happiness they're having other people tell them what will make them happy trying to do that to become happy and finding that it does not lead to happiness at all again it's those statistics right there that's the true pandemic

I mean like I am absolutely aghast and beside myself the fact that that those numbers can present themselves and that all of society doesn't slam on the brakes and go holy shit it is time to reorganize uh and in fact instead of that being the response we get we get the exact opposite where it's you know what like fuck everybody under the age of 50 like let's shut all society down to make sure that we protect these older people. And it's, you know, I had an old coworker say to me, any society that makes a decision to sacrifice the young for the old is not one I want to participate in. And that's how I feel, too, you know. And it is heartbreaking to think of how much people in our age group are

deeply, deeply suffering. And there is no answer to be found inside of political establishments, inside of media inside of education uh religion is lacking like it's all empty and it's so so hurtful and horrifying and we seem to to you know be rudderless and lost at sea and that again this is why bitcoin is so important is because it's this lifeboat that you can cling to and that it can have you recover actual meaning to the world that like maybe it isn't all just fucking bullshit nihilism but like maybe there actually is a true purpose to this world and maybe you can discover it inside of yourself by you protecting yourself and rewarding yourself and asking yourself to you know convert to your savings take on a risk have bitcoin and maybe

because you make those choices farther down the line you're going to be able to take care of yourself better that you're going to protect your family better that you're going to be able to help yourself more um and i think these ideas more so than the actual wealth it's so so important because if not bitcoin in this then what is it if if we're actually going to recover ourselves and not live inside of this horrific panopticon the wef is presenting what is it you know and as far as i can tell it has to be bitcoin because at this point there's no shit coin that has any possibility of doing what we want to do and in fact most shit coins seem to actually be these weird status applications and i also think that this is one of the things that becomes kind of more

astrological in the end it's like i actually think like vitalik's probably going to like be anointed as like president for life of like some fucked up country and they'll like make eth it's like reserve currency but they'll just like get to like randomly give it to whoever they want to um you know and like the best thing i can say to people is look like if if you want out of this cage that they've made for you like we we got a seat for you and we're waiting here we want to help you we want to educate you we want to teach you uh but like you have to make that choice for yourself you know and it's scary and it's difficult and it can be hard but i just really want you to people to know like uh and it's sort of hilarious particularly with like this idea of toxic

bitcoiners but like bitcoiners are some of the greatest people i've ever met like i swear to god these people give you a shirt right off their back if you ask them for it and they they really want to help you um and that's pretty unique and different for for where we're at so i hope anybody who's listening that they're being casual about it and they haven't really took the plunge like stop and ask yourself what do you want life to look like in the next five years and ask yourself if you can do that without bitcoin um and yeah also if you just have other questions for us please please reach out thanks for for watching and participating and we want you to know that uh we want you on the bitcoin standard not because it helps our numbers go up

and it makes us richer we want you on the bitcoin standard because i honor love and respect you as a human being enough that i want you to have uncompensatable money and i want you to want that for me too beautifully put get in i mean for me personally just thinking about my journey in my 20s were very volatile very good financial job out of college took a risk to get into like product management failed miserably at that uh luckily uh like my career my time i was unemployed for a lot of my 20s too but luckily i had bitcoin all the time like and like this shelling personal shelling point for me to to to use as a guiding light in north star if you will to always anchor into like

i always had that feeling throughout my 20s like right and then bitcoin's got some signal i should keep learning about it to keep acquiring as much as possible and it's done leaps and bounds for for me personally um i think most importantly it really lit a fire in my ass to start a family I have a child. I have another one on the way. I have a happy wife. I have a home. And that's what's fulfilling. And that's, again, all these people our age who are stuck in the existential dread of the nine to five and going out and partying. A lot of them are waking up at 35 with no kids. And they're like, what the fuck am I doing with my life? And nothing will expedite that process faster than focusing on accumulating Bitcoin so that you can accumulate capital to deploy in the future for your family. Well, it's interesting that it had that effect on you because, you know, it is true self-ownership that has you look at your life in a responsibility in a way of being truly responsible for it. And that's exactly what Bitcoin is. it is true self-ownership you must take responsibility for your wealth and how it

is protected in the world because if you don't mean somebody else is somebody that can hurt you somebody that can take it from you somebody that can not have your best ideas at heart and in all honesty like i really think what we've been talking about the whole time marty is that this is about death this is about as human beings we are going to die and what do we want to do in order to make this life meaningful here and how do we want to contribute to it in a meaningful way is it by following the fiat bullshit and the authoritarianism that they give us and having our self-ownership extricated from us and put inside of a system where we don't have control or is it asking for ourselves to be responsible for our own wealth and to take

self-ownership not only of our wealth but of our commonwealth of the actual res publica the public thing, our society and life. And I think that's truly what's happening with Bitcoin is that we're not only taking responsibility for our own wealth, but the way that that inflects upon us to start taking responsibility for our life and then how that eventually becomes taking responsibility for our society. Because the truth is, is that Bitcoiners must take responsibility for all of the shit that is happening in society because there is no one else. We are the last option. a lot of work ahead of us freaks eric i can't believe it took us this long to to get on a podcast together it was a fucking incredible two-hour conversation i can't wait to do it again

if you ever come to texas please let me know i'd love to meet up in person um maybe do one of these absolutely thank you so much marty i i deeply appreciate your work and uh you know it's great to hear you you wake up and it's not work for you it's it's your purpose and and to me like this is the shit that i absolutely love about bitcoin is because like i don't think you ever had an idea in your life that this is what you would be doing in early 2022 and it probably excites the absolute hell out of you and this is how it is for so many bitcoiners that i know is that as you go deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole it starts to transform you you start to get empowered by others you start to be nourished by their content and become more powerful and so like

i i just really want to say i i celebrate the work that you do and i look forward to seeing you again in person and giving you a bear hug and uh i'll probably be visiting texas because i'll be terrified of how i'm gonna get uh exploited by the state here in california so i hope that's not true and i hope that uh you know when i get my psychedelic compound because like i'm trying to buy those 150 acres for people to come and be able to do psychedelics and have spiritual experiences So hopefully it'll all work out. And if it does, you and many other Bitcoiners are invited to come and participate because that's my other passion. Well, I'm a big fan of psychedelics. I'll definitely be making the trip if and when that land is acquired. And speaking of content that's fulfilling, Eric's got some of the most fulfilling content in the Bitcoin space.

space crypto sovereignty.org is the website um just uh if you really want to get esoteric and dive deep into the why and the the philosophy behind the revolution that is bitcoin highly recommend going to check out all these pieces you're going to be better off for it freaks i think you're going to be better off for this conversation too eric you're fucking very high energy this is a very high energy riff i'm very excited i've got another podcast at three i thought I was going to be a little tired after having this long conversation, but I'm like ready to go. Awesome, man.

Well, I look forward to the next time that we get the chat. Thanks to all the freaks for joining us and, uh, you know, buy Bitcoin know that the world is good and that we're going to be transforming stuff in a positive way to create a world that, uh, is so much more exciting and profound than you ever thought it could be. Let's do it. Freaks. Peace and love. Thanks for watching!