TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #469: Bitcoin And The Great Financial Crisis with Parker Lewis

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

Marty sits down with Parker Lewis to discuss his new book Gradually, Then Suddenly, and highlight Bitcoin in the framing of the financial crisis of 2008. Parker on Twitter: https://twitter.com/parkeralewis Get the book: https://thesaifhouse.com/ 0:00 - Intro 7:07 - Liz Warren and CBDCs 16:55 - 2008 crisis still echoes 22:17 - Marty’s experience of the crisis 29:00 - Metting people where they are 35:27 - Satoshi was keyed in 38:29 - It’s personal for everyone 53:01 - Bitcoin, not Blockchain 57:41 - Bitcoin is not for criminals 59:28 - Dollar is not patriotic 1:07:50 - Sound money is freedom 1:13:49 - Bitcoin in future crises 1:22:59 - How much will they print next time? 1:26:08 - Replacing an unfathomable behemoth 1:38:10 - Can’t stop the signal 1:44:11 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠

so for you to boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc i sat down with the unofficial mayor of austin texas parker lewis to discuss gradually and suddenly broadly but more specifically the forward that i wrote and the introduction that parker wrote that really touched on our understanding of bitcoin stemming from our experiences of the great financial crisis i think it's one of the i think this is the best episode that parker and i have recorded 101 it was a great conversation almost two hours you guys are going to enjoy it don't want to waste any more of your time this rip was brought to you by good friends at river river dropping big products last week last thursday they dropped river link

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Freer than free When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts All the central banks Going nuts So it's all acting like safe haven I believe that in a world where central Bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean

that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be we are recording we're not live not live we will drop this tomorrow morning cool senator warren i mean it's actually a good jumping off topic for this discussion historically famously against the big banks but for some reason or another she seems to be their best friends their best friend these days they're teaming up to attack bitcoin yeah i don't um that close for you you know i always wonder where these things come from you know i think like if you just step all the way back somebody who is as um for lack of a better term like anti-american

you know just in terms of you know kind of what her policy agenda generally is relative to the founding principles of the country um that you can kind of explain at the you know 30,000 foot view why she wouldn't like something like bitcoin but it's also um you know there's always special interests involved right and so and there's always something that that somebody wants in the political sphere that they're getting in return right i don't think that um you know it's all about money so i don't think that despite you know someone like elizabeth warren's um socialist communist leanings um that it's just that that there's going there's got to be some special interest that you know is trading some horse to have her be out in front of this and but

this also isn't new what's happening right now and also i feel like you know she's been leading this charge for at least the last you know year and a half kind of like what happened you know the policy that they were working through summer of last year, similar to what she was a champion of. So, you know, it's not a surprise, but I do think it puts, you know, Bitcoin on display, you know, kind of light versus dark, good versus evil. Yeah, light versus dark,

particularly juxtaposing Bitcoin with the CBDC, which is what Elizabeth Warren would like to thrust on the American populace. Yeah, and then, you know, it's like, again, what is the special interest that, you know, So she's pushing what she's getting for it. Did you see the video that came out today? No.

One of her co-sponsors on the bill came out and explicitly said that the American Bankers Association helped them draft the bill. Yeah, I mean, if you go back to the formation of that, I mean, this guy who wrote the book, Creature of Jekyll Island, but when you realize that the people who wrote the Federal Reserve Act you know were secretly the you know people who controlled the bank existing banking system um yeah i guess that's no surprise but it is also you know you know do you remember when um um neil kashkari basically who's who's you know in terms of his like

what he advocates for in terms of monetary policy like disaster you know um in terms of you know had the famous you know line in 60 minutes where he says you know you know we have an endless amount of cash in the federal reserve an unlimited amount of unlimited amount of cash but you know there's that you know and i guess our circle is that famous um video of him saying like i know why an authoritarian or communist would want a cbdc but why would the american people like basically saying you know i think and he actually articulates like if you want a mass surveillance state like i can understand why you'd want a cbdc i do not understand why the american people would ever want that or agree to that so to have somebody like neil kashkari who's otherwise you know

fairly like head in the sand when it comes to you know understanding the ramifications of printing massive amounts of money on this one he happens to be you know a very clear signal which is just interesting having like someone like kashkari juxtaposed against someone like elizabeth warren yeah that's cbdc is a step too far for these people who have created this insane monetary policy yeah it's like i guess you know and i think hope maybe you know one i think in broader context we already have a digital currency it is the dollar um this is just a different technology rail you know upon which to deploy it or through which to deploy it And that current system is centralized enough that Fed or Treasury can functionally, not literally, but functionally exert whatever pressure they want on whatever large interest to get to the same means as what a, quote, pure digital, central bank digital currency would do.

and if you did that it would be like hitting people over the head you know and be more obvious in terms of exactly what your intentions are and you know typically you know it would be more common for them to be underhanded to be you know to to want to achieve the end through a less obvious means so um i think that that's kind of the strange thing about like elizabeth warren's like kind of you know over the top support for cbdc and uh and her you know antagonistic nature toward bitcoin but i do think that you know it all anchors back to there's a special interest pulling the plug or not pulling the plug but pulling the strings and funding her campaign or giving her some other policy you know kind of promise or something else who knows you know

doesn't really matter what but um it's there yeah i wonder what she's aiming for because we've heard the rumors that she and others may have told gensler that he'll be the treasury secretary if he plays ball with their attempts to thwart the industry here in the united states i don't think yeah but what was that did she run for president last election like does she want to i think she got like one percent like she like if i remember correctly and i'm you know it's a long time ago now but i feel like she never got more than like one or two percent and then she dropped out of the race so i don't think she's a serious um like a contender contender in any future election no um and also like if there was something there were promises being made to

quote gensler about you know future position and future administration it's like i can understand you know similarly someone like jannon yellen at the treasury department you know her um antagonistic nature toward bitcoin but um you know that would that would make more sense of like yeah i don't know it's like their whole circus is you know actively unraveling and you know with each next thing that somebody you know who is functionally socialist or communist you know kind of the further and further out in the ledge the more obvious it becomes not to necessarily even the majority but for the people that are paying attention yeah yeah that's been my inclination recently is this push for the cbdc particularly warren posturing that way and others

being somewhat open to it is that they understand that something's broken on the back end and they need this thing to sort of reset the system or they're told that that will be the like you know there's something broken and this is how we fix it yeah um but i think you know the motivation is first and foremost some special interest second like more surveillance you know more control um more um you know shifting away from the constitution you know in terms of like what the underlying principles are and what the underlying protections are and it being rooted in you know protecting the rights of the individual so um yeah at the end of the day i do think that in in certain ways like the central bank digital currency is a distraction because

um to me it's irrelevant it's like the current system is broken this just makes it marginally more broken you know like if it's broken it's broken um and that But it's not to say I don't ever see them, quote, changing, like, the back end, you know, of how their system runs. But the way it functions, it is already a not just trusted system. It's a hyper-centralized system. And in that world, the difference between that and things that people are talking about are marginal. And then the consequences, rather than forcing people to be more forward in the support of Bitcoin, it requires very little political capital to say I'm against CBDCs. It's like it almost feels like this PSYOP to have these two people fight on this false front of CBDC, for or against, where it's like, okay, you guys fight over there while a bunch of individuals that produce things in the real economy go figure out a real solution.

I hope that's the case. And this is a good backdrop for the conversation. We want to have, I mean, this is where the state of the discourse is today is this framing that you just described with the backdrop of a systemically weaker financial system compared to what we talked about in the forward that I wrote in the introduction to gradually than suddenly. And like to set the case for this, I think what we're trying to get out of this conversation today is to really drive home the people that Bitcoin is a child of the great financial

crisis of 2008 2009 and everything we just discussed the first five ten minutes of this episode really is just a knock-on ripple effect from the consequences of the reaction to that great financial crisis and you can argue even further back in 1971 all the way back to 1913 if you will but i think for us for the context of the book which you can now go by at the safe house.com um good plug is the great financial crisis is really the nexus of satoshi launching bitcoin into the world yeah i think that um i mean i think everything i mean with each passing day kind of every evolution of what the fed of what the fed is doing today Fed or Treasury or our, you know, central government realistically, because while there's

that supposed to be that kind of formal separation, functionally it doesn't exist. And that, you know, the way I like to think about it is for many decades, you know, it was decades of imbalances that built up in the financial crisis of you know similarly a function of money printing just in in smaller more regular doses and that then you know some you know the imbalances that have grown over three or four decades broke fantastically and ever since then it's been you know um trying to get out of a straight jacket of you know being you know at the you know late stages of that system collapsing entirely and the thing that um about your forward that was great um to me was you know kind of you relating kind of you know kind of your formative years

you know junior in high school senior senior in high school when you when the financial crisis happen. I was a few years out of college, you know, at Deutsche Bank. And a lot of the, you know, kind of principal way that I got to understanding Bitcoin was because of the financial crisis. And I do think that there's a whole generation of us that were coming of age at that point. It's not to say that people that are older or younger can't similarly grok Bitcoin for, you know, similar underlying reasons of the financial system being broken. But, you know, for me, I kind of looked at the world and said, okay, something was clearly broken. Unclear what at the time when I was, you know, 2008 working at Deutsche Bank. But it never, I never got past

that. It was always like something was broke and we didn't just go back to normal. I think a lot of the world was like oh that was scary but that's gone now and that you know for me you know i didn't you know bitcoin didn't immediately click but then you know for separate reasons when i was going back through the history of the financial crisis you know as part of my role working for a hedge fund trying to understand what would happen when the fed unwound its post financial crisis qe as that started to make sense of why they had to print all the money that's what then made bitcoin make sense to me and that it's not just like a you know quick easy like oh tell me that and then that and it all makes sense but that that period of my life was

formative and if i was looking at bitcoin in a vacuum and just trying to you know analyze it on its own not in relation to the solution or the problem that it's intending to solve i could never arrived at bitcoin as money it was kind of that anchor point of seeing like okay this system is broken it was never fixed can kick down road and now it's becoming very clear to more people that that you know what was off then is still off now and the you know kind of panopticon is flailing and trying to figure out like, you know, how do we quote fix this? Can we fix it? Or what do we do next? So, you know, me and, you know, being right out of college during that financial crisis was critical to my ability to relate to Bitcoin and to see it as a solution.

And I think that, you know, for different reasons, you know, after reading your forward, you know, different era of your life, we were in different places, but, you know, kind of questioning the world and in similar ways because of that you know cataclysmic shock that happened yeah and i didn't get to expand upon it or expand on it too much in the forward but i mentioned that during that time uh my dad was going through a lot of stress so he my dad for most of his career worked as a marketer for funds typically like small cap uh and mid-sized funds they would He would essentially help go raise money for these funds that RIAs would be able to allocate to. And so I think seeing him go through that stress really multiple times throughout our life.

So I think my story even begins before 2008, go back to 2001, after 9-11. We had just moved from Philadelphia to South Carolina. My dad was working for an asset manager, and he took over the Southeast Territory of the United States, and we'd literally moved from Philly to South Carolina, I think mid-2000. We weren't even there for a year when 9-11 happened. It was like late 2000. Then 9-11 happened, and he immediately got laid off after that event. and you had financial turmoil and a crash in the markets then obviously the dot-com bubble was blowing up it was off the heels of the dot-com bubble and so he wound up getting laid off and we

lived in south carolina and he took a job as a bellhop and like took side jobs while he was trying to rebuild his own business on the side and he built that up over the course of the next six seven years and got it to a place of great success and then 2008 happened and the same thing that happened in 2001 so i had these two very close to home events happened to my family centered around this financial crisis and then going to 2008 when i was a senior in high school i just so happened to be taking this economics elective class selective economics class went to an all all guys prep school so we had really good teachers and my teacher mr robson who i mentioned do you think mr robson's a freak i don't know i don't know i went to the directory

my mom obviously read the ford and said you should reach out to mr robson i couldn't find his information he's not teaching at the school anymore um at my high school so mr robson if you are a freak and you're listening reach out to me but yeah explain explain kind of like what he had you guys doing as a uh so it was funny so the uh i mean it was from what i remember obviously it was gosh how many years ago now at this point uh 15 years ago yeah at this point so i don't remember the exact curriculum but i do remember him like we started that fall semester right after labor day markets go into turmoil like a week into the class uh and like the week before markets blew up. We, we started like one of the things we did in the class was like a stock

picking thing. Like you get an allocation of 10 grand and we had the software where you could pick stocks and create a portfolio. Everybody's portfolio immediately went to shit. Um, but as the crisis was going on throughout the three months of that semester, uh, obviously you had tarp and the bailouts and hank paulson and tim geithner going to capitol hill getting on their knees and begging and he was really on top of that like gentlemen look at what they're doing and then tarp i think was and i mentioned it and i mischaracterized it as the uh toxic asset i said it was an intentional freudian slip that will forever be we'll never correct it in the future they were toxic assets yes they were i mean literally if you look at it's the troubled

asset relief program but if you look at the definition of what that is they're buying toxic assets from the banks um and we dug into the tarp bill like granularly like it was an 800 page bill and he had us like read all the different stipulations that different congressmen and senators snuck into bill it was a spending bill essentially and they were just putting in a bunch of at the time they're calling it pork it was filled with pork that was like one of the lines that the media was running with and so he had us identifying all the pork and it became glaringly obvious to me in 17 again a very traumatic financial event is happening uh and something that i'm aware of for the second point in my life yes i was 10 when the first one happened but i do

remember i don't remember the financial ramifications of the markets but i do remember what happened to our family and i immediately began to connect those two when i was 17 in this class um and the tarp bill really highlighted to me that things were terribly wrong like how if the financial system the economy the global economy uh was on such fragile footing and was in such dire straits could any of the politicians focus on anything but like the financial aspect of everything and they just threw all this pork in the bill that really highlighted like a moral hazard and just like the corruption that exists in our system and then mr robson just made it clear to us as all this was unfolding like this is not right this is not how things are

supposed to play out i think i'm pretty sure he was at the austrian persuasion and a sound money guy uh and he really instilled uh when the semester ended i had a whole another semester of senior year before I went on to college but I'll never forget like him basically telling us like this is really messed up like you gentlemen should try to understand what's going on here and so as I mentioned in the foreword I went to college with a know your enemy mentality studied economics to really try to figure out what was going on in the system and to learn about it so that I could answer the questions I had as a 17 year old and of course studying economics in college started in 2009 i think it was around 2012 when articles about the silk road started

popping up uh i found bitcoin i don't remember exactly what it was that had me identify bitcoin was like 2012 2013 once i found it and then actually like read the white paper and um understood that it was a monetary system with no central authority it was a distributed system it clicked with me almost immediately and i became infinitely obsessed and knew immediately that it was the answer to the problem i went to college trying to solve yeah and i think that i mean the thing that i loved about your forward was one it just fit so well with the introduction that i had written of you know kind of really jumping in to tell my story about how i came to bitcoin and and linking it to the financial crisis because i think that you know when it's on the tv screen on cnbc and

they're talking about it like a stock um and you know um you know the snake oil that is crypto and that all that nonsense um or that it's like a technology like you know it creates this amount of noise that allows people to when they hear the word bitcoin not just associate with it but, but, um, rationally turn it off because they associate it with snake oil, you know? And so it's, it's a very hard challenge for us that are trying to, to be out there educating and communicating because very reasonably, if you're sitting on the outside looking in like, okay, no, that thing, Bitcoin, you're telling me it's not stable, but it, it, it looks the same to me.

And that, um, starting at the financial crisis and, and, you know, kind of very intentionally, with the book to try to, you know, get people's attention, but also relate to them in a way and relate to them specifically connecting Bitcoin to the financial crisis to say, this is something serious. And this thing, Bitcoin is related to that thing, the financial crisis, and that the problems that existed then exist today, you know, in a worse way. And this is the only thing that can viably fix it and um you know i remember myself like you know um didn't have that similar you know experience in 2001 because you know i was i was in high school then but you know my dad was in real estate and you know kind of living in austin texas not you know super exposed to the

stock market but um but then you know the financial crisis i was working at 60 wall street second I would have been a second year analyst in the M&A group and, you know, remember something critically happening in the fall of 2007, but not remembering exactly what that was. And then obviously Bear Stearns failed and ultimately was bailed out through an acquisition for, you know, equivalent of pennies on the dollar. But that was engineered by, you know, the Fed and the Treasury. And then what I really remember is, like, over the summer, you know, basically every, you know, whether it was summer or right around the time of Lehman Brothers, people just being tapped left and right and, you know, being laid off. I remember having, like, the recollection of being like, okay, I can't imagine being in that guy's shoes at that person's age, you know, and I never want to put myself in that position.

Were they older? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then I remember one night and this was around the, when, when Lehman brothers was rumored to be failing, you know, working on the 45th floor, leaving the office at like 9 PM on a Friday. And like, there must've been 10 senior bankers sitting in the group heads office at 9 PM. You're like, okay, margin call like situation.

That is not a, that is not a normal thing to be happening, you know? and then, you know, kind of, cause there were a lot of rumors about Lehman brothers and remember that weekend, you know, being in New York and some, you know, social event, talking to friends about it on a, you know, kind of rooftop porch. And then Monday morning, Lehman brothers gone, you know? Um, and I, I really think that there's kind of, there's two arc, you know, kind of, um, I don't know what, maybe archetypes or personalities, but there's people who look at at what happened in 2008 and they say um it was crazy it's not going to end well but they had to do it and then there's another group of people that have common sense to look at and they're

like that was crazy and it's not going to end well and that recognize that there's no logic applied between it's crazy it's not going to end well and the part where they say but they had to do it and so you know my broadest hope with the book is that people um you know more people are able to come to understand bitcoin in a in a way that's accelerated um you know kind of myself you know i read the bitcoin standard it was formative to me but then relating it specifically to all the research i was doing at the time related to the financial crisis and the dollar and its brokenness and why they were always going to have to print money allowed me to pair that knowledge with the Bitcoin standard and then, you know, be able to apply, you know, the things that I had to

work through in a very logical, you know, reasoned way to not only recognizing that something was broken, but why Bitcoin was the solution. And that kind of tying those things to the financial crisis for a lot of people who are, you know, of their working age now in the primes of their career, you know, being able to, like they know because they lived it, you know, to then, you know understand right at the front of gradually and suddenly that you know in my view and i think what will prove to be true you know as a testament of time that this thing bitcoin not just you know the i don't want to say coincidence of its release because i have to you know believe that you know when satoshi nakamoto wrote the white paper worked on the code released the code um that those

problems that all of us came to see in a brighter way you know at times of financial crisis maybe he learned you know in the 2001 crisis or was paying attention to the manipulation of interest rates by printing of money that had pre-existed but you know that sudden shock that was the crisis is a period where people don't forget if they were you know alive and conscious and even at the time if they you know might be one of those people that looked at it and said but they had to do it And if they start to relate it to Bitcoin, they can start to see that maybe there is another path. And if I start to, you know, read and learn about and understand Bitcoin through that light, maybe I can see something that I couldn't see previously. So that's my brown school.

Yeah. And as it pertains to Satoshi, I mean, I think it's pretty clear he overtly referenced the inability of the central governments and the central banks to not debase the currency due to the levers of control that they had access to. So I do think it's. Oh, no, 100 percent. I'm just saying that, like, the fact that he had written all the code before the financial 2008 financial crisis says that he was keying in on this being an issue before it was obvious to a lot of other people. Because we do have historical... It wasn't like the financial crisis happened in terms of the height of it, which was that September of 2008,

and then Satoshi sits down and starts thinking about this as an idea and writes some code in 45 days and releases. No, because I'm pretty sure we have historical evidence. I think Adam Back audited the code in July of 2008 or something like that, and a couple others on the Cypherpunk mailing list. So he definitely had written a lot of the code before. Yeah. This would have to be something that you were thinking about for a long time. Right. Like, but, you know, basically being that much more prescient that to be working on it, you know, for however long leading up to then have it ready to put out to the world in literally the height of the financial crisis. And that is also what, you know, makes it so, you know, just the timely of like, you know, the period of time that we're living in is like someone like Elizabeth Warren can be so not just tone deaf, but like backwards, you know, kind of antithetical to, you know, American spirit, American culture, whatever, you know, the Constitution.

but that, you know, the kind of way that I started the introduction is kind of basically going back through that timeline of like, you know, um, March 12th, 2008, you know, basically, um, David Faber asked the CEO of Bear Stearns, why, you know, what, why, or whether Goldman Sachs would not, um, accept the counterparty risk of Bear Stearns, Bear Stearns fails, you know, six months later, Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, September 15th, 2008, um, within a few weeks, the 2008 emergency stabilization act. And then, you know, 30 days later, shadowy super coder steps out from the middle of nowhere and puts forward the solution, you know, that, um, it, it wasn't just the timing of its release that is relevant to me. It's that, you know, it was the

solution to the root cause of what was broken you know and that that really is like the the most relevant of all of it that like um you know it wasn't just that like it happened to be put out at the same time as that that person was had identified a problem you know long before and then put out the thing that actually worked at the perfect time at the perfect time yeah i'm gonna take elizabeth warren i mean for me personally thank you number one for letting me write the forward thank you for writing it was a perfect forward and because it was a bit cathartic for me because i don't know it's personal to me like when you see elizabeth warren out there basically being a spokesperson for the banks now after

years of being the bank hawk on the hill particularly after the financial crisis like it's it is disgusting to me because i do have a deep-seated hardcore belief that this is the root cause of the systemic issues that exist in our society not only financially but socially like going back to my dad's story i mean he died earlier this year he was 54 and i would not i would go as far as to say that like the economic stress that he felt throughout his life like contributed to his early death um and that's my dad's just one example of many that are out there that particularly grew up in this hyper financialized industry he graduated college 1990 or 1991 the year i was born and then that was the industry that he saw the most opportunity in

and it was just built on this house of cards and i watched him throughout my life just get beat up and beat up and he was a great man great father great friend uh uncle brother uh son and he shouldn't have had to go through all that and i don't think he did actually wind up connecting it like as soon as i got into bitcoin began explaining it to him like he he grokked it and understood he like yeah and he's walked away from the finance industry later on in his life to start a coffee shop because he don't want to deal with the stress anymore but uh that's one thing i tried to lately get across in the forward is that like for me this is actually personal because it affected my life my family's life pretty directly um the insanity of the financial system and we're just one family

of millions of families that are out there you don't even have to be directly associated or working in the financial industry to be affected by this anybody who saves or tries to save yeah dollars is and it's like it's a very very big problem i think i mean i think it's personal for like for for everybody like when you think about like what you have to put in to produce actual value to then only be rug pulled and that when a country's currency hyperinflates is the ultimate rug pull but like you know literally like crisis after crisis i remember like right after bitcoin started to click for me i'd step back from working at the fund that i was at because i wanted to work on bitcoin and um went out to santa fe new mexico went you know got a guide and went fly fishing and

this older gentleman was our guide i don't even know how it came up because i certainly wouldn't have been talking about bitcoin by that time i was still like you know trying to find my own way in it you know of like really deepening my knowledge but like somehow it came up that this would have been 2017 um that uh you know he had just gotten back to even from the financial crisis you know this is this is probably a 60 60 year old you know fly fishing guide on the side um and when you think about that it's like like in my mind that signal like lost decade you know and that you know when my you know when i was sitting there in a bullpen you know at deutsche bank seeing guys who had families 45 50 years old just like you're out

you know and that like it's it's personal to you know people who are most acutely kind of impacted you know on the front end of those crises but then it's like when you just think about down to the last individual of like what is actually happening and the consequences of the instability created you know not just what we've seen to this point in our country but what we all kind of sense is out there um like people feeling like i mean the impact of inflation going to groceries or figuring out how they're going to feed their family like the cost of travel things like that that um that's very personal you know like and you know i you know i call i refer to it as formative because you know being in that chaos zone um you know in and around the financial

crisis it was it was just like you know that feeling of something being broken but not knowing what it was now it's like that you see bitcoin it's like it gives you a reason to be optimistic Right. Because, you know, the thing that I still think is so personal about is imagine like the majority of the world out there that is feeling and suffering from the same underlying economic struggles, but can't identify what exactly. searching for like things to blame or you know just dealing with the stress of it but not connecting it with a solution because you know kind of at the same time that i figured out you know this was 2016 um into into 2017 just how broken things have become if i hadn't quickly figured out bitcoin it would have been very easy to be very negative and pessimistic about the world if you you know not only like it's one thing if you're just feeling the symptoms of a problem

but not identifying the root cause of the problem but even if you can identify the root cause of the problem if you can't identify a solution it's incredibly difficult to be to not be stressed out constantly or to to be optimistic or to be hopeful and so um you know when i think about where it's like i go out and you know try to explain bitcoin to people and help them understand And one of the things I mentioned in one of the chapters, Bitcoin is a great definitionalization of like that there's something cathartic when you're finally saving in a form of money that works in your favor rather than against it. And what that ultimately translates to is getting off the hamster wheel and what you can do when the value that you produce in the world retains its value in the future, you're finally able to just, one, have some stability, and two, work on the things that you actually want to do and actually value rather than just working to pay bills. And like, you know, for, you know, you see the statistics about how half of Americans, you know, don't have like $500 of emergency funds or live paycheck to paycheck, whatever that is. You know, whatever the statistic is, it's in around that order of magnitude.

The dollar being printed and causing everything that someone's produced in the past to lose its value is very personal. and the times of financial crisis are when the, you know, kind of supercharge of the event of money printing happens that, you know, then trickles through to just destroy people's, you know, kind of essentially past decade, decades. And, you know, I think that for a lot of people who are either working on Bitcoin infrastructure, building Bitcoin companies to be able to make Bitcoin work better, podcasts, 1031, you know, the book, you know, kind of past working on Chain, now working on ZapRite. It's like it's a very kind of purpose-filled, you know,

kind of we're moving forward and driven. But, you know, it does seem consistent to me that, you know, a lot of people that work on it, you know, do it for, you know, not just personal reasons, but because kind of the consequences of the broken system are very personal and that there's a wrong to be righted, and that is Bitcoin. Yeah. Why do you think it's so hard to get this through to people?

I mean, obviously, that's the intent of the book is to get this through to people. Why, up to this point, do you think? um i you know when i try to rationalize it i think that i think that there's a lot of noise so if i try to go back to myself before having bitcoin clicked for me um it's a it's very difficult to put yourself back in that state because Bitcoin is, is incredibly unintuitive, you know? So it's like giving those people a break, you know, on the front end, it's like, it's not intuitive.

Nobody has asked the question, what is money in their life? They've, you know, a lot of people have evaluated buying a stock or buying a piece of real estate or buying a bond, um, making financial investments, making consumer decisions. they've never consciously thought about the what is money question because they you know people in a developed world at least have never really had to money's been there and even if it's quote broken and degrading over time it's getting them food at the grocery store so so it's like that's that's the inception of it second thing is there's a lot of noise so when you're trying to decipher hey this thing's bitcoin different from all those things if you start from that point of this thing

is incredibly unintuitive and it's difficult to see layer it on with um all these things put together look the same how am i supposed to decipher and then the third thing which is i you know kind of what i you know mentioned in the introduction and hope people read the introduction online or share it and then you know get their you know friends and family to read it that i think a lot of people become intimidated or maybe said another way are fearful that if they consciously endeavor to try to understand it that they won't be able to because they assume that it requires a lot of like technical understanding and you know it's one of the reasons why i like to describe it's like not an iq test it's a common sense test um and you know some billionaire can get it some

other billionaire can't some you know yoga teacher can get it and some billionaire can't you know um but that when you you know add those three things up of like incredibly unintuitive people haven't had to ask that question before to a lot of noise and distortion um you know it's why you know everything that is blockchain, you know, digital asset chamber or blockchain council, like I view is like, you know, you know, in some cases maybe unintentionally, but moving the ball backwards because it, it distorts and conflates and creates this cloud. Uh, but then, you know, if you were to think about human psychology of someone saying like, okay, I want to understand this, but if I try and fail maybe it's better to not try because i i don't want to be reinforced that if i tried

i can't actually see it you know and so um you know i i think that you know it is the cumulative effect of those three things but that's also why kind of you know one of the ways i describe my writing is that like i don't know if this is actually true but like i've always associated myself with like a very right side of the brain like a lot i gotta have i have to have things logically ordered like i was not a tech bro i was not a you know dive head first in like yolo let's buy bitcoin if it works great you know super conservative um when it come when it came to you know saving and investing my money um and that um that in order to you know i like to think that like you know having met safe before he wrote the book the bitcoin standard and having him you know

know kind of share a lot of his knowledge on money and monetary economics but then the bitcoin standard kind of like helped things fit into place for me but even then i still needed to like logically order all the the but what about x y or z and so my hope is that kind of a couple things about my book that i hope will help reach another you know layer of people is you know kind of connecting it to the problem you know because i think that if if people look at bitcoin as a um a solution in search of a problem that that is also part and parcel to why they may not endeavor to try to understand but if they connect that this thing bitcoin is about that thing the crisis and that thing the crisis is about they're always gonna have to print money with a you know approach

that's like i'm building a very logical case because these are literally the things that i had to go through myself even after it started to click for me to come back to the same conclusion consistently time after time bitcoin does work it does work because of its fixed supply because its fixed supply is credible it's the solution to this problem um and so you know but also just a bunch of people's brains work differently so you know being able to communicate my thought processes will inevitably reach people that have similar thought processes to myself just as like you know somebody else might write with a different style and you know kind of attack it from a different angle and be able to reach people that i couldn't so being able to have um you know

and obviously not obviously but you know the series that i wrote this is kind of built off of that i published from 2019 to 2020 it's already you know kind of impacted a lot of people so But my hope is now that it's in a book form, that, you know, that combination of attaching it to the problem and logically ordered, you know, will allow more of those people that struggle with that combination of it not being intuitive, there being a lot of noise, and they're being fearful that if they try, they'll fail to understand it, that if they give this a shot, that, you know, this is hopefully meant for those type of people. out of all the chapters in the book based off the essays that you wrote previously what was the hardest question for you to answer that you were proudest of putting into clear logic um the the one probably uh bitcoin not blockchain really yeah um and i think it's also probably the um one of the densest and I was, I have it as the second in there. And I've kind of like in the

introduction, I explained to people like understanding Bitcoin is not a linear thing. You have to juggle a lot of different concepts at the same time. I've written each of the chapters or essays in a way that they can be read as standalones. They're packaged together to be a comprehensive framework and they're ordered in a way that say like, you know, if I was to go through this, this is how I would order them in an outline. But if you, um, if you're kind of struggling with a fundamental, because the first two are probably the deepest in terms of the fundamentals and Bitcoin, not blockchain is the second one, but you have a question about, you know, something like, well, um, you know, you're saying Bitcoin, not blockchain, but, you know,

So you're talking about how it uses all this energy and that doesn't seem sustainable to me. And then, you know, but if you're hung up on that question of energy and sustainability and I have an essay that's Bitcoin does not waste energy, it's actually easier to digest why that's the case. Just go read that one to jump around. But so I was a little bit, you know, questioning myself for putting it second. But but it is, in my opinion, kind of like the hardest question for those people. And I think the people that I connect with, it's like, you have to have thought about Bitcoin some, and you probably had to be confused about why Bitcoin is different for that one to really land. But I think it's probably one of the hardest questions and to be able to approach it from a very logical way, because the way I think about it, it's like if there's a thousand cryptocurrencies and only one of them signal, but 999 of them are snake oil, which is the truth. but now it's probably like nine thousand nine hundred yeah whatever it is if i was to tell

someone that their their immediate and very rational question would be like okay i know you're saying that but like how how can you make that statement and that if you approach that problem from i've got to go evaluate number one number two number three number four number five number six all the way to a thousand there's far too much information for you to possibly arrive at a coherent or any answer at all but that if you start to build up on a few you know bottom up building blocks and the ones that i articulate in that piece are that you know i could basically explain fundamentally basically what a blockchain is demystifying that articulating why it only works in the application of money um and then articulating why money converges to one or why

economic systems converge to a single medium and that if the reader comes away and says okay i can get why economic systems converge on a single form of money but assume that is true if the if it is then does this thing blockchain only work in the context of money because if it does then you put those two things together and someone could rationally say well now i know that there's only going to be one and i need to just be identifying one versus the next not one two all the way to 99 so that one i think is the hardest thing for people to like once they start to like once bitcoin starts to become a possibility where like they've gotten to the point of like not just being open to i wanting to i want to learn but start to be able to say okay

i know that there's some signal here but i still don't know if it's real or not um that the thing that often trips them up is being able to distinguish bitcoin from um from everything else and the reality is if economic systems converge on a single form of money and a blockchain is only good for one thing, and it's the application of money, and Bitcoin has a fixed supply, then it obsoleted everything else already. So, and I go through kind of like the technical parts, but in a way that it's meant to be accessible. So that was one. The other one was probably Bitcoin is not for criminals, because I talk about censorship resistance in that one, and I kind of use it to explain on a fundamental level, you know, kind of what censorship resistance

and its means, why it's relevant to Bitcoin, why it's related to Bitcoin's fixed supply, and why basically Bitcoin has to work for everybody in order to work for anybody. So that one was probably one of the best and easiest that I did, but also helpful. Maybe Elizabeth Warren will pick it up. Matthew Stoller should read that essay.

Read it sometime. Did you see that today? No. Bitcoiners are treasonous. Bitcoiners are treasonous. For enabling criminals to use Bitcoin. I feel like, you know, there's nothing more American than Bitcoin, you know, like when you think about just like this quote, like the structure of governance, like kind of on a couple of levels, but like when you think about the checks and balances and Bitcoin and nobody, you know, like the mechanisms that ensure why no one is really in control, why it's incredibly hard to change. like similar to the structure of the checks and balances and, you know, kind

of one of the great things about the structure of government in the United States was that it was very difficult to change, like, and then that it puts the individual and enshrines the rights of the individual over everybody else. You own a Bitcoin, nobody can, you know, equal rights, you know, no one can debase that. It doesn't matter if you're, you know, in one of the poorest countries in the world or you're paul tudor jones you have the same assurance you know and so whenever i hear people saying that either the dollar's patriotic like that is one of the most comical comical

statements on that like one of the like the one of the statements that like lacks supreme self-awareness to claim that the dollar is patriotic you know it's like one like you know there were like you could go back to the 1700s you know go back to like when they were trying to you know do a um like one of the quotes that i have is from alexander hamilton who's a lot of people you know um you know give credit to or um deride because of you know the first bank of the united states but he was uh vehemently against uh unbacked money you know or paper money you know so just like thinking about the you know like reading a read read the constitution and you know show me where you know the fed's ability to print money is somehow patriotic but then when

you when you think about it at its broadest level of like basically this putting this collective which is the entity of the united states the mechanism by which the central government puts itself into debt and then finances it the fed it is inherently a collectivist um governance structure and the united states constitution enshrines the rights of individuals you know so um people and yeah like that dollar being patriotic like go read some history no i think it's par for the course in the era of the manipulation of the definition of words like in their minds the dollar is patriotic in the sense that you need to uh be pushing forth the

efforts and the goals of the u.s federal government like that is the sense in which patriotic to these people i think like the the air and and i see a lot of even people that i will I agree with them. Most things, they will say things like, you know, the dollar is important for our national security. And clearly that is a, I'd say, whenever they express those views, they're talking about it, maybe in relation to how our military is funded and associating, you know, we need to be able to fund our military in order to have a, you know, viable defense infrastructure. um or they're talking about you know the u.s financial system itself and the rails and you know doing our best to keep out all the drug lords that still seem to use our financial system and the banks just pay fines for after the fact you know um but that what i think you know particularly on like the front end of it which is like well we need the dollar is important because it's how we can ensure that, you know, we have the best military and that translates to the

greatest offense. I think it ignores the thing that actually creates security for America, the American people, which is enshrining the rights of individuals. And I think that that's what, you know, if I'm reading history of the founding fathers of the United States, it was knowing that the collective would be most secure if the rights of the individual were secure and that the rights of the individual do not come from a government that the government is there to serve a purpose which is to protect and ensure the rights of the individual not not that they come from the government and so that if people got back to that foundation they would see that the current centralized ability to print money undermines the rights of the individual.

And if they figure that out, then they'll understand why the, you know, if you're only looking at the first derivative of I print money and it goes to military, military defense good, that you're compromising everything and undermining everything. and so dollar is actually bad for national security because it undermines individual you know like i'm laughing because it's actually this is playing out in real time too i'm i was gonna say are you aware of this ask you but i'm pretty positive you're not aware of it but there's a big trend it's been growing on tiktok over the last couple weeks which is enlisted servicemen typically millennials or gen z's like openly going and taking selfie videos telling people

not to join the military because they don't make enough money they can't afford things yeah that's a good one that's a good one because what i in um in bitcoin is not backed by nothing what i you know one of the things one of the like observations i make is that you know oftentimes when you ask people um you know why does the dollar have value they'll say something along the lines of like first they'll say like either it's a collective hallucination or belief system But after they get through that, they'll say because of the military and because of taxes, things like that. And it's that, you know, militaries protect things of value. You know, the thing is not of value because there's a military and that every government currency that's hyperinflated has had, you know, a military and the ability to tax.

and that, you know, even like go back to like Roman Empire, I presume, you can't pay soldiers, you know. They're not taking your bunk clipped metal anymore. Then you don't have an army, you know, like. The barbarians are going to sack the city. You have to have something of value to be able to pay, you know, and if you destroy that thing of value, the money, you no longer have the thing to pay, right?

Like it's like, it's the reverse set of operations. It's like your ability to print money is destroying everything at a more fundamental level because of the individual. But even the thing that you're, you know, keying on as a reason, yeah, that's the thing you're putting at risk because you're not going to have a military if you can't pay them with a form of money that affords livelihood to make them putting themselves at risk, you know. Worth it. Worth it. Yeah, this is played on. But it's hilarious. He brought that up.

And I caught it yesterday. I watched like six or seven videos. enlisted military servicemen and women just being like don't join the military you don't make enough money it's not worth it saying that explicitly like it's not yeah and and also like again but like go to the like more fundamental levels like if you don't respect the rights of the individuals you know i saw a picture that um mike hobart posted about you know like there's that kind of thread going along of like post the most epic picture of yourself and he posted a picture of himself in uniform waiting for his i think he said discharge papers as he was refusing to take the

shot yeah you know but like if you think about it's like it's not just like soldiers of fortune but it's like if you disrespect the rights of the individual and then you expect like good quality people to want to fight for what you know because it isn't just about like money and riches right it's about wanting to protect something worth protecting right and and that thing is a governance structure or country founded on the idea that the rights of the individual are more important than the collective and that the way to get a strong collective is by protecting the rights of the individual yeah um and so yeah like it really it uh astounds me any time that i hear people talk about the dollar as being patriotic or that bitcoin is treasonous um because those

people are just short of history and yeah and a free market sound money is probably the foundation for respecting individual rights, just allowing people to access a monetary vehicle that allows them to accumulate capital over time and disperse it as they see fit. That is like... Yeah, I mean, and I have it on the back of the book, but I have...

Well, difficult to see Bitcoin as money, or I'll read the whole thing, but discovering Bitcoin is a personal journey that requires navigating uncharted waters but as the picture comes into focus chaos turns to order gradually then suddenly while difficult to see bitcoin is money and is the greatest instrument of freedom ever invented by man and i kind of stole or and i have it referenced in the actual book but it's playing on a line from hayek in the road to serfdom where he describes money as one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man because it affords people with a range of

choice do you know what page it's on um i believe that might be my copy so um i don't know we've got books in the studio i don't know what page it is but i've got this highlighted um that's my that's definitely my copy i think uh i'm pretty sure this is my cost is your copy yeah just based on the chicken scratch oh i found it page 125 this is uh wrote a serf in text and documents the definitive edition f.a hayek edited by bruce caldwell he said um here i'll read it a little bit ahead but it says because of modern society it is through the limitation of our money incomes that we are made to feel the restrictions which our relative poverty still imposes upon us many have come to hate money as the symbol of these restrictions basically keying on on like money

being the root of all evil he says but this is to mistake for the cause the medium through which a force makes itself felt it would be much truer to say that money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man it is money which in existing society opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man a range greater than that which not many many generations ago was open to wealthy. And so kind of connecting this idea that the economic good that is money is what allows people to pursue the endeavors that they actually want to spend their time on, produce value for others, and then be able to convert that value into the widest range of choice, the output of all the other people that accept that form of money and that um you know when you connect that

idea of i get to work on what i want to work on and somebody pays me in a medium that then i can convert into a range of choice that you know a few generations ago kings might not have you know been able to access access um that that's what money actually delivers and that it's not you know kind of the exorbitant wealth that's created by quantitative easing um and the extreme you know wealth extremes that are created by quantitative easing where you know the economic system is broken for virtually everyone but it's working for very few it is that i go i get to go out in the world i get to deliver value i get to deliver value how i see you know see and choose and then somebody can't come behind me and cut me out from underneath my knees you know like

that value that i deliver in the world i get to go out and determine how to allocate you know what value i'm going to get in return without it being debased and the ability to do that is incredibly like it is an instrument of freedom and you start to see it in that way because the other thing, and I don't know if I talk about it in the book, I think I talked about when I was describing the cover, but this idea that a sound money basically creates the incentive for you to produce more value from others than you consume of them. And if we're living in a world where there's only 21 million Bitcoin, if you have some Bitcoin, that means that you've delivered more value to other people than you've extracted from them. And so any savings that you

have in monetary form basically represent that excess of of what you've delivered for others but have not consumed from them and there's there is something also noble in that you know but if you don't have that mechanism that stores purchasing power basically the incentive reverses you don't actually have an incentive to deliver value to people you actually have an incentive to extract yeah you know it doesn't mean that you know everyone then suddenly doesn't you know still find ways to deliver value it means that the underlying economic instrument has a perverse incentive um that that's basically working you know um against the stream of those that are trying to create value yeah it was pretty poetic that you just switched up that quote applied it

it to bitcoin considering that hike was the one that said we will never fix the money until we find a sly roundabout way to take it out of the hands of governments and central banks and it's exactly what bitcoin is i'm surprised i was able to find it so quickly but yeah when you when you gave me the book i was like i'm not gonna be able to find it but yeah so you know that's also just you know a little nugget from the from the cover that um is there and it's fully referenced in the i think a few different uh chapters too yeah so i mean we're here to we came here to sort of place bitcoin in the context of the great financial crisis

now that deeply affected how we came to understand bitcoin at the end of the day we've had probably one major crisis since 2008 lockdowns money printing we would both argue that wasn't really the crisis it was a lack of liquidity in the banking sector that was made clear in september of 2019 with the repo spasm but they were successfully able to paper over that narrative with the covid narrative um so i would say that even though that was a financial crisis that led to massive amounts of money printing people probably i would be comfortable to say that most people just associate it with covid and the lockdowns and not some stress in the banking sector with that in mind i think moving forward how do you think

people will view bitcoin in future financial crises that are probably inevitable considering the fact that they always need to print more money and they've hiked up rates and pulled a lot of money out of the system they're just waiting for the point at which it breaks how do you think bitcoin is viewed by people in these scenarios do you think they get it yeah like i think one i think that 2020 was full full-blown financial crisis i think that um so it was in many ways worse than, um, than 2008. I think most people even, you know, kind of wise on it, have that impression that it wasn't, you know, um, but because, because of their association with the government shutdown you know like they associate and what they remember is you

know the 10 million jobs lost or whatever it was and then i go that wasn't the financial system that was the lockdown the lockdown and the financial crisis was the lockdown too you know and that they don't go back to the repo crisis where the fed printed more money in a single day 75 billion um than they ever had because prior you know in post 50 billion post finished christ qe the height of it was 85 billion but that was in a month 75 billion in a night on a dime you know um so that like that does not happen if something isn't broken and when the repo markets you know the interest rates tripled like something was deeply wrong then then uh february prior to that was the setup for the essentially the oil wars which created the crash in oil that then you know

ultimately then when they did the government quote lockdown resulted in oil for technical reasons becoming negative but like going you know from wherever it was to like 30 the may futures contract yeah um so but in that moment of crisis the fed did remarkable things that they hadn't done in prior crises right like they um they like like fundamentally broke their charter you know in their um in concert in concert with the treasury to basically like fund you know to basically be able to purchase corporate debt to be able to purchase uh municipal debt like they were basically having to plug the ship in many ways that were breaking and that they were seeing and they were just stuffing money in the system. And that doesn't make the crisis any less bad. It makes

it worse in my opinion that they were having, you know, they, they had their learnings from the last crisis and they were like, okay, we're going to need to print money quickly. But even then they like did three, you know, instances of like rate cuts and, you know, emergency funding for the repo markets before they then came out and were like, we're doing unlimited quantitative easing for as long as we have to do, you know, very quickly. Um, so I'd say 2020 was just as bad and that, that thing that turned people onto Bitcoin, right? Like Paul Tudor Jones's letter is one of the things that I highlight a lot when I'm trying to relate to, um, you know, I'm, I reference it in the presentation I gave at Dallas sold Parkland. Um, you know, he has his two quotes

keying in on Bitcoin's finite scarcity and the fixed 21 million supply with, uh, we're seeing a rate of monetary expansion like the like none of us have ever seen like a market i think the term he uses like like a that shook even a market veteran like myself has been there for 50 years whatever um so when they printed three trillion dollars in three months 13 weeks people that were paying attention connected it to bitcoin um one of the things i also talked about in that in that Bitcoin is not a hedge presentation at old Parkland is in order for a crisis like that to be relevant to you or for not to be relevant to, but for you to be able to relate the relevance of Bitcoin to it is that you

have to know something about Bitcoin prior to it happening. You know, imagine you or somebody that you just said Bitcoin snake oil, and I've, you know, never endeavored to learn anything fundamentally about it. and there's a bunch of market turbulence and then you might read in the paper about how the feds reintroducing QE, but you don't understand the effects of it. You can't relate that event to Bitcoin, you know? Um, but if you've picked up a book and you started to read about how, you know, the 2008 financial crisis is related to Bitcoin and about how the financial system and its instability is rooted in, um, the printing of money and that it would be in all of our

individual interest only anybody who produces value as you know our interest um to be able to save in a form of money that can't be printed and this is a solution then the next time that the crisis happens you're then going to say ah this thing i read about they just did it again you know maybe maybe this whole thing bitcoin makes sense and i think what happens is a function of time. It's like knowledge distributes as a function of time. So more people are likely to have read something about Bitcoin and that its whole purpose is to eliminate people's ability to print your money out from underneath you such that each next time it happens, not only does it make that system more and more fragile and the ramifications of it on the system become more

apparent so even if people haven't connected the solution they're out there with their you know radars on and trying to figure out like knowing something's broken but not knowing how to fix it and then someone slides the bitcoin standard across their desk or gradually and suddenly and they start to relate it to it so i think that the short answer is just like function of time more people will have learned about bitcoin such that when the next thing happens because it's inevitable that they're going to have to print more money that they're then able to connect it bitcoin and that only accelerates because knowledge distribution accelerates yeah and it's just it is inevitable like they um each time they do qe it causes the credit system to

metastasize has since 2020 you know um credit systems expanded by i think 23 or 24 trillion in total and just in the u.s um they are you know quote trying to you know drain reserves quote rain and inflation not not gonna work and then you know something you know something's broke and then they come back in and they're gonna have to print more money than they had before because the system and the amount of liabilities in it and i'm not talking unfunded pension liabilities i'm talking about fixed debt maturities are so much larger it necessitates they have to print a shit ton more money and that absolute scale you know was enough to spook uh paul tudor jones into bitcoin but it's just perfectly rational and the more it is the each successive

instance of it puts people on that path to being able to see bitcoin yeah and i apologize for the background noise they're working on the restaurant below the commons right now yeah we're getting a restaurant back i you know whenever something happens like this i say if you're gonna be in bitcoin i deal a little volatility yeah you know so can't can't deal with a little uh you know people sawing underneath your feet what how are you gonna make a bear market yeah come back next cycle yeah um no would that be like if you had to guess how much money will they need to print next time around I just anchored

to more so you know um you think we hit I think like what is it nine ten

eleven figures how big is that ten trillion at least um like like some of the ways that I bookended yeah

ten no I gotta add three more fourteen figures the numbers get so large I start to you know yeah

like so in over five years they created 3.6 trillion and then between 20 to 2019 and the fall of 2021 basically two years they created five trillion or had to inject five trillion in the system so it's both the scale and the speed accelerated um and so it's like like you know not wanting you know like one way that i would think about it is in terms of like uh system leverage like debt to dollars so when there were 70 you know in 2019 there were like 73 trillion of um of 73 trillion of debt and like three and a half to four trillion in the banking system um so i think whatever it was it was like something like 17 times and then after the you

know in terms of debt to dollars and then they print all that money and it was 12 to 1 now they're in the process of taking that money out and the credit system's continuing to grow which is one of the things that creates this strain of inevitability of something breaking it's like as credit system is trying to expand because it needs to span otherwise it collapses the feds taking the building blocks of liquidity out so it's actually re-levering the system essentially um that you know the um they have to deleverage the system they have to reduce that ratio you know if it was say um eight to one you know then you know that would you know at a debt stack of um 100 trillion i'd put it like 12 and a half you know so that would say

that they you know you need to introduce an incremental five trillion you know from where they're at today approximately but i think that you know ultimately what they did before and why that they'll have to print more money than they did the last time is like they're going to overshoot because they're trying to plug all the holes in the uh in the leaky ship so it's like i don't like to pick you know put your number on it but it's going to be greater than five trillion dollars you know they have to deleverage the system um because the system is now 25 trillion dollars larger than it was before yeah and they're having to sustain all the past excesses as well yeah logan can you yell at these guys i can't take the volatility of this noise i'm kidding

um but the last question i think this is on people's minds too and this is hard really hard for people to grok like the system that you just described with the immense amount of debt and the dollars the significantly less amount of dollars underlying that debt it's a lot of money unfathomable astronomical numbers too large for us to actually conceive yes truthfully yes like quickly like one way that i would relate the three trillion that was printed between march of 2020 and may of 2020 was that jerry world took one billion dollars to build and it coordinated economic activity the way that you should think about you know what one billion represents first five to six years to build that

stadium which at the time maybe to this day was still one of the nicest and there's only 32 of in the country and three trillion what they printed just for that you know three month period was the equivalent of three thousand jerry worlds just flooding the system like literally like the word trillion is a number that you can't conceive of in your daily life like i don't even think i mean maybe you know elon musk can start to equate them to like the number of rockets but like you know number of stars i mean the new more the number of like in your individual life when you think about like you know buying a one of the biggest ranches in tech it's like you still like trillion dollars is outside of the realm of like what you can actually grasp in your um

in your daily life of like what that value translates to what you'd have to need to produce yeah and that's you're you're helping me like frame the question even better because with that fact in mind this is all unfathomable that's what i think and it could be making an assumption here but that's what i think when we talk about transitioning to a bitcoin standard i think that's the one thing that holds people up is thinking of those unfathomable numbers i mean like the incumbent system is this big how could we possibly get in the lifeboat and get to uh the the statue of freedom uh in the in the calmer waters with that in mind this unfathomable amount of dollars and debt that is built up like how do you transition away from that

like with the least amount of volatility as possible how do you get from the front cover to the back cover without tipping your boat essentially yeah i mean i think that that the error that most people make is trying to um to to forecast the end state and trying to prognosticate or forecast everything that has to happen between now and then um and i talk about this in one of my more recent pieces not in the book i'm sure i you know touch on these similar themes but in a different way of the way i like to describe to people it's like if i know a is where i'm at today and b is bitcoin's the form of money that everyone's going to adopt i don't have to know exactly what that looks like or when it's going

to happen or how we're going to get there in order to start heading out in that direction you know because there's a ton of uncertainty in the world we're mortal you know um we lost or father too, too soon. The future, we, we don't, we don't know exactly what's going to happen. We don't know how long we're all going to be here. And that, you know, when we think about the ideas, it's like, what directs human action? You know, what is the thing that allows me to take one foot in front of the other that guides that decision rationally without having to know how the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, rest of my life, you know, maybe less, maybe more plays out. Um, and so that it's really to start with the inputs of like the cause and effect and

getting less hung up on, well, what are the consequences and more focusing on the cause part of the effect rather than the effect part of the cause. Um, because if you get to the idea of it's in everybody's interest to have a form of money that can't be printed and that that allows you to better retain value and you recognize that this other thing isn't sustainable it doesn't really matter you know how many other people's lifeboats you know tip up down go under it's just what's the most rational thing for you to do to look over your own self-interest and that if enough people do that if enough people are rational which um you know people are then um we get to a better destination than we otherwise

would be like one of the things i like to relate it to is like hey venezuela hyperinflated there were a lot of other working currencies around there imagine if venezuela happened and there wasn't a working form of money to coordinate aid or to help reboot right that's what bitcoin imagine there wasn't this that other that other system it's going down you know now just imagine a world where there wasn't this thing bitcoin that could be the solution because the ship's going down either way it's not going down because bitcoin bitcoin's here to fix a problem that was created by the chip that's gone awry and so i think that the idea of like the nominal amount of money trips people up but the fundamental answer is the nominal amount of money is not

what's relevant because there's enough money to go around to satisfy everything everything and every every one because bitcoin can be divided into you know infinitely small numbers of units and what that ultimately represents is that everyone can have their own percentage of a fixed pie and that in the world with a fixed pie that means that their their value will be stored or will most reasonably be expected to store value better than if that weren't the case and and if they're if that weren't the cases of what the current system is where they regularly print money you know and so it's like don't get hung up on you know the 93 trillion and you know how that all gets dealt with it's it's real and it's valid but the thing that's relevant is that

it's not sustainable and it's what causes them to print money once you realize that and that you realize that printing money is a problem then your solution is finding a form of money that can't be printed and if that thing is bitcoin it's like okay you know be rational and and take that forward action to solve your problem but you don't have to be as concerned with like well what's the consequence of you know there's a lot of people that are holding u.s treasuries that think that they're assets and they're not going to be worth anything you know and like i don't celebrate that fact but it's just reality i don't have to like get hung up on like well who's the person that has the treasury and how's this going to impact their saving you know it becomes less relevant

than like what's going to guide you know the future and what what what is the reason and logic to to lead to those conclusions because if you if you focus on like all the different things that happen between here and there or what exactly it has to look like and you're not focused on the inputs you'll never get there yeah completely agree i do think that is like a mental hurdle for people i think the the sheer size of the incumbent system is just like a mental anchor it's like people almost feel like they have to be pot committed to that yeah but it's like well but if they can print money faster than you can contemplate the size of the amount of money they're printing like literally like when someone in congress says our budget is two trillion dollars

like you have no concept of what two trillion means you just don't like you can't it's a number that's too large and if you were to equate it, um, so like, um, it's like the numbers become irrelevant when they become so large and you should be asking yourself, well, if they become so large, then maybe the thing's becoming less relevant, you know? And, um, and just, you know, hopefully be glad that you don't own any of the credit that is going to, you know, essentially not be money good because the money is not going to be worth anything when they pay it back to you, you know?

So, but I do agree that that's a hang-up, but like I just encourage people to like focus on the inputs of what drive decisions because that's what will lead to outcomes. And there's two sides of the equation. It is the printing of money causes the currency to fail for very fundamental economic reasons, not just because of the fact that they printed too much of it that the underlying form of money cannot coordinate trade which is money's uh value to the world um and that if that's the case you

still need money and you still have to go solve that problem if you do have one which everyone does yeah no i think it's important to walk people through this because i do think like that's the big problem i had that question it was one of the questions the question the answer old partner was like this logic makes sense in theory but how do we get there you know it's like and that's part of you know it was part of the inspiration for the um the article that i wrote a few weeks ago i made the thumbnail for you oh yeah that's right that's right great thumbnail yeah great thumbnail perfect on the first try on the first on the first try i literally texted marty i was like hey i need a picture of a dude who's like on a cliff you know where there's like a deep valley deep valley

and uh he sent me one back i was like this is perfect no iteration needed but um but the the idea that um like someone's going next you know and you just have to figure out what the economic incentive is that dictates why that is true, because whether or not it's you is entirely in your control and no one else's. Um, and that, um, yeah, it's just, you know, but, but, but then the other connection is like, that's everything in life, you know, like how do you build a building if you don't know that there's going to be someone there to buy it? You know, you're, you're you're operating on reason and logic of what you know guiding inputs that you know result in outputs and sometimes you know you get things wrong but that's why in my case and what

you know i intend this book to be it's like i had to test these like that reason and logic about bitcoin over and over again uh on at different levels or for different questions in order to consistently arrive back on it being the solution like and i also try to reinforce that to people it's like you don't get to having the level of um you know confidence conviction exposure to bitcoin as i do or anybody does after they've been working on it for so long without having to struggle with these same questions because they're very they're very um they're very logical you know and so um but it is a classic um you know pitfall to try to like try to focus on the end point rather than just what what guides the next next decision for the next person

yeah it's an incredible book thank you for writing the forward i mean like i said the last sentence was the other part of the fourth i wrote about was my journey of learning about bitcoin um that's speaking to the point that you said earlier is that each cycle whether it's a financial crisis cycle or a bitcoin halving cycle whatever it may be more people are more aware of bitcoin and i think content like gradually than suddenly the bitcoin standard the fiat standard uh broken money by lynn a bunch of other books on this bookshelf and in other places in the world have set individuals living today in 2023 and moving forward up in a much better position to get from zero to one much quicker. Because when I was learning about Bitcoin in 2013, 2014,

luckily we had Michael Goldstein and Pierre writing the Nakamoto Institute, which probably saved me in the early days. And you had Zabo's blogs that weren't really directly connected to bitcoin but describe the technical aspects and social incentives that that make it work but beyond that i mean you had andreas antinopoulos his videos were good there was a few podcasts shout out to vortex and crew who were running uh the bitcoin show uh back in the day but outside the noise from the altcoin vortex or one vortex it's just the vortex i just call people just call him vortex yeah but he was he was in around like sending signal yeah you know particularly on like the bitcoin versus yeah um and the point being is like i

think anybody who picks up this book uh as their first starting point on their journey to try to understand bitcoin is in a much better position than i was at the age of 22 in 2013 like i said it in the forward i think this collection of x essays that you've expanded on in the book is the best zero to one primer for people to get to not understanding what bitcoin is to having a well rounded understanding of what it is and how it can impact the world now i want to appreciate you having written that and saying it um because it does it means a lot to me and um you know as well you know as one that was guided by you know once you know safe had sent me the early copy of the Bitcoin standard that he had, you know, we had developed a friendship, working

relationship in the year prior to that, before he had a working draft, but second, the Bitcoin standard came out, Gideon Powell and I bought 250 copies and was like, you know, I just had this, you know, very common sense was like, okay, how long does it take to read a book? I can send this to somebody, they can read it and then I can help them understand it from there. But imagine me trying to explain this, like best leverage on my time is buying book and giving it to somebody to learn about bitcoin um and then you know also though like

there was a way that um the bitcoin center connected for me and then i had these you know even though like my brain connect them i still needed to like get that thought process on on certain key questions down on paper to test you know the reason logic assumptions however you to describe it and that now this being in a book format and all being packaged as one it's like the benefit of it in the past has you know been something similar to what i expected to carry forward but i hope to be on an amplified basis is that if i had to go through all those questions and in in order them myself now somebody comes and reads the book it will hopefully accelerate their path to understanding bitcoin because rather than having to necessarily sit there and ruminate

on the same questions to order it themselves and they they inevitably would have gotten there over a longer period of time you know possibly shorter but that this now serves both for people that have already read it they're familiar with it hey read the book because maybe somebody wouldn't you know click on an online blog post but also they're refined they're shaped and having it all packages one they have everything right there easily attainable and that you know if it was going to take someone x amount of time to get to bitcoin if they read this the goal is that um for you know certain group of people whose minds work a certain way that you know relate to to the ways and ideas that i talk about that it will accelerate their journey so um it's kind of you know that is

what the distribution of knowledge is about that it does accelerate because there's resources that didn't previously exist and you know when i was learning about bitcoin for the first time you know even though the bitcoin standard was forming for me it wasn't yet out you know i i was lucky to have a personal and working relationship with safe um but then also people who pointed me to the satoshi nakamoto institute and um you know it's just it's you know the more high signal content out there the the faster the destination or the more you know kind of accelerated the path is that an individual should be able to grok bitcoin and if i've done my job that that's what the book will do what took me probably about three years to go from zero to like a comprehensive

understanding like as close to i am now as i think i fully understood bitcoin like three or four years and if you pick up this book you can do it in a weekend i think i don't think so there's got to be some time component to it you know let's call it six months you know you read it over a weekend or a month and then like over the next few months i feel like the things will start to really sink in okay from three years to three months yeah we gotta be like you know humble understanding bitcoin is still hard it's still difficult to see i don't want to blow smoke up your ass but i think you did a good job thank you thank you it's been great thanks for having me on anytime i mean you're right christmas you know you know

the studio is always open if you're yeah sometimes you demand that i i did last week you did i answered the call thank you i do that um mention again where can people find the book um so the book is exclusively for sale on the safe house.com safe spelled S A I F. Um, and, uh, you can read the forward and the introduction on tftc.io. Um, and also review the table of contents, get a good sense of what's in there, uh, to figure out whether or not you want to purchase it. Um, if you're, you know, kind of struggling with some of these questions or some of the ideas in the podcast makes sense like definitely go to the safehouse.com right now buy the book and then you know if you've read graduate and suddenly in the past online series buy at least 20 copies for

your friend any any fewer you're doing your friends uh a disservice serious disservice it's an injustice some would say yeah i'm gonna buy 20 books and take them home but is it like weird for me to go home to my friends and family and hand them a book that i wrote the forward to no I think it's like hey I'm proud of this forward I care about you

and I want you to understand Bitcoin it's all about the framing of how I present them I care about you yeah I care about you

here's this book I just so happen to write the forward I wrote this forward with you in mind yeah well Parker as I said in the

forward as well it's been incredible seven years now almost developing a friendship

view you as a mentor to a certain degree as well same views mentor and a friend yeah go both ways yeah it's been uh it's been fun to see you go from where we were when we first met both of us where we both were when we first met to where we are now it's pretty cool yeah it's been a fun ride and look forward to the journey ahead too that's gonna be a long one volatile fun stressful exciting

that's what it's all about the journey would it be worth it if the journey wasn't the way it has been and will be wouldn't want it any other way peace and love freaks