TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #498: Musings Of A “Right Wing Radical” with Ben Braddock
Episode Date: April 15, 2024Marty sits down with Ben Braddock to discuss everything from micro to macro. Ben on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GraduatedBen IM—1776: https://im1776.com/ 0:00 - Intro 5:05 - MS-13 8:13 - El Salvado...r and rule of law 12:47 - Media control and narrative shifts 30:51 - Covid lockdown’s financial motives 36:35 - Places to escape to 41:11 - Inflation is exhausting 52:37 - MAID and spiritual starvation 55:25 - They’re not sending their best 1:02:16 - Gradually, Then Suddenly 1:02:56 - Manosphere and nationalism 1:14:54 - Connecting over distance 1:22:35 - Cities and aesthetics 1:34:10 - Environmentalism 1:42:12 - IM—1776 and journalism 1:48:46 - Politicians 1:58:03 - Austin 2:06:41 - California water cycle 2:12:39 - Energy/mining 1:18:31 - Competency crisis and price system interference 2:36:47 - Eclipse and final thoughts Shoutout to our sponsors: River Unchained Zaprite Bitcoin Talent Co Gradually, Then Suddenly 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
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you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free
if 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
so are you on an ms-13 list uh i was i was told to behave as if i am
but it there was this funny little synchronicity that happened after i'd spent a couple days just
like nailing down the final draft of the article i wrote uh on like the history of ms-13 and what
bukele did to you know finally uh defeat him once and for all and after this it was like kind of
late at night i was tired i'd been like writing for hours and all i uh go hit up chipotle for uh
for like a 10 p.m burrito bowl and uh i'm there in line and this group of you know comes and gets
behind me in line and here and they're talking spanish and i turn around and the guy has uh
a clear uh tat on the side of his face that's like a that's a yeah it was an m13
uh and you know i just started to get like kind of skits out and paranoid just from that but
you know it's uh there's these guys are still out there uh in in in america um in states like
virginia it's been a problem since uh like the early 2000s even in you know affluent suburbs
of washington dc like fairfax county um school systems have haven't have been having to deal
with this kind of thing for uh for a long time and like students getting involved in it and
and all so it's it's been an ongoing issue um you know they've tried different tactics there was a
uh, attorney general in Virginia, he had some, uh, interesting ideas like, uh, putting in these
tattoo removal parlors, you know, to try to get the, uh, trying to create these programs for
rehabilitation and stuff, uh, varying degrees of success. I think the, uh, the fed cracked down
like the FBI during the Trump administration, they, uh, they went pretty hard on some of the
gang prosecutions and that seemed to have tamped it down quite a bit but in the in the past couple
of years like the uh ambient crime levels have been rising in the uh dc virginia maryland area
and whether that's you know linked to the member to the gangs officially or not it's a lot of a
lot of it's being caused by the same people uh and that's just something that you know i haven't
seen a strong federal response uh from the biden administration on this so uh at least not in terms
of prosecutions and things but i guess they have bigger fish to fry like uh donald trump yeah
they're not prosecuting anything these days yeah it's really perplexing so to set the stage for
this conversation we briefly met at an event last year i've been following you on twitter since even
before that event and i think i had this the picture of you on my mind and your worldview
just from following you on twitter and meeting you briefly that uh is extremely fast not by
picture i think you are an extremely fascinating person from what i've observed from arm's length
on twitter i think the start this conversation i was like what drove you to focus on all the
subjects you do whether it's ms-13 in el salvador the state of the united states more broadly
your work at im 1776 like what drove you to cover and speak out against all this stuff
well it's like starting with el salvador um you know i'm from a part of virginia that has a
significant el salvadoran population so uh i've felt for a while that a lot of our uh histories
and you know culture like we you know they're distinct cultures and distinct histories and all
this but you know they've been like in this like mixing pot with us for uh for a while so it's like
i you know that was like the the big other like group right like uh you know for for people in
texas or california it might be like mexicans are the other big ethnic group for people across the
south it might be um well if they're white blacks but if they're blacks or white but you know for
uh for me it was like the el salvadorans are like you know that's the that's the big other group and
you know it's um it always found them kind of interesting and they were they did keep to
themselves a lot uh i remember growing up and you know i could tell there was a lot of really uh
they've been through a lot of heavy stuff i think because of that like closing off and i don't know
they just seemed like as a people really beaten down and a couple years ago i started seeing um
like bukele's face right like at pupusarias and all this stuff and it's kind of like he was
displayed in the salvadoran businesses the way that the pope is displayed in italian restaurants
or at least in like the old school italian restaurants in america and uh you know i was
seeing some of what he was uh tweeting about like one was in i think it was in 2001
when uh el salvador made a dramatic about face on covid and 21 21 uh initially they had pursued a
strategy just kind of in line with uh world health organization guidance and all this but then
it's like at by the following spring i think they had just realized um you know this is going to put
us into like permanent debt like this is blowing things up it's nuked the economy and the about
face was um it was like what i would have designed if you would just put me in charge of coming up
with you know the public health plan uh which basically like encourage people to get outside
get sunlight for vitamin D because we know vitamin D was vitamin D status was the biggest
risk factor for COVID mortality. Um, and lifting, you know, any restrictions, there were no vaccine
mandates, there were no, uh, entry mandates into the country. So you could travel there
as an unvaccinated American, which the way things were going at the time made it one of the few
countries where that was possible. And, uh, yeah, so just, you know, seeing for a while the, uh,
but the success they were having in governance and embracing like Bitcoin and
freedom. And at the same time, you know,
being realistic, not being like dogmatically libertarian as in,
if we make the police go away, then that's going to cure everything.
Like they were the right kind of Austrian.
They took the right lessons or like hike and those kinds of guys. Right.
It's the right mix of like pragmatism and libertarianism to me.
and yeah so um i decided about a year ago i was like i should finally go check this place out
and uh yeah i went down uh last march and i've been back uh five times since so i love it and
it's convenient it's like a three-hour flight and usually like a couple hundred bucks on avianca
um really easy to get in and out of there great airport uh and it's a you know it's a country
about the size of new jersey so it's not that daunting to travel around uh you know you can be
from the uh the beach to the summit of a volcano in like a couple hours so that's that's really
cool it's like for for such a small country there is like a pretty uh diverse array of like
topography and landscape and all yeah i haven't made my pilgrimage to el salvador yet it's on the
and it is fascinating obviously el salvador bukele what he's done in the world of bitcoin
is something that everybody's been paying attention to for many years now i mean he
sort of planted the flag was like yes we're going to embrace bitcoin as bitcoiners
we're very much in favor of that or a lot of us i won't speak for all of us because there is
a contingent of the bitcoin people are into bitcoin i hate to say bitcoin community
flack better term bitcoin community who view what bekele has done as a fascist in in some way or
another and i i tend to um fall on the side of like what you just described is like i think
his implementation of bringing rule of law to the country was not only very successful but very
necessary considering yeah and that's a that's a view that uh frankly is ignorant and kind of
insulting to, um, to Salvadorans because if you, uh, and I think I have like a strong reaction to
this because I've talked to so many Salvadorans who've told me what things were like before
and the entire country was a prison. You know, you're talking about that. People are complaining
about, Oh, you locked up 60,000 people. You're depriving them of their freedom. Everyone was
deprived of their freedom. You couldn't leave your neighborhood unless you paid an extortion fee.
you know mothers um kept there were some uh kids who like they never really got out and about
because their mothers like kept them inside all the time and like homeschooled them you know so
you had this i mean that's that's a prison it's not a formal prison governed by a state but you
are uh you're not free to come and go as you please and so in effect every poor neighborhood
in the country was like a prison and those people have been liberated and there's now this like
outpouring of freedom and the streets like uh like there's like sports are being adopted that
they hadn't seen much of before like biking a lot of salvadorans have got into road biking
um a lot of the kids have gotten into skateboarding like skate culture has taken off
off there and you know just like this flowering and even uh without like specific sports or
whatever it's just like there's a lot of families they can go to the parks they're going to the
plaza so people are just going out into public feels very different than america where people
now i think like they treat their suburban houses like castles there's not much of like a public
space that that many people go to it's like you know space is kind of we've brazilified a lot i've
actually noticed this uh since 2020 just in like people's space their habits like what spaces they
go out into um it's it's what kind of wild to watch that happen well expand on that like what
do you mean by brazilify well in brazil you have this situation where um you know the the streets
and public squares and that sort of thing um people like avoid them or at least avoid them
And during certain times, I mean, I had a gun put to my head on a residential street one quiet morning in Rio.
And it was in a nice neighborhood.
I was getting in an Uber.
But I was, like, transiting, like, between two secure points.
One was, like, the gated condo I was staying at that had an armed guard.
And then, like, the moving car.
And it's, like, that slight in-between time when you're a target.
And this dude rolled up on a motorcycle and robbed my phone.
um after putting a 1911 to my head that was uh when was this that was in like uh
i think what year it was right before bolsonaro was sworn in i remember because i was there uh
it was like the week after that his not was his inauguration so i guess that would have been like
20 2018 like january 2018 or so because i think he got in like i think his the election for him
was like a year after trump anyway um whatever it was but i remember the next time i went back
rio felt much much safer like there was a very appreciable difference in the security situation
uh once bolsonaro took over not that much had to be changed it's just like he let the police
off the leash and it's like actually yeah go go take care of these guys um there have been a
hostage situation on a bridge between niteroi which just sets across the bay from rio and rio
and they brought in a sniper and shot the guy who was holding these people hostage
they just just the government started like publicly you know being more hardcore
um and it sent a message that took effect very quickly yeah but what back to the brazilification
Before that, things had gotten so bad from a security perspective that, like, if you were going to go somewhere and just, like, walk around, like, in public, it would be, like, one of these really nice luxury shopping malls that you can see favelas from.
Like, the contrast between poverty and ultra wealth in Brazil, like, it sits next to each other, at least in places like Rio de Janeiro, because they're all packed in, you know, it's very dense.
And, you know, a lot of people would just avoid these like public areas that theoretically should be secured by police, but or by culture, but in reality were places where you could be mugged.
And, you know, so Brazil had this like decline of the third space happen like at least a decade before the United States.
and you know i don't think it's gotten quite that dire here but in a number of cities i have noticed
like okay people don't want to take subways they don't want to take public transportation
they don't want to walk places um they're like avoiding these you know public areas that should
be uh controlled by the police or secured by the police and instead you know opting for like
safer measures to get from point a to point b and i think part of it is uh it's not even like
the serious crimes it's just like the low-level harassment by um the homeless and mentally ill
happens here in the city yeah well i was in uh i was in new york about a month ago and yeah i was
i was shocked at how much i still love new york city it's probably an unpopular thing to say
these days but uh and i think there's a lot of great qualities to it as a city but you know
riding on the subway used to be just like a very normal experience and like now you will see
something i feel like like whether it's uh someone like openly defecating on the train platform or
having a schizophrenic episode in the train car you're in it's just like there's this there's
this like background ambient level of stress that goes up yeah no it's been growing for the last
decade so i moved to new york from chicago in 2014 i put six years in there between 2014
covid and it was a noticeable difference from when i first moved there even before covid
like i remember my wife and i lived in williamsburg it was before we had
children and towards the end like 2019 2019 predominantly like i remember two instances
where we were coming from the west village back to brooklyn on the l train and two separate times
probably around like 10 30 11 at night both times like some dude just whipped out his dick and
started like massaging himself like on the l train in front of me and my wife it was just like
what the fuck yeah this was before kovat like we were smart enough to get out of this the city
like march 6 2020 our first son was just born we're like we're not staying here for these
lockdowns we escaped to the beaches of new jersey and we went back we we thought we were there for
two weeks when it became apparent the lockdowns weren't going to be for two weeks we're like all
we're canceling our lease we had to go back and wind down our apartment and get all of our and
move it to a storage unit and we went back we we lived on north fifth and wife um when we were in
williamsburg so right down the street from uh joe's pizza and we couldn't even go and get a
slice without my wife getting cat called it was just pure anarchy during that time and then i'm
I'm originally from Philadelphia.
Haven't lived in the city for 15 years,
but my family and all my friends from growing up are still there.
And you can't even be in Rittenhouse Square past dark
without getting harassed these days.
Is that named after Kyle Rittenhouse?
Maybe not.
Should be.
I met him once.
It was just a funny interaction.
I did something for, it was on Glenn Beck's show,
And he showed up right after I interviewed with Glenn Beck
and was like, oh, you're Kyle Rittenhouse.
Good shot, sir.
I forget who I should know this as, a native Philadelphian
who Rittenhouse Square is named after.
I know one of the other things that's hit Philadelphia hard
has been the fentanyl epidemic.
Oh, yes.
I think one of the first places where Trank started showing up,
which is an additive, xylosine.
you can get it for like ten dollars a kilo from shanghai you can order directly and the uh
like this had been a problem on the street for months and months and um like i looked into it
and i found like it's not even on the schedule and it won't even like raise like customs and
border patrol doesn't even uh track it because it's like so unlisted like they so they don't
even the dda doesn't even know how many tons of it are coming into the united states annually
and i started like researching into this and that uh tweeted about it some and what was cool is um
there was a congressional staffer who followed me uh or saw the post on twitter and um got his
boss to like draft a letter and it was funny it's like right after that letter was drafted that was
when the white house was finally like we're gonna do a task force like 24 hours later uh
sometimes cool things can happen from the internet uh but it uh reminds me of something
amanda millius described she said if you wanted to get anything done uh you have to go on cable
news or something and say it like it's you know governing by uh fox is kind of the euphemism they
used but it is uh it's interesting like that's what people respond to now is just what what
becomes uh discourse in the news cycle and uh you know in the political system right like just
people want to issue wise like they want to focus on what's being talked about which is can be cool
sometimes it's kind of horrifying because if you have the platforms controlling algorithms that
tell you what gets talked about like that that's a powerful form of control but i mean we witnessed
that i got put youtube time out twice during covid for talking shit on the vaccines and
ivermectin first was ivermectin it was before the vaccines ever even came out and they're saying
hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin had a few doctors on it were like yeah i think we think
this is a good preventative um medicine to take if you're worried about getting covid and then
if you do get it maybe you should take it as well and boom susan wasiki threw us in time out i uh
i got uh i got banned a couple of times on twitter until i finally figured out how to talk about it
euphemistically without like tripping the sensors but uh i remember during the time like youtube
was just nuts and then also like instagram like meadowhead went kind of went really hard on
uh stuff even well i like i lost my personal facebook account because i was posting about
vitamin d you know yeah i was it was and it was an old post it was like from the first month of
the pandemic where i said like we don't know much about this but everyone should be getting as much
sunlight as possible because we know vitamin d is uh really important for all respiratory diseases
as simple as that uh i was saying look this is like this worked against works against the flu
colds all these other things we can probably infer even though there's nothing published
so i had all the caveats in there and still yeah it wasn't even like a takedown thing it was like
your personal account that you've had since college uh you know it's gone now uh you can't
like download an archive of photos or anything. It's just, it's a,
it's a really demeaning experience to go through something like that.
Oh yeah.
You know, I just, and now it's like having social media for personal reasons.
It just feels like you're setting yourself up for, for failure somehow.
Yeah. And the fact that you did that as early on in the pandemic,
is even more crazy to me because i vividly remember again my son was born right before
it became apparent that covid was a thing but i think bitcoiners were on to covid early like
december january particularly and we had a doctor's appointment with my wife before she
gave birth to my son it was like one of the last checkup appointments before she gave birth and i
was freaking out my wife was yelling at me in the uber over to the doctor's office because i was
i'm gonna ask about covet should we be worried she's like don't you're crazy like there's nothing
going on here and i was like it i don't care asked and the doctor looked me straight
in the face she's like you have nothing to worry about you should be more worried about the flu
and then the fact that it went from something that you should not be worried about to something
that you had to censor anybody who was questioning any anything the regime was putting out about it
uh it happened literally within a six-week period yeah and they were uh they were mocking people
like they were saying like though the tech bros down in austin are like paranoid because they're
you know not shaking hands at south by southwest and all and then yeah washington post vox all these
vultures um the early thing was like if you have any concerns about code if you even mention it was
racist it's racist it's coded it's dog whistles you know about chinese people it's like okay
you're calling it a dog whistle but it's kind of in that context it's kind of a dog whistle in and
of itself i'm not saying that they're eating dogs or that's where covid came from i'm saying there's
a lab in town and that's which is like the funny thing too is when they tried to say the lab leak
thing was racism uh if people talked about the lab leak like they were being doing coded racism
it's a lot more racist to say it came from a wet market you know like the official line was like
these disgusting chinese people are eating bats you know this is how it happened instead of just
like uh yeah there's a lab accident and uh everyone covered it up as tends to be the case
and uh bureaucracies like chernobyl uh the the hbo series it came out like just the fall before
you know it was uh it was actually like that was a nice reminder watching that before that was a
nice reminder of just how these uh systems operate but then it became really horrifying
to see the american government do the exact same thing that the soviets had done in the 80s
uh as that unfolded it was uh yeah it was totally nuts but yeah i mean i had the experience of like
being called an alarmist and then being called like a denier and just really without modifying
my position much at all yeah so i i was my position was modified pretty aggressively over
that first six months of 2020 where in the beginning before covid was even talked about
on the news i was hyper worried about it one of those like we were stocking up on food the whole
foods in williamsburg uh wearing masks like two weeks before like getting looked at like we were
crazy people and then quickly by april i was like oh shit i got got this is something else
is going on here like this doesn't make any sense with the lockdowns and the way they're treating
this and um and so i had that pendulum swing especially with the lockdowns because nothing
in the plans leading up to that like nothing in pandemic planning had indicated that that should
ever be an option because it was understood you know even by like people like falchi they were
saying that yeah you don't lock down during a respiratory pandemic this is the wrong thing to
do and early on they were really pushing against locking down uh it wasn't i think until
march came along and they they started to understand i think what could be gained from it
which was the liquidation of the American working and middle class
and a massive transfer of wealth via fiat currency,
printing just insane amounts of dollars.
And, of course, as you know, inflation is not evenly distributed.
It takes from the people who are farthest away from the central banking cartel
that sets around the faucet of the Fed.
and yeah i mean we just watched the greatest robbery in history play out
and no one's even talking about prosecuting the people responsible no no well except bobby
kennedy uh and that's probably why he's polling better than any independent candidate has in 40
years uh so we'll see how the ballot uh access thing goes i know that um like move on.org
it's like a death star of progressive electioneering uh they've now moved on to
fully focusing on kennedy which is pretty remarkable to have such a large democratically
aligned organization um like totally tune trump out like they're not focused on him at all they're
terrified terrified that they're going to lose uh democrat constituencies to kennedy i mean
can you fault people for voting for if it's a democrat choosing between biden and kennedy
can you fault people i don't think so i mean that gets like the bigger question that's been
nagging me and i think i've become pretty convinced that i don't think we're going to
solve this via the bureaucracy or the political system like i don't think we can vote our way
out of this is that am i correct or would you what would you say to that like i'm that's why
i focus on bitcoin going back to the fed like i'm convinced that the lockdowns happen because they
need an excuse to print trillions of dollars because there was something structurally broken
on the back end of the financial system you had the repo spasm in september of 2019 it highlighted
that there was pretty significant liquidity issues and they needed to fix that and so the
covid leak was a um a sort i'm looking for was convenient way to lock down the economy print
trillions of dollars and re um get liquidity back into the system and i think until you take the
power over those monetary levers away like voting and trying to work through the bureaucratic system
is not going to be productive.
Well, I agree in a sense.
The biggest thing I see facing us is a fiscal cliff in 2025.
I kind of suspect they might let Trump win
just so he's holding the bag when that blows up.
However, it's like this irrational thing.
I know, but I kind of still, it's like, all right,
this is like a last-ditch chance to keep from going off script
because when things go off script, really bad things can happen.
And, you know, I think coming up with alternatives,
working outside of the system, like, you know,
all of this stuff is really good, but the, and essential,
and I think long-term, it is the solution.
But I think in the short term, it makes sense to engage at some level, even if for no other reason than political campaigns are often a means by which you're able to get certain messages out to the public about the nature of the system, the nature of things.
And so I, you know, I really like a lot of what Bobby Kennedy has been doing, talking about the Fed, talking about inflation.
I mean, I haven't heard anyone talking these terms since Ron Paul.
Right.
Right. And, you know, there's a lot that can be done administratively in terms of the health issues, the chronic health problems, the corruption within the the medical industrial complex, you know, having a Department of Justice.
It's like there's not that many laws that actually need to be changed.
It's just which ones are going to be enforced.
um and you know i i think with biden we would just be hitting you know there's a danger there
um we've been flirting like on the edge of world war three for a while and my concern is if we got
like tied up into that it could manufacture consent for like a a massively destructive
of war, but also I could see them trying to do something like that, uh, as a way to slingshot
out of the economic problems, fiscal problems, kind of the same way that FDR used world war
two, uh, to slingshot out of the recession or the great depression.
Um, and you know, I think in any kind of major confrontation like that, like anything we
could do, uh, we should do to avoid.
so i you know i believe you know at the end of the day i'm an all about all of the above guy
right like let's try it via the political system but let's not put our faith in the political
system that's like that might be a hail mary to where we could get some kind of melee type
situation you know and i i think melee and bukele are good examples for what can be achieved by
going through the usual routes, but with unusual people.
Millay in particular, he's facing a Congress that's dead set against him,
but they have taken a $12 billion cash reserve shortfall
at the Argentine Central Bank, and it's now an $800 million surplus
in the span of just a few months.
I mean, that's from, you know, in fiscal terms, it's, yeah, he has a great team with him.
Policy people, he's enabled, like you have like actual, you know, people who know Austrian economics now running the program and you see the results they get in such a short period of time.
You know, it does inspire you a little.
God, I see what you've done for other people and I want that.
and i get some people who are like oh okay well why should i care about el salvador or argentina
and they're any of these places i was like so you have somewhere to go to if it really gets
you know if it gets really weird here and i know a lot of people have done the whole thing i was
born here i'm going to die here i admire that attitude and i have it myself uh at the same time
you know if you have uh if you have a family and young children uh i think you do need to be
thinking you know at least uh in theoretical terms about like what how how bad is are you
willing to let it get here um well what's the worst case scenario in your mind like how what
two pass could you see this going down um maybe it's not just two you know in one case it could be
uh they reinstitute the draft they start sending you know your kids off to die for taiwan or
ukraine or whatever proxy they've decided as the um you know the be-all end-all um
Um, or, you know, we get, I mean, at the same time, uh, let's say they start world war three.
Um, I don't know.
We get nuked.
Um, that's a pretty bad thing to go through.
You know, I, I think it's, uh, it's a lot nicer to be in Argentina eating steak than, you know, outside of DC, like, uh, with your skin peeling off from radiation.
uh or just probably the more likely thing is things just like continue to deteriorate uh
economically and socially and culturally and you basically would have kids growing up in a country
where there's no opportunity um and just a lot of bad stuff a lot of risk a lot of good people who
suffer in these uh in in situations where you have these like anarcho-tyranny systems
um yeah like you you see it now already the deaths of despair because so much of the heartland has
been hollowed out you know i mean there there are great innovations and exciting things happening
going and opportunities in america and all that but but geographically they're pretty confined
to like a few key areas like here in austin you know here in austin it's like it feels so
different from the rest of the country but you could drive you know a thousand miles from here
and not run into any other place where there's any level of opportunity for young people
the way there is here so you know if if let's say argentina became an engine of dynamism
and and that sort of thing i think that uh you know i mean same for el salvador bukele just
announced uh they'll be giving away 5 000 free passports for you know doctors and artists and
you know just they want to bring great minds to el salvador to vitalize the country um
you know i mean that's that's real vision right there and i think his ambition is to uh
to turn the place into like a singapore central america yeah it's so frustrating
as an american somebody grew up in philadelphia really had that sense of how the country was
founded in the spirit of the founding fathers imbued in my personality to a certain degree
maybe it was just because i was more attuned to and more interested in it growing up than others
but there's again that idea that i'm going to stay i'm hopefully not go down with the ship but
right the ship something i certainly align with philosophically and it's just like what the fuck
do we need to do to get this back on the right track whether it's via the political system
which we're touching on here like i think one thing that you're doing particularly with im 1776
i think we need to really instill and ingrain these ideas of freedom and abundance into people
So the American populace is literally fat, complacent, stupid right now.
That's like the big thing.
Another big thing in my mind is like,
how do you light that fire in people's minds
to take agency over their lives and take control back of the country?
It's no easy answer to that.
No, there isn't.
it's uh there's such a variety of things that i think have had that have people kind of trapped
but um you know there's there's a lot of programming there's a lot of beating down
particular generations it's like a lot of millennials graduated into the worst
job market and since the great depression they were getting their feet under them and then like
covid came along and ripped the rug out again uh and yeah it's just like after uh after a while
people get burnt out and kind of hopeless and i i think covet is uh well what we call
covet but it was a number of things it's everything that happened in 2020 and shortly after
uh put it that way the events uh because you also throw in the election um january 6th
uh all these things that had there that created these um
these current things right the things to get everyone scared and hyped up over
um you know i go to other countries places like italy uh el salvador obviously but just all around
and they've bounced back pretty well from the pandemic like you still have this uh you know
there's like youth vitality vibrancies like return to towns and you know places are people are having
fun and um there's just like a i don't know a carefree spirit and in america though it seems
like people have just been so beaten down like there's this heaviness that you find almost
everywhere in the country and it's just like an exhaustion and i think it's because like we
followed up covet with well when we piled on on top of it right january 6th thing which was like
blown all out of proportion into like i mean they mention it in the same breath in the same sentence
as 9-11 and pearl harbor you know connell harris getting up 9-11 and now january 6th you know
like pretending to be solemn and all this stuff and then after january 6th you had
um the vaccine mandates that happened after it became very obvious that young people were
dropping like flies from myocarditis and other issues um blood clots and then you had the fall
of afghanistan which i i think we should have got out of afghanistan but it was done in like the most
sloppy embarrassing humiliating way possible um and you know it's just been like one hit after
another and slow building inflation or quick building inflation i think that's been one of
the biggest psychological for me now you know i remember when you could like walk around a grocery
store and it was a nice experience and you just oh yeah i'll get this now it's like all right
going in with a list consulting the sale thing it's like why does this cost three times as much
as it did you know a couple years ago uh but the thing actually the thing about inflation that
i think drives me most crazy is shrink inflation oh yes because it's that's like uh
uh that's surreal you know it's like is it just me or are the candy bars getting smaller
or the bread loves you know losing slices like what's going on here and uh like like my local
grocery store they now sell a half a loaf of bread for what a full loaf of bread used to cost
i think it's marketed as a half a loaf yeah a half round of sourdough but it's done it's
packaged in such a way that it it's supposed to look like kind of similar um it's just like
shorter and you but like toblerone bars i think they're one of the ones where they like
take the notches off or take the notches off yeah it's just uh and then there's also what happens
where lower quality ingredients are added in and this sort of thing it's like all of these ways
people try to hide inflation um rationally you expect it but um yeah it's just the little things
of uh you know you swap the sugar for corn syrup and all this stuff that's uh and then it's nuts
you're confronted with that reality at the grocery store and then you go home you
check twitter put on msnbc god forbid and the government's telling you no inflation's down
it's uh it's solved it's at its lowest rate since uh before trump even got in the office
and that's like the the orwellian doublespeak propaganda that's initiated and they constantly
tell you well you know yeah okay your groceries cost more and tell them that but wages are up
and i'm like not if you haven't switched jobs yeah like no one's getting raises out there
um layoffs are happening companies are advertising job positions that they're they have no intention
of filling because they want to appear to like investors and such that they're in a growth mode
they're hiring and all this but all so much about the economy is just illusory uh you know i've got
like friends in tech who they left their jobs thinking they could just you know easily jump
into another one and they've been looking like six eight months and nothing crickets i mean i know
you know tech as a sector it's like gotten hit particularly hard but then people will be like
well you know they can be plumbers it's like well it takes some time to learn how to be
become a plumber and when everyone goes and becomes plumbers the wages for plumbing is going
drop a lot so you know that's why one of my bugbears is like when people are constantly
pushing the the trades thing um saying that ever tell all the young people to go work in trades
i was like y'all are a bunch of boomers who just want it to be a lot cheaper for you to remodel
your house because that's exactly what's going to happen if everyone rushes into these industries
you know it's the nature of labor markets yeah well and then you have
sticking on labor markets like all the jobs reports over the last two years have been
revised now we're two months later and very quietly the job growth has predominantly been
either part-time job growth or full-time employment that's been taken up by illegal immigrants
and then i mean speaking of like wage growth we have an incredible example of an attempt to
manufacture wage growth in california this week where they instituted the 20 minimum wage for
fast food workers and he literally had overnight companies shut their doors and fire thousands of
people and this the central planning whether it be via overt policy or the data manipulation
again going back to the exhaustion that you were mentioning earlier i think that's another
big factor in it is like people are seeing these things in their real life and then the government's
telling you don't believe your lying eyes everything's okay it's the the best market
we've ever been in yeah well you know it all goes back to 1971 doesn't it it does that's when we had
the great divorce between productivity and wages used to be gains and productivity people were
compensated for um and you're not going to have i don't think we're ever going to have like a good
wage
growth model
until we go back to
until either like Bitcoin becomes dominant
enough for people to be paid in Bitcoin
which would be awesome
or
just like some kind of strict
either like Taylor rule at the
Fed or you know
go back to some kind of standard
I like the lead standard
lead standard
yeah
economy backed by bullets
yes
and butter i went i went giant vaults at fort knox we're gonna like stock them with uh
5.56 rounds and then really fine butter that has been one of the positive externalities of all this
economic pressure um at least in my life i'm like obviously can't speak for everybody but
my wife has noticed it at the grocery store she's like fuck like the good butter the good bread
it's way more expensive or you're getting less so she's decided i'm going to make my own butter
make my own bread that's been something that's been happening in our house over the course of
last year it's been incredible makes their own pasta as well um yeah that was that's what it
took for me to uh double down and just start like buying whole cows whole hogs all that that's been
great actually um so it is there is this trend of um like millennials suddenly connecting with
the silent generation in terms of lifestyle that is uh it's it's interesting to watch and that's
like the best case outcome you know like that's the healthy way to adapt to these kind of pressures
the problem is when you know people take these pressures and like just give up hope you know
start on drugs or drinking heavy or whatever you know all number of vices that are coping
mechanisms for all this and um or just suicide and like the suicide rates are nuts the assisted
suicide rates are nuts oh yeah the uh yeah they're killing the autistics in uh canada now
yeah and uh i think i saw someone was a 28 year old in sweden was getting assisted
who decided last week which is crazy some of the more publicized cases i feel like they're
going for attention yeah i believe it's like no it's very perplexing if somebody was a father
with two young children i look out the world i'm like holy fuck what are you two gonna grow up in
and and the canadian government is saying that uh we can't afford to not do the maid program
like they're now talking about it in fiscal terms and it's getting to material levels i
think it was like five percent of deaths in canada last year were made wow
do you know how they're doing it i think an injection injection multiple injections one
to numb and one to kill that's uh that's wild because like the pharmaceutical companies now
won't sell it to states for execution purposes but i assume the same manufacturers are like
selling it to the these governments for uh assisted suicide yeah it's uh yeah it's like
they're they take the great moral stand against like uh executing someone who i don't know killed
a young couple and burned their bodies and uh but it it's fine to do this for like
kids who are molested and have mental health issues because of it
How much do you think a lot of this is driven?
I mean, we've been focused on the economic and the political of it,
but how much of the despair and the exhaustion and overall stress that we see
is driven by a lack of spirituality or connection to God?
You know, I think that's a big part of it,
and I think there has been a turning in all of this.
like i uh like the new atheism of you know past 20 years or so like that's gone
um you know people are people are searching so i'd put it um
and you know i think because that foundation didn't exist there's a lot of people who
um you know got especially buffeted hard by those times but also like uh
the church is being shut down during the pandemic.
I think that made things worse than it needed to be people's
connections to, to God and to each other.
And, but, you know,
and I think the other part of the malaise is just like, it's,
it's such an open clown show. You know, it's like everyone,
you just see the fakeness, right? Like the,
the fake president right who is supposedly declaring easter like a trans day invisibility
he has no idea what's going on no it's like that is not that man that's some like staffer you know
who didn't even know my theory is like they just didn't know when easter was like they're just
you know out to lunch on that and then they just doubled down after they were called on it um and
And then the order went out for the rest.
Okay, light up the Empire State Building, the trans flag colors tonight.
You know, we've got another thing.
I mean, it's like I don't give them much credit for having, like,
a big overarching plan.
I've met too many of them.
I had a weird run-in slash conversation with Anthony Blinken not that long
after the Ukraine invasion started.
and you know before i thought on like television that uh that that was an act the way he would
talk you know i was like he can't really be that much of an idiot and be secretary of state right
and no i talked to him and it's like wow this guy really is this stupid
how did you and that's scarier what was your chance and i don't know if it's scary it actually
gives me hope because uh i think the idea of this like big art this big plan that is being executed
uh makes people feel hopeless but if because that's the thing i don't know if you remember
the uh i think it was a academy of ideas video that became very popular in covet is like mass
about mass psychosis mass hysteria whatever you want to call it and he had to follow up to that
which i thought is actually been very influential on how i approach what we're doing here on the
show and in my writing which is you literally have to ridicule these people highlight to others out
that they're literally fucking stupid and once you have this knowledge that there's not some
grand plan there's a bunch of idiots in control like you can begin to highlight the fact that
they're abject idiots and then some way some form get back control yourself well i think it's
i think the issue is like when
that's the cut of the people that are running the show but they keep running the show
right it's it's kind of like i i deserve better enemies like god give me better and they're not
sending their best it's like is it better to be targeted by like a jack the ripper type serial
killer and killed that way or just like some like random uh crackhead just like stabs you with a
bottle and you bleed out on the subway platform like i don't know i think it's like if you're
up against something that's like a conscious plan or something at least it's sexier yeah
more of a hero's journey yeah more of a hero's journey it's just it's not like
meaningless random violence that's a good point random stupidity just like people lashing out
it's like what if there is no one behind biden like what if he actually is giving the orders
but just in an advanced demented state like that's that's pretty uh see america's colleagues
yeah you know i thought that was uh going to be senator federman
that stroke was the best thing that ever happened yeah yeah it's like how do we uh how do we
replicate this you know it's like he took the trump vaccine that's the other thing too everybody
thinks trump's like gonna be the savior of all this many people forget that operation warp speed
um yeah i think the biggest risk is that uh you know term two would just be like jamie
diamond as treasury secretary and you know just like a staffing of like a collection of
you know some of the most entrenched uh elites in power i mean term one proved that yeah that's what
what would happen maybe it was steve mnuchin but um on the war side of things like he surround
himself with pretty terrible people yeah i could and i could kind of see it early on because it
was like well you know there's a lot of uh there's a lot of fear that he's like day one he's going to
like start pressing the the nuclear launch button but as there was turnover it's like they were just
getting replaced with other bad people and it wasn't until the very end like the very end of it
that was that that almost made everything worse because it was like this is who you could have
put it uh department of defense all along but you waited till like november 2020 to like put in
miller uh you know or these other it was like the the last couple months he just started like
throwing in like the wildest people and that's because they were the last ones who would work
for them but if they had been as staffers all along i don't think it would have ever gotten
to that point so god there's so many angles to this series now i want to talk about like the
media's state on this and we're talking about social media earlier but now you have this
environment where you have tucker breaking off there's a lot of independent publications like
im 1776 coming to the fore um obviously of the this fracturing of the mainstream media into these
more you have more established people defecting from mainstream going independent there's tucker
megan kelly don lemon on the other side cuomo um and how much they've fed into this
the least that we've it's interesting to see cuomo uh like off the leash for all these
personalities like off the leash but then you just like realize that um pretty much everyone
who works professionally in media is a chameleon oh yeah and it's it's like it's not the on-air
personalities you hate or you love like um you know they're reading scripts and i don't know i
i think uh i think with the impact of tucker's cancellation you now have this phenomenon where
like tucker was kind of the guy who kept people on script but he did a good job of identifying
like which topics which things to run after um like how to herd the cats and
without that monologue every night i think there's just now a lot more um weird like
infighting and weird directions that things are taking.
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freaks. The price of Bitcoin is going up. You need to understand it. This is the best zero to one
primer back to the show. I don't know. I think a lot of people are trying to be entertained
and that's, that's becoming a problem because you have like, I don't know, Charlie Kirk, who's
running the biggest, uh, right wing youth organization, suddenly just getting up and
being like 30 year women are not in their prime uh i hate the whole manosphere it's it's they all
need to be taken out back a lot of them i mean a lot of it's it's very it's all a bunch of
hypocrites who no one don't practice what they preach i don't think they believe all of it
again this is a lot of people who aren't in their own prime either they've hit the wall in that now
her uh exactly i mean well it's uh it's very online and ahistorical too because like people
are thinking when people are talking like the phenomenon of a spinster is without precedent
or you know the guy who just like doesn't get married or the wine ant yeah this it's like these
archetypes of you know they go back thousands of years uh there's always a percentage of them
in any society and it used to be that uh people just had the good taste to like not try to be
unnecessarily cruel like a lot of it you know talking about like oh these these women who
aren't married it's like a lot of these women they're they're not married because no guy has
asked them you know it's not through like any fault of their own um and i don't know somehow
like just making that a thing is it's just for people to talk about in public to me it's just
kind of uh it's it's very uh low-class behavior it it is and it's creating this weird i mean i
don't know if it's indicative of a broader trend but i've seen like yeah i've seen like reddit
posts from women who've been happily married for years and they're like my husband started
watching andrew tate or name your other manosphere influencer and now he thinks that he has the right
to just have sex with whoever he wants and his his uh his place on earth is just go forth and
spread his seed and he doesn't need to be monogamous like that's just one example of
the corruption that you have this whole his brother put out this video talking it was
basically like a coaching guide like this is how to convince girls to give you their virginity
uh but then on the flip side of it it's like well i want my wife to be a virgin
that's the other thing it's like they're like promoting like this one life style on the other
hand but then they're just saying but for me i mean for my wife then like you know she needs to
be like untouched and it's this uh yeah complete like hypocrisy and schizophrenia and it's like
why is this even like up for discussion yeah like why are people actually interested in this
the uh the impressions and the views and the attention it gets would suggest that they used
to say that uh that the uh the war of the sexes uh would be impossible to fight fight because
there would be too much fraternization with the enemy um but now i kind of worry that that's not
the case anymore like people really do buy into these uh to some of these like group um
like paintings of a group right like these ultra stereotypes and caricatures like all women are
this way or like all men are this way or many do this media it's like 99 of the time they're
like talking about one specific person in their personal life you know like uh you know one woman
who did this thing to them or maybe two and then like amplify it as like this is a critique of
billions of people yeah uh you know i i still see people as individuals uh that you know very
often resist categorization and um pigeonholing and you know it's a lot more uh i think it's a
lot more fun to get to know people on individual levels and judge people on individual levels all
that kind of at the end of the day i come back to being a liberal like classic mlk you know content
of character all that stuff it's uh you know because that's you lose uh you lose things when
you take uh something as complicated as a human being and you you know narrow it down to like
m or f or yeah you know rd or any of these things like you know people are bitcoiner like that's
what i was like earlier i was trying to be particularly lack of a better term like i don't
want to paint everybody's into bitcoin as um a regimented subgroup that believes all the same
things certainly we could we could say a person of bitcoin yeah person of bitcoin the people of
bitcoin um it's like the whole rise of identity politics on the left that was what drove me to
like you know what would be defined as the right and so like a right-wing version of that that's
not what i'm after you know if that makes me just like a dinosaur then that's fine well and you think
again i even hate people like if people would call me i am conservative i'm like i'm married
to 25 of children we go to church like trying to conserve traditions that we grew up with
and yeah i'm conservative but i even hate that label like i'm like i said very much in line with
viewing everybody as an individual getting to know them i think something that drives a lot
of that there's a lot of the people who are like promoting the discourse uh curse me they are
themselves very deracinated and they don't have i think strong identities and i think that's why
they're they're kind of like grasping towards that right like a lot of the people who are the most
like online kind of annoying proselytizing christians are like themselves recent converts
right and they're like the ones saying that um well you know all protestants are going to hell
and it's like they just became a catholic last year yeah and you know like cradle catholics
like they don't talk that way no so that's me like so i grew up catholic still a catholic but
it's maybe blasphemous to any of the new age catholics out there where we've been going to
an episcopalian church just because it's convenient for us it's down the street they say the nicene
creed they don't believe in transubstantiation which i still have a little bit of a problem with
but um it's the community we've grown up with in our neighborhood who our boys hang out with
That's where they go to church, and it's convenient for us.
There's not that many Catholic churches here in Austin, Texas.
My dad once described to me, like, the Episcopals are like Catholics
without as many of the bells and whistles.
And it is, like, across the spectrum, but, you know, that is an example.
But then you have, like, other people who, like, they'll be, like,
catholic converts to like they'll become evangelical or something and then it's like
it's it's the opposite phenomenon they'll then suddenly be like freaking out on the other
catholics or you know they're like they're family members that didn't do the conversion process with
them um i guess some of and some of that's like a natural thing but with this other stuff too like
i don't know like american nationalist identities and some of these things like not having a strong
regional identity but see like a certain brand of person like they're really into the idea of
america but they're there's not like a particular place or region within it and then you you find
out that they're tweeting from from uh malaysia it's like okay maybe that's why yeah the and
the other thing somebody was born in philadelphia we moved to south carolina charleston for four
years when i was growing up went to college in chicago live in new york now live in texas like
there are these distinct cultures there is no there may be quote-unquote american culture
that anchors back to it's like the idea of what the founding fathers fought for but beyond that
like there are these subcultures that are beautiful and necessary and probably
necessary to have um a strong society overall at the end of the day yeah i see i see uh identity
as being kind of like this nesting doll thing right so just in like the context of national and
regional all that it's like you know american virginian and like start boiling it down to you
you know i'm from this town philadelphia i'm from this parish yeah yeah well places like
philadelphia boston all these cities like have very strong city identities uh and that's a very
classic thing you know athenians versus spartans and all this like that's in a lot of ways that's
like a lot more uh natural and better fitting than to try to have like a national identity
you know i think something um that's kind of missed when people talk about like nationalist
movements and uh early 20th century whether it be uh germany or france or wherever was that a lot
of these were left-wing in a sense of like having this um homogenizing culture war type flavor
right of creating like a german people which was actually a new invention in many ways because
before that well you had swabians you had bavarians saxons right all these like very
distinct peoples and cultures and you know try to mash them up into one you know homogenized blend
an example of that too is um in france during the last election like this right before the
election maureen le pen said that she was against the teaching of the breton language
in the schools in brittany um yeah because it was a regional language it wasn't french
but it's older than france you know and that's that's the example i use is like nationalists
are not always your friends you know because they'll ask you a lot of times to give up
all of these like real particular things that i think at these lower levels of uh
uh, you know, attachment like to particular places or regions or whatever, like that's,
that's what, you know, the, the big national stuff, like that's the broad outline,
but what really gives a color to it all is like these really particular attachments people have.
And yeah, I think there's a generation out there that's like looking and they've been stripped of
those, right. Because of this ongoing cultural revolution, they've been stripped of those.
And so now they're like, they're out searching, trying to, you know,
grasp onto these things.
But unfortunately enough of them are being annoying in the process that it's,
it's creating a lot of noise.
What do you mean by that?
Well, just like what we were talking about with like, I don't know,
manosphere type of stuff and this and that.
It's just like, you know,
people are just like groping around in the dark for answers and bumping into
people and things are kind of messy.
Yeah.
i mean and that's a product of the weird inflection point we find ourselves in
humanity finds itself in with this transition to the digital age like we have these
digital spaces where people who are geographically distributed across the world can meet and
think they um not think but in some cases definitely like that's how i found a lot
everybody comes on this podcast i met on the internet most people i found on this podcast
met on the internet but we're in this weird inflection point where people are over indexing
on the digital forgetting the physical sort of connection you need in your everyday life
and beat space yeah uh for me like within this sphere you know for a long time i uh
i just you know didn't hardly meet anyone offline um from it i just kind of kept kept all that
um, segmented, but then, you know, going to, uh, come to places like Austin, you know,
come in here, all this, it's, it's great because when you're actually able to be in a room with
someone, whatever, like it's, it's so much richer than just the content that, uh, that's out there.
And I think one of the most valuable, um, things you can take away from all of this is just like
the the uh connections like that uh you know like what if the real maga was the friends we made along
the way well it's uh it's funny i had so i have this internal struggle
where i would not be sitting in this chair i would not have the life and the career
that i have today without the connections i made online in the bitcoin space
and now broadly branching out to other tangential areas, if you will.
Moved my family to Austin, Texas.
Most of my family, my wife's family, big Irish Catholic families,
are in Philadelphia.
It's this weird struggle I go through where I feel very compelled
to work on what I'm working on and be around physically the people
that i'm working with but then family is the most important thing this is like this i don't know if
i'm articulating this appropriately but uh the distance being physically disconnected from my
family while working on something passionately here is something that i struggle with yeah it's
uh it's a very american struggle yeah i'm reading the uh especially for like californians because
like you know for for those of us from the east coast like our our family stopped when they got
to a certain point californians it was just generations they continued across and so you
have like the most restless breed of americans um and you know without modern air travel or any of
this stuff so many people like that's that's kind of a core part of the american identity though is
It's just like just being willing to uproot and go, you know, and put new roots down.
But, yeah, totally.
And it became, I think it became a much bigger thing, though, after World War II, right?
Because most people, even with the settlers and all of that, once they put down roots and created families, they stayed somewhat in the same areas.
uh after world war ii we had like this new paradigm of labor nobility mobility uh people
moving across the country for aerospace jobs cold war industries all this stuff and uh there's a
really interesting essay written by joan didion called uh slouching towards bethlehem where she
had pinned a lot of the late 60s cultural foment on just how like novel and artificial it was to
move away from your extended family and like raise your kids in a subdivision um and it was such a
new thing that like the you know the parents had just like kind of done the same thing their
parents had done but without like the extended family being around uh that ended up being a very
different experience for the kids right like you know having grandma and grandpa next door like
that was kind of like the uh that made one model of parenting work and as those parents though went
and you know tried to do the same thing but without that extended family presence uh it just
led to in a generation that had a like a lot of runaways you know kids would just run off to san
francisco and be preyed upon by pimps and drug dealers and all this sort of thing um so yeah i
mean it's something that i think each successive generation since has like gotten a little better
at dealing with i think uh the rise of affordable air travel has probably just like made it much
much better. But now, you know, I hear of this thing, not in my own family, thank God, but
among others where people talk about like their parents just not being that interested in seeing
the grandkids. And this is like totally unimaginable, of course. Yeah, my roots are
kind of similar. It's like Scots-Irish and then Irish-Catholic and then some English. So,
uh you know we have i come from like a big rambunctious family where family is everything
like you know for scots irish and irish it's like it's the it's the extended clan like that's
that's who you're loyal to you're not loyal to a country you're not loyal to any of these things
you're loyal to the family uh and you know hearing now about how you know there's some
like older americans who are just less connected that that really scares me yeah
no i mean that's the i mean that's exactly my family i have 25 cousins we're all like brothers
and sisters like we leave austin since we moved here we've left austin in the summer and gone to
the shore where we all congregate my whole extended family congregates on a small barrier
island and we throw the kids in the middle of the circle there's probably an 80 person circle
around the kids and you have grandparents my generation our kids like all intermingling
together it's very important particularly for the kids to see us interacting with our parents and
how it really does take a vill i mean i think what we have is very special something i desperately
want to protect i think other people should strive for but um takes the whole concept of
it takes a village and really um makes it very apparent in the physical world yeah
yeah i think that's that's another thing too of like the um the more recent like decline in the
conditions of the cities that's so bad is like the the large families within the cities i mean
that's such a instant that's a such a cultural pillar um you know that making a lot of these
cities uh like philadelphia you know making it harder for people to to thrive there it's like
they're kind of replacing the population to a large extent i don't even say mass in english
where i grew up anymore wow it's a portuguese and korean for brazilian or are there portuguese
moving there brazilian brazilian wow it's uh that's what like you mentioned the uh
philadelphia's very interesting um so i grew up in northeast philly so not too far from where you see
all the people doing trank under the frank fordell the interesting is like frankford has always been
that way it's always been like when i grew up my parents were like don't ride your bike past
kensington have um towards towards frankfurt uh the frankfurter um but now it has devolved
to a certain set particularly on the outskirts but i don't know philly's uh i consider it the
shire it does have these strong pillars that i don't think will ever ever um crumble south philly
um philly was uh it's always been like fascinating to me because you can have something like uh
boathouse row on the schoogle and then where i i used to go to race in college
at the the dadvale regatta yep still held on a saturday to respect his uh beliefs that you
shouldn't exercise on sundays uh really cool event largest collegiate rowing competition in the
country but uh at the same time like just a few miles away staying in a hotel that had a bullet
proof concierge that's like a bunch of uh prostitutes standing outside yeah that uh are
the person who did logistics for our rowing team um they fell for the fake reviews that the uh
indian cousins had left just like ah this is such a cheap motel and it has a five-star rating
well it's because that's i went to high school right not too far from boathouse row in north
philly on um and that that is like because you get fair amount you get gerard ave and you get
towards north philly like towards temple and that was uh i went to an all guys prep school and
you were like in the middle of north philly where like you had lockdowns for like stray bullets that
were being flung around around the neighborhood where we went to high school but you could
easily walk like to boathouse row from high school so you have this like juxtaposition of
the chaos and the beauty of what was built um in the previous centuries yeah it's uh
yeah it's really something i mean you get these glimpses of what it was like
kind of before um i see this in brazil a lot like in rio there's beautiful colonial architecture
that's crumbling and then like modernist brutalist architecture like it's more recent but it just
hasn't been well maintained uh and then like you know by the 2010s it's just like squalor
all around that and it felt a lot like being like the barbarians living in the ruins of rome
you know it's like there's aqueducts but no one knows how to keep them up
um i don't think uh i don't think philly's that far gone as as rio but it is uh it is interesting
to be in these places where you know it's like a lot of old nice architecture that and things
get run down you know there hasn't been a major civic beautification movement in america since
like 1920 like with the city beautiful movement uh and it's it's incredible to me how many um
um parks and museums and just great you know public works are from that period like that 10
years of uh or however long it lasts i think it was yeah it was like 1920 to when the depression
kind of put us put a damper on that sort of thing but so much of like what we identify as like this
is what makes this city a a nice place to live or to visit or wherever uh was just like built during
this one decade decade yeah i like this outpouring of like um you know civic reform and beautification
and um yeah when like the mckenzie bezos of that era like was not giving the money just to these
um communist non-profits when they're actually like spinning it to build like a park in a city or
museums or sculptures or whatever else um yeah speaking of and it kind of relates back around
bitcoin uh nashville they have the uh the uh what did they call it it's the big greek temple
that's right there uh it's like the one in greece the parthenon parthenon yeah it's like a replica
of the parthenon that they decided to build in the early 1900s and just huge statue and i think
it's athena but uh yeah you go there and it's just it's amazing it's like kind of in the middle of
the city massive grassy area and then this huge greek temple that's in better shape than uh than
the one in greece obviously it's not as old uh but you think about it like this is what people
in a much poorer time like tennessee in the early 1900s was not a particularly wealthy place
and it's like how is it that you know we're on paper so much more prosperous now but nothing
like this is happening project-wise like there's so few people with vision to just do anything
or the mean you know vision and the means um i think that's why like elon has such a big fan base
you know because it's like there's at least one guy who's still trying to do like these uh
these wild projects and doing things like uh you know manufacturing instead of just software
um you know but and i see some of our guys up and coming uh
like uh the daylight computer yeah the arjun that not fully the parthenon but you can take
that thing to the parthenon and just like you know work from the grass as you know people walk
around the park well that and then like on the on the engineering like the architecture side like
shout out to chuck marone at strong towns and austin tonnell building culture and thousand
year homes like there is bright spots like strong towns i think it's probably one of the most
profound books i've read in the last decade just because it was like holy shit i've never thought
of the economics of a city this way the focus that he has on revenue per square foot and how
you should try to design a city physically to produce an economic outcome it's like one of the
biggest unlocks i've had um in in recent memory and that's the thing it's like it's
but chuck maroney's not mckenzie bezos he doesn't have the the will he can give towns like the
playbook of like if you really care about the economic well-being and the aesthetic
nature of your city here's here's what you can do but you gotta invest in for a lot of these
smaller towns that want to become strong towns it's a massive time investment they don't simply
have the capital to throw it it takes time and vision and patience yeah you know there are these
like i see them almost as monasteries like there's this um school down in charleston where they still
teach the classic building trades like the artisan artisanal style and i i love that it's there
because i think charleston has the best urban architecture anywhere in the country by far no one
comes closer it's like one of the only cities that i recommend for foreigners to bother traveling to
i feel lucky to have lived there for as long as i did yeah amazing place you know scott's
irish that's where what happens like my uh family started in mississippi and then half broke off to
charleston half broke up to philly very interesting yeah yeah i think a lot of uh charleston was built
by like the huguenots um this was one good thing that came from persecuting the protestants as they
sent them a lot of them to south carolina they were really good builders uh but yeah you have
like places like that they're just they're keeping this technology alive and like hopefully you know
some of the elites will start to grab onto it and you can have like another big uh
version of like the city beautiful movement but but that's like i don't know the elites these
days have terrible aesthetics like elon agree what he's doing with spacex tesla um
and all those other companies x now i think it's ambitious something we should be striving for big
ideas the aesthetics are terrible bezos amazon's a great company he ditches his long-term wife for
some cosmetically manufactured side piece yeah it's bill gates like all these people they don't
have good aesthetics which is disconcerting to say the least that's that's uh one you can mark in
favor of trump is uh he has he still has the every man's taste um he does he's one of the only
billionaires who has like the courage to have a beautiful wife and it does take courage to have
a beautiful wife as a billionaire they all seem to be like allergic to it right uh yeah i mean i
guess that's why we have to have new elites that's why the the people in this bitcoin office need to
you know make a ton of money yeah that's why we actually just had a last month an event bitcoin
urbanism where we had austin snell from building culture come in to demister let in that was
to give a great presentation saying like if bitcoin keeps tracking on its route to full
monetization as it has up to this point like right i think he said right now bitcoiners make up one
percent of high net worth individuals does another 10x will make up 10 so on and so forth and at some
point we'll find that bitcoiners are the majority of the high net worth individuals and what is the
proper uh aesthetic for bitcoin though i don't know it'd be mid-century mod or i kind of feel
like art deco no not art deco i mean i'm i'm uh i'm partial towards like
like the bay i'm terrible at like the uh the labeling of these different architectural
periods but um like i love the old stone houses in philadelphia like in chestnut hill
like by boathouse row that aesthetic for that environment um is what aligns with me then you
get a south carolina like the colonial big tall porches that wrap around and uh i do want a south
carolina plantation one day with like the long row of uh of oaks with the spanish moss that
Did you create the...
Have you ever been to Daniel Boone Plantation?
I haven't.
Yeah, it's right on Mount Pleasant outside of Charleston.
Beautiful plantation.
Mount Pleasant is great.
Sullivan's Island.
Yeah.
Love those beach houses out there at Sullivan's Island.
Yeah.
Like that 1930s style of building on the coast is unparalleled.
So we lived in Mount Pleasant.
We went to church on Sullivan's Island.
It was so beautiful.
i think we would take the 30 minute drive to go to church speaking of aesthetics and south carolina
um kiowa is interesting because so much of that has been developed since the 1980s it's a modern
yeah but you go there and it's not like this ham-handed attempt to do like the classical
architecture uh to me it feels like it feels pretty authentic and natural there yeah because
you do have those um those it's like the road to kiowa it has like literally the the oaks yeah
going over the whole road yeah the spanish marsh falling it's beautiful yeah well one of the one
of the principles they had was like remove as few trees as possible so even like building brand new
houses they would build decks around existing trees and so much of new development like they
just go in and clear off an entire site and then like plant you know trees it'll take seven years
to mature uh so i think i mean i think that's a big part of it is just the uh you know taking
down as little of the mature vegetation as possible and you know building around the
environment rather than trying to terraform the environment to just be like a flat pad for house
and yard yeah and there's i mean that's a lot of what we covered at the bitcoin urbanism meetup and
and then i record a podcast with austin turn kelly lennon after it was like economic consequences
this urban suburban sprawl excuse me where like you create a a shit ton of maintenance
debt that will not be able to get paid back in the long run so you're literally gonna have these
suburban enclaves outside of city centers that are just they become the slums that the the poor
people are pushed into eventually because they cannot be maintained economically yeah i have
some brothers in uh construction remodeling and stuff and the uh suburban homes that were built
like the 2000s and 2010s like that's what keeps them in business these things are falling apart
after 10-15 years you know like you have a fake stone applique for chimneys and that starts
peeling back and you see that it's really just like what it's like a chicken coop construction
under there um walls that are sprouting mushrooms because they were improperly sealed or improperly
sided or the eaves are too short and they don't shed the water far enough away to keep the walls
from running uh you know substandard plywood and materials used for roofing all this stuff it's
like it's a huge problem we we like we adopted the japanese model of building houses that are
to be torn down 30 years later but without telling the consumer that that's what we did
and so by the time the average homeowner today i feel like by the time they get done paying down
their mortgage unless they own an older home if they own a new home like by the time they're done
paying that down like the thing is pretty much ready to be replaced uh just like the the grade
of materials that's used all this it's it's insane and then you contrast that with like the
the big old houses you'll find in just about any village in Western Germany
that they date back to the 1100s, the year 1000 and all this.
And you think, okay, it's expensive to build a house like that in the first place,
but is it really expensive?
Because this is going to be housing families for centuries.
I think, I would argue our mode of development right now is the most expensive.
it's not just the maintenance debt but it's that you know it's like it's just not going to be able
to last with maintenance even with really good maintenance uh anywhere nearly as long as it could
if it was just like properly built from the start which is hilarious considering the um
cultural revolution that we are probably under that really pushes uh environmentalism and oh
yeah no it's it's uh but you know like they're pushing the the new you know go get a new electric
car but really um the most environmentally friendly thing you could do is have an old car
and repair it and have you know have a catalytic converter on it obviously but
because of the cost of extracting all these metals to build a truck with um it's better to you know
if we got rid of planned obsolescence, like if that was our,
that should be our response to, you know,
to the demands of the environmental groups is there are really serious
economic environmental issues that we're facing as a country.
And with a lot of the environmental movement,
like the hysteria and just bad policies and things that they're promoting,
a lot of it's just corruption. You know, it's like a way to
um get federal funding for like various you know solar startups and whatever else it's
it's all very much grift um you know the response to that should be like no this is the right way
to do things but i think a lot of people they do this like kind of knee-jerk like
no you know nothing is happening or uh i'm going to like install the thing that
calls this uh black smoke to roll out of my what do they call it coal burners i think or
rolling coal that's one of those things you'll see sometimes uh people like retrofitting their
pickup trucks to intentionally make them dirtier just because it's like a middle finger to the
environment like this is uh well this is insane instead of just saying you know all right we're
not going to do cash for clunkers any of this stuff we're going to you know give you a tax
right off to uh restore and keep like your old car running because it it takes a lot more to
build a new car than it does in terms of like the environmental cost uh it takes a lot more
to do that or for anything like refrigerators freezers my uh my dad has a chest freezer that
was a wedding gift from um 1967 yeah and the thing has been running continuously since then
still uses it still works great 57 years
yeah the bath right and that's well you can't even buy a blender without it
having to buy a new one 18 months later or a washer and dryer i just had to replace a dryer
because of uh not because of like any real mechanical issues but because the uh motherboard
board on the control panel glitched out and was just like uh like wouldn't turn the heat on it
would like so when you turned it on like the it would start spinning but there would be no the
heater wasn't turning on to heat up the air and that's just a computer problem that's just a
computer problem but i samsung doesn't know how to fix it it was out of warranty so they weren't
really able to tell me anything other than uh go get a new one go get a new one
and so i hunted around on craigslist craigslist and facebook marketplace and i got a really old
ge top loader dryer and i was like yeah i'm not touching anything digital this thing is like
totally uh totally you know old school analog uh working great so far and if it breaks down
you know i can get in and like fix them fix it yeah whatever yeah it's uh we've had to replace
our washer and our dryer down here already um which hasn't been fun then we almost had to
replace our washer again and it was just a water line problem and i figured out how to fix the
water line insulated properly i was like all right we're not buying another one of these
yeah fuck man we've covered the macro and the micro of uh the problems that exist
in our world what are you what are you in terms of like actionable things that you're worried about
right now what's your focus
uh my focus right now is on this uh futurism issue next print edition of im 1776
before this particular talk about this particular issue what is im 1776
uh it is a online magazine slash print journal that uh we cover everything from uh
Yeah, commentary on economic, social, cultural, political issues to, yeah, some fun pop culture stuff, movie reviews.
It's trying to be the favored magazine of dictators and mercenaries, as some journalist once said,
which I take as a great compliment.
who said that i don't remember who i was just one of the things i saw um there was a guardian
a piece done on us recently that was just really landed on thick like we we ran an obituary uh
when uh ted kaczynski died i think that was one of the things that they included for it which
i don't know i there was no like explicit call to action like you know send out pipe bombs in
his name so i don't see what their problem was but you know because it wasn't just like a blanket
um everything this man ever said was bad and then there were critical parts of that but
they just use whatever they can because they're uh because they're jealous that uh we get a lot
more views in circulation than they do and it is hard to be i think it's hard to be in the legacy
media now and see like up upcoming uh people like eat their lunch well it's not really the
upcoming people it's the fact that it's people who haven't historically or didn't go to train
as a journalist it's just people that are yeah yeah people who have not gone through the like
the authorized credentialing process and institutions at all i mean i've seen it before
like when i've gotten press passes to cover other things like they just like look at you like
really but you know they let you into the press bin
is your dying breed though and it's that's the i mean i tried to touch on this earlier but that's
the other thing like people over index the impact that these legacy media companies have they've
at some point it was um it was uh warranted they've developed this prestige over time over
course of a century for a lot of them um and they're just hanging on to that prestige that
was built by generations before them yeah i mean they're wearing it now like a skin suit
you know there's uh there's great history of uh and you know journalism in the 20th
century i mean just people who found interesting things out and dug into it and all that i think
Like from the 40s, like up through the 80s,
that was kind of a golden age of reporting for a while.
And one of the biggest things I think we've lost
in a very negative sense when it has come to the decline
and fall of the news media has been local papers.
Because a lot of these local papers were good at,
they had investigative reporters on staff,
they were very good at holding local governments to account.
and now you see like almost none of that. Um, you know,
still it still exists for cities, but like in the places that they're not like
big enough, you know,
to have a dedicated newspaper anymore because people get their news from
Facebook. Um,
and they'll just be like Facebook groups and that kind of like serves the
purpose of what things were previously. Um, but of course, you know,
it's not independent and it's not vetted like a paper it's like any anyone can post in there um
yeah which there are some benefits but then there's other like there's reasons that you have
you have these like formal local newspapers that could actually fact check things before they
threw out the accusations and all this so it's i don't know it's like in some ways this is new
in some ways we're just going back to like the really old model of where uh new newspapers in
america were explicitly partisan and just like said the most crazy like you go back to coverage
of uh some of the early presidential races right and i would be talking about how you know like
andrew jackson you know has syphilis and like all of this stuff it's like national inquirer type
headlines um you know that was the that was the coverage for most of the 1800s in american media
So I guess it was just kind of like a blip that we had this kind of objective local newspaper model that existed here for a while.
Yeah, fast forward to six years ago.
Trump's getting peed on by Russian strippers.
Yeah.
Completely fake.
Yeah, man's too much of a germaphobe for that to ever happen.
I mean, that's how you know it was fake.
like if it was the other way around you'd be like oh maybe yeah but he would not be the one
getting peed on so that's how i know it's fake they let into they leaned into it for
way too long we're still leaning into it today i mean like what's going on they wanted it to be
true yeah because they're sick fucks yeah because they can't uh it's easier to create like a
caricature of your enemy that you can dismiss than it is to address like uncomfortable truths
that you recognize as being true so that's that's why you have to like demonize because otherwise
you just uh you would have to actually deal with whatever they're bringing up which would have been
like the mature thing when when trump came up would have been for the ruling class to be like
yeah actually you know we have hollowed out vast parts of the country with uh these like
allowing china to uh you know do these predatory trade operations like target our furniture fact
of our furniture industry in particular with uh dumping like they subsidize their own factories to
produce copies of what furniture makers and uh virginia and north carolina were doing
and you know there's there were already laws on the books uh to prevent this sort of thing but
the bush administration uh wouldn't move the litigation and so the manufacturers themselves
had to come up with like 15 million for legal fees and you know they won but they didn't win
like enough for it to even make it worth their while and it's like six three yeah it didn't save
the furniture industry it really just meant that you know like that was the last of the industry's
money just went to trying to fight this futile thing instead of like acknowledging things like
that and then trying to work on them and you know be like okay yeah let's like we've transitioned
to like this information economy how do we bring the rest of the country along with us right instead
of taking that seriously they just decided to be like uh yeah so this guy who's saying these things
he was peed one by russian hookers in a hotel and uh all of you people that i think he's coming to
help you you're racist idiots um yeah and again it goes back to the quality of the enemies they're
not sending their best it's literally the only tactics they have are literally like grade school
like he got peed on don't don't deal with him yeah but i guess that i guess that's like that
works on the their people that they need to propagandize um maybe that's why they do the
grade school stuff like maybe just so much of society is still adolescent still adolescent yeah
but i think it is but i think they push too far with covid
i've seen this in my own circle i mean coming from philadelphia you can imagine a lot of
the people i uh grew up with and are related to uh are extremely liberal which is the case
and uh i've seen just in my own personal circles um people that i never thought would
like come to me and be like yeah i think what you've been saying is correct uh you know for me
when that happened it wasn't uh it was from covet they stayed stubborn during covet it was the mug
shot the mug shot when trump was brought in to i think it was fulton county where they did it
uh that was like that that was the big change that i saw that was like the first moment when
people were like uh actually we do have crime in the city it was weird because it was like they
were they were telling me like they were sounding a lot more like me but on these other kind of
issues without even like addressing the mugshot but i think that on some level uh the mugshot
was this like indicator of like no you know this isn't like the big scary fascist man like this is
like a po you know a politician that we have just like perp walked you know it became evident who
really controls the power because they've always tried to like pretend that there's you know
someone on the right is really pulling all the strings and it's like trying
to, you saw this during Trump's first term, uh,
when they were wearing the robes from the, uh, uh, that,
that show, um, handmaid's tale, you know, and it's,
it's also to like when you have liberals pretend to be, uh,
oppressed by Christian fundamentalism, you know, like, Oh,
Christian fundamentals run our government. Like that was during the, you know,
during the bush years it was like that uh you know and so far from the truth i mean he had that
netflix propaganda documentary on the family or whatever it was you remember that uh vaguely yeah
yeah yeah i mean they've had so many of these i mean these different shadowy groups like there'll
be like a catholic fraternity like opus day and it sounds you look at some of the writing on the
in the media about it and i mean it sounds like they're alex jones talking about freemasons
you know it's like uh anthony scalia was like the member of this like there's a secret catholic
organization and they're trying to like turn all women in america into baby making machines
and you know it's like a men's group that like gets together like dc professionals
you know they're they're having coffee every tuesday yeah yeah so yeah i think everyone
likes to on both sides there's just this universal tendency to just invent a lot cooler enemies than
they really have maybe that's the lesson everybody needs to internalize from this conversation
the the enemies are not as smart or
or strategic as we may think uh think they're just uh they're just people that's you know
That's one of these things that I tell people.
I lived in L.A. for a little while, and I'd run into celebrities here and there.
And what had struck me at first until it just became so much of a thing
that I just took it for granted then is, like, how much of a normal people they were.
You know, it's like, yeah, Ryan Gosling at the next table having brunch,
and he's just like talking on cell phone to somebody
and he sounds just like an average Joe.
Could be anybody.
I worked at Barstool Sports in New York for a quick minute
and that was a similar experience,
like seeing all these pro athletes and celebrities come through the office
and they would come to the business floor and talk to people.
It was just like a normal conversation.
Mm-hmm.
people are just people
just people there are some sociopaths out there and there are some that are exceptional too i mean
i i met trump once in person uh and the guy is like such a charmer it's it's crazy he was asking
like where i'm from you know and then like a link oh i own a business there uh you know it's the
best in the state not but just yeah just such a such a people person at a higher level uh
some others i've met like there have been some people uh one guy he uh ended up becoming the
governor of virginia uh bob mcdonnell uh was actually prosecuted by the same prosecutor
jack smith that's going after trump now um was prosecuted was convicted and then the supreme
court overturned it unanimously um it was a political hit job because that guy was going
to run against obama in the second term but uh he could remember people's names at insane level so i
was i was pretty much a kid when i first met him and didn't see him again until like five years
later when he's running for governor and he had um he remembered my name my mom's name knew where
we were from we were we were like three hours away from you know the place where he met us it was just
it was crazy to see someone operate like that and then i uh ended up working on his campaign
uh when he did run and he was like that all over the place someone who just had this insane like
gift but at the you know at the end of the day it was a normal guy aside from from that so
um yeah even extraordinary people are still pretty normal yeah that's a talent i do not have
i'm terrible with names great with faces terrible same here yeah can't can't forget a face can't
remember a name that's that's uh something that's plagued me and it's genetic too because my dad's
it was his worst street as well you can remember anybody's name well you got it honest yeah yeah
it's uh something i'm working on that's why you need to have a good wife you need if if you can't
remember names you need to find a wife that can remember names so she can whisper in your ear
right before you walk up to somebody it's like uh in the veep have you seen that show yeah she's
always got that assistant in her ear like uh i only remember him um the hell was his name in
uh arrested development oh buster buster yeah even if he's buster to be it's just like yeah
he plays the same character and everything it works yeah that is was awesome
i threw this out to you what yesterday yeah yeah sunday great uh yeah i think sunday so
uh so austin is great yeah i'm like uh it's it's cool to i came down here like for the eclipse and
then all everyone's in town and then you know we made this happen this wasn't on the on the uh
calendar anywhere near yeah i had already been here almost a week before then so it's uh it's
cool that there's such a concentration of high quality people in one city you don't see that
much yeah no it is some there's something special happening here well there we have going under
bitcoin here in pleb lab around the corner um a huge health focused community um many different
people focus on different areas of it i feel like there's a wellness center on every corner
yeah i went to the uh daylight computer they had their launches like two different ones
two totally different ones but they were each cool in their own way i was like
you get this like co-working space slash gym slash cold plunge slash sauna
uh different kind of tech launch you know i'm not used to like raw milk being in coolers
it's like this is this is good this is a good alignment
uh yeah and then there's like there's other places so many cool places like there's uh
the comedians rogan's mother ships two blocks away from here yeah um
trying to figure out how to i went to this uh palladium um book club discussion thing on sunday
and as we were leaving uh the organizer andrew he was like yeah this is where elon decided to
buy twitter like the restaurant we were at for lunch i was like oh wow yeah food seems good here
the uh the health scene and so it's great like having lived outside of south carolina
philadelphia new york chicago especially um you're not getting outside that much outside
of spring and summer and chicago you're not getting outside unless it's the summer so being
able particularly with young kids to get outside like in february and have it be 75 degrees it's
fucking incredible yeah and you've got country music too country music it's very important it is
my old neighbor moved down here to play steel guitar i'm doing really well with it yeah
at the uh place at jenny's little longhorn saloon chicken shit bingo
that's the thing is you know you gotta keep this city weird this is uh yeah we've got it makes it
special we don't live too far from the broken spoke and so we'll go there all nice terribly
line dance but uh the first honky tonk ever darkened the door of yeah the uh george straight
played there back in the day yeah there'll be like some big exact brian came and played there
last year at some point that's one thing i don't nearly get out that was the great thing about
chicago um the weather and the uh political policies weren't the best but the blues music
was incredible austin in some ways uh set me on my sort of like weird political journey
why do you say that i was like a i was something of a normie believe it or not it's very hard to
believe back in the day you know like kind of libertarian kind of liberal kind of conservative
just like a standard um but i was listening to tim ferris and he had liz lambert as a guest
on and uh she started a hospitality group here in allison started with the uh the the old motel
i think it was like the continental but it was down off south congress like back in the 90s
when it was really rough over there she like renovated this motel did a documentary of like
the last days of it being an operation as it was which was like a drugged in place of where like
prostitutes and all these other people would congregate and live but uh she started talking
about like her design philosophy and that turned me on to the work of christopher alexander
with a pattern language and the timeless way of building and so that clicked with me so i got into
like the like good urbanism design that kind of like wrath of non and then that led me down like
the rabbit hole so it's like this uh i'm pretty sure she's a democrat yeah it's just like spunky
lesbian from texas starting me down this dark path to uh right-wing extremism
it's funny how the world works the butterfly effect it is
yeah that is funny uh like how the lamberts of the world can recognize something like
urban design not recognize that it takes like a certain will um in a certain uh economic system
to to make that possible yeah i was like it was also a matter of timing too i think because i
think the boutique hotel offerings like at that at in that period like they weren't
really thinking in the in the deep terms that she was about like she would you know like okay i want
this this hotel needs to have like the smell of palo santo in the gardens and and creating like
a multi-sensorial um experience for guests like that that was like light years ahead of where
hoteliers were at the time um at least you know in the states generally uh and i she's
she's her doing that like it's been broadly influential i think across a lot of uh a lot of
the industry since then like uh because now you'll you'll see people i'm trying to think
there's this hotel in santa monica like they have um a pattern language like prominently
displayed in the lobby and they're like they're doing the same thing like there's a lot of people
i think who uh copied what lambert and bunkhouse group did uh ran with it in some ways maybe even
cooler than uh than what she had done but yeah just uh like the the force of will i mean it
takes a it takes a force of will to go in and try to make a nice hotel out of a uh a place that was
like uh you know a monthly motel for drug addicts you know like that's uh a certain like texas
countercultural attitude there but you know you run into all types down in texas there's a there's
this boutique out in uh dripping springs that i stopped by when i was uh out near there on a ranch
hog hunting and i was trying to locate a good belt buckle to uh to fit in successful got a really
nice one with a long horn on it but uh you know i started talking to the owner and at first and
she mentioned moving from uh originally being from connecticut and like i clocked her as like okay
these are one of these northern liberals that are moving down and turning texas and such
i talked to her a little more and she starts going off on the fbi
turns out she's a constitutional lawyer you know like hardcore gun nut
and it's just you would have never like and she even i think she even had like uh like the purple
highlights and stuff it was like she was such like a at first like to me like look like a
caricature of just like a northern liberal and you know talking to her a little bit she's like
completely based they're never taking our guns that was one thing i mean i moved down here three
years ago now at this point that was like when everybody's fucking flooding to texas from new
york and california that was like the big worry like i tell people came from new york and they
go ahead don't fuck up the city too and uh beto o'rourke would be senator now if it wasn't for uh
the out-of-staters he won the native texan vote by a few points the native texans hate cruz probably
for good reasons but i don't see how any even if you hate cruz i don't see how anybody could
no i don't see how you can vote for but it was uh it like the day was saved by the californians
um because for all the for all the complaints about the the californians moving in and changing
things but like californians understand what the stakes are because they've just lived through it
and you know most of the people who when people are complaining about californians what they
really mean is like midwesterners who lived in california for a few years really yeah yeah the uh
the native californians themselves they uh by and large don't leave the state in very high numbers
And when they do there, it's because they're like hardcore conservatives and like, they
don't want their kids to get any vaccines or go to any school.
Um, so like go to Texas or Oklahoma or something.
And they're usually like, uh, grandkids, uh, of the Dust Bowl migrants.
So it's kind of just like returning to Texas or Oklahoma or Arkansas.
but um yeah i mean culturally a lot of california is really similar to texas because there are so
many texans and oklahomans that came there during the depression to pick cotton um including some
of my family um that yeah it's like very strong texas feel there you know it's uh
like mariposa county and the foothills of the sierras and central valley and all that
yeah yeah it's a shame what's happening to that great state yeah it's uh we're going to take it
back we are what's the plan we're going to take it back well the plan starts with the water cycle
like california is out of drought now so i have this theory that uh california's fortunes rise
and fall with the rain and so california's on a 35-year water cycle doesn't deviate that much
from it um john steinbeck described it really beautifully i think was in the opening to east
of eden um but you know you get like 10 really good years 10 kind of middle years and then like
10 really rough years uh and said the one thing that's true is that no one remembers the good
years during the bad years no one remembers the bad years during the good years but my theory is
is because this this water cycle like you can graze a lot more cattle grow a lot more crops
that sort of thing once you're in the good part of the cycle and that changes the balance of power
in the state relative rural and urban and so like the years when the ranchers are doing well
that tends to be and i've looked at this kind of through the political history that tends to be
when you have like these kind of reactionary renaissances and then you know in the hard
years when things dry up it's like the uh the people out in the rural areas they don't have
as much power uh because they don't have as much money yeah and you know the balance of power just
kind of swings back and forth a little bit it's uh there's a little esoteric mysticism to this but
i didn't i didn't realize i'm manifesting it i didn't realize they had a water cycle
that was uh yeah yeah it's uh you know now like there's well before last spring
people were talking as if like this the drought was just going to end everything
and you know the whole the whole state was in drought everything was like state of emergency
there's no water that you can turn and like farmers were just not able to plant here as
much it was it was causing really serious headaches and it was getting to the point where
um there's concern that there might not be enough water for the cities
and like the colorado for colorado river for instance that um it's incredibly dry so it's
not like you could even bring it in from neighboring states it's all across the west
huge drought problem and since then though like starting the last spring it's just been like
torrential rains it rains later into the year it there's a lot more snowpack it's like
here a month or so ago i think tahoe got like 12 feet you know like the the thing that they
used to measure the snow got buried so just unprecedented levels and that snowpack is what
you know keeps the lakes fed all summer and all so uh that was last spring and they were saying
okay well this was like a one-off this might save california for 10 years and then this one
or the same thing starts happening all over again and they had these atmospheric rivers
what they call them the pineapple express from like in the vicinity of hawaii and it was light
if you look at it on a uh kind of what was happening on a weather map it was literally
like there was a river running in the atmosphere from way out in the pacific directly into
california so um large parts of the national park at death valley are inaccessible because
the roads got washed out a lot of it is uh there's like a big lake out there like like what was a you
know the driest desert the lowest spot in north america actually maybe in the world i don't know
is death valley the lowest in the world might be it's either there or the dead sea but it's pretty
close totally like filled up with water i mean remember last year um uh burning man yeah right
burning man got rained out in august yeah it burned out and like it was spreading ebola was
spreading that was the best rumor diplo diplo was bringing ebola back to the masses number eight
that valley is the eighth lowest eighth lowest so lowest in america then but you know america's
the country that counts it's our world you know like it can be
i'm worried ben yeah i'm looking out i'm worried that uh this anarcher
anarcho tyranny is gonna take over but maybe i worry too much i i mean things can always get
worse on the bright side but uh you know things get worse until they stop getting worse and i
think we're we're at a point where i think we're we're kind of hitting critical mass
um but it's just like there's a number of things that i think have to go
you know either i'd say in our direction but it's not even so much as like things have to
come in our direction it's just like we need to not make unforced errors yeah and uh
i was being a bit facetious i'm actually very optimistic particularly because i think um
actually it's funny the guy i was talking to when i went to grabby at the front door it's
what we were talking about all for the last couple hours before you showed up was
this intersection of the bitcoin mining world the energy sector
i don't think people understand how profound it is because um it's probably one of the weakest
layers of our economy right now is the energy infrastructure how fragile it is how
uneconomical it was made via the renewable energy credits like bitcoin mining is breathing
very strong life back into the energy sector and the energy companies are beginning to realize this
and i think in terms of this is something i've been telling people in the industry who are going
to start um their own uh like policy initiatives um packs whatever it may be to influence
policy pertaining to bitcoin in dc is stop wasting all your time money and effort doing that and just
make sure that bitcoin mining gets as integrated into the energy sector as much as possible because
once becomes a critical part of their operational and business stack there's no turning back like
energy is the base of everything we do in an economy and if you get the energy sector
and the energy sector is saying no you can't take bitcoin away from us it is
allowing us enabling us to remain profitable not only remain profitable but expand the
infrastructure make it more reliable and robust there's no turning back yeah do you use your uh
bitcoin miners to heat your infrared sauna not yet not yet there's a free startup idea
out there oh there's people working i mean he had that that spa in brooklyn they're doing with the
pools at least oh yeah yeah it's uh yeah i did hear about that my bitcoin miners are off grid
in appalachia in the woods nice of tennessee on stranded natural gas well i've always liked the
idea of uh putting them down into like a coal mine just like buying a coal mine and converting
into bitcoin uh just like a place to do it there's somebody you can talk about yeah this right
outside this door nice we're going to restore all the coal mines uh and all the uh coal power
facilities in wyoming very nice we're going to return we're going to spin up all all the power
generation that we can speaking of power um you know there's there's some moves towards uh building
some new geothermal power down in el salvador uh really exciting stuff like the harnessing
harnessing the power of the volcanoes uh and mining is would be like a big part of that
but i didn't realize just uh how and how critical it was for uh aluminum production like aluminum
smelting that the prices be consistent it's not so much about high or low it's just like the
instability of of them uh and how consistent geothermal is it's it's really exciting like how
uh the output of the power stations that were built before in el salvador from geothermal
they're still putting out as much as they did in the 70s and like the costs are just so fixed
it's it's really incredible you know because like normally the there's so much fluctuation
and you know i think there's a big opportunity uh there and in geothermal and also you know like up
up around like the yellowstone basin and other areas in the u.s that have geothermal potential
to do like man you know power for manufacturing in particular
where it's so predictable you can do like long-term uh planning with confidence
um it's just a it's a really neat thing that appeals to me especially considering how much
instability there's been in uh other energy markets price wise you know we've just gone
through these whiplashes like with uh with oil and gas oil gas the renewable energy credits are
really fucking up energy markets even here in texas thank god for all the bitcoin mining in
west texas it's really helping to alleviate the negative pricing problem that all this
renewable infrastructure build out is brought to the market but going back to geothermal in
yellowstone one can make a very strong case that it is uh in the best interest of humanity overall
to uh depressurize that caldera to make sure it doesn't explode into the super volcano so you need
to uh channel that energy produce electricity mine bitcoin with it have you ever seen the
hakan tweet i was saying uh uh pray towards continue to pray towards yellowstone focus
on the caldera we can end it here we can end it for all time one of my favorite niche uh internet
subgroups is the uh the caldera cult like i have not stumbled across like apocalyptic in times uh
anarcho-primitivist yeah ted kaczynski posters who they've probably all grown up by now i don't
see as much of it as before but it's one of those things like 2016 there was just a lot more of
focus on the really really weird niche ideologies that are incredibly appealing even if like there
would be no particularly reason to but it's like building a uh a political movement around like
praying to the yellowstone volcano to get to blow up and destroy the museum this is how we in the
fed it's the caldera this is the caldera the caldera that's all uh it's just focused on the
calderas the uh do you think we'll in the fed in our lives i sure hope so i saw i think so i think
so too yeah i don't know i think uh i think next year with uh the fiscal situation like this this
might finally be the uh the point where something happens i mean or just nothing happens and we go
another 50 years i don't know i've been wrong before but it seems if you just look at the chart
of the interest expense on the debt alone it's literally hockey stick it's like well the thing
that for me that uh the left side of the bell curve in me is just like that's not gonna work
the biggest thing for me is is not even like the uh i mean i mean that's a big part of it but
the unfunded side it's the military problem it's what the houthis did like showing that they could
defy the u.s military and that our kinetic options sucked like we were not able to wipe them off the
map that as an indicator of like the u.s may not be taliban back up yeah you know if we can't back
up like control of global shipping you know like that's that's a big problem i think when it comes
to the uh because that's what that's what props up the dollar is we have the military power to
back it up yeah you know it's not totally fiat but it's uh it's based off of having a military that
has insane force production and the military the defense industry has become so bloated
um i talked to uh eric prince the founder of blackwater about this back in december
uh we did an interview for the site and uh you know just like the cost of these cruise missiles
that were launching at like the houthis like that alone but the interceptor missiles in israel you
know that was a big problem um going into this was that uh before even before october 7th it
It was like the periodic rocket barrages that Hamas and other groups would send into Israel.
They were like cheap rockets, but you had to use this $2 million piece of ammunition to bring it down.
And the strategy wasn't to actually overwhelm Israel with the rockets.
The strategy was just to hurt their budget, and ours by extension, because we underwrote a lot of that.
and then you as you can see i had this uh ex intelligence advisor on last year lee slusher
he was explaining to me like what's going like the arming of ukraine's completely depleting
our mission base and the thought i mean there was it's not as pronounced as it was this time
last year but the saber rattling around taiwan um and the idea that we could fight russia and china
in ukraine and taiwan at the same time it's like it's objectively idiotic there's no there's not
enough ammunition we don't have the training to fight on those terrains and we don't have
the recruitment uh necessary to actually get feet on the ground yeah germany had better tanks in
world war ii they had better armor on them they can move faster all these you know in specs they
just uh they blew us out of the water but we could produce 20 times as many of them for much cheaper
than uh than the german tyrant and that's that's how we won world war ii but we don't have that
kind of uh manufacturing capacity anymore or was it napoleon saying quantity has a quality of its
own yeah it has quality of its own um yeah so that's i mean they're the argument for arming
ukraine has kind of been well this is how we get that manufacturing restarted but that would
require us like abandoning a lot of uh ideologies and going back to more meritocratic earlier uh
attitude in america towards business and stuff but then at the same time like
you can't just put everything back together again after de-industrialization because like so many
of the workers have lost the skills like just the human capital element um yeah the competency
crisis is pretty massive right now we're seeing with boeing is that just uh this is everything
we're seeing from boeing is that confirmation bias like has this been going on for a while or
are these anomalies that not a lot anomalies but is there a true trend of the
commercial airline force completely degrading in front of our eyes well another example of this was
was I had started noticing a pattern of big fires
and accidents at food processing plants.
I put together a thread.
I think that's why I started following it.
Yeah.
Now, people took it and ran with it and said that this was proof
that the World Economic Forum was planning to starve us out or something.
And, you know, I mean, I was taking hits for that kind of stuff.
Like, oh, you're promoting conspiracy.
i was like i have not said why it is i'm just pointing out okay this other you know yet another
thing has happened uh you know not making any claims but then the more i looked into it
you know the more i came became convinced okay this is obviously not some uh deliberate plot
but something's happening here what's going on and because that had blown up and got become so
prominent uh some of the people who had like firsthand knowledge of what was going on actually
dm'd me tell me hey this is what was going and overwhelmingly what it was was that um it was
covet now it wasn't the virus making the factories catch on fire but it was the way we responded to
the virus uh so much of the workforce like went home during that and basically the people who
stayed and kept the lights on were doing these like superhuman heroic jobs to keep
the food being processed right yeah keeping the lights on but then the companies were like oh
cool we can actually like get this productivity output with a lower with lower labor costs let's
go tell the investors this is awesome you know profits stocks yay without taking into account
that these people could not like do the heroics forever yeah and a lot of them were baby boomers
they're already older workers they knew they had the knowledge of this is how we maintain things
this is how we would do an analog if the digital goes down you know we had this accident back in
1985 this is how we keep it from happening again all this you know core build-up knowledge and
they were started burning out left and right around a year year and a half into this and
So they started dropping out and the positions would be backfilled,
but with people who had like no knowledge of the factory or how it ran and all
this. So then suddenly accidents started happening.
It's very much like the last, uh, like the last half of Atlas shrugged.
Right. You just started getting this breakdown. Um, yeah, I mean, that's,
I think that novel, like more, more people should read it.
it was a big thing people were reading a lot of around like 2010 or so during
the last recession.
But I think it is actually more applicable today to like the competency
crisis and what's going on. Oh, you've got it right there. Amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's that, so it's not,
if it's just abject loss of knowledge in a particular spot.
So like terrible. So like the Francis Scott Keybridge,
similar story nobody dm'd me directly but um a friend of mine who i trust
um spoke to somebody with knowledge of the shipping uh these um
these shipping fleets and how they operate particularly in the u.s within a certain
vicinity of the coast and apparently there was a policy put in place uh that if you're within
a certain amount of miles from a coast in the u.s or a port in the u.s you have to switch your
engine to like a sulfur-based uh fuel and that makes the reliability of the combustion it
reduces reliability of the combustion and so the source basically told my buddy like yeah what
happened most likely was that they switched to the sulfur fuel and they just like it reduced
reliability of the engine and it crapped out like the absolute worst time is that for like emissions
yeah okay wow around like they don't want emissions in urban environments they need cleaner
air something like that no like yeah you look into you look into big accidents and like these end up
being the things and there's no it's it's more you know more insidious in a way than if it was
part of the big wf plot right because it's just these uh like poorly thought out you know it's
like you you said uh i always know some some bad news is coming when i hear there was a policy put
in place it seems to immediately precede disaster yeah yeah yeah you're getting renewable energy
credit policy uh it's led to central planning central planning it's uh and is it is it that
we are actually losing the knowledge or is it the knowledge is being destroyed by central
planning i mean i think whether it's conscious i refer people a lot of times to the um great f.a
hayek article pretty short but if you uh don't tell people to read it until you realize it's one
of the most brilliant things ever written uh but he talks about how it's like the particular
knowledge of time and place and how that's like accessible to individuals and it's like they can't
even really fully express why they know something or it's like he's saying like this is stuff that
you know, never be accessible to the central planners, but it's coordinated via the price
mechanism, right? I don't need to know why there is a shortage of aluminum. I don't even need to
know that there's a shortage of aluminum. Uh, but I will respond to aluminum prices
and take my scrap aluminum, you know, to a junk dealer. If the price gets like high enough to
motivate me to do that he talks about how it's this thing it's like it's it's clean because it's
like it allows information information to be transmitted efficiently it would be inefficient
for me to have to know why aluminum short you know why the aluminum price was high right the only
thing that matters the only piece of information that matters is the price and how you know price
coordinates activity in that way and the reason why like this is why you do not mess with prices
price systems and what is what is it but messing with price systems when you inject
how much liquidity in 2020 six trillion six trillion dollars yeah yeah the i think m2 money
supply um grew by what is what what's the figure it's like 48 of all dollars have been minted in
the last three years three years four years now four years no you go back a lot this is because
i studied economics in college and that's why i fell down not because i studied economics i
studied economics was brain were attempted and they attempted to brainwash me at the keynesian
view but luckily had a good professor in high school it was like gentlemen like
the austrian view is right like you should go study that where you can so read about it
independently and basically like early on in my bitcoin journey it was like running the numbers
on monetary base and from literally from 1776 to 2008 the monetary base expanded from um zero
dollars 850 billion it took 120 odd years to go from zero to 850 billion post 08 went from
850 billion to six trillion like in a matter of two years now fast forward where we are it's about
20 trillion yeah um complete insanity in a very short amount of time and it doesn't just affect
us we're because that's the reserve currency of the world we are pushing this all into everyone
else and i mean i think that's a big cause of the international instability we see yeah it's like
and you know how crazy inflation drives people and then like you put that on the rest of the world
and it's uh things are dire you know that's why i think bitcoin's an imperative you get the sound
money back and then again the still people have really not grasped the beauty of the intersection
of bitcoin mining and the energy sector the fact that you can there's no such thing as stranded
energy anymore if you have the wherewithal it's a pricing signal you literally have this free energy
that's stranded for my personal miners it's they're sitting on a stranded natural gas well
they had no pipeline connectivity to get to bed stream to get to the rest of the market
we bought a generator a data center mining equipment went to the landowner said hey your
well's not being maintained we'll pay your land lease for the year let us plug our generator
into your gas line to mine bitcoin with you like sure mining is very cheap there it's amazing this
exists everywhere yeah not only in appalachia across the world and again going back to energy
is the basis of everything we do in our economy the fact that you have this free market
monetization of energy that is location agnostic is increase you don't only bring sound money to
the world but you bring a bootstrapping mechanism for energy systems around the world where you have
a purchaser of that energy of first resort and last resort that can bootstrap a local energy
economy yeah that's great and it puts places like appalachia back in the game yeah yeah instead of
like our financialized economy where it just becomes what's what are the financial pillars
of the country right new york's san francisco and sort of thing it brings it back to uh
uh brings it back to the core it's reversing triffin's dilemma in real time i mean that
off-grid example is just one example like a part of a mining company that's doing on-grid
operations in appalachia in the same area as well basically what we do is we go to substations that
were previously delivering electricity to large manufacturing facilities that have moved out
long ago decades ago so they're sitting with these substations with excess capacity that
has been utilized in over a decade we say hey we'll buy you can get tva to deliver you more
electricity fully utilize the substation we'll buy the rest of that electricity and since the tva
operates in a utility co-op with a mandate to keep prices low they buy energy bulk at lower prices
then they pass that down to residential consumers utilities more profitable they can reinvest in
their transmission lines or substations whatever it may be and so amazing the only the narrative
problem that bitcoiners have to worry about is like oh this is job creation doesn't create that
many jobs yet but it can bring revenue and um to utilities that will allow them to reinvest
tax revenue eventually then you can figure out how to bring jobs with that on the back end
i uh i am very much against job creation i am fully med-pilled i don't i don't like having
a job particularly i don't like working uh i am pro wealth creation i went to bitcoin miners to
you know uh to pay for my robots that like do they always thought that would be i i i don't
yeah i mean i understand where people are coming from the jobs we that's how they provide and all
that i get the importance of that but so many of these jobs are mine are mindless and it's like
if they're actively uh i think they're actively like destroying a lot of people all right so
So, especially with the, you know,
the whole thing of like working inside under fluorescence.
That's what radicalized me towards Bitcoin.
I was working at a fund.
It was great.
I loved the people I worked with.
It was a very interesting job.
I got to learn a lot at a very young age.
But the literal physical aspect of sitting in a cube,
punching excel functions and just staring at a computer pulling data from bloomberg crunching
it passing it every day writing a commentary every once in a while just like god this is
soul-sucking yeah humans were not meant to do that not meant to do that at all we were meant
for cool stuff like the eclipse i loved i loved uh people's reactions to it you know some people
started cheering oh some people were yeah i felt moved by it it was like a very spiritual experience
to me it was like you know witnessing this show put on by god and just just still an absolute all
uh and we're very blessed too like the clouds moved just in time right uh and we still had just
like a little bit of cloud covered certain moments during it that you could look at it without the
glasses and see some of the colors um that was really cool i was seeing like like green and
fuchsia and these different colors coming from the side when it's reaching full totality
like a real american patriot i i did stare at it bare-eyed i did as well and we uh i was at
my house in my front yard my oldest and my youngest one napped that's his nap time
was a totality head so he was napping my wife my oldest and our neighbors were out in the front
yard it was it was cool to see uh the four-year-old react to it um because we got him all jacked up
about like the moon's gonna cover the sky and he the crickets started chirping the uh buzzards
were like coming out from the trees and flying there was a car like streaking up uh we're kind
of like on this prominent point so you could like look down in the hill country and see
one lone road sinking up and this car's just like flying up like with the car with the lights on and
all it was just like all of a sudden it just felt like the world was like gripped by this you know
wildness or something that was uh it was quite the experience it was crazy seeing it and we it
was probably i imagine it was cloudier where we were but likewise we had this moment of where it
wasn't completely cloudless but it was thin enough the cloud layer was thin enough that you could see
like without like using the glasses see totality it was like this ominous black hole
looked like a portal i i had also got the ideal the idea right before because we were approaching
full totality um that the that i should utilize the bluetooth speaker from the campfire the night
before so i put on the uh 2001 space obviously we were listening to uh we were listening oh no
we were listening to
what the fuck's his name
David Bowie's Space Odyssey
another great one
yeah during part of it
also played a total eclipse of the heart
so
it was a great time
it was hilarious too
that's how you know you have to get off social media
like the two week lead up of the theories
around the eclipse
and CERN running at the same time the portal's opening.
Well, it turned out they turned CERN on, I think, Friday afternoon.
I was like, wow, something has happened.
I feel like I'm losing my mind.
And then I realized I hadn't drank coffee all day,
and I had just drank a four-shot latte.
I was like, oh, no, it's the caffeine returning to my brain.
No, some of that stuff is fun.
I like it for the posting aspect,
but then like people start taking it really seriously it there has been some effect though
like some people uh a lot of people just like started acting kind of crazy in the days leading
up to it but i don't know if that was just like the mimetic aspect of of that itself or if you
know it was just making them kind of uh emotional a little unhinged like people i knew it was just
like behaving a lot of sorts uh you know saying things i wouldn't say otherwise or those are that
but it's weird and i was uh i was like no this is the uh this is really the time because like
the last eclipse was the one that ushered in like the crazy years so maybe this is like the
undoing of it or something we're in the age of aquarius now great awakening it's whatever you
believe is like whatever will happen so you i think it's better to take these celestial events
and put like the best possible spin on it as you know it's a it's a time of rebirth and you know
you can now change anything or let things go that you know no longer serve you yeah
instead of psyching yourself out which if you do it i don't know i'm a i'm a great believer
in uh in manifestation like if you intensely believe that something bad is going to happen
something bad will happen yeah and alternatively if you intend to believe that you're going to make
make the world a better place maybe you can maybe you fix the money you can fix the world if you
believe it hard enough i also say if you fix the lighting you'll fix the world that's true that's
what on john's trying to do with the yeah at the daylight you i'm going to uh send you guys some
incandescent bulbs so thank you i mean we have these here they're not bright enough i can turn
these down yeah that was the real reason i didn't want to do video there's a chance it's actually
yeah you can you can believe the world's going to be a better place and that you can affect
change in that world or you can believe the patriots are in control and uh and fall down
that rabbit hole and hope that somebody else will fix it for you the patriots will fix it for you
well if you believe if you do believe the patriots are in control you should be the
patriot who's in control yes uh yeah that's a good note to leave it leave it off actually
yeah be a patriot in control be a patriot in control until next time freaks peace and love