TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #545: Bitcoin Is Money For Heroes with Guy Swann

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Marty sits down with Guy Swann to discuss how bitcoin is helping in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Guy on Twitter: https://x.com/theguyswann Bitcoin Veterans: https://bitcoinveterans.org/home/ Bitcoin Veterans NC/TN donation page: https://pay.zaprite.com/pl_Mibjv4lkEs 0:00 - Intro 1:29 - Inept/malicious response to disaster 6:10 - Bitcoin Veterans 11:38 - Destruction and loss 15:35 - Flooding 19:59 - Unchained 20:50 - Absurd resource allocation 30:18 - Zaprite 31:18 - People are 1000x more effective than govt 42:14 - Lethargy in the face of a ticking clock 48:38 - Why rules exist 53:30 - Disaster and conflict rackets 1:00:27 - Ungovernable media and ridicule 1:12:16 - How worldviews change 1:26:29 - Overwhelming innovation 1:32:11 - Why open source AI will win 1:38:34 - Approaching AI practically 1:52:30 - Plugging important stuff Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

There's like 600 people unaccounted for. Between the posts coming in and everybody, everything being delivered and like all the awesome stuff. There's like a number of them coming in being like, we ran out of body bags. Everybody's been talking about the fact that the government in the same week sending billions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars to foreign nations and can't even respond in a timely matter when their own citizens are having their lives literally pulled from beneath them. on the same day we sent 157 million to israel and there's no there's no red tape fema spent four billion dollars on covid 19 in 2024 what in the are you doing billion a thousand million hillary clinton literally just said it out loud if we are

not able to censor and control these huge social media platforms then we have lost total control 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 And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Guy, this is 550.

How many episodes are we in? Damn. 545. This is the first time you come on a palindrome episode for the first time. I can't believe it's taken seven years to get you on the show, but happy you're here. Have I not been on the show? I guess I haven't. I don't think so.

I'm sat in that chair. Yeah. No, this is our first time. Now you're making me jog my memory. It's definitely the first time, I think. I guess I can believe that. I guess that's wild, though. It does seem crazy that we haven't done...

You haven't been on my show, have you? I don't think so. I think you've read some newsletters. Oh, yeah, I read a couple of Ben's. Yeah, for sure. Well, shit. Cool. It's good to be here, man.

It's good to have you. I guess I was about to say good to have you here. Unfortunately, not the best of circumstances. I wanted to sit down and talk with you about everything that's going on in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. the you're on the ground there in Raleigh dorm area not directly affected by but you're a North Carolinian at heart and I've been following your efforts on on Noster and X and it seems like you have a good pulse as to what's going on there right now and I think that's why I wanted to talk with you obviously there's a bunch of stuff being posted on the internet and though I think a lot of it is particularly the first person accounts what's going on the ground is very valid but i figured i'd reach out to you and get your perspective on all this what's actually happening and dive into the complete incompetence of either incompetence or malice of the government

in this particular um situation i've come to a point where i don't i don't i'm not 100 sure if there's a big difference between the two incompetence and malice is like if the results are the same you know does it how much does it really matter you know um and it's so hard to decide someone's intent and there's a lot of just kind of you know these things are these systems are filled with humans and it's so easy to excuse or ignore or procrastinate procrastinate on something that just doesn't really help your position you know um and i think there is so much of this desire in government to be the one in charge that it's just it's very easy when you institutionalize assistance that it just becomes a disease that it just becomes something that

does nothing but harm and i don't think it's very difficult for that to become a thing like for that to be the consequence and i think we're seeing a lot there there are definitely tons of posts on twitter and things that are exaggerations or um assumptions i guess uh and and i think it's i think the persona of it if you if you will is worse than the reality but i think it's closer to the reality than the the official statements if you get my meaning yeah no i think it's a very good point who cares if it's incompetence or malice the results of the actions regardless of the intention is obviously pretty terrible um and that's i think that's been a not a problem but i think people waste a lot of time debating intentions or uh around this stuff is it

incompetence is malice occam's razor it's like all right debate that but let's just look at the results and try to figure out how to how to solve the problem at the root you know not even debate and fight over squabble over whether it's conspiratorial malice or just pure incompetence by a managerial class that has become completely bloated and incapable of actually achieving what they should be and what they're stated to, their stated reason for being. Their basic functions? Yeah.

Like utterly basic functions? And I think in the context of the last couple weeks in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, I think the most dismaying thing is you had this natural disaster and time is of the essence and that was the most frustrating thing watching from afar was the time delay from when things began to when the government started actually moving and um two double-edged sword like very frustrating that the government didn't move but looking at the positives like you don't need the government individuals took action immediately got to work

that was and has been the most inspiring thing out of all this trying to find light in the darkness is individuals from all over the country particularly that area the country coming together and helping their fellow citizens yeah yeah for sure there's um it's this mixed bag between seeing how many just the degree of resources that they are sucking out of society and being like how are you not helping then to the flip side of it like just leave us alone and if you could both not help and not steal from us that would kind of be the optimum outcome you know like just please leave us alone like north carolina still has and it's one of the reasons i have a really hard time leaving is because there's a still this really

strong sense of like i guess southern hospitality like of of community here that like we will come to each other's aid and there's also a bunch of county level like um sanctuary city sort of mentality of like i don't we don't really care what the federal government says like you have a second amendment right you know and like there is that there's a strong kind of i am a north carolinian mindset and culture versus just we are the united states and let's beg for the united states government to do you know to accomplish anything and i think that lends itself a lot to why the response on the ground has been so incredible and and also why the overwhelming amount of anger that fema has showed up just to get in the way and that people do know like

there's and i i wanted to i wanted to be like okay it's really easy and it's like super good engagement farming to say the government has done this terrible thing or to misconstrue exactly what happened because you know somebody had their donations confiscated or redirected or something like that but there legitimately seems i've heard from enough people and there are enough people who are specifically um especially like being plugged in with the bitcoin veterans which since we talked about this before i wanted to give a shout out to the bitcoin veterans these guys are anti-government military vets are the greatest people on the planet because they are organized they are like super focused they know how to like bring supplies and they also know they think of authority as this

like okay like so this is where this is where we're going to get we're going to get this far based on where whether police or when we run into fema and then what's our strategy to get around get around them and like people are literally showing up and being like i have this aircraft i have uh this helicopter um where can we land they set up a base of operations uh in partnership with like a samaritan's purse location and they're like these are our landing zones if it's rained recently landing zone c is gonna be wet like it's like these guys have like straight up it's wild to look at this because i've been in this signal conversation like i uh we raised on noster um um like 65 000 in bitcoin uh which one of them came in as a whole bitcoin um and which was just

which was crazy um like just shout out shout out to everybody who is raising i'm still getting just zaps in constantly and i'm trying to figure out how much i mean i've both basically just donated everything in that lightning wallet anyway i had like a million sats or 1.2 million or something in it um so anything that comes in is basically just being forwarded that way but i just put i just sent ten thousand dollars worth of it to the bitcoin veterans and luckily as bitcoin because they they have a number of ways to basically offload to get it so they can make purchases um but it's been so cool seeing it because i can literally see exactly what's happening they're literally like okay we need this many generators uh like they're posting

in this group they literally just went to a house to deliver medicine to somebody that was just had a handwritten note on it you know just like this person needs this medicine they're running out and there's just no roads there's just no roads to anywhere like so many if you go to these areas this is these mountain towns um like boone blowing rock um uh banner elk uh they they're some of our favorite places in the world we we literally like every single summer we go up there and we we spend some time we spend a week up there generally sometimes two to three times a year it's just a it's so unbelievably beautiful and they're they're like old quaint towns which are really hard to find you know especially in the U.S. like everything feels really artificial in

Fiat and it's so unbelievably sad because like I saw I saw an aerial shot of Boone and like I could see i could see like our favorite places to go like the downtown is was was absolutely gorgeous and it was just under like six feet of water the whole thing and you know a small town like that is so i can't even know how you build back from that like chimney rock chimney rock the whole the main really small town but the whole thing was basically off of the main road which was right next to this little creek um absolutely gorgeous and the whole thing like the road the creek basically went from a small creek to like 25 feet high like just like a rushing rushing river and there's no road basically the buildings the buildings aren't under five feet

of water the buildings are under like five feet of mud like just mud and rock for the buildings that are left it's really there's only a couple of signs where you can look and you'd be like oh my god that was that was a street like you just look at it and you just think you're looking at just rocks and mud for you know a football field's worth of just this big open area and you're like what you don't even have a landmass to kind of relate to but then you can see like one of the buildings and it's like you know a trading post like a little store and there's like a sign on the front of it that's still there and you're like holy crap this whole thing this was the main road through the area and a ton of these areas only have one road like literally there's just only

one road to access them and there's whole there's whole neighborhoods that have just their road is gone and they they haven't been able to get out they've just been stuck there for weeks i guess now i guess we're almost we're going on two weeks since this happened um and it's just there's like 600 people unaccounted for i think still um i was just and you know that's like between the the post coming in of like um between the posts coming in and everybody everything being delivered and like all the awesome stuff there's like a number of them coming in being like we ran out of body bags it's uh

completely fucked yeah oh i had a friend i'm not sure my stuff went to sleep um i had a friend who knows somebody in one of those um in one of the neighborhoods because one of the craziest things and there's there's some wild footage of like the big the big thing about why there was so much damage in this area it wasn't like the the hurricane was i mean it was a bad hurricane but it was mostly that these areas are never hit with it you know they're not used to being to having three years worth of rain dumped on them in a matter of hours and you would think you generally think oh it's the freaking mountains you don't have a flooding

problem but when you have that much water rushing down like a steep hill it's moving so fast and if the waterways that are available don't have don't have the the capacity to manage it it will just eat out of the side of the mountain literally and that's what so many of the images and video coming out are just showing it's just this river was just like okay well we're just going to take this extra 40 feet to solve our problem of getting the water out of this area um and then they'll find some other random path there's a there's a video i saw of just a random mudslide somebody was just like out on their thing just like looking it's like oh man the damage is getting so bad and then i just just this mountain of what like this avalanche literally looked like an avalanche of

just mud and water comes crashing down to the mountain you see the cars and everything go uh shockingly the house was fine um but uh the the friend who had someone in the area they were it just was in the middle of the storm like chaos they have uh a pet and two kids and just randomly they hear just like crazy loud banging on the door and it was just get out get out get out get out get out like just screaming at them and they're like oh my god so they just grabbed what they could and themselves basically uh got out ran got in the car and started moving and basically this huge wash of water came down and just basically took the neighborhood and they are they're driving and they go over a road they're basically following anybody that they can see

and they go over a small bridge that was kind of the the main entryway into their uh into their neighborhood and uh and basically like while they could while they were still within visible range of it like just basically seconds after they get over it like the water was hitting the side of it so bad it just the whole bridge just disconnected and went down the river um and then they ended up hitting a tree or like something something like fell in the road or something was in the road uh and so their car just was useless uh and so they climbed out you know carrying their kids and their dog and managed to make their way down the mountain to a fire station and that was that um they're totally fine but that that's it that's all they got everything else is gone

it's just crazy it's just crazy water water is nuts man yeah i mean the videos of like the the rivers that took on a bunch of new water and just he just had container shipping containers just getting impaled yeah on on telephone poles that's that's that was the most shocking thing that looks you're just looking at it and at the river like oh this is a natural river i don't think people understand the the force with which that water was moving now you see the video of um and this was actually from ashville of uh the house just a big just a big ass house just running down the river and then it hit this huge tree and just

crumpled crumpled like a aluminum foil you know just like and you this loud cracking and creaking sound just crazy i mean and you know like you build in the low areas you know you don't build on the on the 45 degree slope you you build at the bottom where it's flat that's where all the water goes too sup freaks this rip of tftc was brought to you by our good friends at unchained Unchained is here building the Bitcoin bank of the future. It starts with their vault product, a two or three collaborative custody vault, which allows you to hold two keys. Unchained holds one. On top of this, they're building incredible products. They're trading products. You want to buy and sell Bitcoin. You can do it through their trading desk. If you buy Bitcoin directly

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appalachia it's people who just want to live humble lives and a lot of people have been overlooked in the united states for for many decades now and we're doing a great job just living humbly and having their piece of earth that was beautiful and getting completely demolished and not to make this political, but it is like just emblematic of everything the government's done over the last 50, 60 years in terms of turning our economy

into a hyper-financialized debt trap and really forgetting about the humble people and what many people would call the flyover states in the U.S. Not that North Carolina is one of those, but um the rust belt the appalachia and that that is i mean for me i got i've lived in different parts of the country lived in the low country in south carolina and it's like when the people are just trying to get by and they really just enjoy nature and living a simple life and

um paying into the system expecting that they'll get something out of it and again going back to what we opened with is just like the the lack of care and obviously everybody's been talking about the fact that the government in the same week sending billions hundreds of millions billions of dollars to foreign nations and can't even respond in a timely matter when their own citizens are having their lives literally pulled from beneath them dude what is crazy to me like they they basically said that you know you have to get approval and we have to do all this stuff that there's all this red tape you know and so like you know we can't do we can't do everything right now but we're we're solving and i can't remember who it was that basically gave

this excuse and this was about a small amount of funds being directed to help you know what happened in georgia south carolina in the appalachian area um and yet at the exact same time we on the same day we send 157 million to israel and there's no there's no red tape there's no we don't have to vote on that that just that just that's just like default that's just business as usual and i'm pretty sure i saw you post about this too i think you had the the screenshot that in september fema spent four billion dollars and i want to i want to double check and confirm that because this just seems so incomprehensibly insane to me four billion dollars in september on covid 19 response

do we just have we just forgotten that resources matter that like that means that there is four billion dollars worth of stuff that people need no longer available to them on covid 19 in 2024 what in the fuck are you doing my my brother just quote-unquote got covid for a couple of days where's he's gonna send him a hundred dollar check what what did he need what the fuck covid like i don't understand it what are you doing how do you spend four billion dollars on that billion a thousand million it's just so bonkers it's so insane well it's not only that and the handouts or handouts but

the the money they are like the it's almost insulting when kamala came out we're gonna give 750 dollars to anybody affected by this and assistance um please go to our website and fill out this application and by the way the back end this is 750 loan you're gonna have to pay back and as well and at the exact same time like the number of reports and confirmations of migrants getting flights to cities and rent paid for in fact i even read this is this is bonkers to me is that you don't see the problem with this is that i read one i always try to go through the community notes because you know you always get the other political perspective um and one of the community notes was just like laughable because it's so great when the community notes actually

confirm that this is the truth and uh so somebody was like there's two different things that were quote-unquote community notes and i'm just like you realize you just proved you you proved the problem and one of them was that migrants were getting uh quote-unquote free rent for two years in this area and the community note was that oh it's a partial assistance plan and they're gonna have to pay back a third of it and all of this stuff and they gave like all these links to like the details and i'm like so so you're saying they got free rent for two years and they got like a 77 discount on you know what is twelve hundred dollars a month two thousand dollars a month whatever the whatever rent is in that area plus a flight to that area and like literal hotels

to put them up apartments and you don't think that's a problem and understand i am not even i'm i'm actually a far more open borders guy i'm not i don't have anything like i'm not i'm not quote-unquote right-wing anti-migrant but i certainly as fuck am why are you spending money on migrants that doesn't that has nothing to do with whether or not you are anti-immigration but we should not be spending money on them like that completely defeats the purpose we spend money on us it's our money it's our resources why is it being given to someone that the people don't want to give it to i just i just cannot and at the same time the other the other community so the community

confirmed that yes this is actually happening that they will easily and quickly go out of their way to house migrants for two years and ship them to some particular place like literally travel air travel and home accommodations for up to two years but the u.s citizen who pays for all of that gets a 750 check or submission to their bank account which they may not even be able to use because they don't have internet and they don't have a road like holy crap how did we get here how did we get here and the other confirmation was the it's so funny because like even if trump isn't mentioned trump ends up in the community notes um so somebody's talking about how like fema spent a billion dollars on uh housing like migrant housing and accommodations and travel and

all of this stuff uh in the year and uh trump specifically said they stole the money to to do it which which is hilarious because like that's exactly what that means i don't i don't really care what your your terminology is like you took a million a billion dollars worth of taxpayer money and you spend it on migrants instead of helping the u.s citizens which fema is a disaster relief relief for u.s citizens that's what it's supposed to be and it's got like a 30 billion dollar budget something absolutely bonkers and uh so they confirmed that yes indeed this is how much was spent but the community note was that like well they budgeted for that so it was like voted and it's like okay well that's not the point i don't care i don't i don't care if it was planned

that way the point is that you're spending a billion dollars on migrants and you're telling us today that you don't have enough to help with the storm like don't budget for that and i don't give a shit who wrote what on a piece of paper who signed what or how official it was or which bureaucracy it went to who gives a flying fuck about that i don't i don't care who who stamped it it's a problem because it happened i don't know if you saw this but like another i mean it's another example of how stupid our government is it was i saw it this morning and it was not the babylon b account but they like they're part of their relief effort was sending a bunch of electric chainsaws up to the area

that has had its grid demolished and doesn't have electricity. Yeah. So they basically have a bunch of paperweights. That's great. Yeah. Well, luckily the Bitcoin veterans and everybody with a brain is taking generators.

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that's why i wanted to talk to you about this because i think this is a glaring example of the government's not going to come save you you have to save yourself and not only that like we are much more efficient and organized and capable of saving ourselves than the government will ever be of actually helping in these and that's again going back to finding the light in the darkness and the silver lining of all this i think the efforts by the bitcoin veterans um samaritan's purse uh the cajun navy yeah that's a cajun navy yeah that was the first donation that i put from the bitcoin was uh twenty five hundred dollars to the cajun navy uh those guys those guys are solid and they're they're basically bitcoin veterans without being explicit bitcoiners in my

opinion um and they're also very i also love how much they shun what the rules are you know um like they they've been joking when they get stopped or they get uh told that they can't do or fly in this area for assistance or whatever they they now call it uh um free tours through the swamp so so it's like oh no no we're not this is we're not providing assistance to this area but we do get free tours uh that's cracking me up i mean we're laughing but it's it's a great example of the like the government coming in and preventing people from actually helping because they're saying oh we've got to do this we've got to organize here's our list of vendors here's where you take the money and we're going to let you know when when when not you can go and

try to help these people it's but the cajun navy is a great example it's like no fuck you get out the way i'm gonna go do this like you are yeah this perceived authority you have over me does not exist and what are they going to do stop them and arrest them some people have gotten arrested but if enough motivated people just bring more attention to it yeah as barbers strisand effect no no one please please arrest somebody we'll get three we'll get three helicopters in place of the one that you stopped right and i think that's their biggest worry the government is that you can't have sovereign citizens proving that they can do the government's job better because then it's how we're going to get these billions to send to foreign nations and

to house illegal immigrants how we're going to justify all this spending and that's i hope this is and it's unequivocally true it's so obviously true you don't even have to compare resources like you don't have to compare how much you know the 30 billion dollars fema has and compare it to the results like dollar for dollar it's probably one to a thousand like like the i guarantee you i guarantee you the private citizens can do more with a million than fema does with a billion um like i think one to a thousand may be an understatement um because the the overwhelming majority of it is about keeping up a bureaucratic apparatus like the institution has become so massive that it's about fueling and keeping the institution up um it becomes its own purpose

and one of the things that um um not only the like it was just uh stefan or steven i think it's steven um uh steven brouillette uh who i've talked to a number of times and he went out there he like very early on he was like and he has like family out in the area um and he packed up a truck and we were kind of like talking because I was trying to find somebody on the ground in the absence of me being able to go out there myself um which I was hoping I was hoping I could like I felt like like the best thing that I could do was just set up communications because when I was first trying to get in touch my best friend actually lives out there he his wife and they're like one one and a half year old now um uh they live in Asheville um and I was pretty sure where they were it was

probably fine but we didn't get up we couldn't talk we had no contact for like 48 hours um and uh but my best friend works for for search and rescue up there so um i knew i'd be able to get good relatively good info from him when when i did get back in contact and he ended up sending me a ton of pictures and video and stuff and it's crazy how much of the video um which i've been mean in a post in the keat room that we set up and on noster but uh how much of the video like it just looks like a waterway and this is days this is like this is like four or five days later there's still just so much water um and you think you're looking at like a waterway and you know it's just a mess and there's a building over here on the side but then like you look closely enough while

he's panning or whatever and then you see chunks of asphalt and you realize this used to be the road like and if you scroll through um i think it's like google maps and you do like the the landscape view or whatnot they have like the little red like dots for like this road is out this road is out and there was a video of somebody just like kind of like zooming in and out on all of these things it's just hundreds and hundreds of these and that's really been the big problem and what the best of the private um assistants have been really just apparently there's like a half a bajillion atvs in the area now like everybody's just running four-wheelers all over the place um uh delivering supplies and trying to get you know contact to and from

and that's a really big thing that bitcoin veterans have been doing is uh they set up i think uh it was um uh operation libertas what's what's his i forget his actual name um there's gary and shane hazel and uh but he was he was telling me that they got they have like 60 um and it was updating as as they were like pulling source uh sourcing uh materials uh they ended up with 60 mesh tastic um nodes and what they're literally doing is they're going to all the other um all the national guard locations and samaritan's purse and everybody who's up and flying and shane is like literally breaking down this is how you set up and use the mesh tastic um stuff and then giving it to them and then even crazier is apparently if i understood this

correctly this is really cool um but that they can set it up and it's running on the helicopter so when they go up in the air they're connecting nodes as they fly um and so like as they and then they drop these down in new areas and they're just building a network to get any kind of communication in and out and they also have a bunch of star links um and trying to get a bunch more this this has been like the biggest thing for like damn like everybody needs a star link as a backup and uh one of the things i've been thinking about recently is getting a satellite um either a satellite phone like a like a like a texting device or whatever or those what are those things called the the ones that allow your smartphone to connect and send like like low band

information over satellite connection um but one or the other but like literally send it to all like buy it as christmas presents basically and send it all my friends and family you know my close social circles because it'd been fantastic if i had been able to contact my best friend while he was out there and i had thought about doing this like a year ago and like literally last year and i'd never pulled the trigger um and just because it was a it was a bit of a chunk what i was looking at you know they're not like three or four hundred dollars a piece and i'm trying thinking about buying like eight of them or something so but uh never pulled the trigger and now wish i had um so i could have stayed in touch with them but obviously they are they are

fine and i've been in touch with them since but it's all been it's all been private citizens so going back to steven i was talking with him i mean i just sent him like a hundred dollars of gas money to try to just help him out while he took the trip uh but he came back with this after i was kind of like we were going through updates and him setting up starlink and that sort of stuff uh he said it's hard to describe but people are less panicked gases and this was five days ago now so so on the uh fourth or fifth um gas is getting easier to find power and water is on for most of black mountain which black mountain was basically inaccessible for a while people are posted with water and food all along 70 through swannanoa so like and 70 was another major one

that has been wiped out in like a couple of different areas we said people are just doing this spontaneously and there's just nothing government looking he hasn't really seen i said very few people are actually using government quote-unquote services as far as i can tell i'm sure it's appreciated where it's accepted but most folks are tearing up and down the road on 4x4s and ATVs delivering water to neighbors and supplies I'll be forever grateful for the sats I wish I'd taken more footage but it all hurts so much that I'm torn between wanting to share the pain and wanting to forget it and tell no one what I saw but yeah it seems like the entire effort is like even if even where the government is there it's just not enough for him

to be like it's of any significance on the ground it's just people yeah and again going back to this is their biggest fear the posture like they exist and we need them to exist to come and come and help in instances like this and if you think about the rhetoric the political rhetoric over the last over our lifetimes as millennials it's been very divisive like you need us to keep the peace because if something like this happens uh everything will devolve into chaos yeah that's another silver lining of this all it's really showed the massive beauty of the human spirit which when push comes to shove uh everybody's down on their dumps and they're going through a crisis together people will bend together and help each other out which it's not the narrative

that the government typically puts out there yeah yeah but um not luckily the people show up at least in at least in southern southern u.s the people show up um like the the response was it was really fast you know it was a long time before even mainstream media was even talking about it um like i can't tell you how many times like again that was one of the big things is the few people who could get still like television signal or information through um they could they couldn't even see anything you know they're watching tv they're you know listening to a broadcast trying to figure out what's going on and what they should do and like nobody's talking about it it was just like talk about florida for a day and then that was that was helene and

off to the next story you know off to how awful trump is or whatever they were talking about and it was like three days all i could do it's like i was hunting instagram and twitter for updates because it was the only place you could get pictures it was the only place that you know anybody could have like information trickle in like when we were i was trying to give information to a couple of friends who were both trying to get out and then another couple who were trying to get in and it was just through a facebook post that we finally found someone who took like what was normally like a 30 minute trip was this crazy like you had to actually go west and then south and do this like weird snaking thing to get out of there but they they found a road in and out

and uh and mapped it out you know like these are this is the long list of directions for our two-hour trip to get out of the area um but like that's what that's what people needed you know um but then i've heard so many people who were just being who were just being stopped and who one guy posted something about like like yeah i have state-of-the-art like crazy good drone um uh thermal drone that could fly through the area and just look for people you know um and he was told not to that he would be arrested if he flew it and i just don't I guess it's just the sense that if that's your thing,

you know, I try to make sense of this. I try to make sense of this because I feel like we can understand people by just like looking at ourselves. And the only thing, I guess in my recent history that I can kind of remember or relate it to as like a voice in my head that I was like shut up was you know I had a bitcoin

audible and I was reading bitcoin articles right like that was that was the thing that I was just like somebody needs to do this and so I started it and after a few years you just kind of feel like you're the guy who does that you know and I remember there was another podcast that I don't remember which one it was now um that started it and started uh uh advertising really big and i was seeing it in my feed and i remember i got this this voice in my head just like i guess it was like jealousy or or ownership you know and there was this there's this thing that says you don't do that i'm the one who does that you know like i got i got like a little bit like like come on this is mine and and then after you know thinking about it for 20 seconds like a sane human

i was like shut the fucking gotta be kidding me how could i possibly own the idea of being the one who reads bitcoin articles not to mention that i already have a list of like 2 000 of which i will never get to as if there's some sort of scarcity in like being able to be the one who I was just like, you know, like sanity was restored. But I remember vividly the fact that I had that response to it and had to shut up that little asshole in my head. And all I can think is that like, you know, the people in FEMA or the people in government who do the recovery, how many probably don't shut that voice up, you know, who say, this is my job. what are you doing here with your stupid atvs and bringing in your drones and the entire environment of government and of licensing and of approval and you know did you did you get the permission for that where's your permit so grossly amplifies that that awful little voice in those people's heads.

And I imagine after a generation, like, there's no shutting that voice up. That's probably their normal mode of operation. You know? I'm in charge. That voice is definitely emboldened by the fact that they have guns and the authority to use them if they want to, too.

Oh, yeah. And they seem to. I don't think anybody's been arrested yet. There's been threats. Yeah. This drone example, it's like if, i don't know if it was a local official or fema or federal government official but if people that want to help you're in a disaster scenario and there's chaos i mean there has to be

some sort of unspoken agreement like we're all in this together like just if you have a drone here that can help us because that's the other thing again time was of the absence the aftermath of hurricane i mean people stranded without food water electricity like the like i've done lifeguard training before like if you have um somebody in the ocean that needs to be saved you literally have a two minute clock in your mind it's like yeah i'm counting down for 120 seconds and if i don't get there before 120 it's likely that person's lost and apply that to this it's like you probably have 48 hours at most to get to these people who are stranded and you just have to and to have that be the zone where mainstream media isn't talking about it the government

isn't doing anything and there's no response and then what response is there is trying to figure out how to get around you know any specifically people being in the way um and who's better equipped to do that than the local people that know the area and understand where to look and where they should be looking and and there's there's another thing too is that you know the self-righteous people on twitter will always come in with a good excuse and they're like well you're supposed to talk to air traffic control tell me you've never heard about whatever i can't remember the name of it um the term for making sure you don't hit the the system they have make sure you don't hit another helicopter you know um tell me you never heard

about that without telling me and uh which i don't i don't remember the name of it um but all i could think is that like but your response is like you're justifying violence you're justifying saying that you should arrest somebody when obviously any basic intuitive sane person response would be okay well then you go to the people that are showing up to help and you inform them of this you don't threaten to arrest them you don't keep them out of the air you give them a crash course for 30 minutes on what they need to be doing and how they need to stay in contact and who they need to stay in contact with and you give them the information and the resources to do that that's your whole job and then you let them help like and the sky's pretty big and open it's

like just keep your head on a swivel make sure you're you're staying easy you're keeping a good distance away from other helicopters it isn't it's just like common sense lack of common sense we've forgotten why rules exist we've forgotten why rules exist you know you know that experiment of the monkeys where they have a bunch of monkeys in a room in a ladder and there's banana hanging from the ceiling and when the monkeys start climbing up the ladder to get the banana they hit him with a fire hose and uh after a very very short time they all learn you do not oh specifically they hit every monkey with a fire hose not just the one who climbs the ladder that's important part of the experiment here and uh it's clearly not fun to get hit with a fire hose

um and so what they do is they introduce a new monkey who does not know about this situation and the results and as he starts to climb up the ladder inevitably to get the banana all of the other monkeys pull him down and beat the ever-loving crap out of him because they don't want to get hit with the fire hose and then they slowly do this they keep swapping people out or swapping monkeys out people might as well say people and at the end of this experiment they have a room full of monkeys that have never been hit with a fire hose they have no idea why this is happening but if you introduce a new monkey they will as they start climbing up the ladder they will pull them down and they will beat the crap out of them

and that's what i feel like has happened we have built this system of rules and we have no idea why they exist anymore we don't understand we have like if your rule is about keeping people safe and there is any point at which the rule is not keeping people safe or it is specifically causing people harm you let go of the rule you let go of the rule you do not like these are guidelines to make sure that there is no default harm being done but the point is to help people and the idea that there is going to be more damage or risk by letting someone an additional person help with a helicopter because one person may get hurt or killed because of the possibility of a helicopter collision when there are 600 people unaccounted for and you have 48 hours

You have not weighed the risk. You have not weighed the, especially when people are doing this of their own volition. They know that this is not, they're not going to be roads. They are taking a risk to do this to help. Like you've misunderstood why any of this matters and what the hell the rules are for in the first place. it's to make sure society doesn't collapse is to make sure that people are actually doing things to benefit so that we are not wasting resources and you are wasting resources hurting people and destroying the very mechanism that we have the very community value and the hope of people coming in and trying to help other people in the effort of keeping the rules in place if the rules are getting in the way you ignore the rules authority for the sake of authority is just tyranny it's just tyranny it doesn't it's nothing else i'm not sure if you saw i mean another great example of this was

st petersburg where you had devastation there too and you had a bunch of volunteers and people in the waste management industry showed up and all the houses were leveled and they were doing their jobs to pick up the wood and take it to the landfill and like on day two of doing this they got to the landfill and landfill guy said FEMA told us you guys aren't allowed to drop it here anymore you have to go talk to them and figure out where their drop spots are and so these guys go and find FEMA and it wasn't immediately I think it was like a day or two later they're like all right we have all this debris we want to drop off where your your landfill drop-offs they were like oh you guys are commercial vehicles we're only letting individuals

drop off this debris we're going to need you to go back and drop it off in the people's driveways and we'll pick it up over the course of a year it's like and the guy was explaining like this debris is already developing mold and you're just going to have FEMA extend this pickup period which we could probably do in a couple of weeks to a month out to a year as if it's better to leave it in the streets and in the yards than to have it in a landfill because of some arbitrary bullshit regulation just like that's exactly what i'm talking about you know it's so crazy and it's also it's also a racket you know i i did this with walker a couple days ago um which uh which i think i'm going to post on my podcast but i have i try to curse excuse me i try i try to curse

i try not to curse on my show as or at least as little as i can and if i say the f word which inevitably happens i try to bleep it out and so i i did my little ai transcript of my conversation with walker and typed in the f word to find it and there were 87 87 incidents and i was like oh god oh no uh this is gonna be a two-hour job uh but um so i i will probably be posting it but um you can find it on his his podcast the bitcoin podcast if you're interested but we were talking about it and he had this post which is one of those things that you you kind of know the shape of this system or scam if you will um but it was a post from somebody who was saying like i've been in the disaster response um relief effort for 12 or 15 years or something like that long time

and i'll tell you why fema does this and why there are so many regulations and restrictions around how you can help and why they block people. He said it's because government assistance goes to quote-unquote preferred vendors. So they have a deal with Walmart to be, and I don't know if it's Walmart, but just as an example,

they have a deal with some corporation to be the preferred vendor to supply all of the generators and the toothbrushes and all of the stuff and they get the listed office like a donation and it's basically just a giant government subsidy and the and so fema works directly with them and so it's competition if you come in and you solve the problem and they don't need to do it that's that's directly out of the pocket of whatever corporation is the preferred vendor in the area for those supplies and it's a racket it's a racket it's just like war it's a racket

that runs off of people suffering is it's massive money-making because it's short-term four billion dollars spent on covet 19 is a great example is that there's no it's too fast and too immediately needed for people to complain about what things cost it's it's an extremely opportune situation to grift and basically the grift you have two main forms of grifters you have corporate partners with the government and you have looters and those are the two things that go in and do the most damage because one in a broad sense and one in a targeted local sense but it's it's literally a racket like war like war is just about the contracts for the bombs and then the contracts for the rebuilding like we're we're

given you know hundreds of millions of dollars now to lebanon to help them rebuild from the bombs that we just sent and we literally sent money to lebanon and israel at the exact same time yeah it's insane to rebuild the neighborhoods that were bombed by the bombs we sent to israel it's a racket and they do the same thing with disaster relief it's it's not really a rack i mean it's just pure evil it's like how the fuck have we gotten so far away from that you're you're influencing me to curse and say the f word but how how the fuck have we gotten so far away from the end goal and the intention of what these governments are supposed to do. I mean,

and this is war is a racket has been talked about since the days of Eisenhower, but it's so in your face now. And that's the general Boris. It's short book, but it's a good book. War is a racket, but Smedley, Smedley Butler. That's right. I highly recommend that. That was world war one, I think. yeah that's like i don't like our do you think we're getting to a point where it's just so obvious that people we use the word revolt but say enough is enough like even look at my orcas i'm not sure if you saw this but yesterday it came out that a lot of the immigrant funding is happening through

an organization that he sits on the board of directors of like so you have this ngo that's getting money from fema that's funneling money to the migrants and he's on the board like that's a direct conflict of interest bordering on treason i tweeted out yesterday this man needs to be tried for treason thinking it's so blatantly in your face when you one example dhs fema which we've been focusing on um during this conversation but war doj um department of state like it exists there too it exists everywhere name your alphabet soup agency there's rackets involved and it's becoming glaringly obvious to me and i assume you as well obviously that we're in the loot the treasury stage like just get us into as much debt as possible get as many tax dollars from the

citizens that you can and just fill the cronies pockets and it's so plain the blood of the golden goose yeah and that's like what i'm trying to discern right now like are we in a bubble where we recognize this very it's very straightforward to us or do you have hope that people are waking up this as well no it's definitely there's definitely momentum against and i think this is just kind of the the expansion of or the natural response to i go back and forth between being kind of like trapped in the political atmosphere or mindset and the and then kind of stepping back and seeing the really big picture like our technology like we are a networked organism and our networks decide what happens all of the politics and all

of the surface stuff is downstream uh it just feels more relevant because it's closer to us culturally it's it's a social it's at the social layer but this is all downstream from what's been happening to communication networks um is and a great example is the fact that i can get so much information from a signal group from twitter and instagram when mainstream media isn't talking about this and how many people have become pseudo journalists in all of this in this environment and i think the shift to do these things and the shift to change course for what you are focused on and what you care about like in your life it requires pressure you know like it's really easy to procrastinate something that doesn't seem like a concern it's not until like you know you you

basically get punched in the back of the head by that thing you've been ignoring that the change actually occurs and and it occurs in waves and i think what we've been seeing has been the fallout of a 30-year shift to a different type of media to the bandwidth between you and i not having to be diverted through the news um through three broadcast agencies um and that's that's exactly what i mean hillary hillary clinton literally just said it out loud um recently she said that if we do not if we are not able to censor and control these huge social media platforms then we have lost total control and she she said those words i'm not just i just can't um but it is about the it's about the ability to communicate and that doesn't mean that people change their minds

immediately it means that the exposure to a new idea like all this pedophilia stuff in hollywood and pdd and epstein you know you first get kind of introduced to those i didn't like like i was first exposed to those like 10 years ago 11 years ago maybe and at the time i was like that's crazy that's bonkers you know it seems hard to really hard to digest and then you see another thing and you see another thing and then the next year and then another thing comes out and then weinstein gets arrested and then there's a me too movement and then another thing happens and then Epstein gets arrested and then he, and then he suicides in a, you know, no camera, like it just like one thing piece by piece and you're exposed to it.

They don't talk about it on the news, but you're exposed to it because of your social circle, because of Twitter, because of Instagram, because of TikTok, because they cannot filter everything. The, the bandwidth and the scope of where communication is coming from is so vast. like even the censorship is usually about like they started censoring like that was one that was the first like serious shadow ban that i got on twitter like my account was like growing like heavily and i was like oh damn this is this is kind of crazy is the first time i was like looking at analytics on my account like god damn this is this is going all right okay i can get behind this

i was doing like 3 000 4 000 followers a month for like six months straight um and uh i was like all right let's do this uh and then i said something bad about uh insert pharmaceutical product um which was verified by the way i i posted my sources uh and obviously we now know to be completely true uh and that month i went from three to four thousand every single month positive to like negative 75 um and i never got like an official like you're not allowed it was just and i knew it i knew it too like as soon as it happened because like engagement dropped in the next couple of days i was like like this my experience just generally changed on twitter and i was like dude what is up and then you know the the analytics happened and it was just a

recognition i was like ah here here i i let myself kind of get excited about this frivolous thing anyway but um it was just so funny because it was it was a it was a sobering moment of like how little how little i control any of that but the big thing is that like you got around that um that type of shadow ban or something almost immediately because everybody started spelling vaccine at vax and then it was like v-a-c-k-s-i-n-e you know it just like they just change the filters the filters only work so the jab the jab and then it was just like memes like you put it in a picture then the ocr started happening and they started doing little tricks there like the scope of things that you have to filter and watch is just so massive that there's

there's no control and people wake up slowly i think it's charles um it's a quote out of um oh god i hate it when i can't remember the name of the book um a group no group not a group thing um crowd something crowd jesus i'll remember in a minute maybe that was the crowds but uh no it's and it was after 2020 it was like published in 2021 um whatever but it was uh it's a quote of people go insane in a group all at once very quickly and they only recover their sanity slowly and one at a time and that's what networks do though like when you when you have fundamentally changed that communication layer and you've opened up this bandwidth and exposure of ideas remember the people that are most angry or most uncomfortable about an idea are often the ones

that are realizing that they can't ignore it you know about the epstein and pd stuff oh no and hollywood isn't all pedophiles politicians aren't all just in this big giant like mutually assured destruction uh uh blackmail ring that can't possibly be the case but then they get really really mad at every single post that suggests it and provides evidence for it because they something in the back of their mind is being like nah dude nah dude it's kind of that's kind of what it is um cognitive dissonance is a hell of a yeah a hell of a drug people don't it's fish and water thing it's like obviously we talk a lot about this in bitcoin this applies directly to people's aversion to bitcoin versus the u.s dollar and other fiat currencies is they don't

want to believe that they've been sold a lie their whole lives and i do like and this is it is funny that you mentioned like this the bandwidth and the network and it reminds me of like the early days of rogan like back in 2012 2013 that was like one of the major clips from his early episodes like the internet it's like you're in a wide creek trying to grab all the salmon that are going to lay eggs like you're not it's like one individual trying to do that it's impossible information is free now and that's i think that's the one of the massive battles of our time is just having the incumbent power structure come to grips with that and trying to figure out a way for them to realize their attempts to stop this information distribution

and the sharing of information and will be futile ultimately and i don't know if we convince them or just move our pieces on the chessboard in a way that makes it very clear to them this is not going to happen so that we can limit the damage that they try to cause along the way i think they increasingly just kind of become irrelevant um you know the the worst thing you can do to a politician like you think about the framing and like what a politician goes for is want to be liked they want to feel important and this is why one of the things that you can do to a politician that will anger them and this is not all mind you um like there's a ron paul yeah and there's like a very very small group of people who literally just feel some sort

of an obligation but obviously they are one out of a thousand maybe one out of 500 and something um um and uh but that what they chase is clout and this is why one of the things that will anger them and make them hate people more than anything else is ridicule but at the same time that makes ridicule the most powerful weapon memes memes are not to be are not to be undervalued you know they are they are literal weapons in the social sphere for i think i remember where you were it wasn't a book but the academy of ideas had a two-part series on mass formation mass psychosis the first was explaining what it is which you alluded to earlier everybody goes crazy at once and then individually comes to terms and the second part was like how do you break through it and it was

like ridicule like you literally ridicule the people trying to hold you down and it's so effective yeah and it's not only is it effective in pissing them off but it's effective in empowering other individuals to see that they're like oh that is funny the madness of crowds the madness of crowds i know i'd get it that's what i said i said the madness of crowds did you i think i did that's god's side wasn't it i don't know i was trying to log into my audible real quick to to scroll down my my list maybe well well if you said it then that's probably what's stuck in my head but yes the madness of crowds was the book that i was thinking of um and it's charles somebody was the quote

yeah that's i think particularly leading up to this election um i think that's becoming very it's becoming very apparent that ridicule is having an effect i mean oh yeah kamala is very easy to ridicule for being honest they didn't trot somebody out that it was more iron clad dude i can't believe it's so weird the die i can't it's so funny because you can see the people who are like you can you can see which network people are in with how they actually communicate um like network in the sense of like narrative network or worldview network um whether or not they still perceive the old guard as a form of authority or source of truth and really this is all about trust right is that you know if a study comes out of new york times there's a huge huge

huge number of people who are just like okay like how much do i believe that study and they've they've seen too many times that the simple simple reality simple reality that if you have something that's incredibly politically divisive and especially quote-unquote science science is so easy to buy because there's no money there you know if you're giving out grants for climate change your study's going to find climate change that's just how it is man like and i don't care you're going to be able to point to so many different things that doesn't make it true that doesn't make it true that makes it grant worthy if you're you know if you're given a budget to figure out who satoshi nakamoto is you're gonna figure out who it is you're gonna find because you're not

gonna that's exactly right oh my god that's funny peter peter todd right yeah it's peter actually no we shouldn't last not peter but um it's likely not peter but that is that's a perfect example of we need a documentary that sends waves through the financial world we need to discover who satoshi nakamoto is hbo if you're using hbo as your your bitcoin knowledge source you already lost man you already lost no it's a perfect example of all this it's go buy rally coin on coinbase too yeah the uh no like to your point of other people beginning to get i mean my mom is a great example of this i mean related to what's going on in north carolina right now like she sent me an instagram post one of the theories that like the um one of the towns

sitting on the lithium like she just sent me that theory that's been going around like they needed to wipe this town off the world or out of the way so they get the lithium mines she's like do you think this is real i was like i don't know i don't i doubt it maybe it could be government's done very weird stuff but again the point being like my mom is getting even though it's slowly but surely slowly but surely like getting into alternative takes on on these type of events the world the walls around worldview are really big and really thick you know like like it's a very like you build your identity around this and you have to very slow like you have to etch you know it's very much the spoon in the prison wall like you don't

you don't just go blasting through like if you just go blasting through one of those walls you're like it breaks people you know especially if they're really deep um but that's just slowly but surely and this is why like when you back out 10 to 15 years um and you look at you know a 20-year trajectory that's why i think the momentum i like going back to kind of a question that started this thread was yeah i think we're undoubtedly winning the the war of the mind i guess is is the way to put it um that doesn't mean that we win in the political sphere that doesn't mean that we win on the ground in every location but it does mean that I think there is a natural response and also a very natural evolution of things have to be bad.

You have to have the stressors of tyranny, especially when you find yourself in a technological environment that has changed so vastly that none of the systems work the same. It's important to remember that 124 years ago, those systems that we put in place to protect freedom or to protect free speech, none of them apply anymore. like we we have to build entirely new systems because the avenues of power and control don't lie in the same place or in the same hands um which is why noster bitcoin like it is the cypherpunks who have pioneered this and all i can see is on a 30-year timeline what has the cypherpunk persona the the culture the the worldview done but grow you know like like what has a trajectory that is that more in the common knowledge i mean of course it's still niche you know it's still it's still a corner but it's a vastly larger corner than it used to be

um and i think that is really where the heart of you know the fire shifts to a different place when the technological environment is different you know when it changes anything about our generation it's coming up millennials now we're both married children thinking about this stuff but i remember downloading aol via cd-rom onto my gateway uh desktop in the 90s then i remember napster when it blew up i was around like 11 or 12 at the time i was a napster fiend uh all the forums and chat rooms like we're native to that and i think that's i think maybe not us but i think many people and it's not all of us millennials there's obviously where a bunch of us who never were really online growing up um but i think uh a critical amount of

us were critically online growing up and we're sort of grown up in this era because i remember like when it comes to like bitcoin specifically i mean i was radicalized by 08 um the the middle east wars snowed in julian assange when i found bitcoin it wasn't earth shattering to me it was like oh no this is it was obvious the solution that was yeah and that's because of being very online growing up and if you think about the cumulative effect of more and more people growing up with the communications network just playing that forward another 20 years when we're getting towards retirement and it's going to have profound effects yeah that's going to be the fish in water it's like no this is the way this is the way media works it's the way we share information

but i think i think it's going in our direction like without a doubt and you know in the um howard bloom a book i've been reading most recently or listening to um uh been reading a book about thorium listening to a book called the global brain uh by howard bloom which i can't remember who recommended this one to me but it's so good um and uh he talks about when there's such a cool there's such a cool story about like bacteria and that um just kind of this layer of communication that we just clearly are not aware of and how literal generations will shift like the bacteria doesn't even look the same like doesn't have the same features the the structure of the body of the bacteria doesn't look the same and they will when they find when

they reach out and they find resources they will literally grow and start having infants like the the new generations will be a completely different type of bacteria that are basically built to stay in place and consume as many resources as possible and so they build this huge static like kind of collective group that is built to work together and consume resources as efficiently as possible and spread out then when the resources start to dry up basically all of these pressures start to occur and you have tons of this bacteria start to die and then literally the genetic there is a genetic shift and they start having the next generation start coming out and they literally have like these these little tentacles these tails that will get them to go out and they they go out

on their own and they go in search for food again and it's a literal generational shift like generations and generations it will look like one thing and then when the pressures start to break down their community they turn into something completely different and then rather than wanting to coalesce and work together and consume resources that they're built to be efficient to travel quickly and to be on their own until of course they find resources again so cool but the the idea here is that um and one of the things that he specifically brought up is that kind of in the fires of the collapse of the last thing that has kind of reached its end like like where its scale doesn't work anymore it is actually in that you that environment is a

necessary part of of the pressures that end up building the thing that is the solution it's it's it's like you you need the ashes necessary to grow the next thing in a sense you know um and i think kind of my perspective i kind of got quote unquote radicalized during the same zone that you you did probably a little bit later um i remember in 2001 i was still in 9-11 i was still you would have called me a hardcore republican um and it wasn't until really 2008 2009 2010 that i was really it was after the great financial crisis that i think i was like really solid like oh this is a scam like you know this whole thing is just up in smoke um because it wasn't it was shortly before that like because i found bitcoin in 2011 and it was like blatantly

obvious you know we were already austrian economic rabbit hole uh i was bit torrent and i'd found the cypherpunks at that point um which is funny because my brother actually heard about bitcoin first in a conversation about the fed um whereas would have thought like me going down the cypherpunk rabbit hole maybe i would have heard about it first but um uh but we were both like instantly down that and it's such a great example i think of kind of that collective mind is that the pressures build and you you start to shift that worldview by this the small consistent exposure to new information and and bandwidth to be able to communicate with people that you know otherwise would have thought they were alone in the world with their perspective um and you find out oh

there's a hundred of us. We could do something. And then you start to build those solutions. That's Noster, the, the pairs stuff, like the, the pair stack, like with Keaton wholesale Bitcoin. Like, like I think these things are like, I feel like I've been tuned into that, that direction in that worldview ever since then. And Bitcoin was kind of like that first piece of the puzzle is like holy shit you can solve this you know like this is actually fixable this isn't just some big insurmountable problem that i have to go through my life as a lonely libertarian defeated by the fact that the world doesn't care about what i feel is an obvious answer to our problems like no there's actually a solution um and when you think about it we're

14 we're 15 15 years into it it's moving faster than it's ever like it's changing faster than it's ever changed in 20 21 days it'll be 16 years since the white paper just crazy so crazy so yeah it's the 31st we're very close and that's the uh that's the other beauty of it too like i mean i was definitely on that island i was in college at the time that i found uh bitcoin and i mean i was studying econ getting indoctrinated with keynesian neoliberal is neoliberalism uh and went to like a party like not a party that was a bar school but like my friend group partied a lot and i did have that feeling of like i found bitcoin and i was like weird that i cared about uh econ in the first

place the banking system and um was really in the snowden and julian assange like michael hastings was around the same time when that aaron schwartz and like was really particularly post middle eastern wars like radicalized like this is all fucked and was a bit of an outlier in my friend group yeah it wasn't we get drunk and be like let me tell you about hayek let me you guys read hayek right yeah and then it wasn't until i like silk road i think is what got me in i started reading about it watching podcast about it and then found bitcoin talk.org and i was like oh yeah there's there are people talking about this and like did make me feel comfortable like my island that i was on personally within my friends and family group it's like a weight off yeah you know like

and that's i mean when it comes to bitcoin pair noster bit torrent whatever maybe that's the other beauty of it is like you don't have to wait on the solution the solution's there and you can act on it immediately and that is the most empowering thing of bitcoin it's like you don't have to wait you don't have to feel the pressure of helplessness because you can't work through the political apparatus to get a politician in to vote the in and push the policy that you think is most advantageous for yourself as an individual in society at large like it's like no you don't have to wait for any of that you literally just opt in and it's there for you yeah and you can build yeah you can build like the that's really like one of the biggest things and and it's an

allegory it's a perfect like mirror to the beginning of the internet itself is and i think this is discounted a lot too um is just the how open the new solution or the new landscape for creating solutions is and it's kind of like when youtube happened is you know legacy media absolutely balked at it you know there's some wonderful kind of like the internet is only going to be as good as the fax machine sort of quotes about youtube um from major broadcast broadcast media back in the day um and what they discounted was the fact that there was going to be a whole new era like it's there is there's not just high high expensive national broadcast media what there is now going to be is between that and home videos there's there are multiple markets

that will now exist because the landscape now allows them to reach people and this is the same sort of thing with like when it comes to payment solutions and applications for money and privacy and all of these things is that there has been more innovation there's probably been more significant innovation and new business models and new ideas for apps and different ways to utilize some tool or payment network or lightning or noster in the last year in that landscape than there was in 50 years in credit cards maybe longer and it's purely because of the permissionlessness it's purely because you had to have a banking license you had to have a to get to to get a bank you couldn't just you can't just like make a payment card and be like go try this

like you can do that with lightning you can do that with ecash you can do that with a fediment with a federation of a multi-sig setup like how bonkers is it that like i i quote unquote can provide recovery financial services for people that i know and you know people that i own board to be like okay we're gonna do nunchuck and i'm gonna hold one of the keys and we'll just have this this is these are the devices that you need to keep track of and if you ever lose one just let me know like and you know i don't charge for it or anything it's just like these are these are people that i'm close to and i care about i don't want them to lose their money like but i'm essentially i'm doing what would have been a bank's job before and there's no permission there's

no well it is it's completely open like i'm using some open source tool that somebody else built you know um the people really underestimate the simple fact that if you just if you have the environment and the pressure, there is no limit to human innovation. Like we will just figure it out. Like, and I know that feels like a hand wavy, have faith. I'm not saying that don't build anything because if you don't build anything or you don't participate, well, then it will just happen in spite of you. And it will probably happen slower if you had an idea that could have been useful but nonetheless humans will respond you know like we we will respond to stimuli and if the pressure is there and the need is there in a necessity is the mother of invention

right yeah and i i feel like necessity is here it's here and when you're like particularly with like bitcoin lightning e-cash noster like you mean like the i completely agree like the amount of stuff that's been built in the last 12 months alone is mind-boggling but then when you think about the combination the different combinations of those different networks and those different protocols getting to materialize it gets like mind-bending like we built a news newsletter referral app using notster wallet connect and the lightning network and our ghost server and it's like hey if you uh recommend the newsletter to a friend and they read three newsletters we'll send both of you 500 sets and it wasn't until nostril while connect allowed you to basically

have people sweep sats from from a wallet like albie or something like that that that was possible to connect these two protocols and so we're only at the cusp of the benefits of combining all these protocols together like if you thought bitcoin lightning was cool just wait until you begin to to mix these monetary transfer protocols with communication protocols and then these chummy protocols it's gonna get insane it's gonna be nuts man it's wild throw ai in the mix you get the agents in the mix dude i've been not to go down the ai rabbit hole too much but um uh it's funny there's it's like extremely i increasingly think i think a open ai is gonna go under um i've been reading

and maybe i'm just like kind of in a bubble with some of the stuff i've been reading um but uh they seem to just be losing a staggering amount of money like just an excruciating amount of money and there does not seem to be a solid product for ai like it's there's this weird imbalance between how useful ai is in certain contexts and how unproductizable it is in another that like i use it constantly but i have found that 80 of my use of it is entirely local and it's very small extremely targeted things with little apps that i have built funny enough with ai like with an llm you know with chat gpt or llama 3.1 or whatever um and like i think the future of ai is really really bright i think the future of corporate ai is not so great um which

is wonderful which is wonderful i think open sources is really going to take over and and i don't think like open ai just raised like 6.6 billion dollars at like the highest valuation ever in this extremely weird we're half profit non-profit like this totally bonkers like situation where they literally only sold ppus they sold like profit it's not even equity like just so it's so weird they lost all their executive executives except for sam altman yep yep and uh and i think that buys them like and new york times was saying that their revenue was like two billion um and they were estimating that it would be like three or four billion for the year but so much of this is based on the fact that they're getting like a third of the cost for

microsoft server um subsidized microsoft compute so it's literally because they're being like heavily heavily subsidized uh and i think that buys them like eight months like the all that money they just raised i if they don't i they've they just lose money they just lose money um and it's why i've been a little bit slow to buy more gpus because i kind of suspect there will be a big big supply of gpus this coming year a100s that i can probably get at half price um so we'll see it's following the bitcoin mining cycle that we went through in like 2021 imagine just the hardware side of it but your point about like open source ai i talked to matt hill about this he's wholly convinced that the future of ai is people self-hosting their their their own um

instances and just building there and so i've gone back and forth a lot but i i i'm falling there too well i see that's where i've landed like last week i downloaded lm studio put llama 3.1 on it and then set up a cursor account and llama 3.1 on my macbook pro i think it has an m1 chip like it was fine like it was maybe two or three seconds slower than using something like perplexity or chat gpt and it had really good answers and i was giving it a bunch of context i made just a small app had the help of rob hamilton who was also holding my hand in dms along the way but it built just like i wanted to see if i could build something from scratch using a combination of lm studio cursor like try to create context in lm studio and then use cursor to actually

really tighten up the code and it was a simple uh sec api app it's like i want to know like if somebody files a 10k if they mention bitcoin and i haven't gotten it fully that's cool that's a good one i haven't gotten it fully worked out yet but like i have like the simple api call to recognize like assess your numbers for individual companies so i know that i can use the key to look up information on individual companies and we'll have to spend more time actually building out the functionality, but it was completely possible,

open source AI on my own device and it was completely functional. Yeah, I did a episode recently. I was using the Lama 3.1, the 405 billion parameter model, so I couldn't run it on my own. I was running it on a Venice.ai, which MVK actually just pointed out recently.

He's like, you know they have a shit coin, right? i was like you've got to be kidding me you're serious so does it shock you of course of course they have a shit coin does it shock you um i'm i'm sad i guess i'm not shocked i'm disappointed i'm just disappointed um but uh uh uh the what i was getting at in the episode because we talked about i covered a piece by uh uh ashton brenner i don't know i can't remember his name uh but he was talking about how we're on the road to agi and it was hard to argue with his stance because he was basically just projecting out the last 10 years of orders of magnitude improvements just kind of basically going moore's law it's like okay well if this is held true for 10 years if we just

project this out like 2027 2028 like we should be seeing something crazy um and uh so he had a really strong argument i i kind of was like wrestling with myself as to whether or not i accept his premise or not in the conversation in the takes afterward but i've also found something is that i have dropped my anthropic and chat gpt subscriptions recently um last few months uh and it's because llama 3.1 like there are times where i feel like i can probably say okay this one's better this one has a better answer than this other one but for the most part i can't tell and i actually have this if there's no judgment and there's no like underlying goal i have this thing it's like what's the value of a machine that is somehow quote unquote

smarter than you and it seems like okay sure like it seems like on the surface if you just say that out loud of course of course it's going to be like worth infinite it's going to be worth everything but then at the same time if you cannot judge if you cannot benchmark that it is actually smarter that the answer is better and you don't know how to value whether or not that answer is better it's like i likened it to computer graphics in video games is that kind of once the answers are indistinguishable it's just about cost you know and that's kind of where i am with the models that's why i canceled my subscription with both of those other ones because i just want an answer that i like and it gives me the result that i'm looking for and it's really hard to verify the

result of this is smarter than you or so like it's such a vague and kind of subjective claim in the first place it's like in context of what like in what way is it more capable than me exactly um it just seems to be this kind of like hand wavy thing that can't be defined like we're already hitting a point where we don't really have good benchmarks to even make a comparison in between the things um and once computer graphics just kind of like got good enough for video games like that was the thing every single year our graphics are better our graphics are better our graphics are better you lived in same generation right and then it was like playstation 3 and xbox era where it was like nobody really cares about graphics anymore

yeah halo's the next one had like better graphics and everybody's like okay and they didn't go out buy it immediately you know it was everything slowed down and suddenly you had retro games suddenly it became cool or unique to have old graphics and it just became a non-thing like nobody really cares about graphics anymore my graphics are just graphics you know um i kind of think that's where we're getting with loms and when that happens it will be about how they can solve explicit problems and i think ultimately it's a probability machine it still just needs the program uh but in reference to what you were just talking about with uh building your own little program in the sec that's why i started uh hope and i a developer i've been working with

started devs who can't code and it's uh on the youtube uh channel which i don't really devote much to but i try to publish i try to publish everything to youtube if i can uh just for the sake of it um youtube and rumble but uh it's a fun little series that i only just kind of get dabble in every once in a while but it's because i've built like so many little like single purpose i have become in love with single purpose apps i'm just like this just does this one thing and it just does it all the time and it's just part of my workflow and i just need it every day like i have my transcription app like just like on on my dock the one i've been working on when i worked on last night i told you i the f word was 87 times in that episode i haven't worked every piece of it

out but i think it's going to work pretty easy because you can do a json file where there's like a threshold for like every single word in the transcript um and then with ffmpeg you can actually just like generate a beep uh i think i'm gonna have an auto censoring uh tool probably in the next couple days if i can just get some hours to really devote to it so i can just drag and drop my episode into it and it will push out a new audio with all the f word bleeped um and you know i just i wait for 60 seconds or so for it to for it to propagate but that's been the use of ai and now i can't really tell the difference i have to piecemeal so much of it anyway it's just like llama 3.1 does more than enough right now yeah it's sort of i mean it's very

it reminds me of just like general search engines it's like when you go out there you're not asking the ai well you're asking google's index and by extension asking the wisdom of of the crowd and you're essentially doing the same thing it's like i don't exactly know the answer but i'm gonna look at this answer that is up here high on the index and say all right this is good enough yeah and the other big thing is that it really just kind of like makes especially since like llms hallucinate so much um because it's because it's just a probability machine you know it's just guessing what an answer would sound like which is usually really good it's usually good but it's so difficult to productize because it will affirmatively it will confidently

say something that it just totally made up you know it's not it doesn't actually have thinking or reasoning it cannot distinguish between something that was invented versus something that was probabilistically sounded good because it all is probabilistically sounds good but if you can get a context relevant result it does mean that you can search through stuff on your own computer without knowing what the thing was actually called you can you can search based on how it made you feel or how you were thinking about it at the time like if you save something of that's titled uh uh pharmaceutical drug lies chart whatever and then you search for uh covid vaccine data you're not going to get it right that search is not going to turn that up

But if your LLM does a probabilistic search, if it just embeds all of your information, that will show up as one of the top results because you are extremely close in the probability context window of that LLM when you say vaccine and pharmaceutical, when you say chart and data, like those things are close to each other. so it's actually like it is just kind of like a super a much more advanced search um so it's like incredibly useful but it's also something that's like really hard to charge for it's like am i gonna pay to search better or is somebody just going to put that in their service and then i'm just going to expect that as the that's what the free thing is like now that's kind of where i think it's going and that's why i think the small models are gonna win yeah which is another hopeful thing which is a very good thing it's a very good thing yes another one of those like bandwidth and permissionless building like now you have more builders like again i'm a dev who can't code

same but i'm building you know as much as i can but it's useful an auto sensor tool that i'm sure there are people who would want that you know yeah that's what the last week the weekend project i did it's like all right i can like i've known how to get into the terminal and hook up to my bitcoin node and use cli to communicate with the node to figure out what's going on but now it's like all right i did that project and it was very disorganized and that's like the one lesson i took from it's like all right i get it i need to get a better perspective of like how to actually organize your ide and the order of operations by which like you create like a file structure and where you save things and that was the biggest lesson i learned from as a

dev who can't code like trying to think about the engineering is how do you design it like like what's the big picture thing yeah but it was without ai like i wouldn't even have the context to understand that's what i need to learn out and like that's the next step of like what i need to take a step back and figure out how to do this and it'll probably be much easier moving forward yeah yeah 100 yeah that's what i've been trying to that's why i have hope hope is a developer um and that's why i have him on the show um and talk to him a lot about it because he kind of gives me gives me that like how should you build it framework um and that's increasingly why llms can be really useful if you know the building mindset because the llm really wants

to get just give you the whole app in like one app.js and what you need to do is know how to reference the different pieces because like if you can keep every single module and every single function under like a hundred lines of code and then make sure that your app.js is just referencing that or ref like loading in a different tool or a different module uh lms are really really good producing 100 lines of code that work um but you have to know what kind of context to give it's like you know this is my current file this is the variable that we're working with this is my this like a bunch of different things i've been doing with uh i'm building this little tiny apps os thing that i've got which is just just basically combining a bunch of little apps

that i've already built um and i'm trying to make a little interface so that uh they all work within it and i can like drag a file to it and then say make a transcription uh after you make a transcription uh archive this zip it and then delete the original file uh and then uh you know sensor it like i could just have like or convert this from uh dot mov to uh web optimize dot mp4 and i don't have to get out ffmpeg or anything like that it's just like i drag it in there and then i run a command and then if you build a thing in javascript i can just add that as like another function so like i just kind of build this little environment and it's just like this little like sidebar thing that just helps me and i just drag whatever i'm doing and then i just say run

these commands convert gif to webp do you know whatever it is and it just saves me from having to open up eternal and terminally do a bunch of little things and like this really lengthy process and i can kind of automate it um but if you know that kind of framework that you're working in llms can build a crazy amount of stuff and there's a bit of beating your head against it too you know yeah you know you just your progress is i have a different error code but But it's crazy what you can put together. Are you open sourcing this? I mean, of course it would be open source,

but I'm wearing, look at my hat. But I mean, I built it on the devs who can't code slowly and a little frustratingly. Logan, are you taking notes over there? uh but yeah i'll i'll release it it's in pair runtime or whatever so if i if i seed it you can just do pair run and then punch in the key and you can get it from a peer-to-peer with a pair stack hand up i need to get on pair yeah you got to check out pair runtime you got to check out the pair stuff you're making it very compelling uh your your pair purchase are very i seeded so

so my tiny apps thing and i did this i think in the in the episode that i cut um i was running this thing on my mac and my my goal from with that episode was to get to a point where i could just drop drag and drop a file and then run a function on it and i was like okay the easiest function that's not going to need to import ffmpeg or like whatever it is or whisper uh is copy i'm just going to copy and so i got to that point and i dragged a file to it and then i hit copy and opened up a window and then saved it to a different location i was like ah cool it worked and uh but the really cool thing is that like after i was done because i built it with pair runtime uh i i said pair stage and did my app and then pair seed and it gave me a key

and so now my macbook is just seeding this app out into the universe like a bit torrent and i took that key went over to my linux machine and said pair run and punched in the key and this is all just terminal obviously this can be obfuscated away very very easily it's a ui but i said pair run and punched in the key the app booted up i dragged something from my desktop into it it copied and i saved it to a new location on my linux i just i built something that worked on mac and it instantly i could boot it up from my mac peer-to-peer on my linux machine and do the exact same thing on linux um and i don't think people realize it's again one of those things if you know where the tools are and you know how to use them like the seeds of our solutions to

everything are already here you know like we just we just have to we just have to water the tree yeah i guess no this is a very optimistic way and a hopeful way to end the conversation going back to everything we've talked like this is uh everybody not everybody but many people are very frustrated with the government right now um particularly with the response and the misallocation of funds and it's very frustrating very enraging and i would argue evil to a certain extent and you can rage at the machine or you can rage against it and uh actually build the solutions this is it like you build these solutions in the digital sphere that make you more productive and allow you to do way more to get better information out there that

people in meat space can consume and use to to better organize and provide meat space solutions to to solving these problems oh yeah that's uh yeah thank you for doing um all you've been doing particularly these last two weeks i know it's not easy for you and it's very close to your heart and And I think the move to action that you've displayed over the last few weeks is inspiring, extremely admirable, and I think what you've done is awesome. I've got to shout out to everybody who donated, man. Like, I can't believe everybody who's, like, I just kind of did it on a whim because somebody asked me when I was doing posts, and I was like,

okay, well, I just made a wallet in Nunchuck. I was like, all right, I'll do a new multi-fig real quick. and threw up an address and i was like and i'll divert all of my lightning there too and it was just like a flood like like every every time i went back and check it's like here's another 500 bucks here's another like and some of them were coming in with like hundreds of 21 payments like literally it was just a flood and i was like holy crap man this is this is crazy and what's funny is that like my biggest problem hasn't actually had been anything to do with fiat i mean with uh bitcoin it's been how to move it to fiat because everybody like takes paypal

you know like cajun navy and the henderson rescue and all of that stuff uh and i was like hitting my main methods to get in and i'm on a bitcoin standard so like i usually hit my weekly limits you know like to pay for things and i've recently gotten my sister-in-law to accept bitcoin directly so i don't have to do a conversion for it um and luckily i pay a lot of people in bitcoin so i can avoid a lot of it but like you know when when it turned into 60 000 65 000 i was like i'm i have like a 5 000 cash app you know like i'm suddenly running into i'm trying to i have to figure out a whole new way because as soon as it's not and that was one of the best things about bitcoin veterans and i got a shout out again um please donate to bitcoin veterans uh uh follow

them they're doing updates 90 of my information now is literally from bitcoin veterans they're absolutely killing it they're on the ground out there shane's been sleeping in his truck um and uh i i'm probably going to be holding on to the bitcoin just so i can piecemeal it out because i feel like there's going to be this flood of supplies and resources like some of them are even being overwhelmed and i think you know five days go by like that's going to kind of dry up and there will need to be resources again because it's going to go on for months um and it seems like bitcoin veterans are kind of in this for the long haul too um so it's going to be good but i can send them bitcoin so i didn't have a limit so i could donate ten thousand dollars to them when i

could see them buying generators and tents and you know this sort of stuff um but just it's been wild especially with the last couple of weeks it's stressful but so many people have been have stepped up yeah so many people it's crazy it's just like super hopeful it's so hopeful you don't need taxes like when shit hits the fan and people need money like this is a perfect example like people give via charity yeah from all over the world like yeah like that's why i'm landlocked in texas and not able to physically get and help out and so it's like yeah donate and it's you know parker hit me up he was like dude how can i help you know like

and he had a friend he was trying to get in touch and i was and i was like oh yeah sure and you know i went out and filed a missing uh welfare check like they're a bunch of different you know just getting sources just getting it's a it's a shocking how important communication is and i feel like it's like largely dismissed that's why i was like super jacked about what the veterans were doing because they um that was their first goal is like let's set up communications like let's try to get people connected um and i think people really discount how powerful that as a first step is but yeah yeah well keep keep crushing it man i know it's not easy um it's a very shitty i've been sitting here and the signal group has just been

pinging the whole time like i can barely keep up with it i just try to like go through every hour and like read apparently chin chinux can hold a lot of hay somebody found like an enormous amount of free hay that people were donating uh but yeah that's crazy there's there is a machine of community helping to make this happen. So that was good. It does feel good. And hopefully, um,

hopefully in a few months we can catch up and we'll have some great examples of, uh, disputing who will build the roads. Exactly. Are you going to Lugano? I am not. I'm not going to be able to make it. Well,

I'll probably see you early next year at one of them. I mean, I can't wait for that. It's always a pleasure, sir. thank you so much for coming on good hanging dude

always good hanging it was an easy two hours I mean not easy but it flew by was it two hours oh shit it was two hours

alright well hell yeah man thank you for having me dude yeah if you're listening check out Bitcoin Audible that's what I was just gonna I was just gonna

unchain and guys fun and all that good stuff no seriously check it out like I said in our DMs the

an incredible resource for Bitcoiners and future Bitcoiners if you're looking to streamline your zero to one understanding of Bitcoin nobody has read more

about Bitcoin and then outside of your reading just explaining explaining Bitcoin through an Austrian lens guy is your guy

go check it out hell yeah makes you feel good warms my heart thank you man peace and love freaks take care Thank you.