TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #625: Leisure, Magnificence, and the Bitcoin Standard with Michael Goldstein

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

Marty sits down with Michael Goldstein to discuss the philosophy behind "hodling for good" - exploring how Bitcoin holders can use Austrian economics principles to think beyond mere price appreciation toward deploying their savings for higher purposes like leisure, education, capital goods, and magnificent works that benefit civilization while maintaining the economic virtue of low time preference saving. Michael Goldstein on Twitter: https://x.com/bitstein Nakamoto Institute: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Shoutout to our sponsors: Coinkite https://coinkite.com Unchained https://unchained.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/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ 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/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Shoutout to our sponsors: Coinkite https://coinkite.com Unchained https://unchained.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/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ 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/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be and we're live just like that just like that 3 30 on a friday memorial day weekend it's a good good good way to end the week and start the holiday weekend sir yes sir thank you for having me here thank you for coming i wore this hat specifically

because I think it's very apropos to the conversation we're going to have, which is, I hope, an extension of the presentation you gave at BitBlockBoom, HODL for Good. You were working on that for many weeks leading up to the conference and explaining how you were structuring it. I think it's a very important topic to discuss now as the Bitcoin price is hitting new all-time highs and people are trying to understand what am i doing with bitcoin like you have you have the

different sort of factions within bitcoin uh get on a bitcoin standard get on zero spend as much bitcoin as possible you have the sailors of the world we're saying buy bitcoin never sell die with your bitcoin and i think you do a really good job in that presentation i just think your understanding overall of bitcoin is incredible to put everything in the context it's not either or it really depends on what you want to accomplish yeah it's definitely there there is no actual one size fits all um for i mean nearly anything in this world so um yeah i mean first of all i mean it was the first conference talk i had given in maybe five years i think the one prior to that uh was um bit block boom 2019 which was my meme talk which uh has uh become infamous and

notorious so uh there was also a lot of like high expectations uh you know uh rockstar dev uh has has treated that you know uh that that talk with a lot of reference a lot of people have enjoyed it and he was expecting this one to be you know the greatest one ever which is a little bit of a little bit of a uh a burden to live up to those kinds of standards um but you know because i don't give a lot of talks um you know i i like to uh try to bring ideas that might even be ideas that are common so something like hodling we all talk about it constantly uh but try to bring it from a little bit of a different angle and try to give um a little bit of uh new light to it i also i've i've always enjoyed kind of coming at things from a third

angle um whenever there's you know there's there's all these little debates that we have in in bitcoin and sometimes it's nice to try to uh step out of it and look at it a little more kind of objectively and find ways of understanding it that incorporate the truths of all of them. You know, because I think we should always be kind of as much as possible after ultimate truth. So with this one, yeah, I was kind of finding that sort of golden mean.

So yeah, and I actually, I think about that a lot as Aristotle has his concept of the golden mean. So it's like any virtue is sort of between two vices because you can always take something too far. So you're always trying to find that right balance. So someone who is courageous, one of the vices on one side is being basically reckless. I can't remember what word he would use, but effectively being reckless and just wanting to put yourself in danger for no other reason than just, you know, the thrill of it.

And then on the other side, you would just have cowardice, which is like you're unwilling to put yourself at any risk at any time. And courage is right there in the middle where it's understanding when is the right time to put yourself, you know, in the face of danger and take it on. And so, in some sense, this was kind of me, in some ways, like, I'm obviously a partisan of hodling. I've, for, you know, a long time now, talked about the, why hodling is good, why people do it, why we should expect it, but still trying to find that sort of golden mean of, like, yes, hodl, but also, what are we hodling for? And we're not hodling just merely for the sake of hodling. There is a purpose to it, and we should think about that. And that would also help us think more about what are the benefits of spending? When should we spend? Why should we spend? What should we spend on to actually give light to that sort of side of the debate?

So that was what I was kind of trying to get into. Um, as well as also just, uh, at the same time, despite all the talk of hodling, there's always this perennial, uh, there's always this perennial dislike of hodlers because we're treated as, uh, as if, um, we're just free riding the network or we're just greedy or, you know, any of these things. And I wanted to show how huddling does serve a real economic purpose and it does benefit the individual, but it also does, it has actual real social benefits as well beyond merely the individual. So I wanted to give that sort of defensive hodling as well to look at it from a broader position than just merely I'm trying to get rich, because even the person who that is all they want to do, just like, you know, your pure number go up moon boy, even that behavior has positive ramifications on the economy. And while we might look at them and have judgments about their particular choices for them as an individual, we shouldn't discount that their actions are having positive effects for the rest of the economy.

Yeah, so let's dive into that, just not even in the context of Bitcoin, because I think you did a great job of this in the presentation. just you've done a good job of this consistently throughout the years that i've known you just from like a first principles austrian economics perspective what is the idea around capital accumulation low time preference and deployment of that capital like what what like getting getting into like the nitty-gritty and then applying it to big yeah it's it's a big question and um in many ways i mean i i even i barely scratched the surface uh i i can't claim to have read uh all the volumes of bomber works you know capital and interest and and stuff like that um but i think there's some some sort of basic concepts that we can look at that we can

uh draw a lot out um the first uh i guess let's write that so repeat so like capital time preference well i guess getting more broad like why saving why do people save um what should they plan to do with that savings yeah and what are the externalities throughout the broader economy of individuals doing that in aggregate yeah i mean it always goes back to you know the very beginning is like you know humans are acting purposefully uh because they have um they they believe that they can um perform some action that will have an effect on the world that will remove some uneasiness and basically improve how they how they feel. And when you're doing this, you're always you're employing some means may even literally just be, you know,

your own body or something. If you're, you know, if you're Robinson Crusoe, that's that's how a lot of economists like to start this is just you're a one man on a desert island. You only have your body and you need to go make shelter, make food, find food, et cetera, et cetera. So you start using your means, your body, the resources around you, and so on and so forth. And what happens is So, you know, like as you're doing that, you may start to realize that there are ways to use means to produce goods that are not meant to be consumed. So you're not trying to, you know, maybe you're trying to catch fish. Um, you, you make goods that, um, you realize will help you catch more fish, um, uh, because you want to be able to eat and eat more and know that you have, uh, food available.

So those kinds of goods, that's what we call capital. Um, and those goods don't even need to be physical. It can be knowledge, um, you know, or other sort of like non-physical things. a capital is is something that we it's a it's a psychological categorization that an actor chooses so you know one man's capital is another man's consumer good um uh or or worthless um but it's not uh there's not just like a magical thing called capital um which i guess like a lot of marxists and uh think as well as uh like keynesians treat capital often as uh you'll see it in kind of keynesian neoclassical that kind of stuff it all treats it as sort of these like

black boxes of uh just you know here's a factory and it's like as if it's just like all other factories um but it's really you know a conglomeration of all kinds of very particular goods but when you have capital now you can produce more things um and but the thing is in order to make that capital you need to know that in that time period that you're not actually out catching fish that you'll still have fish to eat in the time it takes you to make you know the the spear or then the net or then you know and so on and so forth um each of those times you actually need goods available for that time period that you're not specifically trying to get those goods. And so, uh, you have to recognize one, you have to recognize that there's a

possibility of doing something that can produce more in the future. Um, and then you also have to recognize, uh, you know, uh, that, uh, or you need to have enough savings, uh, to actually get through that time and uh this is where the concept of time preference uh comes into play because if if you know that um humans sort of necessarily want goods sooner um uh than later so uh you you would prefer things uh now or earlier than than waiting but whenever you have uh some kind of production production necessarily takes time so your ability to sort of withstand that time both in a physical sense of uh literally having something to feed you but also uh you know being sort of psychological psychologically willing to wait it out that uh that that requires

having some some form of uh lowered uh time preference where it's like i'm willing to wait because i know that there will be more for me later and i prefer that future to what i could have right now so that's that's where time preference plays in um and as as an economy develops whether it's one person or you know adding on um they're able to hopefully continually identify new ways of uh sort of lengthening that structure of production we call that roundabout production because it's you're you're doing things that aren't actually related to literally getting a fish, but all of the capital goods needed to do it. And the more you can lengthen that structure of production while knowing that you're actually

going to get more of what you want, obviously, the more goods you'll be able to have. But along the way, you need to be able to lower your time preference in order to do so. But also the actual success of that can also lower your time preference because now you actually have more goods. So your time is valued differently because you actually have something available so you can more safely rest and look into the future. um so savings is effectively uh at its at its core uh it's the uh just having the goods available to withstand all of the potential uncertainties that you have to deal with through the production

process um and then there's uh also investment um which came up in my talk in the form of capital goods of you know something that you might actually use your bitcoin for um uh that's taking your savings and putting it into some productive goods some capital good that can help uh create more future goods um and uh yeah i don't i hopefully that's like a decent that's a good covering of what you asked to no i don't know if i missed something no i think you covered it well and just to go a little bit further before we get into like the triple entendre of huddle for good uh how's that process been disturbed in recent decades yeah so um i would say that uh fiat money is is by its nature a a disturbance of that process and a very notable one and the one

that obviously Bitcoiners are kind of most focused on. And the reason being is that at a basic level, if money is being continually produced, especially at an uncertain rate, but even at an exact formulaic rate, your mythical 2%, Um, in that case, uh, that means that whatever savings you have, uh, necessarily, uh, the time that it can last. So you, you, you receive money that you could put away in savings. Um, but if you

do that, um, every time money's being printed, the amount of time that that money can last, to suit your needs is less than it otherwise would be in the market. And so your time horizon is necessarily brought shorter. And now it might actually stimulate you to go invest with your money. You might find yourself seeking out various investments. But these two are focused on shorter term profits, uh, than they otherwise would be. So your, your, the way that you invest also changes. Um, so, uh, you know, we, we see this in the marketplace of, you know, especially you in the sort of VC world, you can see how this, uh, plays out where people are chasing after whatever kind of stock picks they can for the sake of getting some short-term profit that helps,

uh at least keep them afloat but also they want to make it uh extra big you know get rich quick because you know that gives you more breathing room um uh but that that sort of behavior is uh exacerbated by the fact that your money is continually uh devalued um but then of course if if you're also adding in an uncertainty to how much and when it makes it even it makes this even harder to rationally plan out. And so you're even less interested in really treating just plain cash as something to hold. And so now we live in a world that is heavily debt financed as opposed to self-financed through savings. Something I didn't mention that I think is crucial, um, especially like to understand, um, what, what tends to just be sort of the,

the Austrian position is that, uh, savings proceeds, um, capital accumulation, um, and capital production. You can't, you can't produce unless you already have resources that you can manipulate into something else. Um, you can't, you can't just snap your fingers. So whenever the government stimulates the economy, what they're really doing is just inducing you to put that savings into investment. But often we'll hear economists talk as if savings is just this thing that is withholding from uh investing which is also why they want to do that because they think uh saving is bad um because you're not you're not doing anything according to them um and so

uh they they're trying to induce you to to put it into something but the key there is that um you're only able to actually start doing anything insofar as the savings are actually there, that there is something to save from. So often these policies are really just redistribution of wealth. And then it gets especially bad when you artificially change the interest rate, which is basically like kind of this kind of societal measure of time preference, so to speak, based on how people price money and such. If you artificially change that you have situations, uh, which caused the business cycle, which is people begin doing projects that they don't actually have the savings for. And then at some point, you know, your, your,

uh, uh, Mises gives the example of like, you know, building a, building a wall or building a house. And, uh, you think you have all the bricks and in the process you run out of bricks and realize, oh, well, this project is, is over. So you have to just kind of liquidate everything. and then everyone down the line who is lending to you then also uh takes that hit and so the boom is yes look at us we're we're doing all these things look at all these things we're building but then the bust is realizing that you don't actually have the savings you thought you had and everything comes crumbling down so it's it's very important for society to um uh allow these things to uh operate in a way that describes or reflects reality rather than merely what you wish uh to be

yeah leads to a misallocation of capital do something hoarder yes do not save yes do something yes it leads to half-built buildings and projects and yeah societies in aggregate overall if you do long enough and i i think you know an important thing there is like you know why you know why hold like we said it's like it's dealing with uncertainty so a lot of people who uh they they have that attitude towards hoarders hoarding being you know just this pejorative towards saving um is this idea that it's unproductive because the cash is just sitting there why aren't you doing anything with it um but it might be unproductive to you because it's not literally going towards something you want it to go to um but people are broadly speaking rational in the sense that they

use their brains to identify means to attain uh particular ends so if they're doing something they're probably doing it for a reason and when people are hold holding money um it's because they have more uncertainty about the future um and so that that's what the money allows because because it being the most liquid good they know if they have money whatever opportunities good and bad arise so uh you know a positive opportunity you come across something that you didn't know even though existed before and now you have the cash to to get a hold of it um or a negative thing like uh there's a there's a you know a bit of a disaster and you need to uh weather the storm um both of those things having money allows you to get past that and so when people feel have that

feeling like there's probably more of these uh potential situations both good and bad coming my way they're going to want to hold cash and that's that's actually productive from that individual point of view um so it's it's uh it's uh very very silly to to look at that as unproductive because if it was unproductive people wouldn't be doing it sup freaks this rip of tftc was brought to you by our good friends at coin kite they make the cold card queue my favorite hardware wallet the most secure hardware wallet on the market as you can see it's got the blackberry form factor full keyboard it's got two secure enclaves you create your private public keys offline the device never has to go online never does go online so you keep your bitcoin secure if you have your

bitcoin on exchanges and you're looking to get it off secure it in the best way possible pick up a cold card queue go to coin kite.com find the cold card queue use the code tftc for five percent off if you're a power user of bitcoin like i am if you're running a business on a bitcoin standard if you're just a bitcoiner wants to secure your bitcoin get the most secure hardware wallet on the market go get the cold card queue it's a beautiful thing in that context you're hodling for good and that good being the ability to opportunistically take advantage of something that is unforeseen that may arise that is seen as a positive opportunity and conversely able to weather a storm in the future so you're huddling for yes um good in the sense that you will be able

to repair your roof or do something if some emergency arises yes and i think bitcoin hodlers are doing a bit of bit of both the real speculation that all hodlers are dealing with that that's usually really motivating them is the number go up um so it's effectively more focused on the the positive but also that then in turn means that oh more negatives uh would be able to be uh addressed in that case um but they obviously most are looking for number to go up and they desire that um and with that it's very well possible that you know what you would see uh post-hyperbitcoinization, when the economy has settled on a Bitcoin standard, the rate of growth of Bitcoin would no longer be as high as it is now. It would be more reflective of the growth

of the economy as a whole. And so therefore, people would find more investment opportunities that would have a higher return in purchasing power than just holding the Bitcoin. And so you would start to see more investment. And in fact, the reason that there would be continued economic growth would be from the fact that some other hodler out there in the universe had seen one of these opportunities and they took it and they were successful and wealth was generated so there's more goods in the marketplace and then it gets reflected back into uh you know the the purchasing power in the economy as a whole so holding holding in that state um where you know with the the you know

global money or whatever, that can be sort of analogized to people investing in the economy as a whole. So you're not investing in any particular structure of production, you're just investing in the economy as a whole. And the reason why that's possible is because when you hold money, sound money, where there's no more new Bitcoin being made or very little still being mined, what that means is when you hold, you're increasing the marginal value of everyone else's Bitcoin, which means that their purchasing power is increasing to that point where some of them start to see, uh, this purchasing power gives me opportunities that I didn't previously have. And now I can self finance, um, some, you know, venture, um, or, or even just, you know,

getting a consumer good that itself, uh, you know, um, you know, uh, benefits some other, uh, line of, of, uh, business, um, and, and so on and so forth. So, um, the reason why there's economic growth, uh, is because others were doing exactly that. And so you're sort of investing in them. And then, uh, hopefully, you know, I would, I would recommend people, uh, trying to imagine what would you actually spend on? Um, but you have this, this positive externality, um, on everyone, uh, by, by holding, um, your, your, it's not just for yourself. It's actually, uh, rather charitable in a sense um that sort of uh gratuitous benefit to everyone else that you're you're increasing their um potential uh to be able to uh acquire more and was it holstman who you referenced in the

in the uh in the presentation who wrote a book about yeah he had his his newest book uh which is a tremendous book it's it's one of the most interesting economics books i've read um so uh I'm still one of my, I've, I've put a lot of memes out there. Um, but I think one of my favorite has, has always been that I, uh, got a lot of Bitcoiners to read his book, the ethics of money production. And he brings a similar lens, um, to the idea of, uh, gifts and charity, um, in his book, uh, that came out, I guess it was last year, um, called abundant generosity in the state. And it's talking about the, like I said, gift giving, charity, the gratuitous effects of free exchange, and also how government intervention destroys that ability to give gifts and creates gratuitous bads on the economy. In the form of NGOs just taking taxpayer money.

basically yeah yeah just a huge huge grifts lots of grifters no and i think we were texting about this the other week because independently i was at bit block boom but i didn't show up till after you get the presentation so i saw for the first time earlier this week and i was a bit proud of myself because i was on a podcast last week and the last question that was posed to me was what would you say to an individual that buys bitcoin now an individual decides not to like what's their life going to look like in 10 years my response is basically the individual who buys bitcoin now and saves using bitcoin as a savings vehicle they're going to be i believe very happy with their decision and their life will be benefited massively for making that decision

the person who doesn't decide to huddle now they're probably not going to benefit as much from bitcoin directly as the individual decided to start holding now but their life will be better because others will have decided to have used bitcoin as a savings vehicle lowered their time preference built up an amount of purchasing power that allows them to go invest in productive endeavors in the economy and the person even if you didn't buy bitcoin will benefit from that because the economy overall should be better yes and i i agree completely uh the the last person um yes they're they wouldn't get gains necessarily um although if they start saving right then and there uh there is no top uh to bitcoin bitcoin goes up forever um so

you know with that in mind they actually could continue to get gains um they just wouldn't have uh gotten gains from uh speculating on that future coming to fruition um and perhaps They might be a little bitter about that, but hopefully not. Hopefully they'll get over it because they would now be living in a Bitcoin world and in an economy that is running on a Bitcoin standard, which is much more conducive to prosperity, capital accumulation, free exchange, all these good things that lead to economic growth and, uh, you know, increase the, uh, just the, the amount of, of goods that we have in the world to, to make use of, uh, to make our lives better. Um, this is something that I think is,

is so interesting about, um, uh, time preference and, uh, kind of this, this idea of, of gratuity, uh, gratuitous goods, meaning, um, these are, these are goods that are not intended. They just sort of happen. And you can have gratuitous bads as well, um, collateral damage from, from some activity. Um, but free exchange has a lot of, uh, gratuitous goods, which Holzman writes about. And, um, specifically, and I referenced it in the talk, uh, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, uh, the very first, uh, um, actually the very first sections of the very first chapter, uh, essay, uh, in, uh, his book democracy that got that failed is talking about just the nature of time preference. Um, and this is, this is prior to even getting into anything about,

you know, government or anything at all. Uh, which of course there's, there's much you could say about how that affects, uh, time preference, but he's just talking about time preference itself. And he basically alludes to this exact concept in such a, such an interesting way, Because he points out the fact that whoever it is that exists in the economy, as someone around them is lowering their time preference, adding knowledge to the world, creating more goods through their own self-interested capital accumulation, capital production, and so on and so forth. because there's more goods in the world the marginal value of all goods is going down for even the the poorest uh person or the um sort of highest time preference person for whatever reason uh their high time preference um all goods are are now marginally cheaper So whatever money that they receive from their labor is now worth more.

And so they're inherently lower time preference than they were before because their relation of time to goods on the market has changed. So that is an incredible revelation and it goes to exactly what you're saying. It's like this doesn't just apply to Bitcoin. Rather, what you're describing with Bitcoin, that last Bitcoiner, that's actually just one application of this more fundamental fact that what we do in the marketplace can benefit the market as a whole, even the people that you're not thinking about. Some fat cat capitalist or whatever is not necessarily thinking about every single person in the market, and yet insofar as he's successful in a free market where you have a rule of law and everything is just and all of that, insofar as if he's earning profits, it's because he was creating wealth, and it is ultimately having that downstream effect. and then when you have things like knowledge um which you know comes from you know explicitly people teaching one another or implicitly of just kind of picking up uh whether through you know anything from memetics to just trying to reverse engineers like how did that guy do it i want to do that too and you just kind of pick them up that knowledge spreads like wildfire and so in many

ways, people become smarter, um, as well. Um, and so, you know, and, and the more, uh, knowledge you have, uh, regarding, uh, your, your available means to the, the, the possible ends, the more you can get, get out of the economy and also the, the more productive you are. Um, and I, I think that's incredible. Um, a nice example of this would be, and I think it's almost relevant to consider, um, in, in today, cause there's a lot of talk about AI and labor and so on and so forth. And I don't know how that will fully flesh out. Um, so I'm not, I'm not trying to comment on that, but just at least thinking up until now, um, when we look at someone, um, like a, uh, like think like a barber, uh, a barber is not, you know, it's, it's not like a prestigious job

and yet it's one that we all need um you know most most people get haircuts um if he just continues doing his job like the job hasn't really changed that much in my life like all these things have changed over the past few decades but like the barbershop experience is is basically the exact same for me uh as it was when i was a little boy and um you know, the price has gone up because of inflation. But, you know, I imagine the margins are just the same. The thing is, is that person, their labor over time is actually becoming more valuable, despite the fact that there's nothing about it that's really changing. They're still just sitting you down and cutting your hair, getting a basic cut. But their labor

is ultimately more productive because everyone else in the economy, you have more, you have more capital goods. Um, so everyone, any, any unit of labor that you're putting into the world has a larger downstream effect of how much is produced from that labor. And so when you're getting a haircut, um, that, uh, the, the, the time saved, you know, it takes, you know, 20, 30 minutes or whatever, to get a haircut, that 20, 30 minutes is actually more valuable to you now than it was back then in the sense of the opportunity cost of what goods could have been produced. Uh, had I, um, been working more instead of getting that haircut. And so, uh, even the barber, uh, you know, the barbers have not getting, you know, the barbers are not getting, uh, you know, uh,

poorer and poorer, they're actually helping. Now, that's assuming a sound economy. I'm sure a lot of barbers are hurting a lot. I think everyone is in this inflationary economy. But in a sound economy, that kind of labor, it only becomes more valuable. And then if you add Bitcoin into the mix, supercharge sound money, it only benefits those people even more us now has a strategic bitcoin reserve that's not clickbait it's a policy directive unchained and the bitcoin policy institute just dropped a new report and are hosting a live event to unpack it it's called the strategic bitcoin reserve era begins we've got congressman nick bedich matthew pines and joe burnett breaking down how the first 100

days of the new administration flipped the policy script on bitcoin go to unchained.com slash tftc to register and read the full report that's unchained.com slash tftc diving deeper into this concept of like shifting towards the idea of leisure like what is true leisure and how does the ability to exercise leisure as you defined it in the presentation actually compound and accelerate this type of productivity growth and value creation yeah um and so it's it's somewhat indirect um i guess i would say it's like i was trying to say it was like okay what do we what do we uh huddle so as you said earlier huddle for good i was i was uh you know rather uh proud of myself for for you know coming up with a what i thought was a clever title uh because of being a

triple entendre the first one just being was like well no there's a reason you would huddle for good you'd huddle forever um and then the second one is like well huddling for good in the terms of i want to huddle for good stuff. Uh, meaning, um, I don't, I don't want just what I have today. I want something better later. I want, I want my children to have a better life than I had. And I want my grandchildren to have a better life than, uh, my children and so on and so forth. I think every, every normal person, you know, wants that, uh, in the world. And so, um, you know, the question is like, okay, well, what's this good stuff. And one of them is like, you just, you just huddle so that you know number go up and now you can have more of something or you can just

have like the nicer version or whatever um then there's uh i talked about uh capital goods so you know the the market doesn't necessarily magically make exactly what you want maybe if you just want commodity items that kind of everyone wants but there might be things that you specifically want and there's no guarantee that the market is going to find the most efficient way unless you actually uh participate in in uh developing those structures of production so um so for the people with with means that's a great way to uh to try to uh actually help the market provide what you really want um and uh trying to think what there was like an another thing but uh the big one that you were asking about then was was leisure and i think

this is a, an important one that, uh, Bitcoiners should, should think a lot about. Um, and when I say leisure, I don't mean just sitting around watching Netflix, you know, just taking a breather on the, on the weekend before, uh, you know, uh, you go back to, to your wage cage, you know, it's like leisure, uh, leisure is a, is about contemplation. It's about, um, uh, you know, uh, communing yourself with, with philosophy and the arts and science and actually, uh, coming to, um, see reality, uh, more face-to-face and engaged with just, you know, the, the, the reality around you with, with, with contemplation. Um, the, the word, uh, I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna butcher things, but, you know, the, the word comes from the Greek skole, uh, which, uh, means like school.

It's like very, like a proper, like liberal arts education, um, is, is, is teaching these types of, uh, um, the, the, uh, what, what would make the mind capable of engaging in these sort of, contemplative acts. And when you go back to Aristotle and many philosophers since, contemplation is sort of the height of living. That is the height of human living. That's why you do it. You work for leisure. You work so that you have the savings so that on the seventh day, you can rest. And when you're resting, you can actually take a look at what there is and decide if it's good or not. And you can actually start to chase after what is truly good. So when I talk about leisure, I'm not meaning, like I said, I'm not talking about just watching

Netflix or something. What I'm talking about is actually engaging your mind towards a vision of the higher good. Um, so thinking about, um, what do you truly value in life? Um, and this, this can take many forms. Like I said, you know, there's, there's, uh, you know, there's the arts and sciences, philosophy, a lot of these things ultimately, uh, kind of go together. Um, but that's, that's what we mean by that. And where does this, you know, come into play? Like, what does that have to do with anything i've talked about and i would say that uh in a sense it has to do effectively with with time preference because what what you're doing um i wish i had like a whiteboard so i could be like you know drawing drawing graphs or whatever but it's like

if you have a time preference schedule um uh if you go find hoppa's book you'll you'll see the little graphs of of time preference versus uh monetary income but in that you're looking for the book so you like hold it up to the camera on one of uh it's okay but like it's my home book the point is is like any given given a time preference schedule you know you you have you have a certain schedule and um assuming your your personality doesn't change your knowledge of the world doesn't change um your your rate of income through just the process of production and so on and so forth so everything's kind of static otherwise you're just on that curve and your time preference is lowering um but uh along this curve and i would say that so when he's describing

what he calls the process of civilization which is all of that stuff together i was talking about leading when you have when you have a whole uh society of people engaged in this and connected to one another you're building on top of it and that builds civilization that is the civilizing process and what he shows like he has a little graph for this and he's basically saying it's like the process of civilization is taking that curve and then like taking the whole curve and lowering it fundamentally because you've changed um in in some way and then also because you're accumulating capital you're getting further down that curve so the lowest time preference stuff like every step of the way you're trying to you know not only take where you are and accumulate you know more of the

goods so your time preference goes down but you actually what what can be done to actually lower that curve completely. Um, and once again, that comes through knowledge, uh, cause ultimately capital requires knowledge because it requires knowing that there is something that you can add to the, the, uh, you know, structures of production to lengthen it in some way that will take time, but allow you to have more in the future than you would today. Um, in a way that, you know, pleases you or whatever. Um, so when you're engaged with leisure and you're thinking about what you truly value, you're, I mean, you're, you're really looking into the abyss. I mean, so I, I referenced a book, uh, called leisure, the basis of culture, um, by a German philosopher

named Joseph Pieper. Um, and, uh, he's, uh, he's, he's writing from a very Catholic perspective, but I think it's, it's something that a lot of people could, could get a lot of value from, you know regardless um and for him coming from that catholic perspective he sees you know when he's even talking about culture he's he says uh cultists and i i can't remember exactly uh all of the etymology of of that uh word but it was effectively around celebration uh which for him you know meant effectively worship um but even from like a sort of you know non-religious perspective I don't want to, you know, like you have many listeners of, of many stripes. So I want to like bring this to a more universal, uh, kind of way of thinking about this.

Um, when you're celebrating or worshiping, what is it that you're doing? You're, you're trying to get in touch with the highest of the high good. So for him being a Catholic, you know, it's, it's, you know, worship around, you know, the Eucharist and, you know, uh, you know, Sunday mass and everything, because that, you're getting they're getting communion so it's uh it's you're you're getting in touch for them with literally god himself um so that is the highest good now for whoever anyone is everyone has some highest good that they're chasing after and so it's like leisure is that connection with trying to connect uh not only with whatever that highest good is but also uh all of the

sort of implications of that of like a whole ecosystem based around having that vision of that highest good um and so you know this manifest is like okay well if whatever is the highest good it's like okay well how do i how do i best express that and how do i best express the implications of that well that's going to change your perspective on the arts and how things should look um and and what kind of value should be imbued in the design of things. Um, if it's in, um, the sciences, it's like, well, you know, how, how is it like, what, what are the questions that I have about the world? Um, how, how do I go about asking these questions? Um, if you, if you believe that the world is just chaos, you know, the scientific method's not going to really help you. Um, but if

you, if you think that the world has some kind of regularity to it, now you can start to, you know, have more of you know the scientific method and so on and so forth start investigating to try to understand the full extent of natural reality which is also going to feed itself back on you know when you're trying to build capital you're having to overcome like the the realities of of the natural world and the scarcity of of things and how they work and so you have to deal with all of the complexities of you know you can't fly a plane if you don't understand gravity and along with everything else you need to know to fly a plane. You can't turn on a light unless you understand electromagnetism.

So all of these things have to deal with these realities. So when you're engaged with leisure and you're focused on these highest goods and trying to explore that highest good and all of its implications, it helps form your mind around the higher things so that when you go to the idea is like, okay, like, what do I want? You basically want better things, whatever that is better, better in this sense, meeting, getting you closer to that ultimate good, that ultimate end, um, on your, your entire, uh, you know, uh, uh, um, uh, order of, of preferences that you have. Everyone is walking around with just, you know, uh, I would

prefer this to this and it's all this it's just this big giant list in their head of of what they want and every economic decision is like okay well i have these goods available so which which thing can i address and it's like you know well i have this and this could address you know you know you know my third thing and um you know or i could get this and this would address you know four uh but it's cheaper so that would help me in the long run actually be better at getting towards number two or you know whatever this is this is what economizing is is you're you going through the world trying to do that all of that is ultimately trying to get to whatever that ultimate good is and so when you're engaged in this whole process of leisure and trying to find those higher order

goods and how to make them and how to put resources towards them by saving, uh, and so on and so forth, you're pushing yourself closer to that actual ultimate good, um, which is going to reflect itself as actual good in the world. Um, and hopefully your, your vision of the good lines up with, uh, uh, other people so that you're not, um, actually making their lives miserable, but. Yeah. I think there's another important nuance to this, to, to point out is like, if you have enough savings to exercise true leisure to think about these higher order goods and the market's not meeting the needs that you would determine are necessary to depart with your savings to attempt to achieve

that higher good while you're continuing to save, while you're looking for things that will help you achieve that higher good, you're also setting a signal to the market that this isn't good enough. so it forces producers to to rethink what they're doing as well yes yes you are effectively uh you know you're you're helping liquidate um or or make less profitable um certain structures structures of production uh than they otherwise would be if you were participating and that then creates an opportunity uh to create better structures of production better in this case meaning more aligned with your actual thing so uh for instance you know if i ever wanted to buy a

house um which i don't recommend at this moment uh people should should let black rock buy the houses and you keep the sats not the other way around uh you wait until later for larry fink to try to sell you a mansion so you can so you can get eek out a few sets from you or something um Um, but, uh, if you're doing that, if you just, if you just go and buy a random house, you're getting a piece of trash. Um, and you can, you can follow a lot of great guys on, on Twitter to, to learn about just how awful, um, you know, uh, houses these days, uh, can be like modern builds and such. Um, our friend Kelly Lannan is, uh, very, very good on this topic and urbanism and so

on and so forth. uh you're not if if you if you go buy a house at a new development you're not you're not getting a forever home no uh just physically speaking you're not getting a forever home it's not about like whether you like the house or not it's like it's literally not going to last you um a lifetime um certainly not passing down likely not even the length of the mortgage that you take yeah yeah it's just it's it's total garbage um uh i i had a tweet uh i was like you know fiat um you know fiat housing is is paying you know two thousand three thousand bucks per month for uh a house or apartment that has doors literally made of cardboard no quite literally

i remember a couple years ago you sent me a video yeah so i put a video of a guy he's looking at the doors it's like and i i didn't know that before i like i had these doors are so light it's like sound i can hear everything in my going on like the what's going on there and i but i never really it didn't really cross my mind other than how annoying um and how weird that the doors are so light and i watched this video and it's like no it's literally cardboard um uh and have you ever seen the movie the producers no okay because they like i always think of that because you know the the guy he's he's totally uh the the producer guy is a uh he's he's washed up and he's just like i'm i'm wearing a cardboard belt and it's like that's all of us like we're

all we're all living that life we're all washed up from from inflation so point being that it's like if you just go out and get a house you're going to be getting a piece of garbage um but if you don't participate and you just focus on, on hodling, but you also learn more about what it is that you actually want out of a house, um, you are, uh, ultimately helping, uh, create, uh, you know, the, the conditions to have more, uh, what I would prefer, which is more traditional, uh, you know, housing, housing builds. Um, and I'd want that whether I was living in a house or an apartment or anywhere i want i want a beautiful building to live in because i have to look at look at it and live in it every single day yeah and you can squint and see projects like

thousand year homes pop up and more uh builders and architects will understand this problem and they're coming to market with higher end like masonry yeah that uh right now is probably not scalable across the country across the world but it can be it can be if people begin yeah in fact showing their preference saving enough to right now they may be more expensive than your average cardboard box build and that makes sense but the more people that save enough and then go and deploy that savings into the capital goods that these builders need to build better homes thousand year homes then they're more economically secure they can expand their business and sends a signal to the market of other builders like oh maybe there's an opportunity here

if i decide to really focus on quality builds instead of fast high velocity trash economy builds right so uh that that video was by a guy brent hole he's he's located here and here in texas he's up in fort worth highly recommend his his youtube channel to anyone who's uh interested in home building and traditional styles and, uh, architectural principles or whatever. Um, but, uh, you know, he's, he's a good example of, of some of those, there's only so many people like him. Um, but if you could, if you could get more, that'd be great. But even for people like him, um, he, I remember he was starting to use more, um, CNC, uh, to do some of the milling because he has only so many people.

And while there is this sort of, you know, people like the idea of handcrafted stuff, you can get over the fact that there's not enough people by now using machines to help augment the thing. And it's going to come out nice. In fact, he's shown there's, you know, long traditions of machines helping with builds. That's why a lot of Victorian houses are so ornate

is because it was it was the start of like really industrializing a lot of production of various metal work so you were able to make way neater designs than just hands would be able to do or at least in a in a time frame and for a cost that's actually worth it so with that in mind not only is it something that uh you know you can you can start to create the conditions for But also, if enough people are sitting and having those thoughts, the structures of production could build in such a way that's like, you know, yeah, you might not get the handcrafted traditional house, but you can get the one of good materials, and that looks really nice because it was made by a machine that did it exactly to the spec. And so I actually see no reason why that sort of architecture should be expensive at all. In fact, it should be dirt cheap over time. But it also, the economy is, frankly, it's sort of garbage in, garbage out.

And so part of what I'm saying is that it requires leisure to actually stop inserting garbage into the high-volume trash economy and start demanding something that's actually a little better because it aligns more with the long-term view of the good. um and uh but the other thing there's there's also uh the the somewhere capital goods also plays because obviously people can start businesses they can invest in stuff that makes stuff i mean this is basically what you would do at 1031 you want to live in a bitcoin world so you invest in businesses that are helping make that thing um but i also think education is part of that because education is what helps form the mind to actually engage in effectively sort of higher forms of leisure to be able to think more clearly about, uh, what makes a good house. So in many of these things, I like talking about it, but I'll, you know, I'll be the first to

admit I'm a, I'm a deletante. I'm a, you know, you know, I, I don't, I'm not, I'm not an expert on these things. Um, but in some sense it's like, I do desire them. So it does actually create an obligation for me to try at least to do something to learn about how does this actually work to actually understand not just that building looks good, that building doesn't, but actually think about it as like, why does that building look good? What are the principles underneath that do that? And that takes time and education. And even the beginning of it, it still does take a sort of vibes mentality. So capital goods, like I said, it's psychological. It's very broad. so i would even put things like uh people people starting uh vibe accounts on on on x as being

within that because what that does uh you know some of them can get really annoying and they also turn into grifts and stuff like that that's a prep propaganda i like prep propaganda if we're gonna if we're gonna give shout outs i have to give a shout out to necktie salvage lw root uh who is is probably the vibe king of of x um a wonderful guy super nice guy and uh he does he does a great job of of promoting the oxford uh collar button downs um and uh so so yeah necktie salvage but like guys like him what is he doing i mean he offers services to to teach people like you can he'll go help you uh you know improve your wardrobe or whatever but even just you know having these accounts that just show different things um it's like you know you go

to a showroom for all kinds of interior design and so on and so forth that's meant to help you understand the different vibes of what is out there so you can just get this even a visceral feeling of what is good what is bad and get a sense of that um but then i would recommend it's like you also try to get deeper of why does that feel good? Why does that, what is it about it that makes it good? You know, why is Bach so good? Why is Mozart so good in the realm of music? It's not just because they just, you know,

it's not like, it's not pure vibes that did that. There's also musical principles underneath that made them, that they built those vibes on. um and so education is extremely important and so getting this out into the world um creating those signals so that people know i mean how did how did uh a steak and shake know that the world wanted beef tallow um they didn't just make a guess is because there's been a growing uh sort of movement online of people sharing information about uh what they believe are the health effects of beef tallow, uh, versus, versus others. Seed oil disrespector vibe, vibe connoisseur of

a beef tallow over seed oils. Yeah. So this is like one of the, the, the, the rules that, that things like that place. So people should, people should consider that of, you know, what, what are the, what are the vibes that they can put out? Um, so, uh, I'm, this whole interview is just me trying to, trying to, uh, you know, get a, get a job at vibes capital management, i suppose but um yeah it's just that that's very important and uh but also like i said you know further education um and so where is all of this going you know with with you know you you have leisure you have that moment of rest to actually stop like uh you know trying to earn yet another you know dollar or whatever um or you know like you know take take a break um and actually reflect

on what is it that you're doing so that you can recalibrate and you know go back in uh with with a a higher sense of of what you're trying to do in your day-to-day life um and where that goes is that what I would argue is there's obviously a market price for a good. So Bitcoin's market price is whatever it is at the moment, like $110,000 or whatever. That's the market price. That means you can go, you can trade it, you can get $110,000. You have that much purchasing power, whatever that means. That's just the price. That doesn't tell you anything about what if you just wanted to use a bitcoin to go get something um that doesn't tell you what you should get it only tells you how much you can get and so one thing that i was trying to argue in my talk is

that um the the ultimate value of your sats is up to you because it's it's up to you to decide is is this uh are these sats worth a lambo or are they worth something better than a lambo How do we even define what's better than a Lambo? How did we decide Lambos were a thing? It's up to you to ultimately decide what that value is good for. And so, um, you know, price obviously enables much more of that sort of value expression, but it's up to you to sort of make yourself worthy of desiring something that gets every potential value out of any given unit of money, uh, that you have. Um, and it's, it's only up to you, like the, the market, the market will give you anything that you ask for.

Um, and if you, if you do not have, uh, a, a virtuous mindset of what you want, they'll be happy to just, you know, sell you all the, you know, all the crack that you want. Uh, and you can just, you know, smoke crack, uh, till you die. They'll be happy to give that to you. Um, it's, it's up to you to say, oh, well, I want, I want a beautiful house. I want, you know, uh, you know i want um you know uh good good things for my family and so on and so forth like only you can can demand that out of the market yeah and this is this is reminding me austin to now is also in the world of masonry and his the name of his company is escaping me but they're building beautiful brick houses and old neighborhoods up in oklahoma and other parts of uh south midwest

and he mentioned one thing that's like i think building on this like he has a problem finding quality brick for the builds that he wants to do because the brick factories don't exist anymore because the market has basically gone out there and say we prefer these high velocity trash economy builds with cardboard over the bricks all the brick factories sit down so like kelly who you mentioned already austin tur and i sat down recorded a podcast probably like a year and a half ago at this point in turn i've often joked since we recorded that podcast like when are we going to invest in the brick factory so that people like austin can because if you want it you have to actually make it happen and it takes time yes like you don't just get to when when you

demand something out of the market you don't just get to snap your fingers and say i want bricks now but it's like i don't only want a beautiful house i want my neighborhood to be beautiful yeah and if i want that we need a brick factory yeah you can't yeah you need not just enough brick production for yourself but enough for uh the whole the whole neighborhood so you you know build the change you wish to see in the world effectively is i i think how i put it um so yeah you you have to actually you know get to work um and so um i you know with any of this i don't know uh i don't know what what everyone else wants i don't know um you know because of that i don't know at what point is the best point for them given whatever they have to to be making moves

into anything my point is not to make any kind of statement about what the correct thing is because i don't know i'm not you but rather be thinking about this and take that time dimension into consideration take the knowledge uh factor uh into consideration and be thinking about it so that you can find what what is the right thing uh to do so that you can actually get what you want now i'm really happy you gave this presentation that we're recording this right now i'm trying to figure out how to frame this without coming off judgmental but i think bitcoiners need to be thinking about higher good higher level things like this and thinking in this mind or at least me individual i'll put a broad brush on bitcoiners but myself and i think others should

as well and it's like raising the discourse to think and and teres talked about this a lot i think that same bitcoin urbanism meetup that we had last year or a year and a half ago whenever it was that is sort of the flag he planted in the ground is we could look up 10 years from now bitcoiners could be like 90 percent of the 0.1 percent um and what are we going to do with that wealth like how we're going to make the world better and obviously that meetup was highly focus on urbanism but right beginning to think of this not just buy a lambo or buy a second house it's like how do you want to see society progress yeah well the nice thing is at least you know obviously people are going to want to stack more sats i don't blame them they probably should go

stack more sets um but one of the nice things about bitcoin is that it's going up regardless of you like like you're along for the ride when it comes to bitcoin and so um first of all i agree It's like I look at myself like this is a this is a a, you know, me judging myself, telling myself I need to be doing this. I need to be thinking about, you know, what is it that I truly want in life? Because I don't think I've done well enough thinking about that in the past. And I should be I should be focused on on a better future. And as we've said, it's like money itself alone does not do that. You have to have all these other things to actually turn that money into those nice things.

And as I'll just beat the drum on it, it's like there is a time dimension as well. These things take time. So, yes, I think that because of the fact that it's like Bitcoin is just going to do what it does, you have, you know, however much time between now and Bitcoin getting to a price where you want to engage in something, you have lots of time to study. and you should probably be uh making use of that time i should be making use of that time um to actually uh figure out you know what what does your dream house look like um what does uh you know we go down the list of all the all the things that someone would want out of life but what are all those things how do they how do they reach their highest potential that are imbued with uh the highest values that are ordered towards the highest good um around and it's like you can be

thinking about that now even if even if you have no plans on spending because you recognize that if i if i hodl in the future i'm going to have more that i can deploy uh you know orders of magnitude more you know 10 100 times more purchasing power um and with that there's so much more potential that it is worth waiting to actually get the ball rolling at a future date even before then you can be doing the education stuff because that's all free online well i'm going to combine two three things here now going back like huddle for good in the context of in the future there may some good be a good opportunity for you to deploy your savings into where something bad happens and you need your savings to to assist the latter happened to me

um but it gave me like when i in my mid-20s i quit a job expecting to get a new job within a month and it turned into 18 months i was unemployed and it wasn't a great time to be selling bitcoin but i did have bitcoin savings that i could have some leisure to think about what i want to do next could also get through the the hard times yeah and get through the hard times because i had savings um but i also had the leisure to really think and you were actually working at this company during this period of my life and this is like a great example of me spending my leisurely time and the excess savings that i had to learn more about bitcoin turned out to be a very shitty miner but i learned how to operate uh like bitcoin interact with bitcoin from the command line i

learned more about hashing and mining pools and those concepts which gave me the knowledge to confidently write about some of these topics in bitcoin so that leisure and the excess savings that i had gave me the time to learn more to start a business educating people about bitcoin and i think in the long run i'm better off because of that but i was only able to do that because i had savings and somewhat forced leisure but use that leisure i would argue wisely to learn more to bring something yes productive in the form of this media so in that sense like when you're when you're re-entering the market you have way more uh to aim for and way way basically way more human capital to deploy um on the market that's funny because i remember i was setting this up

and playing with it when i was unemployed in brooklyn east williamsburg i remember exactly where it's at but i remember playing around the cli and yeah learning about mining and all that yeah oh and for me you know what was exciting about that was the uh was was before then it would it would seem silly to people now because we're in 2025 but back then uh having having some of the you know things like a payment decorator and like all these all these just like having a node with a python library that could communicate with it well um that was that was very fresh and exciting um and simplified things that uh used to be extremely difficult i remember trying to make a just you know toying around trying to make a blog with a paywall that was based on you know

watching a node for payments to come in and is like when you actually look at it's a complex engineering task because you have to you know watch the blocks you have to like wait for you know uh the right you know wallet to i mean the right address to to get some money and you have to be paying attention to all this and depends like do you care about confirmations or not so you have to you just have to be uh you know doing doing all this stuff and then you know when it's like oh there's like a simple uh you know a couple lines of python that just does all of that now because it's tied to a node um that was sort of revelatory um and that's also a you know software is capital um and that's a great example of of how capital helps we've and we've

advanced you know far beyond that now yeah a decade later it's funny i literally just looked up i was like oh this actually ties in well to this conversation it's a little computer yeah um and uh yeah you know i was trying to think uh it's kind of just veering into this other thing um i don't know if you wanted would want to be named so i won't name him but he'll he'll be listening and he'll he'll enjoy this but uh i was having a discussion with a gentleman because i thought he would like my my talk so i sent it to him and you know he he likes bitcoin but he's not a he's not like a hardcore bitcoiner he probably has some or something but um you know one of the things that he was uh concerned about is this idea that you know money is a tool and money itself

does not do anything you know like he's not meaning that in like sort of the the keynesian way um but it's just like you can have all the money but it's like do you actually have the things you want and it's like if you don't it's like you do have to spend in order to get those things um and uh it probably is good to have you know other productive assets that are aligned with uh the specific things uh that you like in the world and um one of his concerns is like because of people just hodling and and just buying more and more it's like if people are doing that then in some sense that sort of keynesian view is like kind of right you know it's like people are just going to hold forever and then and then what and um you know i you know i was thinking on that and

i think uh there is an interesting concept that i think people should should be uh thankful for bitcoin uh with which is a lot of what he's describing is to me more of a problem with uh with fiat than it is with Bitcoin. And I think Bitcoin actually solves it. And the reason why is because with fiat, your time horizon is shortening. So you're always having to chase after more yield. Everyone's yield chasing at all times. And you can never stop. It doesn't matter how rich you get. You still have to keep going forward or it's all going to go away. Now, maybe you get to a point where you're so wealthy that you don't even want to give it to your kids. You just want to give it all away like Bill Gates or something. Don't

recommend that. But, you know, for him, obviously, like how much is he truly chasing after new wealth? I'm not sure. But for most people, you can't stop. And then even beyond people as an organization, you have to keep chugging somehow or this whole thing's going to fall apart and then everyone's going to lose their job and they're going to have to find something. You're always trying to do something which in our in our trash economy means like every business becomes a financial services uh business um and um and so you have to do that do that but with bitcoin because of the fact that units are are not being added so it's not getting debased and so you can actually just hold on to money and know that it's part of a you know that percentage of a pie

you can actually rest you actually have that room to rest and so um there's actually uh in some sense a uh like there there is a diminishing marginal utility for money and bitcoin i think helps illustrate that better because of the fact that over the long run if you just save it the value of each unit is going to go up. And so, you know, at some point, you actually can theoretically say, you know, this is enough for this moment for whatever your purposes are. And if that's the case, I would point out, you know, where do we get the chance for leisure, we get the chance for leisure from being able to rest, taking that seventh day off or, you know, whatever and so uh bitcoin i think uh you can you can actually come to a rest you're not chasing

after money just for the sake of more money um i think that is mostly a function of bitcoin being in such a high growth state that it's like in many ways why wouldn't you want to uh attain that kind of sort of uh uh you know monetary mobility when it's put in front of you especially if you have that long-term view where it's like you know at the very least i can pass it down to my children they can figure out what to what to do with it even if i don't get to partake in that um that's very attractive to people and it totally makes sense like of course you would just go bananas over trying to stack as many sats as possible and just just leave it at that but um because you can rest there is that room to actually be able to stop and think what really

matters and as as the world converges on bitcoin that growth rate rate will slow down so people are not going as bananas just to get additional sats and they can think more long term about what do i want to do with any any money that comes in whatever i have now whatever i get in the future what is it that i actually want to do with that they have more capacity to actually contemplate and reflect on that and so um that in turn we're talking about all the production all the whatever that in turn would actually lead to more of the thing that i think my my friend was hoping for. Um, so I hope that's a good answer for him. I, uh, to, to, to address that sort of concern and anyone who else, who, who might have that concern. Um, and I think,

uh, if you, if you're interested, you're the interviewer, but, uh, leads us into a different part of my talk on, um, basically a legacy. Um, um, so, you know, I talk about legacy and you said, you know, there's, there's some people who, uh, what they want to do is just die with their coins, you know, and, uh, they see that as a benefit because there are gratuitous benefits of the marginal value of everyone else's coins, uh, goes up. And to me, that is a, we'll call it a good baseline. Nice thing of nice legacy. That's a baseline legacy because it's like, well, you, you know, that you're, you're helping just like when you invest in, or sorry, when you save money you're sort of investing in the economy as a whole in a sense you're uh putting

like a permanent endowment in the economy as a whole you know and so it's like okay everyone gets that little little bump in their money that's cool um but at the same time if you have a vision of a higher good that you want and you have values uh that you're trying to uh build the world towards if you just raise the marginal value of everyone's sets then you just get whatever like you're just you're just feeding into a a garbage in garbage out kind of thing and you know hopefully bitcoin because of its properties will indeed kind of make people lower time preference kind of have a longer term uh view of things that reflects back and sort of uh you know you know more more civilized uh you know lives and whatnot but uh there's there's no like inherent guarantees

of that whereas um if you can leave other things behind and you can actually put those coins to something it's not everything obviously you'd you're you're not gonna you're not gonna like any of this stuff you don't spend your whole stack like you use balance it out however it is uh that you want, but there will be more savings than there would be in a fiat world. If you do that, then you can be leaving things behind and leaving capital goods behind for your children and others, and also just great works of various kinds that help imbue the world with those particular values for them to continue building on. And so I brought forth, you know, a virtue of magnificence.

Magnificence is basically the act of basically doing great things. You know, you're sacrificing your wealth. In fact, like a poor person can't have magnificence. And I don't mean that in a sense of a poor person can't be a virtuous person, but specifically the virtue of magnificence is the sacrificing of great wealth for the purposes of something great. And so it's something that actually demands only a whale can possibly do something that would be considered magnificent. And if you have your mind towards magnificence And you have another virtue of, I didn't mention this, but magnanimity, which is basically directing your mind at great things.

If you have that, because you've had leisure, you've had time to reflect and contemplate these highest goods, now you can think about goods that can sort of outlash your Bitcoin. One of the things I said was that when you, if you just leave your Bitcoin, if you have children, like they'll have children, people will spend, maybe they have lots of children. So maybe things get diluted over time. Like at some point, it's sort of a, it can be an Ozymandias, you know, situation where everything's just kind of dissipates over time. But what are the things that you can do that would outlast your specific Bitcoin? Bitcoin itself will be here forever. your your stack might not um and that might be the case uh i don't know i don't know uh what kind of money uh the the mozart family has today like i i don't know i i don't just i i literally don't

even know if the mozart family uh exists anymore or not uh maybe they do um but uh like uh i don't i don't know what kind of money uh you know his his broad family like you know has but he left behind you know some of the absolute greatest pieces of music in all of history and we're still listening to it hundreds of years later and i imagine people are going to continue to listen to it for hundreds of years uh especially because they're going to open up the reorg podcast and uh be forced to listen to uh some mozart but point is is um having you know if if you can uh be a patron of the arts or or even just have have the leisure time to be able to learn the skill yourself and produce something like a great piece of music a great building or

whatever, that is something that can exist forever. And perhaps Bitcoiners should consider what are the magnificent things that they can devote themselves to. And I had a picture on there of the cathedral in Florence, which is probably one of my very favorite buildings in the world. And I remember going to Florence when I was a teenager and I was just standing and staring. It was already one of my favorites because I thought, you know, Brunelleschi's dome is just so, it is magnificent. Learning about how it was engineered, it's just, you know, incredible thing. And I stood there and I looked at it and just to think that that's hundreds of years old. And of course there's, I think there's regulations in Florence about how tall they can

make buildings or whatever but that thing still towers over florence and it is it it um you know it's just a very moving site anytime you see it and that's been that way for hundreds of years for countless numbers of people and so what what can you do um that perhaps also has that effect on the world um and uh the way that you get there is by uh aiming at those higher higher ends and so um and and that to me is something um that would uh be worth uh spending spending bitcoin on if you if you knew that you can make something that would uh hundreds of years down the line still bring inspiration to the entire world um what like what what what is bitcoin for if not to um make a society and create the conditions possible uh or make the conditions that make

such an act uh in creation possible um so to me that's that's sort of uh you know part of part of the whole end so it's like you know when we're huddling for good we're huddling forever we're huddling for for nicer things but we're also huddling sort of for the these these ultimate goods uh or and i i also put it as like the common goods of you know things that are are just these magnificent gifts uh to the entire world going back to the cathedral like something that was built hundreds of years ago that inspires you inspires you living today in 2025 or 2015 whenever you visited yeah on the total you know other side of the world yeah it's the sort of thing that you know i'd love to go travel to the other side of the world again just to see it um and that goes

for you know many many other great buildings um many many other great you know works of art um you know uh you know there's there's all sorts of things in this world it's like you can't imagine even wanting to live without it there's some things in this world it's like how did the world live before this you know it's like what what was the how could you live in a world before beethoven's ninth existed um it's almost like inconceivable once it does exist so you know why why wouldn't you want to create things that have that kind of effect on the world that sort of you why are we here um why are you holding in the first place it's not merely for the sake of holding even even though holding is completely rational it's something i i recommend people do

um you shouldn't necessarily just like throw away all your all your sets on this thing because then uh yeah you made this thing but how are you going to eat uh so you can continue to enjoy the thing you just made. Um, so, uh, you know, this, once again, this is not, it's not telling people that they, they ought to go spend right now or, uh, what they should spend on or anything like that. My, my goal, um, with that talk and subsequently this interview is to inspire people to think about um how these fit into that their their uh their own world and uh what what it means for their sets um and i think for you know a lot of people they they think about their family um and so on and so forth which you know obviously an obvious good thing um and to me that's sort of

like the the first baby steps is kind of these obvious universal things it's like oh yeah like i want to take care of my family but then further it's like okay how do we take that to the next level there's always a next level and the more time you can spend um reflecting and contemplating on these things the better you can find what that next level is and uh the more that you're actually placing value on those sets that you have because those sets actually mean something you know it's like i'm going to be able to put these sets towards that one day um uh and and i would like to know that would be including i want to hold these sets because i want to be able to know that i can give my children this amount because i think it'll be um what they need to have a leg up um in

their lives and in my in your grandchildren's lives and so on and so forth so you know even you know passing down hot old sats is also part of this equation um but there's a lot more than just that yeah and this seems like uh extension another way to articulate bitcoin fixes this that meme um and i can hear people saying like this is such a pipe dream uh it's cool and all that you're talking like this but it'll never happen like the economy's foregone and even to your the gentleman that you had a conversation with about our bitcoiners falling into the keynesian trap of or becoming the the uh just like literally it's not a character yeah don't eat coming the hoarders the uh the keynesians talk about yeah just push back like this stuff is already happening

on the margins like to the gentleman um that you had the discussion with like this is an example i spent sats during that period when i had time for leisure but also needed to dig into my savings to to live um yes maybe not every bitcoin is doing that but it is possible made me able to survive that time uh in terms of like magnificence and building institutions and things for the greater good maybe it's not beethoven's third or a cathedral in florence but nakamoto institute very integral um sort of property for the higher good of education to help people better understand what predate a bitcoin why bitcoin works how to think of it from an economic perspective and where it may go like that is an example of a bitcoiner yourself going out there and building

something for the greater good not only that the patrons and the donors to the nakamoto institute or individual bitcoiners to say hey i'm willing to part sats with my sats and give them to the satoshi nakamoto institute because i think what they're doing will be for the greater good of society so this stuff is already happening at the margins and many people may hear this and be like you guys are are talking pipe dreams here but it's happening not at scale that we would like to see like it to see but if adoption continues at the pace that it has and more individuals internalize this perspective and framing of what to do with my bitcoin i think you can begin to see the feedback loop accelerating and you also have to start you have to start somewhere exactly it's like if you're

you know you you run a marathon by taking that first step um so uh yeah and you know like i said you know part of you know capital goods and and so on and so forth much of that has to do with education which is you know kind of the the realm of capital goods that i find myself uh you know kind of most interested in um and so that's that's why you know like like you're saying like why i have the satoshi nakamoto institute and uh you know i would say even though you know the websites existed for a long time i think as an institution um as like a you know legit you know organization and everything i think we're still on that you know that first step um but uh you know that that step is i think uh oriented in a in a direction of wanting to know um how do we actually create

a magnificent uh educational institution that helps us know that we're not just passing down sats, but we're also passing down the knowledge to understand what those sats mean and what those sats are capable of, which also means understanding how do we actually value this? What does it take to make those sats worth something? And so that's why it's like, why have the cypherpunks and the Austrians and so on and so forth? Well, it is my belief that in order to best understand what Bitcoin is, how it works, why it's important, why it unlocks any of these nice things that we have, why it is integral to the process of civilization through the lowering of people's time preference and the increase in savings and capital production, accumulation, et cetera, et cetera,

et cetera. All of that requires understanding these economic principles, which I think are best um uh that that uh knowledge is is uh exemplified by the austrian school and uh the cypherpunks help um help us sort of best see in a world of um uh a a deeply connected uh computerized world with the internet um how is it that we can build social institutions on top of that and ones um that do an even better job thanks to computation at protecting uh protecting our rights and uh facilitating exchange uh than we had previously so actually sort of being able to put these technologies into creating, shall we say, technology that helps us socially, but is also use social in the sense that it actually does things in a positive direction, a more

humane direction, such as being able to have more personal freedom or protecting privacy in certain ways and so on and so forth um all of that comes from understanding a you know broadly cypherpunk vision of what it means to um engineer with the internet in mind um and uh you know likewise there's there's you know just understanding the the history of cryptography in general and understanding computation um but then uh you know there's there's much more in the world uh that that has to like come into this to all play that that role in helping people know this is why there's only 21 million uh a bitcoin um or i guess it's 2.1 uh quadrillion bitcoin now but no we're not we're not no 21 million bitcoin um i'm not giving into that um

but uh yeah why there's a 21 million bitcoin why we why we run our own nodes uh why hold your own keys etc etc all these things require that all of that knowledge of understanding what this gift that we've received in the form of bitcoin what it actually unlocks for us And then in turn, like actually appreciating like the full picture of what that what is actually being unlocked through all of the sort of economic and, you know, sort of cultural and dare I say spiritual elements of what we've talked about today. yeah so go support the satoshi nakamoto institute please uh i'm a supporter a very happy supporter i will be a longtime supporter yes moving forward but i think i mean we've had many discussions about what you're building over the years and honestly as a bitcoiner who cares deeply about the principles that we discussed in this article i think an institution like the satoshi nakamoto

institute is going to be an imperative if we're actually going to facilitate the necessary knowledge transfer to make sure that bitcoin has the potential to survive in the long term across generations yes and people can go to nakamoto institute.org slash donate if you uh wish to uh part with some sats um and and frankly i mean sats are needed to actually build these capital goods and uh you know one of one of the reasons why, uh, things are, are more, uh, sort of slow going and it's like, you know, baby steps in this organizational process is, uh, you know, these things do, uh, have, have, you know, resource bottlenecks. I can only do so much as a single, uh, individual, um, and with only so much, uh,

you know, monetary resources at hand. So, uh, for those who, who have gotten value out of the nakamoto institute and they like uh what has been done so far and you want to see that uh scaled um up with with all kinds of new stuff uh please get in touch and uh any any contributions are are uh greatly appreciated to say the least michael this is my last in-person tftc interview in austin before i before i leave thank you for i'm i'm honored well thank you i i picked you specifically because i think uh it's a great way to end yeah i'll be back in the studio i mean i'm also mad at you i know you know for uh for leaving us you know we'll still see you here all the time yes the greater good of family calls in the northeast yeah it makes sense um yeah and you

also you'll you'll get to be around a lot of uh crack in philly so that'll help you it'll it'll help you in your leisure time to reflect on how do i ultimately get as far away from this as possible well i'm gonna go which which will then in turn get you just back to austin because that's all you had to do in the first place was stay here i'm gonna i'm gonna go with some savings and and send a signal to the drug dealers that my my sats are not buying crack so go build something more productive yeah you can get a you know some kind of drone fleet to start like uh harassing them and and getting them away or something i don't know maybe that's a good idea maybe that's the greater good of philadelphia that needs right now i mean hey yeah you know philadelphia is very

much uh you know a birthplace of the united states you know a country that i'm i'm very grateful to um to live in be born in and my family's been here for quite a while and uh i would love to see a a philly that is uh much more pleasant than it is now uh because it is uh it was once a great city and it can be a great city again so maybe it needs people go forth and uh do that maybe it needs productive savers who plan on deploying capital to effectuate that change you know maybe maybe and maybe that needs to happen all across uh all across the world if only there were a large group of people holding on to the finest monetary technology in history to make that happen globally. Someone's got to hodl for good to make the change happen. Yes. Go out there and hodl for

good, freaks. Peace and love.