TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #687: How Fiat Money Exploits the Working Class with Erik Cason

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Marty sits down with Erik Cason to discuss the dangers of centralized AI systems, the need for decentralized technology, Bitcoin as a tool against fiat exploitation, and organizing a new political movement to restore freedom for the working class. Erik on Twitter: https://x.com/Erikcason Crypto Sovereignty: https://cryptosovereignty.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 Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.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 probably should be probably should be deep down like the rabbit hole and not like i think most of the media is like a explicit designed thing to try to get cultural affects that like society wants for controlling people what's really weird too

because we're talking about um robot dicks and then they will manifest um because it seems like on a trajectory that will make them inevitable yeah and definitely people are going to isolate from one another and be like why should i have a real human when i have my robot that i can beat and sexually abuse and do all the up stuff i want to so yeah well like the predictive programming i think of two movies particularly that really come top of mind quite frequently these days it's minority report and her okay i've i've actually had both of those come up in dialogue recently about it because yeah like with with where palantir is going with pre-crime stuff definitely going to try to do minority report style pre-crime uh and her also

like people are obviously falling in love with like different ai at this point in time and like that's going to be a trend that continues because uh particularly like i don't know i don't feel like people are actually healing from all the trauma that they've sort of incurred by the society and so it's it's becoming easier and easier just to retreat inward and refuse to try try to actually interact with other humans in a meaningful way yeah well minority report too it's not only the pre-crime it's the uh self-driving cars that like that like i'm looking around we're in san francisco it's like all the waymos you got robo taxis coming out and people are very excited for this like oh we're just gonna hop in like a number of the people that are at this event

that we're currently um participating in have said how much they love the waymo it's like ah there's no driver it's quiet i get to do this and then in the back of my mind i'm like there were some movies that warned of this so you can get in that car one day and the computer can take you somewhere you don't want to go well it's funny when when because i rode in a waymo for the first time last night uh and when me and the other gentleman were trying to get into the car like it wouldn't open the door for some reason and i had to like drive around the corner and then stop and do that but like the this whole fantasy that people have they don't see the darker side of it that like so what happens when you have your ai girlfriend that you fall in love with and like

chat gpt does the update that like fries its brain doesn't recognize you you know this happened three to four months ago exactly and like uh these technologies are really cool but if you're not actually self-sovereign with them they're very problematic and then if you are self-sovereign with them like we actually get something much more like snow crash which like i think is kind of interesting but like that is also problematic in a number of its own ways yeah Yeah. Well, you said people haven't dealt with the trauma that's been built up. How long do you think this trauma has been building up? I mean, I think 2000, like September 11th, I think was like kind of the key moment that the juncture changed.

Because like there was like a pretty great opportunity after the Soviet Union collapsed that like the United States could have made choices throughout the 1990s to really have kind of opened the world up to like true liberalism. but in that like a number of mistakes were made and it became pretty clear that uh like neoliberalism wasn't like an advancement of liberalism but was like this fundamental and inherent lie that was actually about just like the corruption of culture on a whole for the profitability of a number of individuals um and after september 11th it became clear that like we were going to take a path where we were going to build a gigantic surveillance apparatus that would proceed to control everybody and that's sort of in the past that that's been advanced since then yeah it's not a great path i believe it was you that we were discussing like the

simulacrum yeah and another concept that bitcoin sign guy first introduced me to back in 2018 when he was on the show was uh the hyper real like this yeah concept that we live in this digital world with a digital facade nobody's really connected to reality at the end of the day yeah and that digital facade is more representative of reality to people than reality itself and then i think also with what covid happened and sort of people eating those lives realizing how intense those lives were like that created a new and more intense kind of nihilism but i don't think we've exited from and so it's interesting being here in the bay area that like everybody who's involved with ai that i've talked with particularly like large ai companies like they're extremely

nihilistic they're like humanity's dead within like a decade and then more interesting is even the subtext under that is like that's why we have to make the ai god to like save humanity and it's like oh shit yeah that contradiction that and again i haven't expressed this publicly but i almost feel uncomfortable because maybe i don't feel confident in my ability to appropriately recognize it but it seems to your point it seems like a lot of people on the cutting edge of ai are like hey this is very dangerous but they keep going full borehead and not only full borehead but trying to accelerate as quickly as possible yeah and like the well and this is kind of an interesting edge case is that like actually i think like decentralized private

homoformically encrypted ai systems that like interoperate and can kind of exchange data in ways where like you're just revealing subsets of it to like work together i think like that's going extremely powerful thing that has a lot of potential for humanity but the the current version of the proprietary frontier models like anthropic open ai grok uh to me like this is like this is the absolute apex of communism because like we're taking literally all of our thoughts dumping them into a single database combining them and then getting a linguistic regurgitation that's fundamentally designed to destroy our brains you know like it's it's robbing people of the ability to think at all in addition to like it's modifying their linguistic capacity so

that like they they don't even have the lexicon to be able to speak in a particular way that's unique or interesting anymore yeah how do we change the tides of this uh one is is that like i think we need to like i don't think like you know regulations limits none of this shit works at all uh so like we need to radicalize different models and so like seeing all the different open source stuff come out is uh in my opinion like it's pretty awesome uh there's still problems with how a lot of these models have been built along with the underlying parameters so like but i think that this is all sort of a recursive thing of that in the very way that we got these open source models was off the back of the advancements from sort of these gigantic communist models so

like i think as things advance like we're going to get more and more powerful open source models And we'll be able to use these models to collaborate with each other to create totally new models that can truly be totally open source. We'll know the underlying parameters. There'll be ways to modify that. And people will be able to actually like in their garage, be able to build out their own full, totally custom AIs. And then furthermore, if we have the appropriate systems to actually like encrypt these and make them like private systems that people can own for themselves. Then we got something that I think has like really strong potential. But, again, this is only if we make these things totally private.

No way for anybody else to surveil it. And that, like, this really becomes, like, a digital assistant second self or something that, like, you really own for yourself totally alone and nobody else knows or sort of understands how you work with it. And this is what you're working on. A bit, yeah. Like, this is kind of what Vora is. The big thing that we really want is to make sure, like,

this is going to be, like, a personal home data server that you have that's totally encrypted and has great recoverability, but also like as you work with it over years to decades that like this becomes more and more customized towards who and how you are you can feed all your own personal information talk to it about the most intimate things and really treat it in the same way that a lot of people are treating open ai right now but again very similar to the minority report thing is they don't get on the back end of that that all that information can be used against you like sam altman was very open about like yeah our information can be subpoenaed and used against you yeah

i've said it a couple times in the last six months it's we live in a period that's equally unnerving and exhilarating the potential for doom or some not salvation but yeah there's definitely like not much gray area in between um and furthermore stuff like like if we didn't get bitcoin when we did uh like we'd definitely be in doom territory but with bitcoin uh it really modifies and changes how this can happen because like seeing the the very way that you can use Nostra now to like go find an anonymous developer to like work on a project that you can pay is really powerful in the same way like to me Nostra is the first legitimate social network that's ever existed like every single social network that has came before it's pretty clear

has had ties to different intelligence organizations and that's been again with part of that nihilism is like I think that this has been a societal level programming situation where dialogue has been manipulated across the board. Whereas on Nostr, like, you can fill it with misinformation, but also because the lack of censorship capacity, there now becomes a way to actually find signal throughout the noise. Yeah.

And so, like, I think as we get clamps down onto social media across the board as sort of whatever the fuck's going on advances itself, Nostr is going to become sort of a bastion of people that are sane that can go out there and actually speak truth to power where they would be banned everywhere else. they can actually have those conversations there yeah it seems like it seems like the the narrative

is being prepped particularly around ai and social media i mean you were um just telling me that you had a conversation last night with a journalist who is pro social media censorship but on top of that i wrote about it earlier this week anthropic came out with a post-mortem on some cyber espionage attack that Claude was used to wage on some critical services. If you read the report, it seems like a classic problem reaction

solution set up where it's like, hey, these people are using AI to attack these critical systems. The cost to do this is lower than ever. The ease of waging these attacks is easier than it's ever been. And

what I reading between the lines of that post-mortem is anthropic saying hey we only stop this because we have full visibility into everything that's happening within our llms and our mcp framework and wink wink we need the ability to to do this so we should probably get regulations that make it so you have to get a license to um release these systems into the wild that's what i was reading when i read that yeah and i mean like to to me anthropic's entire business model is misaligned from the beginning because like they're playing this game of like safe ai which means that like they want to prove how dangerous non-safe ai is from the get-go so

like it makes sense that like this is sort of the game that they're going to play uh and to me like those are the same iterations of power that we've seen over and over again is like create crisis and problem present the solution and clamp down and it's just a ratcheting back and forth of tightening social controls around people and like it's really important to understand like this is very very powerful technology and also it's very powerful technology just like cryptography and so we're essentially having the first of the crypto wars all over again but with an ai slant and so like i think as this advances they are going to try to clamp down with regulations and that's why it's great that like you know somebody baked in through an inscription like i think it was the

like open source model like onto bitcoin's blockchain you can go find it and download it directly and i think keeping these things free and open source are important because i'm much more concerned about how do we manipulate and control people through like these very powerful systems that like you can already see the way it's really atrophied thoughts you know like i was talking to a couple for professors yesterday they were talking about how outraged they are at this point in time that like they're just getting ai slop repeatedly over and over and can see that their systems that their students don't actually have the systematic thinking to engage in like true thought on their own like they're literally just turning to the ai and

pinging it every time they have a question and like that creates a pretty dangerous predication for society yeah no it makes me feel very fortunate i went to the high school that i did because you go the freshman year orientation week they're essentially like like, all right, you're going to be here for four years. Our job as your educator over the next four years is to teach you how to think from first principles and then write. So you got to be able to read things and then write, basically expressing that you understand what you just read in a coherent way, in a consistent flowing way. And I feel like that's being lost. And like going back to like the simulacrum and the hyperreal, like it's already pretty bad. And to think of how

much worse it can get if you have ai sort of dictating thought and people abdicating their critical thinking skills to these lms it can get really bad really quick it already is getting really bad i mean the whole meme of getting one shot is real for a reason yeah and i think the so like i think classic models are dead at this point in time like i think the the way that you and i experienced school if you go in you read something uh essays are turned in you get correction uh like i think everything's going to invert where like i think in the schools people are going to go and nothing in hand and it's going to become all sort of oratory and about critical thinking and a teacher asking you a question you need to actually stand up respond meaningfully

and they're now becoming a real dialogue between everybody sort of asking people to think uh but the other major problem that's kind of occurring right now in that same uh process in society is that everybody's so hyper attuned to the opinions of others and so it's like the mask wearing phenomenon is the best example is that a lot of people wear a mask under the auspicion of like i'm doing this to protect you they're not actually thinking about protecting themselves and there becomes a sort of recursive process of where they're much more concerned about how they socially are perceived than actually doing the thing that is correct and so like i think that essentially just needs to be kind of beat out of people and the only way to do that is to like progressively

allow for people to stand up, say embarrassing shit, allow for that process to play out and be like, you shouldn't be embarrassed. Thanks for actually expressing your thought. Let's understand why perhaps it might be dangerous to think in this way and really allowing for this process of students and teachers to work together. But that requires a really different approach that's going to require some courage that I don't think the current public school system is really available to so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out sup freaks this rip was brought to you by good friends at silent silent creates everyday fair day gear that protects your hardware we're in bitcoin we have a lot of hardware that we need to secure your wallet

emits signals that can leave you vulnerable you want to pick up silence gear put your hardware in that i have a tap signer right here i got the silent card holder replaced my wallet i was using ridge wallet because it secured against rfid signal jacking uh silent the card holder does the same thing. It's much sleeker, fits in my pocket much easier. I also have the Faraday phone sleeve, which you can put a hardware wallet in. We're actually using it for our keys at the house too. There's been a lot of robberies. They have essential Faraday slings, Faraday backpacks. It's a Bitcoin company. They're running on a Bitcoin standard. They have a Bitcoin treasury. They accept Bitcoin via strike. So go to slnt.com slash tftc to get 15% off anything or simply just

use the code tftc when shopping at slnt.com. Patented technology, special operations approved. it has free shipping as well. So go check it out. Secure your Bitcoin's future and your family's peace of mind. Too many heirs lose access to Bitcoin because there's no clear inheritance plan. We'll show you how to change that. On Wednesday, November 19th at 11 a.m. Central, join Dhruv Bansal, the chief security officer at Unchained, Jeff Vandrew, CFO and chief legal officer at Unchained, and Joshua Preston, the CEO of Gannett Trust, for a live fireside chat on how to make your Bitcoin legacy secure, simple, and built to last. We'll cover transfer on death beneficiaries, which is a new Unchained feature for designating who inherits your Bitcoin

and removes uncertainty for your family connections unchained vaults are uniquely built to let you share custody to help your heirs or trusted partners securely recover your bitcoin when it matters most and last but not least estate planning they'll go over how gannett wealth advisors expert financial guidance integrates with unchained to protect your keys and your legacy bring your questions this conversation is designed to give you clarity on how to make inheritance seamless with real bitcoin not ious go to unchained.com slash tftc to sign up don't have much faith in much of the public school system but it does seem like in the broader public discourse this overtone window is shifting where people are openly standing up

and saying hey enough enough enough is enough whether it's israel the immigration situation here in the united states it seems like the situation has gotten to such a point where people are like okay we need to stand up now or things are gonna get super crazy yeah and i think it's interesting because it feels like the pendulum swing has stopped swinging that way and it's sort of a product of why people are standing up but I do think that you're having just as much of the outraged responses

from other people going like no everybody deserves dignity anybody should be able to come here and get free social services no matter what and we should all be able to hold hands and sing kumbaya and make peace happen and like that's a really beautiful idea I

really think it's wonderful and I really wish that's how the world works and it's not um and and i'm sorry like that's a that's a difficult reality to come to terms with but like it turns out like if we just have an open border policy as we've seen like there can be a lot of nefarious people that come in here and take advantage of that it also turns out like here in california like you know i have to pay like eighteen hundred dollars a month for health care for me and my family but like if you just walk into a hospital and say like i'm an undocumented migrant but go great like free free health care for you that costs real money to actual taxpayers who like need to incur the burden of that which

frankly like we can't actually accommodate that so i think now all these pressures are starting to add up and people are going huh like it turns out like the kumbaya version of the world is very very expensive and difficult to implement and furthermore we actually just teach people that like hey like you should go to america because all the stuff we have to pay for here you can get there for free and uh again like i want to welcome people from all walks of life and cultures to come here and contribute to society but the key word there is contribute and i think this has been one of the things that we've seen repeatedly is that like there are people that want to take advantage of these social safety nets and that's incurred a very real cost to the american public i was

reading an article this morning about um some of the somalians in minnesota sort of weaponizing medicaid claiming autistic children to get medicaid benefits and then cycling that money back to somalia well and it and it turns out that like there are real cultural differences of why america is a leading developed country in the world and somalia is not and i think like this is one of the the great cultural neglects that a lot of people don't see is that like the melding pot of american culture is really about not just taking other cultures and just plopping them into america but really actually integrating that with greater american values that have come to define you know like i think you said earlier you had like an irish italian background you know like

i have a germanic irish background um pure irish pure irish philly philly philly is split uh it's like irish irish catholic italian catholic polish catholic and obviously mixed in strong jewish community and uh now um that's that's what it was like when i was born now that's well and like these were like when our ancestors came here like they they were true immigrants as irish they were probably discriminated against quite heavily and not allowed to work in various capacities not uh not very well known the irish were a lot of the irish were slaves when they came to this country too yeah absolutely and they came to this country particularly on the back of like the irish potato famine where like one in four people in ireland

died and so like there was there was very real consequences of why and how people got here and yet your identity today is one of being uh like american irish as opposed to just irish and like this to me is one of the the great problems today is like we don't seem to be getting cultural integration in addition to like there's a very negative dialogue about like what being american is sort of on a whole and that like we should be ashamed of being american or that america doesn't have a particular culture on its own and one i just don't believe that's true but also like i think that's a massive disservice to everybody because it says well you as being somebody who's you know lived here as an american for most your life you should be ashamed of that

culture and i think that i i don't really understand it why should one be proud of being any other culture or nationality but not american and like i think it's very difficult to have dialogues with people about why why we should really be proud to be american and that doesn't mean that like i love my government they're great like those people they they suck and they represent everything that i don't like and that's why we explicitly have a constitution that's like a document about limiting the government not one empowering it so yeah well let's have a discussion what is in your mind an american what is america's culture uh so i think one is that like it's a highly integrative culture like we want people from all walks of life and

different communities from around the world to be able to come here to this country but then we're going to work on amerocratic and egalitarian culture where like if you work hard if you're smart if you apply yourself if you build community with other people like you should not only integrate and be able to find and create a life for yourself but like you should also be able to celebrate the various cultures that come and are part of that but part of that is truly respecting other people and also recognizing that like uh all of these sort of race plays or cultural plays are secondary the fact of that like we all live here we all love the idea of limiting the power of our government of being able to live and let live that you should be able to have a business

and make money from it you shouldn't be taxed out the wazoo and with that we should be able to build community and culture together yeah we've gotten far far far away from that now how do we get back I guess this hides in the Bitcoin and bring it back to like the simulacrum and the hyperreal. Do you think Bitcoin helps tether us back to reality and gets us back to a sound foundation from which we can begin to affect these values you just described? Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost is that like we need to understand the deep and frankly, like the core rottenness of our political culture at this point in time. and the way that it's tried to pit us against one another as it being either red or blue it doesn't make any real difference and that's one of the reasons that as bitcoiners we've concluded that like the money is the real problem because when you actually look at the development of

society and the way that fiat money printing has augmented the entirety of it this is where a lot of that rot comes from and furthermore when you see this political culture that has gamified everything and made everything into a right left issue as opposed to going hey hang on like we We actually share a ton of values and we need to find a great middle ground to work together. Like I'm of the opinion, the only way back at this point in time is, and I don't even want to call it a third party movement. Like we need a full cultural, I don't know, for very strong reasons, that should be obvious. I don't like the word cultural revolution. Yeah, I can see it coming.

I was like, hey. uh but like we need to have a strong movement to try to return to like this uh radical modernism if you will and i think part of a radical modernism is understanding that like both the democrats and the republicans are the major problem today and anybody who associates with either of those like i i actually think we should land blast them and just make them an enemy class and that whatever new political culture establish itself is it's a based on the very fact of anyone who's been involved with those two parties like they're not allowed to be part of the new political culture in addition to turning towards the future and saying hey like our children's future and

making them better than ours matters because i think our generation more than any other generation is sort of the first american generation to truly have it worse than our parents and i think that the boomer class and the way that they have chosen to hollow out america for their own benefit is a very real problem that has to be dealt with. And we need to figure out how are we going to actually make things better for our children. And I think it's through a radical modernism that says, hey, we're going to get back to a middle ground. We're going to work together. We're going to find policies that work best for Americans who live here and who have contributed to our culture. And also I've talked about this as like, I think we need to do it through a state's rights movement

to essentially radicalize states against the federal government, strip the federal government of power and really push power back into the various states and allow for sort of the experiment of the 50 states and the different ways that they want to organize themselves become kind of the primary method of how we're going to figure that out. Yeah. And we had a glimpse of that during COVID. Some states asserting their autonomy and saying, hey, we're open for business. We're not doing this. And that was beautiful to see. But that momentum died pretty quickly. Yeah. And I think like that's part of a greater movement that sort of needs to encourage that. But there also needs to be essentially like again i don't know what you'd call it but like a sort of political

collective that's trying to get the states to work together and have dialogues about this and i've talked about before is that like i think trying to figure out how to use the ratification of the constitution through article 5 needs to become this primary tactic to start trying to bludgeon the federal government and really empower states in new and various ways yeah because to your point about the federal government and the mirage of red versus blue it's really just a uniparty i think there was an incredible example of this on the hill yesterday i saw a clip i believe it was the ceo of autopilot which if you're not aware is this um basically this finance app that allows you to follow the trades of individual senators and congressmen and so like the pelosi tracker

yeah like you can put money in and trade with nancy pelosi and this guy was on the hill saying like hey we started this to highlight the overt corruption that exists in terms of insider training that's happening with our politicians and i thought it was a beautiful representation of the uniparty because he called out republicans and democrats like they're basically leveraging the federal government to pillage the american people yeah and i think this has been going on for a long time uh like i i truly believe this is treason it's treason to the highest degree um that's part of why you know like 80 of military hardware in the united states has chinese components it's part of why we've developed these uh deep ties with the chinese communist party

uh and it's why we have american politicians that are actually selling us out to that and this is one of the reasons that i think we need to use article 5 to radicalize states against the federal government is because like i very much believe that pretty much every single federal representative is corrupt in some way and i would love to see an article 5 amendment to the constitution saying that every single member of the united states senate and congress will be put on trial for treason we're going to open the books they get very clear to everybody and at the end you're found guilty of treason you will be punished as such because like the fact that nancy pelosi has been a career politician who now is worth what 180 million dollars more than 200 yeah like the

this is despicable deplorable and disgusting and the very fact that she is allowed to exist in our society not be called out by that daily and hounded but she's actually put on a pedestal and celebrated as some champion of civil liberties like it's deplorable disgusting despicable and just an insult to anybody's average of intelligence to be able to look at the situation and not go this she's made money through explicit corruption that in any other field would be considered insider trading and those people would go to jail for that crime and so i think the only way to do this is because these these people that are federal representatives they believe they're above the law like i was reading this morning that there's a congressional representative out

of florida who she was caught laundering like more than five million dollars of covid money to herself she's like still a standing member of congress right now and it's like well until until found guilty you know which like there's something to be said for that but like it just goes to show the endemic nature of the corruption at this point in time and i think that like as american citizens we should be outraged it's very clear this part of government is broken and we're not going to be able to address this through the federal legislature so we need to go through states and use that as the most powerful mechanism to essentially stand against them yeah and we were talking about this with danny and hodl the other week on what bitcoin did

but i think people in the federal government should push for this because you should recognize like hey game's up we've pillaged enough like the the plebs if you will are getting angry because it seems pretty clear that there's two paths that are being framed for how to get through this to the masses it's find my franco bring them in or overt democratic socialism that leads to communism yeah and like i i you had that you had to defend fascism you didn't want to but like it's just and it's funny like you say this and people get all pissed off but it's like hey if we're being objective and just observing the tea leaves of what the younger generations are saying right now this is what they're saying yeah and like i i and i really appreciate it in that podcast like

hodl is the one that really pointed out that we need this sort of radical modernism and like again like i don't know how we do this i hope somebody takes up the flag and like makes it their thing like i'm old i'm tired like i don't i don't have the capacity to try to do something around this uh but like whoever chooses to take that up like they have my my full-hearted support but uh it's becoming sadder and sadder to realizing that like we're in a pretty desperate situation and like we and then like nobody's coming to save us and i think that's the big problem is we keep having this expectation that like another election some new person some new way of doing things and like it's about the actual apparatus of government itself at this point in

time and that that again is why like i think you need to have radical approaches like article 5 ratification because like we need to change up the structure of the federal government and so it's like uh the very first amendment to the united states constitution that was passed but actually never ratified so like it's not an amendment to the u.s constitution it's still in a weird quasi state where it could be ratified it's called article the first so i think it's passed i think like 12 states or something like that so if you got like another 25 states to ratify it like it would actually become law of the land in the united states and this explicitly stipulates that uh like no congressional member will ever represent more than 50 000 people at one time

so that would mean that the house of representatives would now become like 6 000 people or something like that and that would absolutely fuck up the federal government in a pretty extreme way and like let's fucking go like that's what i want to see is that like this thing is broken so like let's either break it the rest of the way or figure out a new way to organize ourselves yeah so 6 000 reps would just trade gridlock where you can't get anything past or like we we would get like a a very interesting like multi-party thing that's starting to happen because like i think in the uk like the the house of commons i think it's like 2200 people or something like that it's like i think and the other one is like we need to integrate technology into this you know

like trying to get trying to organize 2200 people to have a dialogue uh like in person like it's not going to happen but like we know of plenty of forums where people can have dialogues like that And there there are different technological ways to address all of this that like that's the other thing is I think if we create new forms of governance, integrating technology in a powerful way that uses cryptographic proofs could do something really powerful. And so, like, I would love to see some sort of platform that uses Noster and voting and cryptographic proofs and other things to actually really create some new mechanism of consensus to really try to figure out what do people want and need and how are we going to go about doing that? Yeah. How does Bitcoin play into this in your mind? Like we essentially, so if all the things went how I wanted to, we would essentially use Article 5 of the Constitution and the very first amendment that would get passed

would be end the Fed. So the Federal Reserve would be unilaterally ended through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. We would just refuse to pay any U.S. debt. We'd cause the dollar to go into hyperinflation and every single state would pivot to having Bitcoin not only as their treasury, some would use as their currencies and others would actually issue their own state-based currency based upon that these things would float between the various states in order for them to kind of find stability between each other but like

i think through having states issue their own currency and using bitcoin to backstop those currencies i think would be a really powerful approach because again like unless we actually address how money is being issued and the corruption that's around that we're never going to solve this problem yeah that's what hal finney envisioned in december 2010 you can build a free banking system on bitcoin one you know most people don't know the wildcat era of banking in the united states between when uh andrew jackson ended the first bank of the united states between i think it was uh 1862 and the second bank of the united states was created that like this was an era where there was like 7 000 different free floating currencies that

were issued by private institutions and like that's also the area of the greatest growth that happened in uh like the american economy so like while this seems like a wacky idea to us today like this is actually how it operated throughout most of american history that's one of the big problems is um it's a bit overplayed and cliche but it is apt it's like we're fish and water like there any anybody living today has never experienced that environment and so it's hard for people to um get comfortable with taking the risk to take that leap and experiment with that type of monetary network yeah and i mean like the the other thing is like there's a very different form of life that could be available to us you know like most people don't realize that like we

don't actually have to live lives where you work at jobs that you hate for 40 hours a week trying to make some tech company slightly more effective and it's uh like i recently uh read dave graber's essay on bullshit jobs and like it just i think he wrote it maybe a decade ago but it was just really resounding today of that like i've met so many people recently who have jobs that they really hate and they don't see any other way outside of it other than committing their lives to working at some corporation that they don't like and trying to give them the empowerment to feel like they could go start a small business and be successful really is kind of impossible for most people because of how destructive the currency has been, how much inflation

has affected people, and how difficult it really is to start a business. And I think if we were actually on something like a Bitcoin standard, it'd be a very different way for people to choose to live. And I think we could go back to having a number of much smaller businesses and industries that could really allow for us to break up these large corporate oligopolies and actually create something new and different for the American public. Yeah. I was having this conversation yesterday,

a story of this podcast and this business, my own personal journey. Like I feel incredibly lucky. I've got a bug in the lights above us, but I feel incredibly lucky that there's something that's deeply ingrained. I don't know if it's my genes or my soul or my psyche. We can't talk about having good genes, but I could not do the corporate life.

Like I had a good hedge. i was working at a good fund trajectory to make good money was in a good position and just literally physically could not stand being in a cube pulling data from bloomberg splicing it up like following markets well i think i think for a lot of people it's the fish and water thing like they've known that their entire life they've never had an opportunity to really just be free and allow for themselves that opportunity and i think if they did have that opportunity uh like i've known a number of people that have done their sabbatical thing to like go travel the world or whatever and like essentially when they come back they realize they can't ever do that again

and like that's really a reality i want to provide to more people it's like how do we make this a more creative open and free culture for everybody because like at the end of the day like this is the one life that we have to live and the fact that like we're in this culture where uh you know the idea of having a family with eight kids seems absurd to most people because of how expensive it would be and like what what a crime against humanity to really have created a world where the idea of a child being too expensive is a reality that most people live in did you see the status of the uk no this is very morbid for every 100 births in the uk well i believe it was in 2024 there was 48 abortions this like yeah and like it's it's interesting because i think

charlie kirk kind of pointed out this dialogue that that he really stood around powerfully and like i think it's really important like uh a woman's body a woman's choice like that that's something that i think as a truism that trying to overcome would be too difficult but like i do think the consequences of that really need to be understood and that uh also like we've created a society that that becomes a very real issue for somebody if they're going to be a single mom having to look at like well how the hell am i going to provide for this child in a meaningful way and that's something that reflects on our culture as well and like it's it's really important to understand that the change in how like this issue is being dealt with has very much had like

a demographic shift like in culture on its entirety that we're now really seeing the consequence of and that like there's a lot fewer people there's a lot more individuals that have been imported in order to replace those people um and also like it's a really difficult issue and i again like i really appreciated charlie kirk after he was assassinated i watched a number of videos and like he had a very logical approach uh in addition to the fact of that like i don't i personally like uh i think children are a beautiful and extraordinary blessing and uh like seeing these cat videos of women celebrating their individualism of getting to like sleep in as late as they want to go to brunch that like this like this is a fulfillment that video this morning

too well and it was just like this is a fulfilling life for you and like like people were out there making fun of her and i was just like i feel really sad for her like she she'll never know know the beauty of what it is to be woke up in the middle of the night by your child who you pick up and they will snuggle into you and fall back asleep in your arms like that's that's a beautiful thing and the fact that this has been contorted in such a way that this is supposed to be something that that you're afraid of that you don't want like that's really alarming to me and like i don't know how we correct that and like i don't i don't think there's really easy answers here But I would really appreciate if we had a society and culture that would really support people if they were going to be single mothers or whatever, but also the entire conversation about where we're at and like how and why these things come about is really important.

Well, I think it really, it does come back to the money because, excuse me, I, um, no, no. When I was in Chicago, I, uh, I volunteered at a inner city lacrosse program opportunity with lacrosse and schools or outreach with lacrosse and schools, excuse me. And, uh, so I would go to the West side and South side of Chicago and got to see the sort of ramifications of the welfare state up, up close and personal. And there's a bunch of kids being raised by their aunts and their grandmothers and, um, the father wasn't there. And I mean, Thomas Sowell has explained this pretty, pretty cogently in my mind, like if you replace the family, the nuclear family with the state, like this is the ramifications of it.

And I think that's happened not only in inner cities, lower economic realms, but now it's pumping up to your point, like the cat lady sitting there, like she was told to go be a girl boss. And the conditions of the economy are such that you have to be forced into the workplace because you have to make enough money to subsist because inflation and debasement is accelerating year after year, decade after decade. And going back to my story about being able to quit that job, part of what gave me the comfort of it is I knew I had some Bitcoin savings and I quit that job, got another job in New York. similar thing happened worked there for two years and then hated it quit thought i was going to get a job in two weeks wound up being unemployed for 18 months before i started this newsletter and podcast and i spent a lot of time that 18 months in brooklyn um just like really thinking deeply about what do i want to do studying bitcoin very intensely like it was uh in a monk-like fashion fashion for like a year year and a half and going to all the bitcoin meetups in new york

and trying to get jobs but i think subconsciously really knowing like this is what i want to do and then the timing struck um in june of 2017 i was like okay price of bitcoin's going up my dad um had a somewhat um serendipitous conversation with me like i was down in my dumps down on on the rocks probably rock bottom for my life though i did have the savings i was like okay i just got married i don't have a job i feel like a loser my dad was like you should write about bitcoin you wrote at the fund you know a lot about bitcoin and started the newsletter and here we are today um but i would not have been able to really do that to go through that journey if i did not have this financial backstop that i could pull into to survive during that period and really

have the time to think about what i wanted to do yeah and like you this is your story of the dark night of the soul of you like going into the dark night that is the nihilism of this society and going through your own true angst of like what is it that i actually want to do with my life is the time that i sell myself again and and go find some firm that i can prostitute myself to and have them rob me of 60 hours of my life that i can go in before the sun comes up and leave after the sun goes down and maybe get to see my wife for a half hour before i go to bed and do it all over again or is there something different and i think for a lot of people even being allowed to ask the question if there's something different is an impossibility because even if they have money

in the bank saved uh like that money is dwindling quicker than ever on that there's sort of a uh schizophrenic and paranoid world view that happens under a fiat currency regime where all the money can evaporate the bank can steal it like any number of things that can happen whereas at least for me very similar having my bitcoin savings as a vehicle that i know hey like this is safe and secure nobody can take it away from me it should deflate over time if all the things work correctly that gave me the confidence to actually chase my own dreams and actually say you know i want to do something different for myself i don't i don't want to continue to you know work at the bank that i'm working at and i'd like to strike out and do something bigger and so it's part of a dualism

of that like having the confidence and conviction to know and understand what bitcoin is is one half of the coin but the other side is is then having the conviction and esteem in yourself to say there's something better out there for me that i could actually make for myself that could be meaningful and i think like this is part of the mission that we're sort of on that we've been on for a while is trying to get people to understand bitcoin and so like i'm very big into a pedagogical approach of bitcoin is that like you have to be willing to understand that for yourself first and actually take a moment to look around and you know after the one fish swims by and says hey how's the water this morning boys to actually look at your friend and ask the question of like well what's

what's water and actually understand that like we are in sort of a fictionalized reality that causes for people to go into this prattle and paranoia of that like you need to work a 40-hour a job a week and save money in this way contribute your 401k when that's not actually true you could do something different for yourself but that requires the confidence and conviction for you to actually ask the most meaningful questions to yourself to engage in that what's up freaks been seeing a lot of youtube comments marty your skin looks so good you're looking fit these days how are you doing it well number one i'm going to the gym more trying to get my swell on trying to be a good example for my young son to fit healthy dad but part of that is having a good

regimen particularly staying hydrated making sure i have the right electrolytes and salts in my body that is why i use salt of the earth i drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt the earth i'm liking the pink lemonade right now it's my flavor of choice uh this is their creatine i've added this to my regimen they have it in these packets as well uh makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling you want to work out while you're traveling but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through tsa it's very very uh nerve-wracking at times you have to explain hey it's it's not what you think it is it's creatine i'm trying to get my swell on um make sure you're staying hydrated i have become addicted to these it's made my life

a lot better i can supplement this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away i can supplement i can bring the creatine wherever i need to just put a couple packets in here before i head to the gym bring this to the gym drinking out of a glass bottle make sure i'm not injecting any microplastics into my body go to drinksote.com use the code tftc and you'll get 15 off anything in the store that's drinksote.com code tftc i mean we've been talking a lot over the last couple days like the state of bitcoin itself and people's understanding of bitcoin how would you describe it i think it's atrophied over the last year like i think the bitcoin treasury and number go up thing has been uh pretty detrimental to the dialogue of bitcoin on a whole and people

have been treating it just as a banking apparatus to like make more money and i think that's sort of dangerous and particularly here at the conference that we're at i've talked to a number of people that are like no it's as the bitcoin white paper says it bitcoin is pure pure cash like we need to make it a payment network for people all around the globe and that there people that live in the global south who like just being able to have a payments rail is the most meaningful thing and again like i number go ups nice but like i i don't see it as being either number go up or we get a payments network like these things work synergistically together and i think we need to return to the dialogue of that like bitcoin is truly independent freedom money

and people need to get on board with that and understand like particularly the zoomers that like you need to empower yourself against a system that has chosen to abuse you and enslave you and bitcoin is a real exit for you and furthermore like people do crazy shit like take out debt and renege on it because they can hold bitcoin and just walk away from all of it i'm not saying that's right or correct but like there are ways that you can empower yourself against a system that wants to abuse and fleece you sam hyde most famously i think have you ever seen that video no it's like sam hyden i think in like 2016 talking about like here's what i did i took out 30 grand in credit card debt bought bitcoin nagged on it they called me and they're like hey you need to

pay off this uh this balance and he's like okay i don't have enough money can i pay you like two dollars a month like yeah and speculative attacks the uh the credit system essentially and look like do what you want to for yourself and and make the risks that you want to yeah not financial advice Yeah, not financial advice. But like, it's important to understand, like, once you have that Bitcoin, and if you secure it correctly, people can not take it from you. Like, that's something really important. And also, like, if people are like, well, it's so unethical to renege on it. Like, I'm sorry, but like, fuck these people. These are super abusive financial institutions who exist off of fleecing people. And to be clear, like the U.S. government's in the same fucking position right now. Eighty eight percent of tax receipts are going to like paying this unpayable fucking debt. So like at the end of the day, like we're stuck in a debt based fiat monetary system that is not going to work out for anyone at the end of the day. And people really need to understand that, like, this system is going to go away at some point.

It's not about if it's about when. And you should start setting yourself up and preparing for a different life, you know. same thing like uh like urban cultures are really interesting and innovative but like they're all based around this particular sort of fantasy that like i think is pretty disconnected from reality on a whole at this point in time and i think if we're able to get more and more people onto a bitcoin standard like there there's a real way that culture can shift in a powerful and thoughtful way that isn't going to be a giant crash but it's actually going to create for a solution that i don't think anybody can really predict but this is only if people are really going to start thinking

for themselves like stop believing that uh all these different authoritative figures out there including us like have the solutions for you like you need to sit down and reflect for yourself about what's the life that you want for yourself and what what can empower you in that i know um we were talking about it yesterday and uh my belief is that for the the up return thing it's it's a conversation I don't feel there's a lot of value engaging in for myself particularly. But to your point, don't believe in us. It's been one of the most disconcerting

things about this debate within Bitcoin is the number of people that are literally tagging me and hopping in my comments on YouTube and on X being like, what do you think about this? What should we do? It's like, you should not be asking me. You have to decide for yourself.

That's what Bitcoin's all about. Well, and also people are getting pissed at me because I'm not responding. I'm like, you're missing the point. Like, you should not be asking me for this. Well, and also on that point, like people who are doing that, like, fuck you. Like, like, you're not entitled to a response from him. And even in that, his response doesn't fucking matter. Like, go do the fucking work and figuring out for yourself.

And also, like, my first tweet when I got back onto Twitter was about this op return debate and how much it fucking frustrated me. because people aren't reading between the lines uh they're not understanding the greater technical debate uh and also like they're not understanding the ideology that's being injected into it and it just it makes me really fucking angry because like this is a difficult technical issue to understand and also it's not fucking cut and dry and people that are behaving as if it is like the the hubris really upsets me and like at some point can you fucking stop and actually self-reflect enough to go, maybe there's something I'm not seeing here. Maybe I shouldn't be nearly as confident as I am about the approach here. And so I'd really encourage you, if you don't

understand this, great. It means there's more for you to learn about Bitcoin. And just like, as long as you and I have been in it, I don't think either of us would be able to assert ourselves as being experts in Bitcoin in any way. I mean, I fucking became friends with and sat next to a core developer here for several months. And even he was hesitant and saying, despite the fact that that he's involved deeply in change and like developing Bitcoin core that he didn't feel confident about being an expert in it. And it's because Bitcoin is a huge project that involves a lot of moving pieces and it requires decades of deep and intensive study that even people that would be considered experts by most don't feel that way themselves. So like humble yourself

enough to say, maybe I'm wrong about this, including the Bitcoin project on a whole. that's super important so you don't fall down the fucking z cash rabbit hole and go this is the new solution that bitcoin couldn't do you know but maybe that's true but do all the fucking work to figure it out for yourself and at the end you'll probably have a conclusion that you don't need to go tag marty on x to ask his opinion about this shit yeah no i think i am not an expert and that's why i think i've learned enough being a bitcoin for as long as i have to like know what i don't know i'm not gonna go out there and pontificate one way or the other in this particular debate because i know that i don't know everything and i think that's that i call my bitcoins in

it's like you just gotta it's like surfing when you fall off a wave you just gotta go ragdoll and be like okay yeah yeah i tried to catch something too big for me uh i i got punished for it and that's okay yeah and like this thing plays out bigger too same thing with uh anybody who's out there making the confident price calls about whatever it is like i'm sorry like you don't have a fucking crystal ball you don't know the price goes up the price goes down and like this is the game theory of bitcoin that i like because at the end of the day i know the number of units that exist i know the amount of energy and hashing power that's going in those are true things that i can know and based off of the rest of the economy when i look at bitcoin as a savings vehicle and

how it operates as a payments rails. I feel way better about that than anything else out there that exists. And so as a value investor, Bitcoin is my chosen savings vehicle. And that's what I'm going to keep doing. Yeah. It's funny to watch people really

freak out about this price. What's happening. Oh my God. $90,000 Bitcoin. It's so horrible. Like bro, like rewind the tape a little bit. Look at where we're at a few years ago. Like.

things are going to work out. It's going to be great. But also, we can't just sit on our haunches and say, number go up forever. It's important that there's an ongoing pedagogical conversation with people in your lives to actually get them to do their best to understand what Bitcoin is, why it's different from crypto on a whole, why these other currencies aren't a solution, why we can't rely on the government to try to correct these problems for ourselves, and why we really need to have a neutral money that the globe can use for themselves yeah and to your point about obviously i think it's objective last year year and a half has been really focused on these treasury companies number go up and the sort of freedom money peer-to-peer

digital cash as a narrative has been sort of pushed to the wayside but i think if you're paying attention to what's actually being built in terms of the infrastructure whether it's second layer um subsystem protocols as deeply was describing to me yesterday or what something like block just enabled for their square point of sale systems like if you squint and know where to look there is very exciting truly cypherpunk digital cash infrastructure being built out and i think we just need to do a better job of highlighting and pushing that to the floor of the conversation absolutely and like i these are sort of the ironic cycles that bitcoin continuously goes through that that i really appreciate is that like despite the fact that

things feel kind of stagnant is like actually under the hood there's been huge developments and so seeing what's going on with e-cash has been really exciting and all the different applications and ways that people are using that and it's a really powerful mechanism and it has really great privacy protecting features that like and i think this is going to continually happen as me and jesse talked about this at length once of that like we think all of the cryptography that Bitcoin needs to become a massively successful project is already baked into the pie.

A lot of it's just undiscovered, very similar to like, or not even undiscovered, but we haven't just taken the various pieces and kind of applied them. Underutilized. Yeah, and so like eCash is a great thing. It's like this is a Chamean idea

from the 1980s that just got reapplied to Bitcoin in a new and innovative way. And so like there are various puzzle pieces that people haven't fit together in addition to like, uh there's actually like a pretty small cohort of people that are working on these projects because uh very similar to like working on uh a jet engine or something very few people are willing

to actually lift the hood and look at what's going on underneath it but once you start tinkering with it and giving yourself permission to mess with it and try things with it like it you can learn this stuff and so like i would really encourage anybody who is really interested in bitcoin like start playing with it under the hood and encouraging yourself to do developmental work or get involved in different ways like you can do it and we need other people that are involved with it and as these discoveries are made there's going to be more and more opportunities and so e-cash is just one of many new things that are going to sort of change how bitcoin operates uh on a number of levels and so i ultimately think that like stuff's still exciting the mission's still here we're

we're still gonna win um and just like chill out yeah and like focus like you mentioned z cash earlier that's a very frustrating narrative especially if you've been around long enough to understand the dynamics which brought z cash to the market and um the the narrative that they're running with bitcoin's not private enough but it's like you just mentioned e-cash you can push privacy to second layers whether that's lightning e-cash liquid with confidential transactions whatever it may be but then on chain too like to your point about underutilized this i guess there's cryptography involved to a certain extent but like underutilized transaction batching with pay join like yeah we can we can bitcoin it will be a transparent ledger and you will know that

utxos are going from one address to another but you can construct transaction batching in a way where it's really hard to tell who owns what address. And PayJoin is something I've been passionate about for years. And I think with the work that Dan Gould and others working on the PayJoin development kit have been doing over the last three years specifically has been incredible. And now I think it's time to make the narrative push

for the exchanges in the space, the large transaction batchers, the largest transaction batchers that exist within the industry to really implement this and just position it in a way like, hey, you're running a business, You want to cut costs and be as efficient as possible for your shareholders and not only your shareholders, but the Bitcoin network itself. Like it's a superior way of batching transactions that you should implement.

Yeah. And also like on that note, like it's very clear that governments are against this kind of technology, that they are going to try to spook people out of using them. And seeing what happened to Keenon is really sad and we should all be outraged and horrified by it. and uh we really need to try to stand behind the samurai devs in the same way that we stand stood behind ross like it's important to understand what what happened to him was horrific wrong uh and frankly should should be bill yeah you know and like this is this is really unfair across the board and we need to figure out how and why is our government so against us having the freedom to transact and privacy within that because like this is what this is really about is a war against privacy and we should be able to as businesses say hey i care about my users

privacy enough and about my shareholders making enough profit that i should be able to integrate pay join that we're not violating anybody by doing this and we're protecting people by ensuring them to have privacy so like where and why is this conversation going wrong and again this goes back to like the the political thing is that like we have this class of fucking dinosaurs who don't understand this technology in any meaningful way and they get keyed up on the exact same arguments from the first crypto wars of that this is about preventing uh child pornography and terrorism and all the bad shit meanwhile like these motherfuckers won't actually release the goddamn epstein files because they're afraid of the way that it's going to implicate

everyone in government who is actually doing these very real crimes and like this is sort of yeah i'm just i'm just really upset and disappointed at our government right now and i wish there was a real way to push back against these people and there isn't from a political standpoint and that's one of the reasons why i own bitcoin is because like this is one of the very few ways that we have to have personal political empowerment against a system that's highly abusive across the board so yeah and at what point does corporate civil disobedience need to become a thing like going back to the page one thing like in my mind it's like it is literally just a way of batching transactions that is enabled by the protocol and the software kits

built on top of it like there's literally nothing stopping you from hitting the button that says okay here's how we're going to batch transactions now and to answer that question is that like i think corporate civil disobedience is kind of the the apex of what we need right now it's like we need courageous CEOs that are going to integrate these things. And to be clear, the feds are probably going to come after you. And when they do that, you go, I will destroy my fucking business and allow for myself to go to prison about this stuff and really stand against you guys because this is wrong. And we need to have like America is supposed to be a country that part of its founding principles is the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. And being able to have a

business and protect your users is meaningful like we we shouldn't have to continually kowtow to governments over and over based off of their prattle and paranoia that is non-existent and meanwhile in the background like they're the people that are doing these actual crimes and getting away with it you know like if we want to talk about currency laundering like let's go back to fucking pelosi and the kind of shit that she's doing like this this is really disgusting and upsetting and we need to start talking more about how to to actively resist these people and again like i don't know maybe we need to start organizing bitcoiners in a more meaningful and thoughtful fashion other than the sort of haphazard approach that we've taken so far again i don't know what

that looks like but maybe we need to have something like that why would you describe it as haphazard uh like there isn't any sort of organizing principle that like has us you know outside of sort of all of our unofficial contacts that we have with each other there isn't like a larger umbrella organization that has has us all working collaboratively together and like i have really strong hopes that like somebody can develop some protocol on nostra that we can actually use to start figuring out like who are bitcoiners that are really part of this whole thing that we're participating in and like uh we've all sort of been refugees from you know first bitcoin talk then reddit then to x and now to no stir and like at what point do we say like this is really going

to be our home base this is really the way that we're going to operate and organize with each other and know who's who within the the bunch of people and be able to actually start having real conversations about like how do we create our political power together as a real entity as opposed to again what i would call the haphazard approach yeah and maybe that's a fool's errand and maybe i'm totally mistaken but well i feel like the the root of the haphazard approach is probably seeped in this idea that bitcoin is this money for enemies and like it's this apolitical neutral thing that um we can all sort of anchor into and benefit from but at the end of the day uh it's not any individual's thing you know it's not in the possession of any

individual the network itself and i think there's this embedded sort of apprehension to trying to do something like you're describing because it's like oh it's against the ethos of the protocol itself and i think like the the concern and danger of that is real but also like i i've always been the one of that like i've always objected to the idea of the apoliticalness because like there's an interesting turnabout of that like because bitcoin is money for everybody there is a way way to see it as being apolitical. But the truth is, is like we live in a fiat world where the literal word fiat is by decree. That decree comes from governments that have organized us around national lines. And so the fact that we have a money that is not loyal to any single nation

state is the most political of all things. And so being able to actually organize Bitcoiners from around the world around this idea, first and foremost, because while we've been talking from a very american-centric idea like these things are going on in europe just as much as they're going on in places like africa and south america and asia and it's important to understand that like bitcoin truly is a global movement that is based on top of the internet and we're sort of the first culture of people that understand that this apparatus is something that we can use to empower people all around the globe to be more free more egalitarian and have greater economic opportunity than ever before and we can totally lose that if we're not willing to actually stand

up and say hey this is an important and powerful political principle that people should rally behind and it's important to also return to the fact of that like the american revolution wasn't something that was isolated to america and there was like good reason why thomas jefferson was also one of the primary authors of the rights of man is because like this was truly a cultural movement that was about advancing like the political capital t capital p as opposed to just politics and so like to me bitcoin's about a global political movement for the freedom of money of all people everywhere against their governments and the sort of endemic abuses that they've created through fiat money yeah yeah how do we i mean ah and this is like how do you engender this

uh this fire is talking to you like it's very obvious that you have this fire in your belly that really drives you to this and i feel like that fire doesn't exist in most people's bellies anymore i like i don't know how we engender it and maybe it's like we just need to start building but it's like to me that this is a true political principle of that like uh we need people to get that like bitcoin is a political thing it's not it's not just an innate uh like a political thing you will that like it's truly the most political thing and that's why i've always wanted to try to encourage this sort of political line of bitcoin shining through and that's why i'd love to see some kind of uh and again i don't want to call it a political party but like this cultural movement

that's designed around people understanding and like again like being well read in marxism i actually think that there's a lot of very powerful ideological approaches that we can pluck out of marxism and one of the ideas is the idea of class consciousness like having people be able to develop a clash consciousness around what bitcoin is and what fiat money is and how we're in that is a system that empowers us against it is very much like the idea of class consciousness and marxism and understanding how people were exploited through the labor theory of value well i'm happy you brought this up because this is what we've intentionally been doing with our ai generated videos so i was very influenced by michael goldstein's 2019 bit block boom talk on me more

fair and the art of rhetoric and the fact that you shouldn't view propaganda as a bad thing you're being propagandized in both both ways so with these ai videos we've been making it's uh the last one we did specifically it's uh common man yeah yeah i i saw it i really liked it it was like the two farmers talking yeah but like really like leaning into that marxist idea plucking that out I mean, like, all right, we're going to tell the story of deflation and how money we have all this tech deflation, but we're not reaping the benefits of it because we're printing money. We should talk more about this because this very much is in line with my book, Crypto Sovereignty, and sort of the extension after it through Alexander Dugan's fourth political theory. And that like in the fourth political theory makes the argument that like fascism, Marxism and liberalism are all sort of the political theories of the 20th century. And they're all dead, like they're all murdered by neoliberalism in a very particular way.

that now means the whole world operates sort of under this principle of neoliberalism and that these three prior political theories are dead. However, there's a possibility of a fourth political theory where you can essentially cherry pick from all of the prior political theories and take those ideas and then apply them to sort of this new political theory. This is what I think Bitcoin actually is, but I think it's only once we imbue Bitcoin with principles that draw from fascism, that draw from liberalism and draw from communism to essentially educate people around the fact of that we have the internet as a global apparatus that allows for anyone, anywhere, the freedom and the empowerment to actually create and contribute to a global

economy. We now have a money that anybody anywhere can use freely with one another to transact with each other to create this global economy. But it's only through the ideological advancement of understanding that fiat money, whether it is from the Japanese government, the Chinese government, the Americans or the South Africans, it is all designed around the explicit exploitation of the working class man against a political culture that is designed to steal from them. And it's only through the development of this class consciousness of getting more people on board to use Bitcoin in a peer to peer fashion that allows for an exchange directly with one another in a private preserving manner allows for number go up that sort of creates this

dual union between the first world and the third world to advance one another for the working class in each world and then uh you know like i think ben arc and i we've had a number of really great conversations together because he's very well read in marxism too of that uh i've been meaning to do a deep analysis of bitcoin from a marxist standpoint and again these words marxism communism fascism they're almost useless at this point in time because of how much they've been abused but there is a way to approach bitcoin through a marxist lens that allows for uh these very deep principled recoveries of an ideological approach that that is part of why marxism was such a powerful movement at the beginning of the 20th century like it wasn't all just an insane idea of

using the state to create a giant apparatus of exploitation and that's also part of my line of thinking of being an anarchist like it's very important to understand that the socialist movement in the late 19th century like communism and anarchism were a single thing up until marx produced the communist manifesto and that's when out when bakun approached marx and was like hey what's all this bullshit about the dictatorship of the proletariat and taking over the state for us and marx was like yeah yeah like that's how we can actualize communism and back then was like fuck you like the the state's the problem it's not it's not the capitalist expropriation it's the fact of that these things work in tandem with each other so like fuck you anarchism is going to

go become its own movement on its own and because there is no organizing principle around anarchism it essentially died an early death during the 20th century which i think now there's an opportunity to recover with this fourth political theory wow and it's funny like you're saying this and even myself just like people hear these words marxism communism and the idea of like let's pick good ideas and they'll have an like immediate aversion like immediately shut down uh intellectually oh absolutely and and that's part from a multi-generational campaign against both of them one is is that like it's important to understand that like marxism and the way that it advanced into uh leninist and stalinism in the 20th century like it was fucking horrific

and then it's in its last iteration of Maoism was almost the worst and like these are particular maniacal forms that came out of the idea of Marxism in the same way that like fascism died such an early death and it's been so heavily disparaged over time that most people have no idea what the word means other than that it's it's bad it's really bad and we can't talk about it and i think these things are really important to go well why is it so bad what was the things that made it so uh apprehensible and something that we shouldn't look at not only that but like conversely what were the things that made people really attracted to it yeah and like it's pretty interesting that most people think that like germany just went insane like during

the 1930s and that there was no real reason that fascism actually became the select approach and it's really important to understand the historic context of how and why fascism ultimately is what ran germany in the 1930s and the same reason is like why did fascism become the select thing that worked in italy at the time and most people don't understand that fascism was explicitly developed as an anti-communist movement and it's specifically because of the way that communism was becoming so powerful in places like italy and germany at this point in time and so like again like i also think that like these answers from the past won't apply to the future and that's why i like dugan's fourth political theory so much yeah well i'm chuckling right now because we're

watching it play out again absolutely we were talking about it with danny fascism is rising as this response to over communism which is becoming popular and like we saw how that played out and we should all be very scared of it and that's why we need to have a totally new political approach that has the internet bitcoin uh censorship resistant technology and privacy at the core of it because there is a new and very powerful way that we could create a global movement that ensures and it's very ironic because like part of what i think the fourth political theory is is take picking and choosing a number of these things in order to create essentially like uh i don't even know what you'd call it a la carte political theory well and part

of that is is that like this political theory essentially is like the most radical form of anarchism through the most liberal approach that there is because it truly makes the sovereign individual and it collectivizes sovereign individuals sort of under this uh like marxist rubric but because of the way that privacy is preserved uh that like the individual choice is radicalized through the internet in this very particular way it like actualizes the sovereign an individual like as sort of the preeminent political character of the 21st century but again we only get that if we create this sort of applied political ideology that like sort of the next iteration of my own political work around crypto sovereignty has been working on but also

like uh this is like such a monumental uh political and philosophical task and also like i don't know what the fuck i'm doing so it's like trying to figure out how to do that like i need somebody to deeply collaborate with me and work on well that was you say that and my next question was going to be like okay we're talking high level 30 000 foot view of this fourth political theory that we should really attempt to go after and my question right before you said that my mind was going to be all right let's get into the blocking and tackling what is the first step i think the first step is acknowledging that like we need something like this and then sort of trying to figure out like how does it organize itself and like i have a whole bunch of desperate threats

and ideas that like i've been juggling with over the past i don't know seven years or something but you know uh having dialogues like this encouraged me to look more deeply into it but essentially like it looks something very similar to uh yeah essentially i should go back through all of my notes from the fourth political theory and reread it because after that i felt like there's a way and like bitcoin has a number of these things in it of that like uh satoshi's choice of 21 million is like a total fascist thing but the fact that like one bitcoin is one bitcoin whether it's mine or yours and that's protected by cryptography is like this very marxist idea and so like the i think picking all these things out and kind of trying to go through

it in very deep detail to explain it i think would be really valuable to people and as part of the advancement of that class consciousness to actually have people understand that like no you don't own the money in your bank account that's a debt instrument the bank owns like yes you are actually a very particular form of slave that has been enslaved to fiat monetary system and something like bitcoin is the real way that you can empower yourself and noster is the way that you can really and i think noster is kind of one of the components is that like i think that's the thing that the political apparatus of however we like vote or have dialogues with each other something there's like a way to build that on top of no sir but like it's not very clear to me at

how that's done yet yeah and it hasn't really hit me well it has hit me like i intentionally rebranded tftc to truth for the commoner to really play into that working man thing because that's like i grew up uh both my grandfather's reunion workers one was a steam fitter one was an iron worker my parents had me very young and provided a great life for me but we were never extremely well off and i think just my life experience is such that like i have a lot of empathy for the working man because i grew up in a working man common man family and uh that's who's getting crushed the most and that is who's also getting misled the most and they're getting driven to these polar ideas to your point which have objectively failed and will fail again if you

if you try to implement them and the whole point of this show of the newsletter of my work in bitcoin is to really get through to the common man like this is the way yeah i think like through uh like as you're talking about that that reminds me of like one of the ways anarchism tried to organize itself in the early 20th century was through an approach called syndicalism and syndicalism is essentially like this idea of creating industrial unions that are interoperable together that are like based on those principles and i think like we essentially as bitcoiners need to start getting more aggressive with being like hey if you're a small business owner you need to be accepting bitcoin and like you need to be marking up fiat by 10 or 20 percent

and being very explicit about that like if you're going to use bitcoin with my business you're going to save money and if you're not i'm going to charge you more and there's a reason why and then finding other people to create these collaborative relationships with where like maybe they're people that that are inventory providers or maybe there are other people that you have relationships with. But it's really from a business front, encouraging people to be like, hey, we need to be using Bitcoin for our businesses for these reasons. And this is how it protects us.

And furthermore, by because we've collectivized ourselves in a particular way that like if the government comes after you for, you know, like you get tax audited or something and that that's taking away from you like we have this sort of support network that's going to help you out but again all of this like goes back to i don't know the exact methodology of how we need to organize around this but i am convinced that like organization is something that we need to actually address in a meaningful way and we also need to address this component of class consciousness as well yeah and it's never been easier with the tech that exists like we really wanted to if we figured out like okay here's the sort of way in which we're going to organize the ability to do

so it's never been easier well and and getting into the mematic warfare like that's such an important and powerful component because also like if we're doing it right as this stuff gets promoted like they're going to start banning it and then we can start promoting it on noster and then we can start being really clear that like hey there's this whole other dialogue that if i even try to have it with you here we both get banned and so like come find us on noster like this is our censorship resistant network where they can't stop us from talking about this and spreading the signal because the truth is is like you're being exploited in a way that like do you really think that a hundred years ago your grandfather was able to own a farm and have

eight kids and that he was somehow like are you not working as hard as him like my grandfather was an iron worker and had eight kids yeah like can you be an iron worker today and have eight kids no why is that is it that iron working did not become more efficient so like there's clearly a fucking problem here and why is it that it seems to be that we're working harder than ever and we're getting by less than ever before and it's because of these reasons it turns out that fiat money is a thing that's designed explicitly to exploit you and redirect money to this parasitic political class and really trying to figure out the way that we create the mematic warfare around that uh collectivizing people to educate each other and giving each other the resources and

really finding the right ways to organize around that i think is a very important principle that i really hope that more people are going to get on board with figuring out how we do this together you know maybe uh we need to make like the founding father has like a dinner series around the country around the world even we get a group of us together i mean i think between like our mutual networks along with some other people that we know like i do think that we should actually probably do something similar to this and like have a you know like uh being here with the the group that we're with is kind of a great starting point is that figuring out how do we get us all together for a week just to to hang out and really have a dialogue with each other about if we're to

build something like this what does it look like how does it function and how do we put it together very similar to what the founding fathers did because like that was a decision that those men made for themselves to respond to the tyrannical abuses that their government was doing to them at that point in time which like this seems to rhyme pretty well with what happened you know 250 years ago yeah and it would be very fitting as we approach the 250th anniversary of this nation if we were able to successfully do something like this and it would be really fun too you know like Like, have you ever seen the documents of, like, the bar tab after they, like, got together and actually created that? And you see what they drink.

Yeah. Yeah. So we definitely need to do that part, too. All right. Let's end it here. All right. Yeah. A call to action for the people who care about this and recognize that, at least here in America, and I think even more broadly in parts of the West, the solutions that are being put in front of you are not going to work.

They haven't worked. and the nature of our reality as it stands in 2025 and 21st century in the digital age is not conducive for the solutions that are being put before you yeah and we need to ask ourselves to stand up and be courageous enough to realize that like this is our time to really shine and if we make the decision together to stand up and create a new political dynasty that could change of the future for the next 250 years maybe there's an opportunity that our children can actually live freer happier and flourish better than we could have ever predicted i'm really happy we did this yeah me too all right peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc

if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives you incredible value so please consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time