TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #121: Hector Rosekrans

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Hector Rosekrans, Navy veteran and bitcoiner, to discuss: - Being a Surface Warfare Officer - How the Navy teaches you to think - How Bitcoin may be better at spreading democracy than military might - Self custody'ing your own data - Bitcoin and the Constitution - Nuclear deescalation via Bitcoin mining - How should States lean in to Bitcoin? - much more Follow Hector on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HectorRosekrans Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: tftc.tv Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy Marty Ben here sipping on some delicious coffee here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt with Hector Rosecrans, a veteran of the Naval Academy, a Bitcoiner, and currently working at CASA to help people secure their Bitcoin. We had an incredible conversation about how Hector came to find Bitcoin, his experience in the Navy, why he thinks Bitcoin is important, how the revolution that's being played out via bitcoin may be able to spread democracy more than military might how it is imperative that people take responsibility when securing their bitcoin and how bitcoin compares to the constitution which has been a big theme on this podcast uh last couple weeks couple months

um but we actually since the trace mayor podcast we've really been diving into that and uh hector and i dove a little further he's got a lot of a lot of strong thoughts especially uh bitcoin being a weapon being bitcoin being akin to a weapon excuse me um giving individuals back power and an imperative as we head into the digital age and this is actually before we get into the ad read something i've been seeing on twitter a lot of uh a lot of people debating about what is bitcoin actually for is it for censorship resistant transactions is it sound money is it a savings account it's all things a lot of people like to say it's a swiss bank account in your pocket but it's like a swiss army knife of monetary tools you can use it to

make the transactions they don't want you to make it's going to help preserve your purchasing power over time and your percentage of the whole pie is never going to be depreciated there's only ever going to be 21 million bitcoin so you can have solace in the fact that uh find solace in the fact that you have a good savings tool as well as a good censorship resistant money and you can even store data in it sometimes it's uh not highly recommended depending on what the data is it's very niche use cases but again it's a swiss army knife it's a swiss bank account in your pocket but it's also uh cash in your pocket digital cash that you can send anywhere so don't let haters try to pigeonhole bitcoin into one use

case over the other it is all things in one to me be serving uh more people in a certain use case right now at this certain period of time um but hopefully it'll it'll serve all use cases not even equally it'll just serve use cases when they need to be served and hopefully it is serving people around the world um that was just a wednesday morning tander from your boy saw some shit on twitter this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by a cash app as you know cash app is the simplest way to send and save money and that's the simplest way to try to grow your money introducing cash app investing unlike investing tools that only let you buy entire shares of stocks cash app lets you instantly invest as little or as much as you

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you only got one life we're only here on this rock flying through space for one life, get the most out of it you know work on things that are worthwhile, enjoy the episode take care what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt that your boy marty been here on a tuesday night in the relegation studio sitting down with a veteran a bitcoiner somebody doing

work with casa as well want to introduce you freaks to hector rosecrans hector welcome to the podcast. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming on, man. Totally. How, uh, how the hell are things going? Things are good. Things are really good, man. Yeah. I get, I get to spend all day talking to Bitcoiners at Casa, which is like the best job in the world. So I'm loving it. Uh, how are the Bitcoiners you're talking to? Uh, they're great. They're, uh, you know, we get all types. We get like, you know, a lot of your listeners actually, and I, I love the diversity. We get like, you know, hardcore tech people out of the Bay area. We get like libertarians from the Midwest, from all over all over the world a total mix of just this this that and the other and uh and yeah it's

a it's a it's a lot of fun talking to people helping them uh help them get secure yeah man secure it's big on your mind before we hop into your story i just want to refresh how uh you hopped onto my periphery uh it was earlier this year issue what issue was it i had it up here um 461 which was written in april this year bitcoin is a weapon you were a really great piece uh describing uh it was really descriptive really good writing uh just setting the scene uh for for you being on the water uh while serving in in the navy in the navy yeah and comparing bitcoin to an ak-47 and comparing the asymmetric leverage that the AK-47 provided to warfare. Bitcoin is sort of providing that to the digital age and digital warfare, if you will.

Yep, exactly. So let's jump into that a little later. How did you get into all this? Yeah, well, I want to just go through my whole background, back through the military as well, because it really kind of feeds into my views on Bitcoin. So, you know, grew up in America, incredibly privileged to just enjoy the amount of freedom that we have here. And I kind of took it for granted all the way up until, you know, bright, sunny September morning in 2001.

I was a junior in high school and playing to the towers is a monumental shift, I think, for everybody in the world. But for me in particular, I just, you know, it suddenly kind of crystallized the fact that there are people out there who do not believe in the kinds of freedoms that we hold dear in this country. And they're willing to do tremendous amounts of violence to kind of fight against that. At that point in my life, it made a lot of sense for me, and I felt an obligation to join the military. Initial plan was to enlist in the Marine Corps. My parents were not super thrilled about that. So I think they told me like, just go apply to a service Academy, see what happens. Um, I was fortunate to get an appointment to, uh, to, to Annapolis. And, you know, that was kind of my,

my initial entry into the, uh, into the military was through the U S Naval Academy. Um, and it turned out to be like a perfect place for me to go to college, uh, not your typical college lifestyle in the slightest, which probably a good thing for me. I think that that like added structure was, that was definitely a, it was definitely helpful. Um, but they kind of teach you two things at the Naval Academy. They teach you technology. Um, it's an engineering school, which is critical because you need your officers to understand at a core level, how systems work. Um, you know, you don't have time to call Raytheon tech support when you lose a generator in a, uh, you know, in a battle exchanging missiles with the Chinese and you're, you know, take a hit to the front shuts down half

of your radar array how do you get it back up online don't really have a lot of time to talk to talk tech support so a critical like engineering understanding is uh is pretty fundamental there but the other piece of it is they teach you ethics because they recognize that you know in order to you know be in the military in order to you know have command of these weapons of mass destruction you really need to make sure that the people that are wielding those know how to do it the right way and why they're doing it in the first place. So got into the ethics of warfare, got into the ethics of operating a military

within a constitutional republic, and ultimately got into the ethics underpinning the Constitution itself, like where these freedoms come from, why negative rights like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, why these things all matter. And it also was this incredible way

to kind of bond with your classmates because you realize that from all walks of life, people have kind of come together in this place to learn the craft of warfare, but for the same reasons and to kind of get that same ethical education at the same time. You graduate from that and you go out to the fleet and you know that, you know, the people standing around you are with you on the mission, are with you on, you know, your view of like the right way, the right way to do things and what really matters in this world. So, you know, it's a, it's kind of a truism in the military, like you'll never be as close with anyone else in your life

than the people that you serve with. And I haven't quite found that to be the case, but we'll get into that in a minute. But standing up there on the bridge of my destroyer, center line, looking straight out the window, driving my ship, taking that left-hand turn out of the San Diego harbor, and then setting a course west for the Pacific, surrounded by people that you know believe the same things that you do and are there to, you know, work towards the same objectives that you are. It's such an incredibly powerful feeling. It was great. Then I got out because I realized that as much as I love the Navy, there were certain aspects of it were, you know, just not necessarily for me long-term career wise. But, you know, trying to figure out what's next and it was tough

because you struggle to find that. You struggle to find like that level of commitment, that level of, you know, people that are as committed to ideas as you were in that role. And yeah, I tried politics. I went to grad school. I tried getting into tech and I just, everything kind of felt flat after leaving the military. Um, so eventually I kind of decided, fuck it, I'm gonna make some money, work on wall street, whatever. Um, and, uh, you know, got, was fortunate enough to get a, get a role at JP Morgan. And it was actually like they're working in the belly of the beast that i came across i came across the person who kind of the next person i met who like had that spark that same spark of like passion for ideas and for you know transforming the world

in a freedom loving way um you know and then i from jp morgan i i decided it was a uh i guess you know what happened there and you're probably gonna have to cut all my rambling bullshit here No, not at all. But yeah, so I, you know, blockchain technology was kind of hot at the time and I needed like an in. I needed to like figure out a way that I could like make myself more marketable in the bank

because I was just some idiot bro vet who had no background in finance. Had the engineering training from the Naval Academy and I was like, okay, if I lean into the engineering side, if I learn how this stuff actually works, that's gonna make me valuable and then I can have a career as like a managing director running the blockchain team,

which is what I was aspiring to do. when I found this, you know, open source meetup group called BitDevs. And I was like, oh, well, I'll check this out, see what these guys are talking about. Walked into that room, and I realized that, you know, all these crazy nerds were actually doing the exact same thing that I was doing at the Naval Academy. These are people that care about technology, care about how it works, but care about doing it in such a way that you're promoting freedom. And once I kind of like understood that that's what was at the core of driving the Bitcoin movement, it totally shifted my perspective. And like, I got that same feeling of like being surrounded by people that were

working towards those same objectives of, you know, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, like all these core freedoms that we have in America. And these people are building open source tools that do that exact do those exact same things and what's more what's even better is like we have that in america um it doesn't really work out all that well when we try to export that using our military force around the world but if this stuff is open source if this stuff is open to anyone in the world who can you know decide to run a node get a download bitcoin wallet you know do whatever it takes to be a part of the the bitcoin ecosystem like you can opt in to the those freedoms yourself no matter where you live no that's exactly what i was going to

say like do you think uh freedom enabled technologies like bitcoin are more effective than spreading democracy via via the military these oh totally yeah i think our i think that trying to force it's a weird thing to try to force freedom on somebody you know it's like it's kind of it's kind of paradox it doesn't really work so let's dive more into that like you or joined the military right after 9-11? What was your military experience like? What did you see personally? Do you have any thoughts on sort of like the way the Iraq war has gone

since you embarked on your journey to join the military and enlist? Totally. Well, let me start with just my, like, when I fell in love with the Surface Navy, which is what I did. I was a surface warfare officer, which means you're kind of on the, on the pipeline to be on the captain of a ship someday. And I fell in love with that job pulling into New York Harbor when I was 19 years old. Um, I was a midshipman. It was just after my first year at the Naval Academy when they treat you like total dog shit for the whole year and just haze you relentlessly. So already kind of feeling it, feeling good. Um, but, uh, yeah,

it was just a, I happened to be on the watch. I was driving our little like 120 foot training vessel called a yard patrol craft, um, into the Harbor. And we were definitely supposed to like call up the senior officers and the, the chiefs and the upperclassmen, um, when we were pulling into New York. But the guy who was in charge of doing that, the first class was asleep in his chair. So I was just driving. I was working with a couple of other night, a couple of 19 year olds. And we just like drove straight under the, uh, under the, the, the narrows and into the Harbor on a Saturday morning in the summer, like pleasure boats everywhere, Staten Island ferry zipping in out statute of liberty over there you literally like came into new york harbor um at the same way

that like people coming into ellis island would see the city for the first time and especially after 9-11 it was very fresh in everyone's minds at that at that time um you know just having that experience of being like on my own driving the ship going in and seeing new york for the first time was incredible and then obviously going out in the city at 19 years old when you're wearing summer whites people don't check your ids all that all that carefully won't get into too much of the uh the details from that night but um but yeah definitely please do okay i'm not gonna force it but yeah so that was like my intro to you know that's like my first time in the in new york and uh which just made me fall in love with uh with going to sea and just like the cool you get to

see the world you get to do this incredible stuff um my service you know i was on the ship the whole time i did three deployments around the world two out of the west coast one out of the east coast always met up in the middle east doing a bunch of different uh different work we did some counter piracy operations um i talked about that a bit about that a bit in my piece um that was actually like that's what got all the press but it was the pirates were low-key like cool dudes they were bros um they see you show up on the horizon and they you watch them like on the video screen like throwing their weapons overboard and claiming to be fishermen i was like dude your fish hooks rotted i picked this up i see like a spare ak-47 bandolier down there um clearly you're

not fishermen but they would swear up and down they're fishermen so you can't really can't do anything about about them um you know kind of catch catch and release there but you know the bad guys that we dealt with were the uh were you know terrorists basically smuggling guns people um and drugs from the coast of pakistan down to the horn of africa you know we would uh basically we were kind of goalie. So anyone who didn't get picked up in Afghanistan or you didn't get picked up by, you know, whoever was the cops or the intelligence services in Pakistan and actually made it to the water, we were the kind of the last line of defense against those guys. So a lot of boardings, a lot of kind of, you know, checking people out and making sure that,

you know, everyone has their documents in order. We were a little bit like the highway cops of the high seas. A lot of fun, a great mission. I got to train an incredible team. And that was the other thing is my my commands really early on just gave me a lot of autonomy in terms of all right here's a mission you can go ahead and run this yourself you can you know you can train the team make sure they get to all the right schools train them up during deployment like we're sailors we're not seals or anything like that everyone has a day job working in you know it systems or turning wrenches down down in engineering or standing watch up on the bridge so you know these weren't like you know trained in you know trained infantry or anything like that but uh

getting that team to kind of come together and build this uh build up this this capability that we were then able to uh able to use quite a bit on the planet was just a ton of fun yeah no i was uh i've said this many times in the past i actually worked for a naval captain for like eight oh nice and he would tell me stories of taking uh the ships down the mississippi and and and blowing up stranded ships and stuff like that it's uh it is uh it's a stressful job too right like oh yeah definitely uh handling this heavy machinery like wasn't there just an incident uh like six or seven months ago in the strait or hummus or whatever or ran into like iran ship or no we're trying to think so the two incidents that i remember from a ways back were um you know

where there were two collisions over the summer of 2017 um and those were horrific navy uh collisions navy uh destroyers the kind of ship that i was on this is what i'm thinking of yeah yeah these terrific accidents um these two these ships collided and there were two of them in the same summer um you know this is one of the things that kind of turned me off to the surface fleet when i was when i was there as much as i love the people and i love the mission i love the work you know they were just there was never enough resources for enough people on these ships we were chronically undermanned and it was uh it's a weird it was you know i could see it coming a mile away that you're going to have some incidents like this. It comes as no surprise, you know, when you look at the

deployment rotation schedules, the watch rotation schedules, I mean, I went months without like getting a full night's sleep without, you know, and my having my sleep constantly interrupted by watch rotations, all these cycles. And it's just, it really, it really wears you down and burns you out and i think that it's a weird thing because on the one hand like it was an under investment in that part of the fleet that led to those um you know that led to those collisions and those and those tragedies it's a weird i know it's weird to like say that we don't spend enough money on the military um but for what we ask the military to do we don't spend enough money on it and you know i don't think that the answer is to oh let's like you know jack up the defense

the defense budget and spend a ton more money on it i think the answer is to prioritize what we actually want to do with our you know with the military and then we can decide how to fund those things in the most appropriate way to the most to the best level but in a way that you're not just kind of like you know stealing you know stealing some money from over here robin peter peter to pay to pay paul because we have this new objective this new mission that just came down from our political leaders with for reasons that pass comprehension of anybody on the on the ground how much do contractors get in the way contractors not a ton like how much do they take up of our military budget oh i'm that's it's really hard to say what how much because actually i'm sure

there's statistics on that i have no idea um for me like the biggest issue i think is that there's just like a lack of accountability on and there's like there's mission creep everywhere so the biggest thing that i look at is like you know the deficit exploded under george w bush it went and i'd have to look at specific numbers but both the debt and the deficit you know after after clinton basically balanced the budget at the end of his tenure which doesn't mean the debt was gone it just meant that we weren't adding to the debt um it just totally took off under george w bush and a lot of that was spending on the military and a lot of that was spending on these wars and you know one of the things that got me excited about bitcoin was this idea that you know i don't think

that the american public would have been so easily led you know down the rabbit hole to agree to an invasion of iraq if it meant that we had to like levy an additional tax to pay for that and that was one of the uh the kind of key court the kind of key ideas that brought that brought me on on the bitcoin train was just like our inability to have any fiscal discipline whatsoever is what allows our military to it's not even our military but like our national security leadership to decide that oh this is a good idea so let's just go do it and not worry too much about the consequences because there's no there's no sense of like economy there's no sense that like oh what happens if we run out of money or what happens if like you know no one wants to pay for this

because someone's always going to pay for it. There's no sense of accountability, too, right, at the end of the day. What was that? There's no sense of accountability at the end of the day, too. There's no accountability. If we don't have to, you know, if the American taxpayer doesn't have to pay a bill for the war, it's like, sure, that sounds like a good idea.

Let's go freedom and democracy in all over the Middle East during the Arab Spring, not taking into account what the Second Order, the Third Order, the Fourth Order, you know, questions are going to be there and issues that can pop up. And I think that if we actually had to pay for this stuff and we had to pay for it up front, people would think a lot harder about, do I really want to invest my taxpayer dollars? Do I want my taxes to be raised to fight this fight? And that's not to say the answer is always no.

There's going to be times when it's like, yeah, hey, look, it's Hitler, Nazi Germany, and everyone's on board with that. and if anything it makes you explore more diplomatic options more earnestly before you go to war right exactly and like that's that's a big that's a really big piece of it is that diplomatic options like leave the door open for more stuff down the road whereas war just kind of tends to beget more war and more war i mean iraq the iran-iraq war bled into iraq one iraq two now whatever is happening in syria and you know somehow iraq has morphed into syria and Nobody kind of noticed that we're still operating under the same laws that were for invading Afghanistan in 2001. So what do you think of that as a warrior, somebody who's been to war, somebody who's had skin in the game?

Again, we were saying it may not be as effective as something like Bitcoin is in enabling the freedoms that spreading democracy claims that it's trying to do. Do you think there's an awakening happening of people realizing that, hey, maybe this isn't working out and we should seek alternatives? Yeah, I do. The thing that I got really excited about was Obama put down the red line in Syria. I think that was in 2014 or 2015, maybe 2016. He put down the red line in Syria and he said, if you cross this red line, we're going to war.

And guess what? The American public said, no. Said, no, we don't want to go to war. Like we've already done this. We've been down, we've seen this show before. This is not what we want to do. And there was a very strong backlash against that. And I think that a big part of the reason for that was just the way in which social media had kind of changed the game since, uh, since 2003 when we did a rack and there was just a lot of voices out there in this kind of distributed fashion that could stand up and say, no, we don't want to do that. We're not going to listen to what the New York Times, what the Washington Post, what the Wall Street Journal are telling us. We're going to listen to what people that we respect on Twitter are saying because we can access that information. And there are these more channels. And that ultimately was able to put some political pressure on the administration to say, like, okay, no, we actually can't go that route.

More importantly, I think it gives a voice to the other, too. So, so with Syria and the line that you're speaking of, like, I remember Syrians like getting on Twitter and joining the hashtag conversations being like, please, like, we're just normal people like you trying to get by and making that empathy creation. Totally. And that ability to communicate with people, like that's part of why I love America because guess what? Twitter's an American company.

It is fundamentally founded in freedom of speech. And I know there's all kinds of drama in the tech politics world about the best way to approach that stuff but if you kind of go in with that baseline of twitter was able to probably stop an american war and was able to do that because it empowered not only ordinary americans and gave them voice but also gave voice to people in other countries who could then communicate with americans with the electorate um that to me is like that's that's that's like the best version of free speech and american capitalism coming together and it feels like a there's a stack developing right like the internet and the apps built on top of it like twitter the communication stack like we can

share our ideas and uh 20 30 years into the internet becoming popular we have the the value layer of the stack now with bitcoin and um it seems like it's it's additive to what's been created up to this point. Yeah, exactly. I just think it's another, it's another tool in the toolkit of freedom. I think that, you know, speech has really gotten super powerful because of the internet. One of my kind of my fundamental beliefs that I developed at JP Morgan was that really what was missing, was missing for a long time was the value layer. And if you can't, if there's no way to value ideas, if there's no way to value, if there's no way to like, you know, to exchange value in the same kind of medium that you're um that you're work that you're working with in the

digital realm like spam is a huge problem and you know you can say spam explicitly in your email or spam in terms of credit right sock puppets or what have you but this idea that like there's no there's no way to value content in a differentiated way means that you just get this huge spam problem and yeah it's great everyone has a voice but you know as my old drill instructor like to say everyone opinions are like assholes everyone has them most of them stink yeah i think my asshole stinks probably i mean most of them do so but yeah that's like you know when bitcoin provides that that opportunity um got really excited about that now i did get sucked down the shitcoin rabbit hole for a while um i spent some uh spent some quality time doing

that uh before we get into your shitcoin rabbit hole could you move your phone to the other side because it creates disturbance why it's near the lines you can keep it on you don't have to put an airplane it's not we all get we all get dragged into shit coins i did as well yeah i'll make this mistake um how did you make it well so i got i mean i was still really excited by the ideas in the shit coin space um the ideas of like hey what does it mean to have a decentralized autonomous organization um i also think that the signal to noise ratio what i didn't realize is that for the 10, 15, 20, 50, 100 people that really cared about doing that stuff the right way, it was just attracting scammers from everywhere.

And that ultimately what I cared about the most was working on the most secure chain that had the most value to it and the most potential ability to withstand attacks and the most potential ability to change people's lives in the near term. I think that we would get the cornucopia of ideas that came out of 2017. I think that we'll have all those in 15, 20 years, maybe even less. But I think that you have to have some real fundamental value in the core chain, you know, in the beginning and before we get there. Like, that's what happened in 1999. Like, every failed startup from 1999 is now a billion-dollar company.

But guess what? You didn't have the infrastructure. You didn't have the stuff that you needed for those to succeed when they all pumped to the moon and then crashed to zero and everyone lost all their money. Yeah, and most of them died off. The Amazons, the Googles, the other survivors of the dot-com bubble of the world who made it.

And what I've been saying more recently, what I'm interested to hear your thoughts on, is i think we're going to get everything like dows like decentralized autonomous organizations we'll get them at some point in the future i don't think anytime soon um on top of that like i think uh smart contracts and d5 will be built on layers on top of bitcoin but i do believe earnestly and becoming more uh sort of confident in this view more recently is that there's an order of operations to all this right like you can only have all those those things those functionalities if the base layer is secure and sufficiently distributed and decentralized and

then only from there can you build the apps which need to leverage the assurances the assurances that are embedded at the protocol level yeah exactly you need security and then you and then need liquidity and then you can get applications like i think that that's just the very basic stack there might be a couple different layers there's different approaches to all those things if someone has a better solution than proof of work which outlives bitcoin great i don't think it's going to happen because you also have to tackle the social consensus and a lot of the other issues inherent in this stuff but you know security is what i care about the most it's the most pressing issue i think it's going to be the most pressing pressing issue for a while and that's

why what i like to work on is ux for security right and well and then it's not even as easy to say it's like security and then excuse me security and what was the second thing liquidity liquidity security and liquidity like with security comes multiple things like you're working on multi-sig security like literally securing uh the utxos that represents bitcoin that you own uh but from there you have to think about network security securing yourself against isp attacks securing yourself against node centralization so ensuring that the the state the chain state is at such a size that it can be run on hardware that people can download it on and participate and validate your transactions their incoming transactions most importantly

so it's like checking off those boxes and this is something again i'm just rambling here and thinking out loud about something I've been thinking in my head by myself for like the last couple of weeks. Like, do you have to check all those boxes and when can you say that those boxes are checked? And then from there, is it only then that you can have

all the applications that we're speaking of? Well, I think that the core point is that we can't compromise on the security questions. I think that that's really the biggest thing. And that was like one of the big aha moments for Bitcoin for me was the, uh, the UASF and the, you know, the heroes and the leaders that like made that happen and said, no, fuck you. We're doing it this way. There are no leaders. Exactly. I know there's no

leaders. There's nobody with influential voices or making hats or podcasts, but that's the beautiful, uh, that's the beautiful thing is that everyone can play a role. Um, but yeah, like when I saw that happen, I was like, wow, Bitcoin's immune system is no joke. Um, and what you're protecting when you protect that is you're protecting the ability of that guy who can manages to get a raspberry pi 4 and a internet connection in iran who wants to run bitcoin pay server and take it like you are protecting his ability to be a fully self-sovereign bitcoin bitcoiner and not have to find out how to like invest in a ton of hardware and like that person can run a node that person can be their own their own like you know self-sovereign

bitcoin node on the network and with the same rights and the same obligations that everyone else has and like protecting that protecting that guy is why you need to is why we make the technical trade-offs that we do is why you don't scale on chain is why you do a lot of these things and there's there's some hard questions in there that i'm really happy that you know sharp people are are working on but like if that's kind of the ultimate objective here is like the most accepted currency is going to be the one that requires the least amount of capital overhead to operate i think that that's that's the approach you want to make because that's what's going to make the thing the most saleable to the most number of people around the world i think that was beautifully put um

right and the barrier to entry has to be as low as possible and it's so do you think that has been getting better or worse throughout time i think it's been it's hard to say i think it's been getting better in terms of the tooling and the technology that is available that is available um like you know like i said casa we focus a lot on ux ux is what i care about usable multi-sig it is what allows you to you know be a not just be a fully sovereign bitcoin bitcoiner but be one in perpetuity because no one wants to do glacier protocol and no one especially wants to teach their wife and their kids to do glacier glacier protocol um you know i think there's a lot of other you know there's a lot of other other solutions out there i think that ours is ours is

great and i think that ours is great because we put the user first um and we put user experience kind of at this at the center of that because ultimately that's what's going to drive adoption That's just going to drive people to choose these better self-sovereign alternatives versus, oh, I'm just going to throw it in Coinbase. I'm just going to throw it in Zappo. I'm just going to throw it in this custodial thing. And I have an IOU that is good for Bitcoin until someone decides that it's not. Yeah. And it's important to get away from those tendencies of holding it on a custodian.

and that's it's a big fear for people taking uh taking control of their own wealth it comes with extreme responsibility yeah so this is this is another thing that i just i really think that like bitcoin is not just about i mean you know everyone yeah go shelter your relatives pump the moon lambos whatever i do think that bitcoin is going to appreciate massively in value but lambos are cheesy what lambos are cheesy lambo i agree um but at the same time like it's a like bitcoin is a responsibility it is a responsibility to hold your own wealth it is like you know it's like owning a gun it's like this is a technical tool that can be critical to your safety your family's welfare and safety and like if you learn how to use it you have that it

is that is a tool you have in your back pocket to protect you against nearly all comers um you know the state could kill could still get you but if you and your friends and your family and your town are also a holding, they're not going to get it. They can, you know, they're powerful enough to take Bitcoin from a couple of people, not from a large number of people who stand up and say no, and no state is that powerful. Um, at the same time, it's real easy to fuck yourself and it is real easy to lose your money. It is real easy to lose your keys and just be one of those horror stories on Reddit of, you know, digging through the dumpster to find that, uh, whatever it is, that 600 million dollar laptop that's just gone forever so you know having that approach of like

this is a incredible tool and it gives you incredible power but also comes with a lot of responsibility i think that's the uh that's the way to think about it like i sometimes think about like my my role at casa i'm basically training people how to use the product and training people how to use you know associated you know associated just like general general bitcoin products that are out there and i think of myself a little bit as like you know back in my drill instructor days when, uh, you know, when I was teaching people to, uh, to, to use weapon and it's like, okay, this is, this is my, uh, you know, this, this is my treasure. There are many like it, but this one is, is my own, you know, this is the, uh, the, uh, the mark, the mark one

mod two model T is a fantastic piece of equipment for securing, for securing your assets, but combine it in a standard issue, cost of three, five multi-sig. And you have like a real tool for, uh, for protecting your wealth. You have to understand how to use it because you can fuck yourself. But if you understand how to use it and we try to make it as easy as possible, um, then you really, you know, you have this power and you're, you know, and you can take it with you wherever you go. And that includes, you know, escaping from bad regimes that want to do evil things to you and your family. If it comes down to it, like I love all my Amer, all my American clients. Um, the people that I get me out of bed every day are the people that are, you know,

live in places or might live in, in places where that's a real threat threat for them. Um, you know, and there's, I honestly don't know where a lot of my clients live because you can use the service anonymously. Uh, but I definitely know that there's at least a few people who, you know, who are thinking those thoughts when they, uh, when they, when they sign up for our service.

What, what is their number one concern? Just they want, um, I think their number one concern is that Casa isn't going to fuck them. And that's a big concern for everyone, as it should be. If you're thinking about that, you're the right kind of client. And there's a lot of ways in which we have our system designed so that we cannot screw you over. That also means that if you fuck yourself, we can't help you. Sovereign recovery is a big one that we go through and all our clients talk about.

what that means is that we give you the instructions for how to build your exact same multi-sig account that operates the exact same way but using open source tools you know casa is a pretty purple interface uh with a lot of thought into the security model and the user experience and the design um but under the hood it is a standard issue p2wsh bitcoin multi-sig contract that you can build in electrum with a little bit of a you know a little bit a little bit of elbow grease on the open source side yeah so let's get back to like the power that this gives the individual right like in your piece bitcoin is a weapon you talked about asymmetric money cypherpunks have been building tools for individual liberty freedom to communicate and

the right to privacy for decades but the rest of the world moved faster netscape oracle all these centralized companies have one out up to this point how does bitcoin help us protect against these companies like the ak-47 uh helped these uh guerrilla warfare like militias fight bigger armies so that's that's a great question um the fundamental thing is just it's all it's about providing the incentive for cryptography it's about providing the incentive to like make asymmetric cryptography actually user-friendly um we all know that not your keys not your coins if they are your keys they're your coins but guess what that's that's the incentive for us to solve this problem to make private keys actually like usable by individual by the end user by by the

individual person um but if we solve that like you got those private keys laying around you're not moving your bitcoin all all that much um what else can we secure with those private keys if we solve private key management if private key management is basically like you can assume that as a solved problem the way that developers can assume that mobile applications is a solved problem that like you will have a phone that is connected to the internet with you anywhere you go there's an incredible amount that we can do to kind of re-architect the infrastructure of the internet right now you have these thin clients your phones they're basically calling back to servers everywhere all the time google servers amazon servers facebook servers doesn't matter like

you're talking to you know you're through your app you're talking to these giant servers everywhere um and there's just like no way to do privacy effectively with that kind of architecture however if we're able to do private key management ourselves and what we can start doing is we can start storing data back in the home home computing you know it's not about the internet of things which is really just the internet of shit of you know devices calling back to amazon a great twitter account to follow by the way the internet is shit yeah i'm a fan um but yeah the uh you know And if actually you're calling back to a server that you run at home that is secured with your encryption keys, that is your critical data, your critical financial data, your critical health data, your critical family data, whatever else it is that's like critical to your life. if you're securing that data with the same keys or the same key setup that you're using to secure

your bitcoin um that means that we can turn on its head the architecture of the internet and really give the power of data back to the end users and the generators of the data the people how much have you looked into erbit that is all my perpetual crap i need to sit down and figure out erbit lists i have not looked into it i am i'm a bad bitcoiner because i don't know enough about urbit it's like i know it's out there i'm like i'm like keeping my eye on i'm like at some point i'm gonna have time to like go and just do the urbit rabbit hole i was very contentious a bunch of bitcoiners oh really a lot of bitcoiners who love it a lot and a lot who uh think it's a a scam well i don't have enough information to have an opinion one way or the other

yeah i'm still trying to decide i uh like so what you just described like that idea of uh self-compute and holding your own data i think that's the from what i understand again that's the biggest problem with her but is it's very hard to understand very esoteric a lot of places but from what i understand that's the problem they're trying to solve yeah well my understanding is that you have to like you have to like understand orbit to get access to the forums where people can explain orbit so it's kind of a little bit of a chicken the egg problem there but i don't know yeah you have to be able to hoon i think the people who and they're in their they're lying their programming language yeah um not and i'm not chilling anything here i'm

genuinely curious if you knew anything about it because again the uh thing you just described self-compute and uh storing your own data it's very appealing to me like but the ux around that like how obviously it seems that ux around bitcoin is getting better but like the ux of holding your own data and actually having that extreme responsibility do you think we're gonna have to have like a cultural shift i think i think a little bit but i think it's already happening um i do think that we're we're getting there like you know the things that i i if i i don't understand urbit yet i do you know things i understand like the fourth amendment to the constitution like it says that thou must have a warrant that's not exactly what the words say but

like you know search illegal search and seizure the cops can't do that the government can't do that if you're holding the data they need to come with a warrant that says i can access this stuff um one thing that was really a major major problem with the fourth amendment for a long time was this thing called third party doctrine and third party doctrine came out of the 1960s and 70s and it's this legal idea came out some some uh supreme court cases that said if you're turning your data over to a third party um you're giving up your fourth amendment protections and the government can do whatever it wants so the idea being like if you give up your financial information to a bank if you give up your communications information to the telephone company you have

sacrificed your fourth amendment protections under the law um that fortunately has started to be pushed back on by the uh by the court in the most recent ruling i believe it was carpenter that basically said it's such a chicken shit law what's that such a chicken shit law yeah it's completely all these utilities that you're gonna have to leverage like exactly and like the way that obviously the internet has grown the financial system has has grown like as massively you know as third party doctrine has been expanded um it's just totally undercut all the the fourth amendment in practice entirely because our lives are digital and what we need is we need a return to this idea that like no just because you're turning this stuff over to a cloud provider

doesn't mean that you are sacrificing your rights to it um i think that if we have a basic standard of like everything should be encrypted um that is that is an action that people can take that's showing like no i do not want the third party to access this i do not give my consent to the government to search this without a warrant um and if we start you know if there's services that start doing that, I think that's going to push back in the right direction. The court did just have another case that started to kind of cut away at third-party doctrine. The Carpenter decision was about basically saying that the cops need to get a warrant to get your location data using cell phone towers. Third-party doctrine said like, oh, well, you know, you're paying for a data

service and these cell phone towers can triangulate you. So because third-party doctrine, the cops can just go and arrest you based on finding your location through cell phone tower tracking. and the court said no but how how effective is that though like yes they said no but the the stingray devices still exist all those very invasive metadata collecting surveillance techniques still exist like even if you do have the precedent like the carpenter case like you just explained like even if that does go through court and work in our benefit per se,

like, should we just be working to make it so it's impossible to even do that in the first place? Absolutely. I mean, we should be working on tools that empower individual liberty, no matter what. At the same time, I also think that it's important to fight these fights through the political process and through the legal process.

And it's much better, you know, we're privileged to live in a country where that's an option. I want those tools to exist to fight the... But is it getting more arduous and decaying in quality, the process throughout time? The further we get away from the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

See, but that's... I'm optimistic, and I am optimistic that technology and that ideas like Bitcoin are going to turn the tide and are going to help be a part of this tide turning. I am too, and that's why I focus on Bitcoin because I don't think... The point I'm trying to get at here is I am a jaded individual who does not think that working through the traditional political system is effective. And I focus my time and energy on Bitcoin because I think that is a higher leverage activity to actually getting change that I want to see in the world happen or making the change that I want to see in the world come to fruition.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I don't think you need to be jaded about it. I'm incredibly optimistic about it. Like, I think that Bitcoin is showing people that there's a better future. It's like, it's like, look, if we can stop this, if we can like stop some of this, this madness, we can create a much better, much freer, much more open and optimistic world. And for me, like as an American, I would say like, I want to, you know, I want to make the case that this is better for our values. If you're in a country that doesn't support those values, I want you to have the tools

to fight that country. But I don't think that America is that country. and i i push back on people that say like oh we're we're too far gone it's like no we can we can change here like it's stuff still works i completely agree i completely agree um so i think that's like that's kind of where i where i come down on that but yeah if we if you're in a totalitarian state you need the tools and bitcoin's one of those tools yeah no and it and bitcoin again it's one of those tools it's not a panacea that's what we're we're coming to find But again, it is another arrow in the quiver.

And the last conversation I had on this podcast was with Matt Alborg, who's been doing the incredible research on P2P exchange data, talking about how individuals in Nigeria are using it just as one payment rail in a very elaborate scheme to basically just move money from the U.S. to Nigeria. That's incredible. That is so cool. Yeah. but it again it's people and that's what i'm trying to get here at because i've been having a couple conversations around this uh the last couple days as well is that people want bitcoin to be everything out of the box right away and they don't appreciate the process and the fact that it's not going to be completely scalable out of the box it's not going to be completely

private out of the box whether you like it or not it's just the cards we've been dealt and I believe it is getting more private over time and privacy assurances are certainly not up to snuff right now, in my opinion. Yeah. But they are getting better. I was, I was definitely appreciate the argument. I'm not sure that on-chain privacy is a desirable goal. I want private, the ability for private transactions. But I guess I worry about the, I was just saying,

just be closer to the mic. Oh yeah. I guess like what I worry about is I worry about adjust a little bit. like you have this problem like what killed gold again and again and again was this issue where people were saying oh yeah don't worry it's backed by gold but there's no way to verify that you know the on-chain you know the lack of um you know the lack of on-chain privacy is also the ability our ability to like actually make sure there's only 21 million of these things that is like our ability to audit yeah the utxos and make sure that this really is sound money so So while I want privacy, I want people to have that option, at the same time, I'm hesitant

about some of the proposed, you know, if there's a proposed solution that would like eliminate the ability of us to verify the, you know, the integrity of the UTXO set, I do kind of worry about that a bit. No, I wholeheartedly agree. And I do think there is a happy medium, right? Like there is a, so the point at which you just have to make the cost of surveillance too expensive, right? And I don't think you need complete confidential transactions, the actual technical spec at the protocol level, which would enable us or excuse me, give us the inability to audit the supply.

I don't think we need to go that far to get the sufficient privacy needed to also be able to audit the supply. We can do something like if Schnorr and Taproot get instituted and things like Snicker or PDEP get better and you get creative with sidechains like Liquid and second layers like Lightning Network to do very elaborate CoinJoin setups. you can make it so the cost for the chain analysis of the world to actually try to expend the resources to try to follow you around the blockchain is such that it's just not worth it. And you could, at the end of the day, track transactions, but the cost is such that it's not worth it.

Yeah, and I think that that's a good approach and a good way to think about it. Because what you want is you want the ability to go after bad people. and you know and what you don't want is you don't want the ability to have a drag net that can catch everybody like if someone is breaking the law to the extent that they are you know already the target of a state level of state level investigation like you want chain analysis or potentially more powerful tools that are entirely government funded to be able to go after those people and find them

and identify them um what you don't want is you you don't want that to be scalable to the point that they can just do what they do now which is dump all the data all the data in a data center and just peruse it for any potential infraction of any of any magnitude like that's how you get the financial panopticon this actually gets to you know i think a uh the north korea question which i think is one of the hardest questions in bick in bitcoin you got strong thoughts on some people visiting north korea recently yeah i mean the kim regime is one of the most evil places one of the most evil in the world i mean they keep their entire population of north korea basically enslaved for the benefit of a few elites forget the nuclear weapons that

they have they have enough artillery pointed at seoul to level that city and kill millions and millions of people within the span of about 30 minutes and that's not talking about nuclear weapons. That is just old school artillery in hardened mountain positions that are dialed in to residential neighborhoods to basically commit mass slaughter. Should anyone try to take them out? Um, this is the, this is the regime we're talking about here. Um, and if you are going to North Korea, that means you have the permission of the regime. I, you know, I am known through some breaches of the, uh, us, you know, the us personnel system. I am known as a, as someone with a military background who had a clearance at one point. And I'm sure that if I were to show up

in North Korea, I'd be arrested as a spy on day one. And the question you have to ask if they're letting you in North Korea is who you're supporting there and who's letting you in. So that's just, you know, if those guys are going to figure it out, how to use this stuff to evade sanctions, let them do that themselves. Let's not help them if we believe in the values of this ecosystem. That said, I do think that there's a, I do think there's a kind of beautiful solution to this, which is, you know, this is a free tip for the CIA. If you're out there, if you're out there listening to the, to the bent, they're actually huge fans. You know, in a, in a world where the U S is embracing Bitcoin. Yes, that does mean empowering individuals. And that does mean

in some circumstances, empowering individuals who wield a lot of dictatorial power, whether than Venezuela or North Korea right now. But it's hard to secure your keys. It is hard to secure them if you're a nobody pleb within, you know, with a whatever avatar on Twitter. It is really hard if you are a known, you know, a known like international most, you know, international most wanted, and you're known to be holding a lot of Bitcoin. If I were the CIA, I would offer a bounty for those coins. I would say, you know what, you turn those private key material over to us. we're not going to ask questions about who you are we're not going to ask questions about where you got them

you're going to get a one way ticket SEAL Team 6 is going to come pick you up take you on a nice submarine ride back to America, we'll give you a new face we'll give you some clean coins so they can't track you and let the internal politics of a totalitarian regime

how well do you think Mr. Kim is going to sleep at night knowing that every single person around him is incentivized with a hell of a lot of bitcoin and freedom in america to get his coin away from him quasi assassination markets i mean yeah but for or for murderous dick for murderous dictators and when the result is a bloodless coup oh i'm not against it i like that i like that idea and so this is this your idea to solve the the nuclear crisis that i was alluding to before we hit record i don't know if this is going to

solve the nuclear crisis what i think this would do is this would disincentivize authoritarians to hold you know to like steal bitcoin from their people because there's always going to be that risk that one of your trusted lieutenants is going to is going to turn and murder you and steal your coin and and run off and leave you empty-handed so that's my that's my solution to the the dictators with bitcoin problem yeah now the incentives are strong and what i was alluding to there alluding to is my favorite uh favorite quote of the week right now um was the piece by elaine uh eleno that she wrote this morning you haven't read it yet but uh it basically described all right you want to bring peace to north korea uh you want to particularly with their uh nuclear

warhead situation and you want to de-escalate the nuclear uh presence of north korea what you do is you force them to mine bitcoin with that that nuclear energy they can they can uh reduce that down to uranium that can be made into nuclear reactors that can provably add a hash rate to the bitcoin blockchain um that you can prove that they're denuclearizing by mining bitcoin and they're definitely not making warheads because that uranium is being used for other purposes i thought that was very creative yeah that's a cool idea i kind of like i kind of like that um i think that you'd have to figure it out because the issue is that like the kind of nuclear the kind of nuclear reactor that you the kind of nuclear reactor that runs on like normal nuclear fuel

versus the ones that what you would need to run on um on like the highly enriched uranium that go into nuclear weapons are very different kind of setups you need to make sure that they are really using the highly enriched version and not like faking it with like one percent of their stockpile on the on the other version that would be my my one immediate immediate technical objection to that um but yeah it sounds kind of interesting i mean the issue there is i don't think that north korea has any incentive to come to the to come to the table from nuclear de-escalation in the first place there's one i think elaine may have been a bit facetious and that was i don't want to say it was facetious but it is uh or uh a um putting forward of

opportunity costs like hey you can either build these nuclear wars that if you shoot one off there's a good chance the way that nuclear game theory uh work out works out that if you shoot one off we're going to shoot one off and they're going to shoot one off we're going to end the world so you can either uh use that uranium to build these nukes that just add to uh the risk of us blowing up this planet or you could use that to turn it into sound digital money and that you can hold we may not like you um but if you're using that nuclear energy to mine a sound currency instead of blow up the world, right? We'll take the net positive there.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that the best approach to any of our foreign policy problems, like you want to lean in to what we do well in America. Like we do freedom well. We do freedom well in this country. We do innovation well. And so any approach to a problem

that takes those into account, that kind of leads with those, I think is our strongest play. And you don't even have to apply this to North Korea alone. Like do it to Russia, China, us. like if we were like hey we'll start we'll use some of this this extra uranium we have the most nuclear warheads on earth yeah no i think that's a uh i think it's a good idea i think that really what you

want you know my concern is that you know i think that the u.s is i think that we're losing some of our footing some of our power in the world and i think that like our financial power is one of the ones that's been incredibly useful for us like we use our financial power to go after the iranian nuclear program for great effect um hey let me just mess this thing for a second yeah perfect right there there we go all right so yeah using you know we use our financial power for a great effect to slow down the iranian nuclear program and it worked the problem is that they still want it and that's

due to some foreign policy decisions that we that we have made and just their own their own national interests the other problem is that now that we've kind of played that card the russians and the Chinese and the Iranians and a lot of people are trying to route around that and they're going to be successful if we try to rely on this financial tool push it forward a little bit away from me yeah if we try to rely on if we try to rely on our financial power to continue to do this we're going to ultimately kind of burn out that card and we're going to leave the U.S. dollar in a much worse place yeah it's happening quicker than I think a lot of people expect to exactly And that's why, like, if we were to lean into Bitcoin, I think that that would be a massively beneficial thing for our country, our national security, and our long-term interests.

I mean, Bitcoin is not going to work in a totalitarian country because people aren't going to trust it unless they can hold it themselves. If they know that, like, this is actually how it works, they're not going to trust it unless they can hold it themselves. And if they can hold themselves, then the government can't inflate it away and can't use, you know, whatever power they've achieved to like, you know, fund to fund insane, insane military projects, insane projects that are like counter to counter to individual freedom. Like if we lean into this stuff, yes, does it disrupt our financial power a little bit in the short run? A little bit. But at the same time, what we get is we get a world, a global financial system that is pegged by something that is born of the same values that the U.S. Constitution was based on that has incredible risks for anyone that wants to concentrate power with it because someone can just, you know, slit your throat in the middle of the night and steal your private keys. and ultimately is going to be the thing that like increases liberty for everyone around the world. So what does a US government lean in look like? Like how do we ensure that they don't fuck this up?

That's a great question. I think that what I actually think the best approach for this would be, and I'm kind of coming to this right now, is you start small. Bitcoin is a decentralized system. You want to start with the smallest unit possible. And what I would say is

if you are a state treasury you should invest in a little bitcoin if you are a pension fund that has state employees you should invest in a little bitcoin if you are you know you don't need the permission of the u.s department of the treasury to do this you know each state is sovereign there's plenty of entities there's plenty of government entities that can do this on their own and can start to look towards this future i think that a lot of them are scared because a lot of them see the risks and the things that treasury is concerned about. But I think that if there's a shift

and we see that this is actually an American good, this is valuable from the American perspective, I think that individual small groups, small pools of money can start to say like, hey, let's hold onto a little bit of this just in case because it is aligned with our values and it could be a bulwark against risk that's coming down the line i think that's the kind of first step that starts to normalize it

that starts to get people excited about excited about it you know if the fed wants to go out tomorrow and or the treasury wants to go out tomorrow and put some bitcoin in cold storage for the benefit of the you know of the united states of america fantastic i don't think that's super realistic but i do think it's realistic that you know and even american citizens we get more american citizens who just say like hey this stuff is valuable i trust this i believe in the long-term vision of this stuff i think that that's how you build that's how you build a groundswell that's how you build a movement and then you know when our next president you know when our next president like comes into office they read a report where you know someone says

by the way um you know how america is like the number one the gun capital of the world and there's like you know per capita x number of guns for every single american well bitcoin's the same way now like americans hold a ton of bitcoin and it's not like it's all held at coinbase it's held in treasures, ledgers, steel, paper wallets and safe deposit boxes, steel buried up under the mountain. It is all over the place in America. It is penetrated into the society

because its values align with ours. And at that point, the government's like, all right, well, we might as well throw some in the treasury because why not? Right? We can only hope, right? Because that's my biggest worry is that the government fucks it up

because what we're seeing now, a lot of headlines in recent weeks of a lot of companies starting mining operations throughout North America, whether it be the United States or Canada, a lot of hype around mining in America in the last few months. And it is, observationally up to this point,

individual entrepreneurs embarking on these entrepreneurial endeavors. And what my worry is is that you have U.S. businesses sort of utilize Bitcoin and use Bitcoin to their benefit, and it gets to a certain scale, particularly with mining.

Mining is what I'm worried about most, and the government tries to confiscate these operations and use that as a choke point to hurt Bitcoin in the long run. They certainly could do that. I think it'll be in their interest, and if Bitcoin's going to work, it has to be in everyone's interest,

and that includes the government. I think that, you know, I think that the government's going to decide, hey, we should probably, like, maybe start mining a little bit ourself. You know, where are you going to get those fresh coin-based coins to pay off your North Korean defector, if not from your own, the NSA's own mining farms? If they do come to that conclusion, like, will there be a, hey, be a priority over this energy because we're the government and we should mine first? Will they start an eminent domain for the cheap energy so that they can mine over American citizens? I don't think so, because I think that this is pretty common for Bitcoiners. I think that in general, the government isn't as competent and nefarious as you might think. I think that they want to do things the right way.

They probably want to see themselves as the good guys. like there certainly are some you know sociopathic um Machiavellian Machiavellian types but I don't think that there's anyone like thinking that deeply about like oh yeah let's like seize the means of production to like take over bitcoin mining and like make it all state run yeah yeah I know I mean I hope not so I'm trying to adversarial thinking sure no and that's and that's great but I think that I my whole thing is like I think that we convince them that this is in their interest and i think that ultimately they're going to look at the reality which is that this stuff does empower individuals which is why it's like fundamentally positive for american

values and positive for anyone who wants that in the world and if you you know yeah the government could say oh we want a ton of money and we want to like take take this over but it's honestly better if some of that power is shared it's better if that power is distributed and decentralized and we still have you know enough semblance enough you know pieces of our democracy and of our republic functioning that i think that i think that people will respond people in government will respond to the incentives of like let's not do things that are going to piss off all our constituents and seizing property is a good way to piss off all your constituents i think that we're not in the uh you know i think you're kind of leading towards like the gold thing that

happened in the 30s and i think that like this goes back to our talk about social media like the 30s also was a time when you had radio and it was new and there was no television and it was like and you know roosevelt could go into people's living rooms every night and talk directly to them and spread his message and he was the only show in town and so of course he was able to do whatever the hell he wanted and get elected four times like that's not the media environment that we operate in anymore if the government starts doing stuff like that it's going to be all over social media but you can tell they wanted to sort of keep that power right and keep that that type of relationship between

the quote-unquote gatekeepers and the common man. Totally. But I also think that that's just this struggle that we're going through right now. Ultimately, technology is going to decide which side wins. Right, like the AK-47. Exactly. It didn't matter. It was a better

technology. And guess what? Technology is on our side. So. Yeah. Let's probably wrap up. Yeah, you got to party to get to a holiday party. Sorry for keeping you. No problem. It's fun. And you have any parting notes you want to leave the freaks nope um at hector rose grants i'm not super uh i'm not super covert on twitter so uh follow me on twitter uh hit me up at uh hector at team.casa if you're interested in uh in talking about our products but uh but yeah that's about it

dude i appreciate you swinging through totally it's been a pleasure absolutely thank you for thank you for your service and uh peace and love freaks thanks for having me