TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #17: Bobb Fogg

Episode Date: March 13, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Bobb Fogg to discuss a litany of topics including; Bitcoin Maximalism, do blockchains have to be decentralized, the concepts of Nassim Taleb, and the state of governance in blockchains and the world. Follow Bobb on Twitter: @BobbFogg Subscribe. Rate. Review. Share.

all right what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent i'm gonna switch up the intro it's getting a little getting a little repetitive uh this podcast is sponsored by will it pot barrel bourbon did i say that correctly pot still reserve pot still reserve i did not say correctly close uh that's what we're imbibing tonight on the podcast we've got uh two anons in the studio today uh that i've met in person are not anonymous to me but are anonymous to you uh we've got bob fog b o double b f o double g that's good and sam in the studio it's good man what's up guys um for the i mean none of you know bob and i have met here in the city to talk crypto a few times, really like his perspective, especially given

his background. We're not going to talk about his background because it's a very niche market, but really like his views. He's been around for a while, more under the radar. We talk a lot about how everybody's on Twitter, but this Bob, you have not been on Twitter forever, have you? I think I might have, like, nine followers and maybe, like, ten tweets. He's quite excited about it. Yeah, man, so how did you get into Bitcoin? You went to university here in New York, right?

Yeah, I was at college around the city. I ended up getting into Bitcoin in, like, 2012, 2011, 2012, I want to say. I think 2012 was when I first took the jump in there. um and it's definitely been a wild ride ever since but i think that being said my conviction in the asset class has only grown and it's been cool to watch it grow too um just just given what's up yeah you got to speak like right into it like right into it like this okay cool um but yeah i mean i think just uh like so i am i'm in finance i don't really want to like specify too much uh where i sit but um you know watching it uh and the opinions of people in the

industry and how that's grown over the last i don't know between five and ten years has been really interesting what's the wild ride been like for you so i've talked about my wild ride getting getting into it uh getting into shit coins and then falling out of love with shit coins and falling back in love with bitcoin is your path similar at all what was sort of retrading back in the men pal days back on gox what was that like you know definitely not uh not as far back then i would say i am more interested in the shit coins now than i was so actually this is something i'm pretty excited to like get into with you uh because i think our views are a little bit different um where you're sitting like from the i guess what is known as like the bitcoin

maximalist perspective um so i want to hit you on that a little bit hit me hit me i've been a bad bad boy yeah so i mean like i don't know if you want to jump in right there you want to jump in on some of the uh like the headlines that have come out you know especially in like the last week um the price is not doing too hot right now price is not doing hot not doing hot i'm looking at right now we actually might end with a green candle today we're at yeah that's green candles green we're at 92 um making a little bit of recovery but we uh we were at a height of around 11.8 at one point this week so we've fallen about three thousand dollars almost twenty five hundred give or take um yeah so that's been a big thing so that's what we're talking about before uh we

started recording was sort of it was it was a lull a lull time in the space for at least a month which in this space feels like eight years and i actually tweeted out a couple weeks ago i think it's been it's like too quiet something's gonna happen and of course this week a lot of things happened. We had Mt. Gox, I guess the trust that is responsible for redistributing funds to Mt. Gox survivors, let's call them, or not survivors, victims, published a report that basically had shown that they've been selling off Bitcoin at market price on exchanges over the last three months. That's interesting, Mt. Gox, we can't get away from that saga. It's always coming back to bite Bitcoin in the ass. On top of that, good news, I would

say, Coinbase announced index funds that they're going to start offering institutional investors. The SEC came out to slap ICOs down. That was probably the biggest news of the week, in my opinion. We'll get your opinion in a minute. Then we had Binance, which had a malicious phishing attack uh basically affect a lot of their customers a lot of their customers uh got caught up in a phishing scam and uh the trading bot i guess they blamed it on stole a bunch of their their alt coins pumped via coin then sold everything back into bitcoin weird weird hack there uh obviously we had the price fall and then the other big news of the week which I would put at number two is Japan clamping down on their exchanges, forcing them to get

licensed as money transmitters. What were you thinking through this week? This news came all at once in a pretty quick fashion. I try not to pay attention to the news associated with Bitcoin because I think I jump from the news headlines to the price um way too much and i don't think it's worth it uh so i guess like with that high level uh qualification i think the index funds on coinbase are really interesting i also don't like it i don't like the selection of what they got on coinbase and therefore i feel like it's almost like a marketing play more than anything else yeah i would agree it's uh i think that's weighted like 67 bitcoin uh 17 ether and then a little bit of bcash and ripple as well or

i think that's on there right yeah now is it weighted by market cap no well it can't be because ripple's so low on there right um i don't know what it's weighted by i don't know what they're waiting what they're using to wait it but so so interestingly enough um i mean coinbase is obviously not the only uh not the only person to do this and market it to institutional guys i mean like literally this week i was talking to someone who was running i guess what you could refer to uh as a they're like a crypto focused asset manager and i mean they do this as well what they refer to it as a large cap index fund and it's like one of a few different offerings that they have um so i can totally understand coinbase wanting to do that and i mean like at this point

it's like it's competition right and they need to step up um but i think it's tough too because you're really walking that line between doing right by basically like the retail investors which are 99.99 of people like this is not an institutional play um and i mean i think that's where it's also interesting for me to just look at this industry as a whole is you know most of what i work on in my job is all institutionally focused investments um and any institution would essentially laugh at the concept of investing uh in in bitcoin or another asset i mean like i my personal conviction is that probably won't be the case for uh forever but it certainly is right now so it's like you have these guys like the coin bases like the other larger um you know hedge fund

types who who are making a play towards the the institutional guys um but it's really like it's just targeted to rich people and then it's a question of like who knows how much and like you know it's really hard to assess assess the risk there yeah now it sort of reminds me uh like the the tepidness of the institutional investors to jump in they have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure they know exactly what they're getting into and nobody knows exactly what's going on in crypto so from a fiduciary uh standpoint like i would i don't i don't blame them for being cautious at all but it's actually uh actually funny while you were saying that i drew parallels to the ongoing uh debate about whether or not we should change the proof of

work so a lot of people think bitmain has too much control but i would argue yes that's true but uh bitmain took a huge risk early on in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies lifespan like the incumbents that would have created chips to to mine bitcoin for the last 10 years like the risk the risk is too large for them like your for your nvidia's your arm's like to make asic chips specifically for bitcoin for how big they are the risk just isn't worth it like maybe it's not for the institutional investors right now to jump into these funds. And maybe that's why Bitmain has the market share that it does and why Coinbase has the market share that it does, because they've been willing to take that risk. Good for them. I don't think they're going to be

the only games in town forever or the biggest games in town forever. But I think what we're seeing is sort of the nature of the beast of this new asset class is these incumbents aren't able to take as much risk as these other these go-getters as you say well yeah i mean i think the question really is okay so let's say that you were running the cash for the the retirement plan the pension for the teachers of the state of new york or the like california employees retirement system they need to take all the risk they can cowpers cowpers needs to take as much risk as it can well they're a little different because they can they can move markets they're they're huge but but you know if you're looking at it from that perspective

and you know it's like you're trying to do right by these like you know what are considered public servants it's like okay like you know is that acceptable and i think you know so i listened to the episode with ari last week and i mean he was in u chicago like he had to ask himself that question as well i mean obviously from like a little bit of a different perspective the university endowment look but i mean it's still like the same thing right i mean you're trying to do right by someone who is not yourself you know if you're high net worth or a family office it's totally different because like you know that you know that that's your cash that's on the line yeah um and i mean it's tough i i think like personally if i did it i would definitely invest in the

crypto asset class but you know i think there's a lot of benefits to jumping in right now it's like number one you do a very small amount so if you're working with billions of dollars that small amount can be significant relative to the crypto space right now which i think is really good um and also you know you can really like if you're so in the private equity industry the guys that jump in first um they're allowed to basically set the terms of the engagement and set the terms of the of the partnership that that that eventually becomes a private equity fund and those what they refer to as like first closers um you know they can really uh they can negotiate uh terms that are much more advantageous for them and you know if i was running an endowment or something like

that, I would go to one of these guys, say, okay, like, you know, I don't, I am not going to allocate a large portion of my cash, but it's large for you guys. And it would actually put you in play. And it would put you totally differently in the eyes of the institutional investor asset class. And I mean, you could like cut your fees in half, you could negotiate way better, like way less carry. And you could just make it so you know, you're basically like running the game from that perspective. And then everyone would look to you for a thought leader. So I think there's a lot of upside there. Definitely. And the way I view it, coming from the managed futures space, when I worked for the managed futures fund, when we would go pitch to RIAs

and investors looking to put risk somewhere, managed futures is such a niche market that we would fight for 1% to 5% of a portfolio. And that's a good marketing plan, I would say, when you're going and you're being straight up. I don't want 50%, I don't want 30%, I 120 or even 10 percent of your portfolio one or for crypto i would say like a half to like one and a half percent yeah absolutely at most like and if you're if you're an institutional investor i mean if you've seen the returns over the last 10 years like it would be dumb to pass up that risk and a half a percent it's still like yeah depending on who it is you can make that up a management fee yeah yeah yeah easily like like multiples of billions of dollars it's crazy like

give not hundreds of million dollars for some guys um so yeah yeah so uh i want to hear the tongue lashing i'm going to get for being a maximalist what why do you disagree with me you're not allowed to disagree with me nobody is i'm right i'm right the second i walked into the studio that was that was what i had agreed upon right um well i guess okay so i want to like ease into it right let's ease into it okay so i guess my first question more so than you know how you refer to yourself as a maximalist is see let's let's take a step back there for maximalist refer to myself in the max maximalist let's uh let's lay this out for everybody okay bitcoin maximalist was coined by vitalik buterin as sort of a as sort of a

like an offensive term he coined it as an offensive term for the toxic bitcoin community the bitcoin maximalist and as bitcoiners we we took that and sort of turned it on its head and say all right we'll embrace it and maximalist yeah it comes with a weird connotation but what i call myself a maximalist it's more to one i do believe the bitcoin i don't think i don't know if it's going to be one chain to rule them all but i think it will be the dominant chain in the long run and two is to sort of throw some schadenfreude at vitality not schadenfreude but throw some shade up italic like for you creating this this term revolving around toxicity when when this should be a meritocracy and feelings shouldn't come into play that's not the first

time in history that uh a group of people have taken a term that was used to offend and uh have spun it to benefit themselves i'm not gonna go further than that though i guess my first question just out of curiosity is like okay now you have decent like you have a good sized following you have the the backing of uh you know a pretty large company or at least the resources of that right um you know you've you've become at least in my opinion uh a player of some significance in the space you know your voice is respected wow like okay i don't want to go that far okay but either either way let's just if even if you don't agree let's pretend i'm an idiot screaming online yeah that works so i think the question though is like do you feel like you have to

you sort of have like an image to uphold or like do you do you think there has been a removal or do you ever feel a discrepancy between like uh your own viewpoints and then an opinion that you feel like you have to take because of something that you had like previously said no not at all big big fan of strong opinions weekly held um big fan of that quote miss you on twitter mark come back um no i don't i don't i think so the mission i'm on i don't know i don't want to call it a mission the the tip that i'm on is i went through this shit like i went and bent through the cycle like oh my god discover bitcoin is the greatest thing ever oh my god vert coin it's got three free mining algorithms to make mining fair oh my god ethereum it's gonna

be the world computer oh my god like neo it's gonna do this do that and then you come back and you realize like it's all most of it is marketing bullshit in my mind in my opinion most of it is marketing bullshit number one number two there's only like the fact that bitcoin works the way it does and it does one thing very well and it does what it mark it says that it will do which is enable peer-to-peer censorship resistance transactions in a decentralized network every 10 minutes it's done that since january 3rd 2009 in my opinion i would be decent or not disingenuous but i would be it would it's too much of a risk to to pump the things that i know do not work the way they are marketed right now um i do not feel i need to

uphold an image of a Bitcoin maximalist at all. I truly, from first principles, believe that right now it is the only blockchain that does what it says it's supposed to do. And Monero. I would say Monero, too. Yeah. A lot of respect for Monero. How do you deal with the level of uncertainty of... I guess for me, I just feel like there's a lot of uncertainty associated with saying like something it will be the best in the future like that that's what makes me concerned um and it's like i guess you know if we want to jump to tuleb it's like like i can tell you what i'm holding and i think a lot of people who say that they are bitcoin maximalists or who uphold that

and again this is not like you right like this is more sort of like my observations either on twitter or like talking to people and stuff like that it's like you know they say that but then they also like they own a lot of the shit coins you know and it's like you know you're sort of covering your ass in that way but at the same time you're talking shit like about about the other side yeah i will be straight i think it's tough i'll be straight up i think i own three shit coins okay yeah yeah yeah monero being one of them i'm not gonna say i wouldn't call it a shit coin but yeah yeah i'm not gonna say the other two but the other two are bags i've been holding since 2014 yeah literally just been like fuck it yeah totally um owned ethereum at one

point sold after the dow uh and yeah i guess people can come at me say like you hate on ethereum a lot because you sold early fair assessment would have made a lot of money if i held that but uh truly believe that they made fatal design decisions early on yeah and i don't i don't see them i don't see them being around for for longer than a decade do you think the crypto space only has space for something decentralized that's a good question that's a great question i don't know i think so i mean i think if you're going to like that's the whole ethos of why this started like if you read the white paper it's supposed to be a peer-to-peer censorship

resistant system like that's what a blockchain is as defined by the person who created it person person's alien ai whatever um i do i do truly think it has to be decentralized i will go out and say that so what about like now i mean this is a totally different function right but But if you have, say, like a big accounting firm, I mean, theoretically, they should be able to use a blockchain to eliminate a lot of jobs and make their function a lot more efficient. Now, I mean, that's a privatized blockchain. It's not a cryptocurrency. but you know could you see you know one step one order of magnitude away from that right is like a common uh like uh function that you know all accounting firms can use you know what i mean

yeah but again like that's where things get murky like i would i would alienate the two you know if you want to call it a distributed ledger technology fine do that don't try and don't try and uh conflate it with bitcoin like in my opinion yeah no they're too too totally use cases exactly because then i mean i'm just like thinking out loud right now so if you just did that and then theoretically you or me could then purchase that um i mean if we wanted to if it was changed and then what you would essentially be doing is investing in the accounting industry through a different method other other than like an etf of accounting stocks exactly and that's just not as interesting to me i'm more interested in the revolutionary aspect of creating a new

money like money only comes around so many times in human history and the fact that we are alive during the emergence of a new money is fucking incredible and that's what interests me and that's what i decide to spend my time on and thinking on writing about talking about absolutely i also to go back to like what initially pushed me to i guess say yes and like jump into the game i mean the way that i viewed it is a very similar way to how you just described it it's like i mean this is either going to be i don't want to sound like melodramatic but like you know like world changing or it's not going to be anything and like i'd rather take that lottery ticket yeah uh that then

than not it's binary it's binary and we talked about this yeah at the ace hotel it's fucking binary it's either worth zero or it's worth nothing sticking my neck out there saying it's not going to be worth nothing there's not worth zero or nothing it's worth zero or everything like I'm yeah exactly so the problem is I'm sorry you know what comes into it's like what really comes in is like like I was telling you like punk rock and shit like that it's like a rebellion against the system that I don't think is is as as beneficial for everybody as it can be and I truly believe that the core of the system is money and the way money is created in its current form

allows for a lot of negative externalities that that have made society sick to an extent again we've got opioid addictions here in the states opioid addiction at all-time highs heart disease at all-time highs depression at all-time highs the disparity between the rich and the poor at all-time highs like yes we have the kardashians where we have the internet we have tv we there's we never go hungry and shit like that but i think i think we're we're sick to an extent and the core of why this society is is sick is the way money is created and who's closest to the spigot uh really affects sort of everything when it trickles down or because it doesn't trickle down reagan um big fan of ronald reagan but that was a dumb economic policy um yeah so that's where

i'm coming from yeah so so everybody that jumped in around the time that you and i did theoretically they're in the black pretty heavily uh do you do you think they uh do you think there's a conflict of interest there like i guess personally i feel a little conflicted because obviously i've been running my mouth about this for a long time um and like especially to the people that i'm i'm close to and like my friends and stuff like that and it's real awkward when when you know i'm doing that and then people take the jump when it's at like 15 and now i came into this office when i was fucking 12 on its way to 20 i was like yeah fucking buy i was like i did not say go all in i was like start getting some skin in the game like that's what i was saying i was like buy a

little bit at a time like please do not go like i was literally like please do not go all in nobody fucking listened they fucking went all in started buying shit coins started buying tron iota everything i was like oh my god fucking just like sitting there like mr crap that mr craps meme like just fucking like out of like out of whack yeah yeah i got now i have a blog written about me a week about how stupid i am so oh i i want to get on that at some point too um i i found that entertaining but um but yeah no oh my god like i talk to people it's like oh yeah i decided to jump in the crypto space and it's like oh like that's sick what'd you get and it's like oh i just i bought ethereum because it was really it was way cheaper than bitcoin it's like oh dude

like the unit of account buys or it's it's bad it's bad i mean especially with ripple people are like ripple's gonna go to 300 i'm like uh that'd be a 30 trillion dollar market cap i don't think that's happening people don't understand that with stocks either that's the thing do you follow uh do you follow wu-tang finance on twitter one of the best follows on twitter yeah by far yeah i mean like people legit like don't teach this stuff in school i mean i was not taught it i had to figure it out myself not even in college but like after college like all of that stuff you know with respect to like stocks and just like you know how cash works how a loan works how interest works you only learn by doing i'm so fucking happy that i realized that

or i was lucky enough to go to college in chicago and able to work full-time my senior year and take night classes and i learned more during the day when i was working than i ever did at class yeah no doubt yeah and that's yeah so that's one thing that's the tip i'm on right now is trying to educate the masses there's no masses following me that the the maybe 5 000 people that that know what i'm doing i'm just trying it's better than the nine that i got hopefully that goes up after this at bob fogg b double excuse me b o double b f o double g um on twitter look them up hell yeah um yeah so that there's obviously a lot of confusion and that there's another beauty of the space is that it's such a nation technology and a new asset class

again new asset classes don't come along that often sorry can i interrupt you is it nation or nascent because i've been saying nascent my whole life but i'm totally willing to admit that i'm wrong uh again i'm an idiot screaming online okay yeah i literally have no idea i think it's a preference thing i think you can say either either it's the same thing okay cool nation the sc i would say conscious nation yeah i was working with the silent c there yeah yeah okay sorry i think they're both work i could be wrong you could be wrong maybe we're both wrong it's like nascent that's probably more likely than anything else um yeah so that's the one thing is like trying to i mean even try that's the other thing for me because i write the newsletter every

day and do this podcast like who the fuck am i to like give people advice like nobody knows what they're doing like and that's like i've been really careful with how i market what i'm doing here it's like hey so the newsletter marty's bent marty's bent my inclination and what i think in the space like literally the tagline of my newsletter is like here here's what i thought was interesting i'm just gonna like explain it to you i i'm not an authority figure at all i have no authority in what i'm saying other than i've been around and and could say tell you people what i've seen you know you people you want to talk about your uh the the thing that you linked to today yeah that was some pretty heady shit and i got my wife was out uh with her friends last

night at dinner so like i i got to like throw on some music and read a bunch of shit and i listened And before I throw on some music, I watched some George Gilder, George Gilder, Scandal of Money. I'm not familiar. He wrote Knowledge and Power, very prolific author, wrote a lot about information theory, specifically in Knowledge and Power. And I watched a couple of interviews with him describing information theory and some incredible stuff, and it's very applicable to Bitcoin.

um andrew desantis bitcoins um uh what's that fucking show on usa network um about the futuristic oh oh mr robot mr robot oh i love that show never watched it oh wait are you serious oh dude you got to get on it actually okay wait so can we go back let's go back um to what we were talking about um when i asked the question of uh of having like a decentralized currency so so what there's been three seasons do you watch it yeah i think it's three yeah yeah there's three seasons second season was second season was okay um third season was back first season was phenomenal um it's i don't know if you know anything about it basically i'll give it a plug here hopefully that's okay free ads we're giving away free ads no spoilers here yeah it

basically deals with um someone who it deals with someone who has like a lot of uh like it deals with the concept of mental disorder and then also the concept of societal disorder and and it sort of melds those two and then they're two very different storylines um on the societal disorder front um they actually there is a there's a large conglomerate uh that plays a very big role and they introduce, there's been a societal collapse, and they introduce their own coin. Ecoin, right? Yes. That's one of the best troll accounts on crypto Twitter.

Oh, really? It's the Ecoin CEO. That guy's a badass on the show. That's the only reason I know Mr. Robot, is via crypto Twitter, and the CEO of Ecoin. People making memes about that. That's funny. So, I think that's a good example of a situation that could potentially arise that, you know, it's not decentralized. And that's also a good situation, not even talking about currencies, but just from a political perspective of where a company has more power than a government.

I could see that. But that's the whole, like, even, like, the centralizing aspect, like, I think it's completely decentralized or nothing. like the whole ethos of this is like the way i view when i close my eyes and i visualize bitcoin i've said this before i see like a huge beam of light going up to the air maybe goes through like the middle of the earth which actually doesn't make logistical sense let's say let's say we're talking about like a town of 100 people and in the middle of the town there's a huge beam of light that goes up in the air when i visualize bitcoin that's like i visualize bitcoin is that beam of light that anybody can go to the center of town and just embed information into and every

10 minutes a new beam of light shoots up maybe i don't know i'm describing this terribly but and just embeds the information it's a public utility in my mind and if that's going to be distributed by a company like ripple or something like that like it's just a non-starter for me it comes back to first principles and from first principles it's grassroots organic or nothing in my mind um could be wrong i could be very wrong but uh i just got a feeling it's a visceral feeling Like, it's a gut feeling for me. I'm from northeast Philly. We're big on instincts.

And you go by your balls, right? Yeah, exactly. Go by the balls and go by what you're fucking feeling and try to back it up with some credibility. But, again, like, I've got this gut feeling that this is, like, a once in a lifetime, not even lifetime, once in probably, like, 10-generation opportunity. um and i think there's a lot of confusion so there's a lot of confusion there's a lot of people trying to apply old world sort of structures and tendencies to this new technology and i think

they're just going to get blown the fuck out like it's uh like in the sovereign individual they talk a lot about anachronisms so an anachronism is when you try to apply an old structure to a new paradigm and it just doesn't work and that's a lot of what i see happening in my opinion in the the shitcoin space and and all these crypto hedge funds popping up and all these icos it's just a bunch of people trying to apply sort of the old world structures to this new paradigm i don't know if you have anything to say to that i feel like this is like turned into like you interviewing me now i sort of like it like you never get asked questions well it's interesting i mean you know it's like i i want to get your thoughts on this stuff too yeah um i mean i mean i think it's i

think it's just tough right okay so one example that i i have um and i was introduced to this a long time ago and this is actually before you're in my time but uh back in i mean i don't know i guess the 80s uh there obviously you're familiar with vhs uh potentially some people who are listening to this may not be familiar with that which is a pretty crazy thought right but before vhs reigned supreme there was a another a competitor to that technology the video like tape technology called betamax now i i guess what ended up being the case was that betamax was accepted generally speaking as a as the far superior technology and now i don't know like what what that meant back then right but like you know either like it played at a higher definition

or faster whatever right doesn't matter obviously vhs ended up winning and that ended up being like the household name and you know my my understanding is that you know that was really just due to all these other externalities you know whether that's like marketing or like you know a large company getting behind it and being able to push markets and i think you know the question that i would ask is like let's pretend that some huge ass conglomerate just like you know is able to develop some sort of coin that has an ease of use like tomorrow i mean that is far obviously far beyond bitcoin right would you do you think do you i think for the common person that it's tough for them at least in america to to really think critically about the decentralized aspect i

mean i think you and me are a little bit removed from that and we've geeked out to it but i think what a lot of people care about is just like whether it works and they don't want to think about that shit and you know presumably like bitcoin could come along and you know get to an ease of use but like if a company is just throwing like billions and billions and billions of dollars into it to make a slick app and just have that app work i mean like uh i guess like venmo is a decent example and like everybody uses venmo right it's like you know you could you could take that concept and then just like go beyond and like have it be like a crypto thing um and i think that would be a threat to a certain degree to bitcoin now that doesn't they wouldn't

kill bitcoin by any means right like i think in the long term bitcoin would have a much stronger use case because of that but i think when you're looking at it from a price perspective i think that could significantly hurt and a lot of people that are using it to invest in it they could get hurt and then they could be like oh fuck that like i'm gonna jump to this other thing no i could i mean i don't know if i could see it happening but i could i mean i could see somebody attempting to do it like presumably speaking yeah yeah presumably and and i'm apprehensive to make like the technologies to bitcoin because i truly believe it is like a black swan like fucking fuck shit up type thing like i don't like i hate when people say bitcoin's my space i'm just going to be

facebook today somebody from multi-coin capital uh said that uh proof of work they just raised a ton of money was it 50 mil 50 mil i mean 50 mil and they're trying to raise like 200 250 i got it in my uh i got it on my uh on a newsletter that is completely un-crypto related this morning the analogy that was made was proof of work versus proof of stake comparing proof of work to blackberry keyboards and proof of stake to like the fucking iphone keyboard i was like this makes no fucking sense like there's like there's like this i hate when like people try like to make these analogies because in my mind it's like analogies work in some senses like in some senses all great they're not the best way to make an argument ever but

sometimes they make good arguments um never the best way but sometimes they are a good way when it comes to bitcoin trying to compare it to things of the past you have to compare it to something on such a macro scale like fucking salt like have you ever read the book salt the history of salt no so there's like there's like an 800 page book on the history of salt and salt was basically currency back in the day and it was a like multi-generational fucking currency like and then you could dabble like into the spices and stuff but salt itself i'm sure was like the back exactly like if you're going to compare it to anything you have to compare it to like something on like the scale like like a like you can't compare it to like a fucking myspace and

facebook a website that took over another website in the past 15 years like that's fucking stupid in my opinion like you have to compare it to something that changed civilization on a societal level and those those things only happen very few times in my opinion i agree so quick question or observation i guess on proof of stake now whether whether that is an appropriate uh like way to go about bitcoin is not the question that i want to ask right or like move away from proof work like whatever right but i do think it's a really cool concept and i like it a lot um i think one thing that sort of blew my mind is i have uh i have a friend who is uh that has to be uh shariah compliant um so so he's muslim a sharia yeah yeah yeah sorry yeah um we're good at pronouncing

things so using proof of stake and being able to stake allows for a current income a current yield component to an investment that otherwise would not have been able to exist for him because you're not allowed to participate in debt and theoretically most of the time when you're getting yield it's it's due to debt and so this is actually an avenue that's totally opened up to take to get a yield because of this new thing i just thought that was fucking wild it is wild um and i staked so i staked a coin i've staked a proof of stake coin for two years straight like on a fucking mac laptop and it was incredible like it was like just a stream of income it's wild right it's crazy it's crazy and i just like literally kept my mac open next to my bed under my bed for like two years

was making fucking staking interest yeah just think about the people that literally like they'll buy a separate computer specifically for staking and then i'm sure you know you could even like trick it out and then like you know run like a bunch of different coins on it and it's just like dude if you start up with enough capital there it's like your your income streams are like i mean that's it because obviously like you know that's higher than i mean whatever sort of interest you're going to get and that's it's achilles that's it's achilles hill at the same time like You need that accumulation, and that's where I would argue that, like, the later movers in a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism are more disadvantaged than late movers in a proof-of-work consensus mechanism. Oh, totally.

And it's going back to heuristics. We love to web. We love heuristics. It's too easy. It's too fucking easy. Nothing should be that easy where, like, you can just, like, it just— The margins will absolutely get cut at some point. Exactly.

But, like, right now, it's like this crazy golden goose. Yeah. But if the masses come, when the masses come, I just don't see proof of stake working. I don't see it being scalable in a decentralized way. It's scalable in a centralized way because proof of stake is inherently centralizing because it encourages hoarding. obviously i'm a bitcoin maximalist i encourage hodling but at some point uh but you don't you don't make interest on your hodling like you know i don't get i don't get i don't get it's an equity return exactly like uh and i don't see that i don't see that i just and it's inherently it's inherently less secure because you have to have somebody basically verify for you you can't verify with math you have to verify with somebody already like who's hoarding these coins and like all right follow my my chain to what i got to you know so what about a paradigm that

basically has a couple or let's just it's just bitcoin as as the backbone and then i mean obviously this goes without saying but a large reason why people are interested in like investing in the crypto space is because you know is to make money right i mean can't you imagine a situation that's perpetually just having people jump from coin to coin to coin to coin and it just never that's what's happening yeah it's coins all the way fucking down but like what how does that look in 20 years well i think people realize just continue no i think people that's yeah that's another one of my investment points or investment theses is that like people sort of call bullshit after a certain point when when that point is i don't know

but at some point people are going to put their hands up be like all right first it was ethereum then it was eos then it was neo then it's fucking geo whatever it's gonna it's coins all the way down and turtles all the way down and people are just gonna bitcoin is just gonna suck everything in like gravity it's like this is the only thing that's been around does what it says it's going to do and that's the other thing from a marketing perspective bitcoin doesn't have to do much more like it just says like hey we're going to enable peer-to-peer censorship resistant transactions that's all we're going to do we're not going to promise you the world in a marketing deck like we're just here you can plug in you can download the blockchain start participating in consensus

and basically use our network to timestamp trust every 10 minutes you can go to the center of town and use the public public utility that we have created and it's going to take time it's going to take time because just think exactly like you said think about there's always going to be something better there's always something better and what are we going to do have society fucking transition from chain to chain to chain like every fucking two years like that just makes no fucking sense my mind yeah i don't i i i don't disagree with that but i don't know i think it's just tough because if you look at the way people are amused um that the attention spans have dropped

significantly i mean think about it okay what's the other thing about bitcoin it's going to change us more than we change it like we're not gonna be able to apply these blockchains to what we want them to do bitcoin is gonna change us it's already changed my time preference so i don't have that fucking low attention span like i'm worried about the news like oh shit i'm gonna like this week like when 2000 2012 marty would have been like fuck i gotta sell i gotta sell i gotta sell but now 2018 marty's like i'm not fucking ever selling i'm using this as fucking collateral in 20 years to buy a fucking island like people don't understand the uh the willpower associated with like you know especially when it was like jacked up at 20 it's like yo you're gonna

sell you're gonna sell it's like dude like iron fist i'm not selling that shit yeah exactly and but that yeah that's my point like this shit is changing us like it's changed me i can't i can speak for myself it has changed me and those tendencies of running from coin to coin people are sort of going to realize hey these hodlers who've been showing up bitcoin for like 10 years have turned out actually really really good like maybe we should adopt their investment strategy and just just stick to one thing and that's another thing like if it's going to be money money is only a shared illusion between the masses and it's got to be one shared illusion at the end of the day in my opinion okay i'll agree with that um okay so so you don't have

do you agree do you agree do you agree i i agree that i i have highest i have the highest conviction that bitcoin is going to be around longer than anything else right but like but that being said it's like i i only have that like i only agree yeah you have to play just because but like i only agree with that just because the fact that like that is basically like representative of of what i like own and also it's just like that's the only thing that like makes sense to me right like i i think it's really tough for me to be like oh like you know i think this other thing is gonna jump in because it's like i think the reality of the situation or at least the way that like i i feel when i'm like most honest about it's like dude i have no idea like i think it's really

really hard and and if something just like blows out the water like like okay let's pretend that like tezos drops tomorrow right if they don't get subpoenaed that they haven't been subpoenaed let's pretend that drops tomorrow right and um and it just like blows out the water and like for whatever reason everybody is buying it's like i i i am willing to admit that that's like a totally feasible situation and therefore it's like dude like i don't know how to deal with that right it's like maybe bitcoin gets fucked by it i mean i don't think so but i'm also willing here's why it won't yeah we're we're going to talk about to lab we're getting to celeb eventually but like let's bring to lab into this right now like the rule of the intolerant minority like you can't

form fit governance structures on blockchains they are anarchy at their core like they are anarchy on the web like you cannot form fit like a governance structure where people vote to make things happen it's not the way they work these systems are run or true public decentralized blockchains are run by the minority the intolerant minority that was proven last summer two times with the user-activated soft work and the no SegWit2x. The intolerant minority in Bitcoin stood up to the VC money and the incumbent unicorns in the space who wanted to change the nature of Bitcoin

and basically said, no, this is decentralized money that we all get to participate in. We're not going to let you change Bitcoin because it's not in your best business plan or it's not in the best uh it's not in the best interest of your business plan you know like and in my opinion last summer proved that bitcoin is run by an intolerant minority and if you ever try to form fit a governance structure on top of it it's it's going to defeat the purpose of what's happening so i think it's a good black and white line when you're saying like you know we're either

fighting like the vcs and like you know corporations versus like you know true decentralization right what happens when there's a situation where that argument is much grayer and not black and white and and i think like that that's also like a tough situation to deal with where like you know like the argument is a matter of preference more than anything else popping up now with the uh the proof of work to bit the cobra i mean he's an anarchist from all i can tell um anon he wants to change the proof of work because he thinks bit main has too much of a monopoly and that's something where he's not a corporation he runs open source sort of free uh non-profit he runs bitcoin.org and uh what else is he from bitcoin talk.org as well um which are open forums where

people can discuss this stuff and he's got strong opinions about proof of work he thinks we should change the algorithm and a lot of other people who are were fighting alongside cobra during user-activated soft fork and node2x disagree uh this has not played out we don't know how it's going to play out but again it takes time and going back to what you were saying like what if something takes over bitcoin again it's strong opinions weekly held i have a strong opinion that nobody's going to be bitcoin until somebody proves otherwise i'm going to hold that opinion weekly i i know uh you you touched on this i think last week um you want to talk about iota let's get into it i i mean i i will preface this with like the only thing i know by iota is

the mit audit that i read i believe they launched it or excuse me released it in march of last year like maybe a year ago and i read it then it was basically all right non-star these people are fucking stupid like i'm not even gonna pay attention to this project until like i came to this office people like you buy an iota i was like i was like for some reason i don't like iota like i had to like refresh my memory of why i hated iota and then i looked it up i was like oh yeah don't buy the shit so i was perusing the multi-coin or multi-coin website today and they actually have like little uh like assessments of like each coin i thought that was interesting and like a cool little uh feature but either way um i i got to admit i love the idea of the tangle

um i i think it might be like implemented really poorly with iota um but like i think their concept is really fucking neat and i'm a little bit of a uh like like explain tango getting suckered by it okay so basically like you got a blockchain right and a blockchain is just like a line of transactions it's like like an excel like one excel row of just like fucking you know thousands i mean millions of like you know uh like rows long right um or i guess one row millions of columns longer vice versa so with a tangle what it is is like um it's probably easier to like show it but basically you have one dot and then from one dot if you if you can imagine this two two arrows are coming out and then of that one dot and then they each form their own dot which then

two arrows come out of it again and then it's like a multiplying tree yeah you call that right um and so each of the two preceding uh nodes or dots or whatever you want to call it verify the the previous transactions right so the reason why iota is was there was so much hype around it and also why it didn't work is because of the fact that um there was so much hype around it because this is not a blockchain it is like a new concept of a cryptocurrency where every single it's a non-linear uh thing so they call it a tangle right and it's basically like a web instead of just like a line and so so that's really fucking cool because it requires so little um so a little energy to like run each node and then you know so what they were saying or at least

the concept is that you could uh appropriate it to like uh like a toaster and it's like an internet of things uh version of like a blockchain or or or like whatever right um so then you you know you could have your toaster talk to your fucking watch to talk to your cell phone can talk to your like you know your your light switch in your house and you don't you have to use the centralized like google home we're gonna get does that make sense it does make sense it does make and we're gonna get cosmic here okay let's do it so this is like iota and nano ryblox whatever they're fucking calling themselves now like they have those like rybloxes you run your own blockchain everybody runs their own blockchain and they immediately sync up somehow i don't know

the nitty-gritty i'm going to argue that proof of work the amount of energy needed to mine a bitcoin block and the amount of energy that secures the bitcoin network is completely necessary to give it value like it's a it's when you get to like a cosmic level like things revolve around energy yes like i believe i honestly believe i can't explain it i'm too dumb to explain it this is a heuristic i think the expended energy on bitcoin makes it what it's worth like you need that sort of gravitational pull to the the value system in my opinion i don't know why i don't know how to explain it i just like heuristically speaking like the amounts like hard things are worth it that's the concept exactly exactly that and and that's my first principle sort of view

on on like proof of work versus other consensus mechanisms tangles i mean it's iota specifically maybe tangle is cool but i noticed this specifically trying to like spin up your own fucking cryptographic collisions is fucking stupid well yeah so so that's the whole thing though it's like you don't have to carry the blockchain right you only need to carry like the two preceding like like like uh interactions or whatever the fuck i don't know like their lingo or whatever i watched like some really long ass video and then i read like some long ass paper about it and i was like oh shit like you know that what interested me about it was just the fact that um it was a it was totally different than just saying like oh we're gonna

do bitcoin but two minutes instead of ten right at least they're getting creative yeah exactly it's like i respect that right um so so so it's like okay i i totally like i geeked out to that now now the issue of that the the issue there is that um like there the problems are associated with uh like freezing the like freezing the whole tangle and that's what like they have this thing called like a coordinator or administrator or some shit like that i don't know exactly what it's something centralized sounds yeah yeah yeah that's exactly what it is it's a centralized thing that basically has to like you know check like how and make sure that everything runs non-starter non-starter non-starter exactly doesn't work and it ruins it totally right so my thought and again

like you know i i am no uh i am no cryptographer i don't i do not know how to code i took a um one computer science class in college and i had my buddy who's a coder uh do do the final for me boss boss so i can't say i can't speak to the technicalities of it but like why can't instead of um you know having this like centralized uh like like person or you know decision maker like you know freeze everything and make sure everything's right it's like why can't you just have like a timed like uh thing that basically like freezes like every previous transaction because i guess like you're like without the coordinator whatever it's like you can easily just like fucking like flood the system and then like fuck it all up um and i just feel like you

know there has to be a creative way like or potentially it doesn't have to have to be but i just there i view it conceptually as like there could be a creative way to like do that without just having a long string of numbers that are you know gigabytes and like you know much bigger than gigabytes transferring every every single time and it's like okay another way around that is obviously like segwit right just like you know pulling it off off the block or whatever but yeah yeah taking the witness out yeah yeah so it's just like I don't have as much I have a little bit more coding experience than you not enough coding experience to ever consider myself a developer

or anything like that my coding experience goes so far as i can make you a shitty website with html css and javascript but my other coding experience uh comes from when i worked in the futures fund i was working in matlab and i was pulling data from bloomberg using a code base that our cio had built so i learned a little bit about code and pulling data and utilizing apis during that time and fucking software is hard man it's really hard like it's really hard getting it right every time and that's one thing like that people don't realize especially non-technical people like it is extremely hard and that's another heuristic i fall back on is software's hard like and yeah and the pipe dreams that everybody's selling with these blockchains like

we like barstool like we run a fucking cms on wordpress and it's hard it's fucking hard like trying to create a decentralized monetary system is orders of magnitude harder and like i just like i like the philly coming up at me like i'm calling bullshit on most of this shit like it's bullshit like you're not gonna be able to do this like we can barely figure out how to build a cms and make sure it doesn't have any bugs like to think that you're gonna create a tangle system that has no bugs like from scratch it's just like it i find it like the probability of that being a possibility is so minute in my mind that like it just doesn't make sense yeah i i totally agree with that i'd also think though you could make that same argument for the people that were

messing around with whatever the predecessor to bitcoin is um you know when they're like oh like you know this is really hard like there's a lot of bugs now now that you're making you're making my case for me though all those people are now working on bitcoin and not focusing on and calling bullshit on everything else and that's another like i don't want to appeal to authority here but at some extent especially when it comes to software development you have to appeal to authority the most people do because most people are dumb when it comes to software development like you have to know who to trust and that's another heuristic i fall back on i have met bitcoin developers in person i've sat down and talked to them and asked them why why do you

think this is stupid why does this not work and when they fall back on their first principles sort of software development minds are like this is why it doesn't work like i would never do like coming from like a security perspective like i would never do this um it has been proven to not work in the past like proof of stake has been proven to not work in the past um but it's not dead it's definitely not dead i mean people are going to keep iterating on it but that's the other thing so like i talked about this who did i talk about this with i forget who i talked about this with but the one thing with like ethereum specifically another heuristic light that i go on is like vitalik's what 23

he's young 23 vlad's my age he's 26 27 like all these ethereum developers like your average crypto fund crypto hedge fund manager and like ethereum developers probably like 26 25 they don't have enough like experience to in my opinion like just falling back on heuristics like they don't have enough wisdom they haven't been through they haven't been battle tested enough to know that what they're building is not is not like ironclad like any old school cypherpunk that's been around for like 40 years is working like and is interested in cryptocurrency is focused on bitcoin from what i can tell do you think it's good that they're doing it though do you think it's good for the ecosystem that you have guys who are uh rebelling against the idea of bitcoin

or or do you think that's yeah oh yeah competition's good everywhere i mean it's fucking what makes the the world go around is competition i think it's good i just don't agree with them i mean and that's okay that's okay i have friends in ethereum i have ethereum developer friends i have an ethereum developer in here next week like lane reddick who he's a head uh researcher for the ethereum foundation like he's going to be he's actually if you're in new york city next week next thursday night uh he's hosting uh a debate proof of work versus proof of stake matt corallo is going to stand up for proof of work and i forget who's going to stand up for proof of stake but i really like these guys like i like when you meet like these people in person like i had no

problem having like intelligent like civil conversations with them but at the end of the day like you can't force me to agree with your perspective i think if you can smile at them and tell you tell them you don't agree with them i mean like that that is like 99 of the battle and then you're in a good place right it's like when you don't agree with someone and then you're just like yeah fuck that dude yeah um like like the person specifically no you can't that's the other thing people have to realize like and that's one thing i get bad at sometimes like i mean it's tough it's like literally against human nature yeah exactly but let's see you have to you have to separate the person from the idea and it's not easy i think i find a happy medium that we're like

i like and i'll openly admit i could be wrong and i i openly seek out these people like prove me wrong i have not been proved wrong yet in my opinion like i have not been convinced that i'm wrong yet would you ever want to have someone on the podcast who just like straight up like like still thinks bitcoin is gonna crash or it's like fake or something like that would you think that'd be like interesting or a waste of time yeah just out of curiosity uh working at google um i forget what part of gooey where adam singer you know him he's on twitter he fucking hates bitcoin like like shit's on it any chance he gets like have him on the pod i've we've dm'd like next time he comes to new york he's gonna that's awesome yeah i'm like that's great i don't know

the next time out but i would dm to be like i'd love to have you on the pod like i want a contrarian view like it is uh and who knows yeah we could this could be a fucking bitcoin could be just like a fucking mass confusion like a bunch of idiot maybe we're the dumbest people on earth maybe i don't know i don't think so but we could be yeah if you if you look at the if you look at people's uh like uh pl statement that's probably not the case but yeah but yeah yeah that's um oh sorry yeah look you're interviewing me b double o b f double o g he's got a fucking notepad out he's taking notes like you're getting right asked me quite are you gonna write a paper on this i don't got time to write a paper um no let's dive into telep okay let's do it i was very my boy i

was very very happy to uh have have run into you at that book signing i know that was great i like turned around i was like yeah i'm sorry to dox you in public like that there was no issues no issues with that at all bob fogg yeah yeah i i like turned around i'm like walking to leave after it was over and he's just like standing up like like waving his arms being like bob fogg bob fogg that's great so yeah what'd you think was that the first time you seen him in person funny story no it was not okay okay yeah yeah you want to tell the story so around this time last year that was such a good setup a very good setup thank you for that segue and get to get a little intentional get to get a little selfish here uh last april i got married coming up on

my anniversary wish me luck um my wife and i got married in philadelphia small get together just our our parents brothers sisters grandparents and then we went to spain uh and had a couple of our friends meet us over there we were madrid sevilla wound up having like a ceremony in ronda in southern spain and while we were there uh on twitter i saw nasim talib was going to be there or nasim talib i was like oh shit rachel like we fucking might like run into nasim talib when we're down or talib when we're down here like he's gonna be in madrid and sevilla when we're in madrid and sevilla like maybe we'll eat some squid ink pasta with him and she was like ah i wouldn't count on it honey wouldn't count on it i'm gonna be old 10 days goes by eat way too much cured ham drink

way too much wine smoke way too many cigarettes in in the parks cigarettes are too cheap over there you a cigar guy no no so better for crusties the reason it's my favorite book is because it's like a cigar book i mean it's like a cigar porch like you know you sit there and you smoke you know like a cigar takes like an hour to smoke and then you're just like flipping through and it's like it's fun i can i can smoke cigars i cannot smoke cigars when i'm drunk if i smoke a cigar when i'm drunk the hangover is the worst hangover hangover the next day is like i i love cigars but i will not do that or at least i've done it too much and i try and avoid it it still happens yeah i cannot do it drunk i can do this i can do a sober cigar but a drunk cigar will put me on bed rest for

fucking like 12 hours totally agree yeah um so we're over there lo and behold 10 days go by did not see him fly back to from madrid to jfk i'm a fucking wreck like at the last day we were in seville or in madrid i thought i was having a heart attack because i ate so much fucking meat and i was like my wife thought she was pregnant i was like she said she told me that i was like oh my god i thought i was having a heart attack the trip ended on a good note but like a low note it was like all right like it's time to go home get back to jfk i look like shit i'm wearing like sweatpants and like uh like a like a t-shirt it's fucking like hot as balls out in new york i'm waiting at baggage claim my hair is all unkempt like i probably smell bad i'm waiting for my

bags come up and I look up to my left and Nassim Taleb's sitting standing right there and I was like fuck this is where I run into him like a baggage claim like after our trip's done and like I'd like tap my wife was like Rach like that's Nassim Taleb like the dude like I was talking about all trip and she was like go say hi to him I was like I can't right now she was like if you don't go say hi to him I'm gonna walk up to him and introduce him to you so she basically forced my hand that's how you know she's the one exactly but like he was so dumbfounded he was like why the fuck do you even recognize me like he's got such like a niche following i welcome it was like uh mr tuleb huge fan actually reading the black swan right now i was like oh like thank you thank

you like big fan it was just in passing like shook his hand was like big fan he was like thank you appreciate it and that's that's minus some tuleb story okay yeah no that's great so okay it was your second time it was also my second time i think before we dive in i i i'd like to at least acknowledge the irony of you and i discussing tuleb's book skin in the game while i am using a pseudonym while we are both yeah yeah yeah yeah people know marty's not my real name marty got thrown on me my real name is a lot stronger than marty i'll just leave it at that um but you know that being said i definitely don't got fuck you money and uh i i i guess i am what he would classify as a modern day slave so i'm fine with that right now wage slave yeah exactly i still i

I still need a paycheck, so I'm keeping it that way. So, I mean, everybody at Barstool calls me Marty, so. Actually, I signed a contract under Marty Bent. That's awesome. So, actually, a slight divergence. I don't know if this is appropriate or not. Do people in the office, like, refer to each other as, like, their, like, Barstool names or, like, their real names?

No, people call Big Cat Dan, Fights John, KFC Kevin in the office, yeah. It's like a good differentiator. Yeah, definitely. It's not, I mean. And also separates the, like the persona from the person. Yeah, exactly. And that's one thing people like, especially with PFT, like PFT is like a fucking satirical character.

Yeah. People don't realize that. Like some people don't realize that outside of barstool. When you're hanging out with PFT, like outside the bar, he takes his glasses off and you have like a real conversation with him. It's like, it's different. Okay. Sorry.

I've only done that once. It's not like I hang out with PFT like all the time. um so to let well what'd you think i mean i i really liked it it was very similar to the first time i saw him um so it was under the exact same situation except when anti-fragile came out um i mean he's really he's really funny in person and i think if you like read enough of his stuff it's like of course this is what he's like i mean i mean especially because uh i don't want a fan boy overseeing him in person let's talk about his concepts so let's roll would you consider bitcoin a black swan like that depends on who you ask right it's like if you ask a cryptographer

and someone who's coding they would say no um and if you ask like me and you like like probably yeah right because it's it's all relative like i don't know but like so if you work with the definition of a black swan it's like you know if it's an unknowable event i mean i guess for you um you know when you're working with the sovereign individual and like the the the prescient like concepts there it's like yeah but for me i mean like yeah totally dude like you know when i was uh you know much younger in 2011 or whatever it's like that that was not on my radar no no that that's actually a great point you brought up is that like the crypto like bitcoin was foreseen like by people like we're eventually going to get this we just don't know when yeah and

you know so the definition of the black swan is like it's an unknowable unforeseen event and like The unknowable part, I think, is really tough for a lot of people to deal with. And that's another sort of, that's what I wanted to get on, the overuse of the term black swan. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's become totally vernacular. Exactly. So, this was an example of the overuse of it. Maybe Bitcoin is not a black swan. So, let's dive into the, without bastardizing it, what is a perfect example of a black swan, if we're going to describe it to our listeners? Yeah, well, I mean, I think, again, starting with the premise that it's relative. you know, it's, it's, it can really, I mean, at least in my opinion, it can be something that

like, I want to make sure I'm speaking correctly here, but like, you know, something that is like totally, totally unforeseen. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Actually here, here's a good example. So for the financial crisis in like 07, right. I was, I was working at a small company at the time. It was like a startup-esque vibe and and some this was after 07 um before 2012 and uh someone she was working in the office and she was like oh yeah like you know when i was in the fine i used to work in the financial industry and like everybody like knew like that that the markets were going to collapse blah blah like before then it's like you know like this is not a black swan to me um You know, for a lot of people, if you're looking at, you know, some mom and pop who run a, who run, like, a clothes store in Wyoming and, like, you know, are not, like, tight to, you know, whatever is going on on, like, Wall Street.

It's like, yeah, it was a total black swan. And, you know, when you're, when your 401k gets rocked and put, you know, cut in half. Yeah, cut in half. 75. If not, yeah, exactly. 75% for some people. that was like that's another reason i'm a bitcoin like i've talked about this many times on this podcast like it was a senior in high school when all that shit went down and just like what how

the fuck could this happen like how the fuck could the banks fuck up this bad and then we confiscate poor people's houses like just again going back to heuristics and like first principle shit like that pissed me off and i i think at it at 17 i got like a thought embedded in my head where it's like i'm i want to fucking fuck these banks up because this was completely unfair what happened i don't know if that clouds my judgment but that's just you know that you're you were victims of circumstance well i think it totally clouds the judgment i think the real question is like whether it's appropriate or not right and like that's a different question um you know it's like is it okay to like be be against someone who is basically perpetuating like crony capitalism i mean like in

my opinion like no right but i mean i think in other people's opinion the answer would be like yeah that is fucked up why not crony capitalism yeah like you know it's like you're basically like i'm saying against that oh yeah i thought you said like oh i was gonna say i thought you were like yeah for crony capitalism well this is gonna be a heavy topic i don't know okay let's roll we can dive into like do we truly live in a capitalist society right now in the u.s okay so this is a funny thing right it's like if you um if you take someone who's like a hardcore uh like communist right and you're like yo like communism has never worked and they'd be like yo you're an idiot like like real pure communism has never like uh like tried before right it's like you

know the exact same thing goes with capitalism too i mean it's like it goes both ways it does it does and that's like i would argue we are not as capitalistic as we were at one point in this country yeah i definitely agree with that there's been a centralizing factor i mean capitalism probably thrives in a completely decentralized sort of laissez-faire state and we're definitely not in a laissez-faire state no not at all i mean i mean like there's there's a ton of centralization that the government like runs a a ton of things and i mean like you know from a lot of different people's opinions like the government should have control over a lot of different things or they shouldn't have control over a lot of different things and you know it's

Like, your definition of capitalism is, like, you know, where does the government lie, like, in that system, right? And, like, you know, what should be unregulated versus regulated? I know we've discussed this before off the air. Have you, did you ever dive into Russ Roberts in EconTalk? I have not yet. I have not. Okay. That's on my list.

Yeah, yeah. So, he's a Chicago guy. He's a big libertarian. Thank you for reminding me. Oh, yeah. Actually, by the way, so he's boys with Taleb. Taleb was on, I think, like last week, I want to say, to discuss the new book, obviously. Even he can't escape doing the book tour.

But either way, I mean, it's like, yeah, I mean, we're definitely—the United States has a capitalist bent to it. But, I mean, there's a lot of things that is regulated and the government touches. I mean, I think, you know, it's really hard to have an ideological opinion or it's really easy to have an ideological opinion on like what the government should and shouldn't touch. But then when you're looking at it from like a case by case basis, like a pragmatic, it's really difficult. It's really difficult to decide that. Yeah. I. Yeah.

But I come from like I come from sort of the position that like the people running our country right now are so fucking dumb. they don't get technology like listening to the senate hearing on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies with the cf or the cftc and the sec like some of the questions coming from the senators i was like holy fuck like how are you making decisions for 326 million people right now like this makes no sense to me like there's such a disconnect between the amount of knowledge our politicians should have and what they do have and again this is a i don't want to blame the politics i will not blame the politicians personally i will blame the system they've been thrown into where they have to focus more on raising money and campaigning than actually knowing what they should be legislating on i agree

with that um i guess two things right so my first thing is a direct response that is like okay so then like i guess what is a better system um it's not something i've given a lot of thought to i think i spend much more time like criticizing than actually like finding solutions i think we all do you know and then the second thing it's like okay so what is do you think it's a question of like a type like it's more common on the type of person that wants to be a politician than anything oh a hundred percent like you have to be a fucking psycho to want to be a politician i mean like i like a full-blown psycho i i also agree with that but i also think it's really easy for me and you to say that because we are not politicians

i don't know dude you like uh you had to be a fucking psycho you had to be a psycho to want that power to want that power like well and it's like it's like power without like work you know yeah like it's power without like the work associated with it is basically like charming people exactly yeah it's tough charming your way to the top fucking donald trump is our president right now like or charming or persuading i guess it's like depends right it's like but but they're Slightly different, but two sides of the same coin. Yeah. And, yeah, like, I find it so, I think, I don't know.

Well, it's also really funny because his whole platform was that he's not a politician. Yeah. Right? That, but, I mean, you can say that to your president. You're a fucking politician, like, by definition. I don't disagree, but it was definitely a different platform than, like, a lot of the others, or at least whoever, you know, else he was going against in the primaries or whatever. So, we talked about this on the podcast that was never aired.

oh seriously yeah um wait which one was that the one with the one last week that we did with black jack fletcher it's not gonna air i'm sorry i know i know i tweeted about it but matt brown has shut it down there was too many things said i can't be disappointing black jack's my boy um black jack's a fucking psycho um so what we got in the conversation uh during that podcast was like so i brought it up to the to the boys so why do we have politicians why do we have governments why do we vote for these people 270 200 and fuck we're coming up on 50 years in 2026 right um like two 200 plus years ago we created america and we have this representative democracy that has grown over the last 200 plus years

At the same time, we have this technology, we've had industrial revolution, now we're transitioning into the information age. We vote for politicians to speak for us. When our government was created, the whole concept was that local municipalities would vote for individuals to go speak their mind at a central location where you didn't have telephones or the internet where people could call in and express their views. so we voted on politicians to go to the central place and represent our views i argue now that we don't need to give up our voices we don't need to vote for politicians to speak for us we have the technology and the wherewithal to speak for ourselves it's just figuring out how to how to like aggregate what people want and sort of we don't want a direct democracy that would be fucking hell we don't want direct democracy mean meaning one vote um like per person and

then it's just like straight like uh like aggregate and that's it exactly we don't want that that would be hell but there's gotta be a way like we do not like going back to the mechanics of a politician the mechanics of a politician is they are to speak for their constituency they are to be the voice of their constituency because when these this representative democracy was created it was not possible for everybody to have their voice heard i would argue now today it is very possible and we should reorg the way our government is structured so that we don't have to give up our voices to psychotic politicians so if you don't have it be representative but you don't have it be direct that means you would have to wait each

individual vote by each person and i don't think that would go over very well you know what i mean it's like theoretically speaking like in a uh in a much more populous area like like on the coasts or like in new york it's like you know your vote would only be like 0.5 of someone who lives in like south dakota well that's i mean that's what we have the college that's what we have the electoral college as big as the electoral colleges oh i mean i totally agree like conceptually but it's just like i know that's the i'm not saying i'm not saying i have the answer i'm saying there's an answer out there somewhere okay yeah there's gotta be yeah like there's gotta be there's an answer to out there to that just like there's an answer out there to uh solving iota right

true true but i would argue that's why i'm interested in projects like democracy earth that are experimenting with liquid democracy where you can vote on certain things that you're very knowledgeable on but you will delegate your vote to somebody that you know is like very knowledgeable on another subject like you don't you know you play you sort of play to your strengths and let other people play to their strengths which i think makes more sense i don't think we should have fucking lindsey graham from south carolina making decisions on everything like on on computer science on war on policy economic policy on like these individual politicians should not be making decisions on every fucking subject like there should be experts

on each subject making educated decision in my opinion sam hop in here what do you think and get close to the mic get in here sham not my cup of tea keep rolling sam's gonna hold off this one okay okay so okay um the first thing is that i think one of the more fucked up thing is like when when they're passing a bill the ability to hide individual caveats within laws in bills i think it's just like wild let's go back that's how it works let's go back to tarp do you remember tarp i mean like i i'm aware of the concept asset relief what's the p program program there we go thanks for the help i got you so that was that

was being passed when i was a senior in high school taking this economics plan class excuse me and we went through the tarp plan and exactly what you're saying politicians were holding tarp hostage unless they got like one line one line was like the the arrows in kansas can be this sharp like literally like shit like they had nothing to do with the financial crisis these politicians were just sneaking laws in for their local constituencies and holding the country i mean i don't agree with tarp i don't think there should have been a bailout but like going back to the Mechanics of what was being passed like they weren't gonna pass it unless they got these fucking side deals And it's totally unrelated to and like that's the fucked up thing

You know like the side deals were totally unrelated exactly yeah to the problem that are trying to solve um so I Guess to that example. I guess okay, so I read an article like Might have been a year ago at this point about some Eastern European country that basically put their entire government uh apparatus like on the blockchain estonia i believe right yeah i think you might be right it was a really long article it was really interesting um you know it's like a tiny ass country so like you know they they were able to do it yeah um i just wanted to mention that because obviously like that that is an example of it like or at least by the tenor of the article a year ago it was working and not only like it was working like very very well um so uh another

Another example of it more from, like, a thought perspective is there's this book that's pretty well-known. It's, like, a sci-fi book. It's called Hyperion. There's, like, I don't know. Never read it, but I've heard about it. Yeah, yeah. It's really well-known. And so basically everybody is plugged into what is, like, the internet.

You know, it's, like, their iteration of it. And, you know, that allows for, like, everything. And when I mean plugged in, I mean, like, physically, like, plugged in, right? Like, you know, they can still, like, move and stuff, but you got, like, some sort of chip and you're, like, connected to, like, everybody else's, like, thoughts at every point in time. And you're also allowed to, like, I'm pretty sure it's in this book, it's, like, real-time voting, right? And the positives and the negatives associated with that, it's, like, okay, you can vote real-time, so every citizen does get a voice. but also it sort of at least in the book it devolved into a situation where like you're voting on the stupidest shit it's like that black mirror episode oh yeah yeah yeah that's true

black mirror episode where they're like everybody ever after every interaction you have to yeah rate rate somebody on a scale of one to five like that would be a terrible world yeah exactly and it also devolved into the people that like it was the equivalent of people that like watch daytime tv right and they are the ones that are voting on everything because they have nothing doing they're actually not like doing shit right yeah um and so like i think it's like you know that is an extreme example but you know it's a case of like okay you know if you're giving that uh that voting power to each person and for them to do it automatically it's like you know personally i i i think i would prefer that than the current situation i mean it's really hard for people to

vote right um it's like really difficult um i'm gonna i mean yeah i have a feeling i know where People get pissed. I've never voted. Never will vote. Me neither. I never will vote. I get yelled at so much. South Park.

South Park. Described it perfectly. You're voting between a douche and a turd sandwich. Would you vote if it was on your phone, though? Then it's so easy, dude. I've never not voted because it wasn't easy enough. I have polling stations around. I've never voted because I think it's fucking stupid to participate in a system that makes

no sense to me. The difference between walking down the street and having to wake up early in the morning before you go to work or whatever like that, and then also just like, yo, you're on the shitter, and you're like, oh, I don't know what to do, and then you're flipping through Twitter, and then you flick it open, and then you do it. Well, that's Santi's point, is we vote every day. When we like and retweet and like Instagrams, those are votes. That's in the free market.

That's not in the politics realm. Well, maybe that ... Are we breaking through here? Maybe that's the way it should be, the best idea. no there's been I mean there's been like viral tweets that have been like proven wrong through time but like that's that's our current system of voting like is this model of hey I'm gonna like your tweet I'm gonna like your Instagram like your Facebook posts like that is a way of voting some people would argue um oh I mean definitely isn't you know that also goes down to is it virtue signaling though which is like do we want to live in a world of virtue signaling that's all

another story yeah um there's no cost to someone to send a tweet that you know pretends to care about a thing that they expect to be universally like backed it's the easiest way to go viral it's like yeah dude i mean that's actually that's what that's what telep's all about too it's like you need to have some costs associated with what you're talking about or or it's like your opinion don't don't mean shit let's get into it let's get in the game let's break down the concept yeah yeah absolutely and well and okay so two things right and at least i think that i have not read the book yet um but you know that being said he like posts a lot of shit on medium and stuff i think the two biggest things are the fact that um the the negative incentives are far more important

than the positives positive incentives right like you you got to have your neck on the line in order to be able to like actually like speak to something that's why i'm a maximalist i think that's skin in the game like i'm calling bullshit on everything like fuck like uh like being a maximalists have become like a heavy contrarian view like i would argue i don't disagree with that at all especially for everybody that's jumping in the game now it's like there is no one that is going to that has gotten into or at least most people that have gotten into bitcoin in the last like six months or a year there's no way they're like oh yeah i'm only gonna like do bitcoin it's like no because to them the weighting of all the other stuff like whether it's ethereum

or bitcoin cash or or like whatever um you know it's it's sort of equal weighting in their mind And if anything, it's actually worse to jump into Bitcoin because, like, oh, Bitcoin already, like, jumped the gun, right? Like, Bitcoin's up, and I'm not going to make any more money on that because it is so fucking expensive. It's, like, $10,000. It's $20,000 where it's, like, oh, like, shit, this other stuff's real cheap. I mean, have you seen Litecoin? Like, it's just got on Coinbase. It was only, like, 40 bucks or I don't even know what it's at right now.

But, you know, and it's, like, it's just totally different. Yeah. And it's a pattern, right? there's waves we talked about this like when we met at the isotope like there's waves and that's why i'm ardent in my maximalist views because like a lot of these people are like nah dude you're fucking stupid like this shit's not gonna like bitcoin's gonna get blown out of the water it's like you look at their twitter account created like august 2017 it's like all right asshole you haven't been through this wave yet i'll let you get blown out and fucking taken with the tide

come back to me in two years when you're like all right you're right like yeah yeah exactly well no we don't know if i'm gonna be right but like the other thing is like they'll never say you're right no right and i think this is the this actually is a perfect segue into the other point that i think is like really important and this is this was hashed out very well that i didn't understand it really again because i haven't read the book um but like from the other stuff until uh the podcast that he had with uh russ roberts on econ talk um it's like okay so the the real benefit there is you know ideas don't die and he actually talked about this at the talk as well it's like the ideas don't die it is the um the the the people that hold the ideas they die um and that's

really important but like the the meta observation in that instance is that like individuals aren't rational and like individuals don't learn from seeing like other people die in a system right like the system itself is rational because it allows the the idiots to like get get knocked off yeah yeah you have to you have to have that sort of uh correcting mechanism within a system right yeah yeah yeah straight up but it's like you know so if you see um like say me and you were you know in like a group of like 100 people and we're supposed to like bet stocks or whatever right um and like you know we see like you know someone who bets like all their money like we start off with 100 bucks right and like you know like say me and you uh like like i

i bet uh all my money in one stock uh and you bet like you know five stocks 20 bucks each right and it's like i die real quick it's like you know the concept is not like you don't learn from like watching me and be like oh like that was fucking stupid it's like it's it's a it's a higher it's like one order above that and it's just like you know because like i am not there in the long run it's like the system is going to be healthier yeah yeah like an organic system in organic like you talk about like fractals and shit like that and fractals are messy and you ever read uh what's the dude's name i read this in college mandelbrot mandelbrot i have not but santiago we're fucking riffing off santi again but like he's gotten deep because mandelbrot talked a lot about information

theory from what i understand uh the book that i read is had a yellow cover i don't remember the title of it but it was it was about fractals it was actually really easy to read like i'm not a huge math guy at all um but like it was a it was a very accessible book yeah that's uh hey we're adding it to the book club what what is the what is the title of this book let's quickly google uh we're we're i'm dead ass serious i'm i'm actually to let you freaks know i'm creating a website i'm finally getting to it and we're gonna we're gonna have a book club list we've got uh the sovereign individual number one marcus aurelius meditations all to lab inserto um human action by mizes what else do we have on the book club uh sapiens i don't know who it's by uh

knowledge of power by george gilder this is a verbal list for you and now we're going to add a mandelbrot book so it's called the misbehavior of markets um but then the the famous one that it's it's called the fractal geometry of nature that's not the one that i read i read the misbehavior of markets and he essentially like takes the concept of fractals and he like applies it to uh like markets because you know in his opinion they're they're organic systems um yeah because they're at the end of the day the end points of these markets are humans making decisions exactly and humans can die and like that that's the that's the positive of the situation um and that's um who the fuck was talking about this today no george gilder george gilder last night

when i was watching that video like uh the wall street journal uh interview he did i don't know where you can find that but he was talking about like we only like humans as a species have only gotten this far because we we know how to like hold knowledge within us and pass it on to the next generation like we're the alpha alpha fucking species on the planet because we can pass information on from generation to generation growing our knowledge base to a point where like it allows us to like speak through these fucking microphones and send to the internet i have no idea how that happens but it happens because of people that came before us and we're one of the only we're the only species in the world that can sort of hand down that knowledge from generation

of generation and that's hugely important it is super important and also i mean if we want to bring this back to the realm of politics that's why like you know if you deal if you have someone who loses a bunch of people money or who screws a bunch of people over but then they're not exited from the from that same like social circle um you know you're you're not properly or accurately representing an organic system um i mean like a an easy example is like someone who you know someone who was running a large bank and then you know during the financial crisis got bailed out and then was hired for a political position or a politician that then that bailed out a bunch of banks and then was hired by a bank um you know it's like that that is not an accurate representation

of like like conceptually what would happen in in in a natural way what happened in february 2009 was so fucked up all these banks got bailed out and all the fucking executives left with tens of millions of dollars of bonuses like i'm just gonna walk away deal right no not at all fuck man okay so then the question is though acknowledging that that system is better um or at least okay that's a little too strong of a statement that that the system where you know people have to pay for their sins um how do you how do you weight that versus the idea of like not leaving uh humans out to dry or i guess like the concept of like humanism right where like you know you really want to like you know care for someone and uh you know you you don't want people to be

like screwed by the system so because i think in certain degrees they can be in direct relation or direct conflict with one another so this is a great tweet kevin fam love him or hate him he's one of the most controversial people on crypto twitter i fucking love him i very much appreciate the tip that he's on sort of forcing people to think hard about the space and this is something that i don't think he brought up originally i think other people brought this up like desantis has brought this up andrew desantis but anarchy on a global scale when oh i've seen this actually global scale um what is it like it's libertarianism on a federal scale libertarianism on a federal scale socialism on a no no republican on a state scale socialism

on a local scale and then communism on the family scale yeah i didn't know that was associated with that dude but yeah i saw that i loved it i think it's spectacular it makes sense though right it does like because there's fractals of this shit there's like different levels of this shit well it's it's it's degrees of um so let's describe that again perfectly like you did it better than i okay okay so it's anarchy yeah and now i fuck it up um anarchy on a global scale right so therefore like you know there are no laws between any like countries right so like theoretically like the implications of that are like no un yeah um so so the understanding of that is like you know the un doesn't really have much power in the first place but whatever right

So, anarchy on a global scale. On a federal scale, so, like, you know, in between the states, like, going up to the federal government is libertarianism. So, basically, like, you know, you let each state do whatever they want, you know, within a, to a high degree, basically, except for the very necessary things that a federal government needs to do that only need to be regulated, like, in between states. um and then on a on a state scale so you're you're a republican so basically like low taxes because that feeds for the most taxes being able to be allocated on a local scale um where you're democratic or democrat right um so therefore like most of people's taxes are going towards uh you know what they are specifically seeing in like on their everyday lives like in their town etc and then you know with your family and friends you just like like you treat them as your equals and you know if they need something like you you hook them up unequivocally yeah and that's like i want more people to adopt that world it is a mind-blowing concept for for people especially

in this day and age that they they identify themselves with one party or the other and that is there's levels to it there's levels it's it's scalability right exactly yeah exactly and And that's, maybe that's what, maybe that's the problem we're going to solve on this podcast tonight, is the levels of this shit. I'd be okay with that, yeah. Just like, you know, solving some world issues. But that's an interesting concept that I've never heard until recently. Yeah, yeah.

It was literally like, I spouted that to my girlfriend like, I don't know, like a few weeks ago. Right. And she just like looked at me like I was a psycho. All the crypto girlfriends think we're all psychos. Just, it's amazing. Thank God Bitcoin is appreciated in price. Because I think they would have left us a long time ago.

I don't disagree with that at all. But maybe that's the ending thought that we leave people with. We've been in here for almost two hours. What time is it? Has it really been that long? It's fucking... Oh, shit. It's almost eight.

Let me see. I almost destroyed this art, this beautiful artwork of Viva La Stool. Yeah, 7.50. Yeah, we're at 1.45, so we're probably, like, clipping, like, an hour. and 38 minutes right now so we got we got like 20 minutes okay okay um you want to talk about what you posted earlier today in the newsletter yeah yeah so the newsletter what i posted today was by ted nelson i believe the name is uh a paper written or book written in 1987 called hyper world um i only posted the introduction i only read the introduction i haven't read the

whole book but basically back in 87 the way this guy envisioned how the internet would play out was that everything would be like distributed via hypertext like everybody would just like exchange information via links and he brought up some apprehensions to the way the internet was evolving because he thought that there was a lot of confusion being made because there was multiple programming languages like you go c++ rust k and again javascript python all that shit i believe his his thesis was that the different languages would create like a babble situation where it's confusing to an extent and i believe i believe he's still alive i believe he would argue that the internet today is confusing people to an extent because it's not as easy to build

uh for for applications built in different languages to communicate with each other But the concept that he laid out in that paper of how ideas are spread and how language sort of dictates how we interact in this world, it was fascinating, specifically going back to the written word and sequential order of words, basically bringing up the fact that you do not need sequential order of words to describe something. people can learn things via like memes and shit like that so memes are the example that i fell back on is like we are able to express ideas via a picture in two words that that speak probably thousands of words to people um i don't know where you want to take this but that's what i'm gonna say about it yeah no i mean i thought it was interesting um i agree with the way that you just described it i mean i think you know his whole thing was that you know in or at least in the intro uh throughout history things have been bound by like physical necessities therefore

like you know books are in sequence because of the fact that you need to like print it and then you need to like have the paper and then you know like that's how the sentence is structured and you know it's like born out of that now if you look at it from uh like you know with the advent of computers it's like you know that sort of removes it uh i think it was funny how he was like oh you know like you're gonna have like cd-roms and and those cd-roms are gonna allow you to like jump jump on yeah i think it definitely had a uh well that idea sort of stuck around until like the early 2000s oh no it was totally yeah yeah yeah minority report like a minority report they were fucking loading cd-roms up to the you remember that like tom cruise like fucking yeah

that was a good movie yeah i fucking love that movie great movie to watch yeah um well i mean it was like it was like pressure in that that sense because i mean before like when he was talking about it like that was not the case um but i think uh he i i guess where i found myself chuckling more than anything else when i was reading it is like he he had such a uh he was melodramatic i guess um in the way he was describing it like specifically in the sentence when he was talking about like the uh the software and the cd-roms he said something to the effect of like the information lords will like deliver the information to the information peons or something which is like funny there's a good there's a good argument to be made that facebook's doing that

right now well facebook i don't disagree i just think it uh it like mitigates the the power that individuals do have like a lot of stuff has has gone like like uh bottom up there right like you know the whole overthrow in north africa like on all those countries like you know they referred to those like the facebook revolutions right like that's not that's not top down yes it goes both ways but again there's levels to the shit levels levels levels true um so i would argue like open projects like bitcoin wordpress drupal uh no js like shit like that like a very organic like bottom up but then like facebook they'll sort of like lull their their usership into like a sense of security and then exploit them like they they like nudge exactly and like it's been proven

that facebook can fucking change people's like thoughts like they can literally feed you things that will make you think a certain way and give you certain feelings that's not good uh so that i would say like that information lords facebook is an information lord in the sense that they fucking have all of our metadata they know where we go they track our cookies across the internet and then sell that data to advertisers who then are like hey i know you're depressed right now what was the thing about like depression that there was something like recently that like there was advertisers taking advantage of like depression sentiment on facebook that that does not surprise me in the least and it's definitely fucked up no but with the advent of like blockchain

technology and what block stack's doing right now specifically like block stack is coming from the ethos of no facebook should not have that data like carte blanche they should not be able to get everything like just suck it from you and basically have it being a pull transaction where they pull all your data from you automatically it should be a push transaction where you say hey if i'm going to interact with facebook i'm going to push this data to you where and because this is the only data that i'm willing to push to you um so maybe that's like so that goes into the argument and maybe the first iteration of the internet wasn't the best iteration and there are more iterations to come uh maybe built on blockchain did you ever read any of the

freakonomics books i've read chapters of freakonomics yeah so a roe v wage blew my mind um the bagel experiment blew my mind um what else uh well the one that i was thinking of in particular is that they had one i don't remember specifically this was a long time ago but they were discussing uh how to solve for the problem of people not being a organ donors um and they they basically the government changed it i forget which country it might have been in the no it was it's not the u.s um but they they tweaked it so it was between a push and a pull transaction right really yeah yeah yeah i i forget what government it is but basically like you know in in some situations like you are assumed to be an organ donor unless you decide to opt out

and like that basically like solve the problem i mean yeah the problem of like of of not having enough organ donors yeah because like it's it's a real fucked up situation let's bring up an externality okay have you heard this externality like so the medical associate or like the medical industry is very very very afraid of automatic cars like self-driving cars because a lot of the organs that get donated to people come from car accidents so the advent of self-driving cars is going to make it so that there's no car crashes and no organs to be donated and there's going to be like a shortage of organs to be donated on the market like that's like is that a negative or i mean obviously it's a negative externality but like what is the net net like is the positive of

like no people dying in car accidents bigger than people not being able to get organs like that's a that's a heavy question that's like a freakonomic stat right there yeah those are hard policy decisions and then it begs the question of should you be able to sell your organs on the open market like or it should be a should it be a black market I'll fucking sell my kidney I'll sell a kidney a hundred grand yeah seriously though who wants it I don't know what blood type I am

I'll go get tested is that bad that I don't know my blood type oh dude I don't know my so so so I guess what we can take out of this podcast is neither of us have voted we don't know how to pronounce words correctly and we also don't know our blood type so this is good we're adults you're listening to the dumbest people on the internet

right now congratulations um let's not end on a dumb note okay oh okay i i got a question that i'm curious about it could be construed as dumb go for it okay so like um i'm sure you're aware uh that uh what's his face mcafee uh said he's he would eat his own dick if bitcoin were a million bucks i think he said 500 grand okay either way yeah i mean like the question is like would you rather be able to watch him eat his own dick or have it be 500 grand? I've seen dick chop before on the dark web.

I would not wish that on anybody. Okay. I don't know what that is, but I feel like I don't want to know what that is. It's like fucking Mr. Hands. Have you seen Mr. Hands? I don't know what that is either. You guys did not watch enough crazy internet videos

growing up, all right? I've seen dick chop. I would not wish that on the world. I would take the 500K. Okay, that's fair. Just curious. Do not Google. Do not Google.

Do not Google what I just mentioned. Mr. Hands or Dick Chop. As you pump it like three times. Dick Chop might be one of the most traumatizing videos I've ever seen in my life. I regret watching it. It's replaying in my mind now. I'm a little shivering behind the mic right now.

So we're going to end it on Dick Chop tonight. Bob Fogg, B-O-B-B-F-O-G. g marty bent appreciate it thanks for coming on where can we find out more about you just twitter uh that's a good question yeah i mean i guess my twitter um double b double g uh b o double b f o double g come on get it right yeah yeah i was gonna say dude i'm literally like trying to like look up what my twitter handle is but but yeah yeah yeah you you can find me there and do you have a parting note for any of the freaks out there like i don't want to say advice but like just like a one yeah man uh buy bitcoin like that sam anything one tidbit you guys are great i had

to let you roll with that i want i want one line of advice from sam anything it could be anything it could be if you don't use it you lose it like something like that whatever hi sham it's perfect and you heard it here first all right freaks uh that's what we got this week peace and love woo awesome that was fun yeah right

you guys are rolling