TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #87: Conner Brown

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Conner Brown to discuss how he became interested in Bitcoin, philosophy, the intersubjective nature of money, Kanye West, and much more. Follow Conner on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_ConnerBrown_ Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Shoutout to our sponsor: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy Marty here to introduce this week's sponsor. This week's episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by the Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store for the last two years and the first P2P finance app to let you freaks buy Bitcoin. Now you can withdraw Bitcoin as well. And if you send Bitcoin off of the app, you can send it to a BEC32 address that's being slowly rolled out. On top of all these bitcoin functionalities you can join the cash app boost program which allows you to get a personalized debit card and you go to merchants that are associated with the boost program like chipotle door dash whole foods any local coffee shop to get money back when you're

shopping there so download the cash app today make sure you use the promo code stacking sats that's stacking sats uh one word you'll get five dollars and five dollars will be donated to owls lacrosse which is a charity in chicago helping underprivileged youths basically learn life skills via the sport of lacrosse it's incredible program that i was very uh very lucky to be a part of for many years while i was in chicago and i'm happy to support them here so make sure you use the promo code stacking sats when you go to the google play store or apple app store and download the cash app today hope you freaks enjoy this episode with connor brown connor is an incredibly bright young man we had a far wide-ranging conversation and i think you guys are going

to enjoy it peace and love what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here in one of our relegation studios in the building uh sitting with a very very special friend who i met last week in person for the first time we got drinks and spoke for hours about bitcoin i'm happy to introduce you freaks to connor brown connor welcome to the podcast what is up freaks what is up dude had a lot of fun last week honestly it's been amazing coming to new york and hanging out with the bitcoiners and um yeah that was that was a great conversation we had you're uh so you're in new york for the summer uh doing a isn't yeah i'm working uh as a summer associate a lot summer associate in the

city i don't want to i don't want to denigrate you with the intern title so i forget yeah summer associate yes um coming to the to the east coast from the left coast went to stanford for college you live in sf now correct i went to wake forest for college wake forest for college that's right and then i'm at stanford law school stanford law school now um so what's it like on the left coast it's different it is certainly different um i'm originally from north carolina so it's good to be back on the east coast um but it's been really great i mean i don't think i would be here if i hadn't went to stanford um because it's it's a place where new ideas are welcome and you know you can kind of stand on the shoulders of giants there and i think that was um really good for me

and what initially even got me thinking about blockchain turned bitcoin so i think that was really important yeah i'm sorry i muffed up the intro you're a stanford law student so it doesn't matter uh as is typical for tales for the crypts how did you get like i know you were just on stefan's podcast and you got into like your understanding of bitcoin but like what initially drew you like what was your background and what like philosophically or uh ideologically drew you towards this yeah well internet money i think the the big thing for me you know my background is in philosophy and sociology and what I really enjoyed in philosophy was you know thinking about the human experience and you know

respecting human subjectivity basically so I love Nietzsche I thought that his take on perspectives and interpretation and the fact there is no source of objective truth but you know this thing called knowledge is just something that that these animals called humans have created and uh sort of invented and it's here and it'll be gone um that was that was really really important for me and kind of like getting a grounding in the world and i think um you know especially that was radical for me coming up from rural north carolina um that's not the sort of ideas you you deal with there typically what uh what are you dealing with rural North Carolina? Um, you know, it's, I come from a really small town. Um,

and you know, it's pretty religious. It's pretty, um, you know, traditional and I'm not against those things, but I don't think that was quite the right fit for me. So once I kind of learned about philosophy, that was a big moment for me to sort of question, you know, our place in the world and all those sorts of like really big ideas and i think that bitcoin is what uh the nature of bitcoin um really aligned with with my view of the world um which is it respects you know human subjectivity um and you know creates a system um of communicating sort of subjective values and that was like all very very mind-blowing and that was when i was like okay this is something big when uh when was this exactly well i think that um you know it was listening to lots of podcasts

and reading as much as i could about it and i had been interested in economics before learning about bitcoin but it didn't really resonate with me because it's so mathy it's very um objective it's very much based on you know how can we model and predict humans and you know when i started reading some of the Austrian texts, it was clear from the very beginning, like they had a really deep understanding of humans and on a philosophical level. I mean, like Mises human action starts with just like several chapters talking about there's no such thing as a rational or irrational human. We're all just acting on our preferences and desires and you know, that's really all we

can do is communicate those through our actions. So that was huge. And so for creating a system that allows you to communicate those in a pure way was just big for me. No, I think that's the one thing that draws me towards Austrian economics in particular as well is the first principle understanding of human nature and not even human nature, just the fact that humans are part of nature and are not as calculable or calculated.

Calculable? Probably calculable is the word I'm looking for. like you're not able to be measured and uh predict like they don't make predictable actions um especially when new information is rising exactly every day and i think it's one thing that blows my mind about like college and learning about economics i've beaten this topic to death on this podcast so like not even being introduced to a lot of those topics is really makes you wonder like why do they want you to think this certain way and the system has to be this way and in today's day and age in the mainstream and the neoliberal Keynesian view of the world um so it is interesting and philosophy is actually the one thing that I fell back on a lot was that's what I

wasted all my electives on yeah and uh Nietzsche scared the shit out of me but I'd like to um it is scary I mean it's scary to um grapple with uh our sort of randomness in the universe and that's a really scary thought and people don't want to admit to that in a way or give in to that But I think it is important to, you know, it's about being humble and stacking sats, right? And so, like, humility and recognizing that human experience is no different than a mosquito's, it's just random and relative, is important. And we can build values out of this world we live in and the perspectives we have, but it's not capital T true. It's not objective. And I think that's a big thing that brought me to Bitcoin

in the sense that we have all these objective sciences and they've been incredibly beneficial for humanity. But when we take that sort of objective nature and try to map it on the social sciences, that's where things get really scary. Yeah, social science seems like a bit of an oxymoron when you say it out loud. It is.

It is a very, very strange thing. And I think another thing in this that can be difficult is, you know we can go too far in the sense that um i think a lot of people embrace money being subjective money just being this arbitrary belief system and i don't think that's right either um it bitcoin respects subjectivity but money itself is not a subjective system yes was the uh the crux of our discussion not the crux of it but a good part of our discussion last week is uh and this was actually mentioned you on the podcast a few episodes ago with dan held and we actually brought up uh your argument over this and i think dan said uh money is a shared recognition not not

a shared illusion that's probably the uh the fallacy we're trying to bunk right now is money is not a shared illusion there is intersubjectivity involved that that makes certain monetary goods better than others so let's jump into it yeah no i think that's really important um i know a lot of people I've heard a lot of people talk about this I know Neil Woodfine is a really strong proponent of this sort of framing thing Stefan Levera too and I think that this was sort of a big moment for me in realizing the the the strange place we're in from a monetary perspective I was in this class at Stanford Business School where they sort of bring in the top financial minds one of them was uh this guy named marty chavez who's like the cfo of goldman sachs and um you know of course

being the bitcoin in the room i asked him what do you think of bitcoin and he says um well i think it has a fair market value of zero and i was like you know i didn't want to make too big of a thing in the middle of class but i at least went back and i said um don't you think that you know for something to have the best monetary properties we've seen in terms of scarcity durability verifiability transportability that it could have some value and in front of class he pulls out dollar bill does the classic little tactic and he says you know this only has value because I believe in it and that we all believe in it and it's just you know a shared illusion this is just a piece of paper it doesn't really mean anything and that was like a big moment

me because i was like holy shit these like top finance minds don't understand money no let's let's dip this in the butt right now like the u.s dollar in particular is not a shared illusion that people have coalesced on we are literally forced to use the dollar because it's the only currency through which we can pay taxes here in the u.s so it's not uh a a monetary good that has naturally drawn sort of the users that Bitcoin is in the

way it is and its nature is people are usually in this country in particular are forced to use it and just so happens when you force people to convert their currencies into US dollars by oil that'll strengthen that currency as well and make it seem like a reserve currency that's won out

in the open market and that's I think the conversation that people are beginning to have more and more not even a conversation the the the quote-unquote awakening of holy shit i don't know what money is and bitcoin's helping me uh sort of learn what money is as we go and again questioning strong beliefs and strong uh not not capital t truce but what people believe to be truce in in their in their worldview yeah i think that's exactly right and you know our monetary system is based on coercion and violence um at the end of the day and so i mean that doesn't mean that our dollars aren't a decent form of money i mean they were really good and for the

tech we had at the time right um but it certainly you know comes down to um it's not subjective but it's intersubjective like you said so it's it's based on these properties that really give it that value and just like a language you know and you know when we're speaking we are communicating subjective values you know i'm you know exist in the subjective state and i want to express that my feelings my emotions my you know incredibly complex human self with you and i do that through a shared you know medium protocol english language protocol and that's the beauty i mean that's the beauty of money is that it's you know one of these key cornerstones of human civilization you know money for communicating subjective value and language for communicating subjective ideas and

emotions and those things have been so important for humans to kind of evolve over the years and recognize them recognizing them as having these important properties is really really important to understanding money in the first place you know you could imagine a language that's super inefficient we don't use that we use the one that you know over the years has been best for explaining and describing and communicating expressing how we feel and um you know if a new language came up that allowed people to express themselves better to um have less misunderstandings and have less conflict then i think that eventually over years if it's good enough it would beat out english or beat out whatever dominant language there is yeah and you

extrapolate that to money and a bitcoin imagine uh all the wars that may be avoided from the the uh the friction that's caused by things like sanctions and uh having to convert your currency to us dollars to buy oil if everybody's just running on bitcoin i have one standard metric unit of monetary value across the planet commerce and uh arguably uh peace would be would be a lot better in this world or there would be more peace in this world and more commerce yeah no i think that's exactly right and and that's what's so exciting about this um is because you know like any language that has certain philosophical ideas kind of baked into it um there's some really interesting studies on this how different people um you know have different philosophical

views kind of inherent in their language and money is a language for communicating values and brings its own philosophical assumptions kind of baked in to our money and i think that you know this is the classic thing we talk about time preference but the money that we communicate with right now is based on you know this idea of conspicuous consumption on spending over saving because it's constantly on force exactly um this is a question i haven't posited on this podcast before but popped into my mind while we're thinking of this like so obviously the the language argument like people have different language different protocols it's pretty obvious like you can go to certain areas and use them in certain languages and certain parts of the world are more advantageous than

others i'm not going to go to mexico and start start speaking farsi people are not gonna know what i'm saying but um so people are like very well attuned with that that reality that we have with languages with money like do you think i don't want to put this pressure on you to answer this question just want to like throw it out there like are we the most ignorant civilization that's ever been on this planet when it comes to understanding money um oh gosh um i mean i do think that we are sort of in this collective forgetting um that traditionally and you know nick zabo's piece on shelling out it's great on this um you know traditionally we need an asset that is trustless you know that we can communicate value with and set like for final settlement

between people and then we also have debt instruments for people that we can trust and that they're ongoing relationships and both have been very very important and it's sort of this weird historical anomaly we find ourselves in where we don't have a trustless asset for final settlement but even our monetary base is a debt asset and we're forced to communicate with a debt asset and what does that mean i mean that comes with um a lot of the the bubbles we're seeing right now like our student loan industry exists so solely because there's all these students that are just given cheap debt and then there's an industry right there to take it off their hands as soon as they walk in the door it's not even industry it's the government exactly and there's

and then that has you know ripple effect throughout the economy then you have you know i'm seeing in law school right i'm super lucky to go to a good law school because law school in large part is just a big um scam in a ways uh so many law schools you know half the cool half the kids pass the bar it's incredibly expensive um but people are sold on the idea that you know you get the funding and you can go to law school and you're given loans that they don't care if you're gonna actually be able to pay them back or not and so you have entire cottage industries of terrible law schools just pitching people on that dream knowing that they can get access to debt that um you know be good for that that school in the short term so yeah so that's the short term

uh sort of vig is oh yeah i get to go to law school quote unquote maybe i'll get out and get out a good firm and get a good salary enough to pay back this hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt but the long-term implications are we're seeing it unfold here in the united states but it's more pronounced in japan i know this because i went over the stats about a month ago japan's birth rates falling very low because i believe there was a there was a survey they went out in japan and said uh something like 89 percent of millennials in japan are afraid to start with like don't aren't even thinking of having kids because their economic situation you can easily see that um situation beginning to bubble up here in the states too with the college

debt problem and uh kids our age and a few years above us and below us getting out of college and delaying family formation um because they're in too much debt it's expensive to have kids and think about while you're paying back the immense amount of debt that you're in from school just years out to think about bringing somebody into this world and having to pay for for their debt for the next 18 years is uh is definitely daunting for a lot of people right now but these are the types of ripple effects that you're alluding to it's uh it's a slow generation it takes a generation probably generational decline of family formation that i mean i'm not going to say that the birth rate is going to fall to to a point where like we're not going to be able to have

like a growing economy but it is getting to a point where people aren't having kids because they don't they have too much debt and don't make enough money sorry for that rant no no it's it's it's causing a lot of frustration and and you know this is no surprise but because of the situation we find ourselves in political anger is just you know at crazy levels right now everyone on both sides are just so angry and i think you know a lot of that comes down to monetary problems but i don't think many people realize that it's it's a very difficult thing because people feel like there's something wrong the average person i think feels that they're getting poor they feel like their money isn't going as far they feel like something at at the foundation is kind of

cracked and i think that explains sort of the extreme responses we're seeing in politics and i think it comes down to you know monetary problems and i think bitcoin gives people a voice to sort of express that frustration that's better than looking to the same places that caused the problem to try to fix it. Yeah, no, and it's not even people begin to feel poor and like worse off. Like that's been happening slowly but surely for a while.

Like I think it's gotten to a point where people feel like somebody's actively working against them to keep them down, to keep them treading water. And that's like, you talk to a lot of people and that's what it seems like. they're just treading water paycheck to paycheck trying to stay afloat no that's exactly right and and i think that this comes down you know there's there's a lot of anti-corporate sentiment there's

a lot of you know businessmen are evil um and i think that comes from you know if the problem is monetary you feel like you're getting screwed over when prices get more expensive but you don't necessarily know who's screwing you over um it's something i never really thought about until i learned about bitcoin but you know if something gets more expensive you think oh my gosh this company like they're just trying to rob me they're just you know their prices keep going up and i think it's easy to immediately blame corporate actors because of that um when really it's a problem of of money and incentives and what happens when you have cheap money or easy money um then naturally the incentives are going to be aligned in a way that make it harder for the

everyday individual to get along when you know cost of housing cost of health care cost of education are skyrocketing it's not that the people in those industries are evil it's that the system is through a system of easy money has created an incentive system where they're just aligned and making things go more expensive and and that's really really frustrating for the average person i think and explains a lot of socialist tendencies that people have um yeah and i actually that little uh explanation there made me think of my conversation with alex gladstein where he was talking about the banality of evil and i think that's like what a lot like i would like i don't think everybody in the healthcare industry is like uh ethical and stuff like that

especially like the gouging the opioid crisis and move that to the education um the education side like i don't think like the textbooks and i think the textbook industry is a scam like tenure professor like that whole rat there's like a racket but it's only allowed because of the way the system's set up so it's like the banality of evil they're just playing within the boundaries that have been given to them and taking advantage of of the system and in those two industries in particular like easy money for funding and then giving out loans just allows that that waste and that that sort of uh negative not negative incentive but what's the word i'm like a a bad incentive yeah perverse incentive there yeah i mean exactly yeah um you know when your

demand stays constant because the loans just keep on coming then economics 101 is going to say that you're going to have the ability to raise prices because you know demand stays yeah and this is this is like one of my biggest worries like i've said many times that that my biggest worry for bitcoin is apathy but it's also that people get so confused at the the the core of the problems and like like we're talking about the polarity of the politics in the country right now i've said it many times like they're they're it's two sides fighting uh like a losing battle like it'll be pyrrhic victories for either side like if they quote unquote win the battle they're fighting they're fighting the wrong battle right i mean because really it's it's two sides of the

same coin i mean on both sides there's a crisis of trust the left doesn't trust large corporations and the right doesn't trust big government and both of them are right in the sense that um something is going on but you know it's it's it's not that one is bad and the other is good it's that both of them are acting on their incentives to you know if if the government has the ability to give out billions and billions and uh subsidies then of course the corporations are going to spend money and lobby and try to get that subsidy for themselves um and vice versa if the you know it's easy for politicians to get elected based on uh corporate lobbying then they're going to be pandering to what corporations want so it's it's really two sides of the same coin and i think

your fears are valid um it does it does scare me um in terms of what the future looks like i I'm a very optimistic person, but short-term, it is scary. It is. What scares you the most? There is, as our friend Jerome Powell would put it, a lot of uncertainty. And, you know, I think that the idea that history bends towards freedom is very true. But I see that as a long-term proposition. and there's definitely been periods of human history where it bent the other way badly and

you know i i love the sovereign individual is that prophecy or is that possibility is a different question i hope the latter what i hope just possibility yeah i mean i think it's it's very exciting um but i worry that well the sovereign individual like end game is like or the middle game the midterm and middle medium term in the sovereign individual world is not bode well for our generation our generation probably yeah i agree i mean no matter how you put it the source of power right now is is being threatened well that's why it was beautiful to see this last week let's know we're meeting here in the studio it is uh 7 32 p.m on the east coast here wednesday july 17th 17th we just had two days of testimony on the hill uh david marcus from

facebook got called in front of capitol hill to basically explain libra and calibra and give the case for why the government should let it happen doesn't seem like that's going to happen right away um but before that we had munich come out earlier this week uh against libra and negative things about con about bitcoin as well but overall positive about bitcoin i think because it's i think it was overall positive with him then uh you had trump's tweet which was bitcoin is bad just straight up and then before that you had pal's testimony which uh in which he called bitcoin a digital store value like gold which i thought was very positive so this week in particular um you're talking about you alluded to that power like the power system and i thought today

out of the last seven days was the most powerful because you saw uh we saw uh people like uh peter mchenry is that the first name peter patrick patrick mchenry patrick mchenry from a representative from north carolina yeah from your home state i gotta go meet that guy it seems like he has a very firm grasp and is very he's luckily i think a vote or excuse me a ranking member in the house committee finance committee so he's a good ally to have after today it seems like it's a very good ally to have it started the day on cnbc saying bitcoin cannot be killed governments that have tried to kill it have failed it is an innovation that we should not deter um and he kept that that vibe going throughout the day uh in the senate or excuse me the house testimony or hearing and uh

we may have some fifth pillars in place that could help uh sort of convince the quote-unquote power that you alluded to earlier maybe be uh maybe be a little kind to bitcoin it's it's honestly such a strange historical moment i mean what timeline are we on right now what is this is this real i have no idea everything in the past week it just feels like you know one second we're memeing on twitter and then all of a sudden things got really serious um the impromptu meeting about cryptocurrencies shit coins got mentioned in fucking the united states it was a congress or the house of representatives i think it was the house of reps today like in the house representative shit coins is now in the history like it's in in the notes in in the u.s government in dc yeah

shout out to melt them shout out to melt them to morris did that whole paddle that joined her i mean i thought everybody was pretty yeah i don't think everybody was like a staunch bitcoiner but i think they did a good job at shitting on libra uh yeah it's it's such an incredible uh juxtaposition we have like the ultimate punching bag of you know facebook plus all the bankers that people hate against bitcoin i mean we really couldn't ask for a better enemy in a way um but i guess this goes back to what i'm saying which is like it's not an like it what scares me is that bitcoin is not necessarily inevitable and that we have to fight for it and that if we don't do it um there is a like i don't think libra is something to be taken lightly um because if they do manage to do

this well and we don't succeed i mean i could it's scary to think that you know this system of fiat currencies and maybe libra rebalances so you know the dollar is not even a large part of its holdings um but you know maybe this whole show goes on for another 50 years and maybe we look something more like china in terms of financial surveillance and things like that i mean there's really big stakes here that's the crossroads we're at right i mean you either go to a bitcoin or bitcoin like future or we have this slow drift towards china's towards china's complete pan digital panopticon um freaks like whether you know it or not like even here in the united states we're on that slow drift towards that inevitable future like at my cio at my when i worked at the

managed futures fund dimitri i've said this story before but he looked me in the eyes he immigrated to the u.s in 94 and he looked me in the eyes in 2012 and said marty this country's turning more and more into the soviet union that i ran away from every day just be aware like just be aware is that a little russian accent you got going on was that good that was pretty good all right good um but no it's uh people get complacent and they don't realize they're part of a slow drift and that's why i have this podcast the newsletter like i feel compelled to like you said fight for it and And my fight is via words and on paper, or not on paper, on the internet and spoken words over the internet as well. But yeah, we have to fight for it.

How do you wake people up to fight for it? Like we were saying earlier, people don't even know what the core of their problems are. We would argue it's the money. And how do we get people to focus on the money and then realize Bitcoin is probably a good scapegoat? Not even a scapegoat, an escape pod, if you will. it's hard man it's really hard and i think that um the next few years are going to be very very interesting um because right now when when you try to talk to someone about bitcoin you know you have to explain the macro landscape like bitcoin feels like a solution looking for a problem until

you realize this very very strange historical moment we're at where monetary systems have no room they have no leverage they have you know interest rates at all-time lows negative interest rates i mean we basically blew it out in 2008 trying to save the system and now i don't know what happens next um so it's terrifying but it's also very um hopeful for me in the sense that um I'm hoping that if something, when whatever monetary problems we're looking at in the future actually become the present, I think that that will be a really big moment for people to realize. Because that's when people are willing to question their ideology, question their everyday beliefs. and and i think that's why bitcoin is really difficult um to talk to people about and why people literally think you're a crazy person talking about bitcoin um because everything

seems fine right now you know we're like in the suspended moment where you jump out the window and you haven't hit the ground yet and you're like oh everything's fine um and so well let me interject here let's let's jump into your own story you very learned man learned gentleman and went to wake forest university studying law at stanford coming from north carolina uh you and your family you're telling me this last week have been been sort of the the crutch of information in your family for years out we'll go ask connor about it like he's got to be an expert on this and then as soon as you come out as a bitcoiner you're labeled as a kook crazy a loon so what was that like it's it's been a weird past year honestly because you know i come from this teeny

tiny town first person in my family to go to college and you know i felt like growing up i was like oh yeah that's that's connor like he's doing well in life like he's he's leaving the small town for the big city type thing um and then i get into bitcoin they're like oh no like what happened to him we lost him he joined the church of scientology um and and that's it's a really weird thing for family members to view you differently to view you like something happened to you um and you know like it it's a strange thing to lose credibility within your family because of something you believe in and um what was your have they turned a corner at all at this point um some of them have i think um it actually was so my direct family um are super supportive

uh it's more my extended family it's usually okay same with me yeah and um i i think it's a really weird thing because when you criticize bitcoin when you you know say things that make you a no-coiner you're in a really tough psychological state because when you watch it go up are you going to be a hypocrite are you going to buy in you know if someone told you hey i think 3 000 is looking good like you should consider just you know enough to that you feel comfortable with and then it goes up to 10 000 you're like oh my god i can't buy now it's too painful and then i mean it becomes this like really like harmful psychological circle you find yourself in if you make yourself an enemy of bitcoin because it's just gonna keep getting more painful until

you finally capitulate it's not even an enemy of bitcoin if you just deny the uh the basically what we would argue are descriptive personality traits of bitcoin that make it very highly likely that will become a money in the future a widely used money yeah um you don't even have to necessarily be an enemy just not having your mind open to the possibility that it has these attributes and and can fulfill that role leaves a lot of people in the dust and yeah it's like a lot of people talk about like people are going to be angry at bitcoiners if bitcoin ever takes over and i hope not i i mean you know if we're talking crazy hyper bitcoinization um dollar denominated debts aren't gonna be a thing anymore yeah um so i think that that's actually something that's

pretty hopeful um because you know we see wealth inequality skyrocketing um and that's not a coincidence. That's, in my opinion, a monetary situation. I mean, it just so happens that right at the end of Bretton Woods, all of these statistics start diverging. And it makes sense because at its very core, inflation really is just a regressive tax. And that's unacceptable. I mean, it taxes the people who have the least, the most. Because the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic order they don't have the luxury of investing in real estate or you know um these sorts of financial products or the or the know-how they keep their money in the bank and um you know the idea that inflation is somehow healthy for the economy i mean it's actually just taxing those

people um and so that's why it's such a incredible thing that um it doesn't have more support from the left i mean it's well how incredibly orwellian is it that inflation is good for people deflation is bad watch out for the deflationary spiral the deflationary spiral it's it's such a strange thing what's worse the deflationary spiral or the mining spiral mining death spiral well if people are really concerned with deflation then and and like these big shocks the economy they should be i mean you know inflation causes and um i think ray dalio's book big debt crises is amazing for this and he talks about when you have a central bank um that can control the money money supply it leads to large amounts of debt that eventually results in a crisis and a grand to leveraging and that's

the real deflationary crunch that people are so afraid of i mean so fast deflation or fast evaporation of wealth is very scary for society um but slow deflation is how things should be because we become better at production we become better at allocating capital and so it's bizarre to think that prices go up instead of down i mean naturally things should be cheaper and then incentivize the savings incentivizes capital accumulation people to think about building families right exactly it goes down to the language of money and and what concepts are embedded in the in the bottom of it and i think that's uh some of them it comes down to time preference and saving and planning yeah so let's envision a peaceful transition to bitcoin

with the government's help like is like imagine like if uh patrick mchenry patrick or peter i keep forgetting his name patrick patrick mchenry yeah i added him on twitter like five times i i should know this imagine if he becomes like a growing voice the republican party gets like support behind him and in america turns out to be some like bitcoin welcoming i mean this is very very maybe uh impractical hypothetical but let's let's appease it at this point like bitcoin becomes uh somewhat of a uh an okay thing here in the states and we begin collecting like how not collecting but the u.s sort of has a an open stance about bitcoin innovation and people using bitcoin in the country like what does a slow transition to that look like it is really hard

for me to imagine a slow transition just because you know i'm pretty firmly in line with what paranoid bull is thinking which is that you know there is this myth of the infallible central banker and that's going to come to an end sooner rather than later and i think when that does happen then it it's hard for me to imagine um a hyper bitcoinization that goes 20 or 30 years out because that crisis of confidence in central banks is going to happen soon in my opinion i mean soon being relative um but not 20 years from now um right like how much more ammo do they have and i don't know what they do i'm talking to philosophy majors in law school now like it's crazy how like up to speed you are with the with the like inner workings of the the global monetary

system and in the state of central banking in the world it's it's really a bizarre it's been a bizarre path and I think that you know it's one of those things that I felt when I was you know but before I really learned about Bitcoin that you know this is so complex I can't really understand it but you know Bitcoin in a way gives you confidence to think differently it gives you confidence to question the authority of these big figures and another really crazy moment it was in that same class that i mentioned earlier where we had you know big people in finance and and banking come in and talk to us and one was kevin warsh who is the the governor of the federal reserve in 2008 and he talked about his experience you know because he was the presiding governor

of the fed during qe during the very first qe and you know you expect them to say yes it's something we studied for months and we we uh projected years in the future we think this is a really good policy you know it was tim geithner made a phone call and said we need to fucking do this right now it was he said it was a few people in a room they talked about it for like an hour one afternoon and things were in a free fall and they felt that they had to do something and so they announced that day quantitative easing and they did not think through ramifications and he was not comfortable with it personally um and he was like you know we never expected it to be that large and we didn't expect every other country in the world to do the same thing we did and we

didn't expect it to happen a second time or a third time and now possibly a fourth time definitely a fourth time actually and that was a big moment for me i was like oh my god this is the guy who was in charge who was saying that there wasn't some master calculation one of the 12 people pulling the levers at that fed meeting it's come out and said we had no idea what we were doing and did it in haste i mean this is yeah and this is what drove me towards bitcoin in particular like i was senior high school fall of 08 taking an economic selective and just so happened to have a teacher was like this is all bullshit like let's go through tarp let's follow what they're saying this is not going to work out and then you continue that journey uh you follow the fed

they hit these projections the one the one thing they were like oh yeah we'll never monetize the debt they're monetizing the debt now they're they're not following up on any of their promises or any of the targets that they set for themselves the projections that they set um and and then the the quote-unquote good kpis are being hit like unemployment um uh cpi and stuff like that those are manipulated beyond belief like yeah people people harp on unemployment but nobody talks about participation rate like these are things these are things that like are hidden through statistics like and it's disgusting to an extent yeah and what does it mean that we need full employment i mean at one point we had it so that one person's income could sustain a family

do we really need i mean even elizabeth warren i don't agree with a lot of what she says but i mean she has writings about the two income trap and and how you know it's like this paranoid bull helped her with that apparently yeah i heard that that was really interesting um and and i mean we just heard that they're ending qt i mean that was earlier this year that you know all the things that they put on the balance sheet that wasn't monetizing debt suddenly isn't going to come off and in fact more might go on and i mean if that's if that's not validation of what we're saying i don't know what is i mean these people don't know what they're doing and it's and it's not because they're bad at it it's because they've literally been given an impossible task we don't have a

committee to set the price of mangoes right we don't have a we see what price and wage controls do in other countries it can't handle the incredibly complicated nature of the market and and the prices and and what is so important is through a system of prices we can each communicate our subjective desire and it's this incredibly nuanced and beautiful system and so when you have 12 people sitting around a table determining interest rates i mean you're doing the exact same thing as price control it's in a different metric but it's getting at the same thing which is the individuals in the marketplace are not able to communicate themselves they have to rely on a central authority to plan it out for them and they're going to fail because they can't capture

the nuances. It's impossible. It is impossible. The amount of information packed into a price is incalculable for 12 people sitting in 12 different rooms spread out throughout the United States and extrapolate that to other central banks in Japan, Europe, China or wherever it may be you cannot you cannot calculate that minute detail into your your metrics like it's just impossible and that's why are people so afraid to just let nature play its course and let let the markets do their thing well i think that i think this goes to a lot of the things we're talking about which is that you know with the 20th century we see this incredible rise in human standard of living through the objective sciences right our mathematics and our hard sciences and

you know i think with that same arrogance you know this idea and and i think that of course that's benefited society in immense ways and so with human arrogance we take that and try to apply it to real people and i think that for prices we've determined that's probably not a good idea but for interest rates and the monetary supply it's sort of this inertia of tradition that has made us believe in these infallible central bankers well it's not even tradition it's a generation's worth of stuff tradition i mean in terms of what we believe and are taught i think that there's an inertia so far from the federal reserve but i mean of course we're a total aberration from from history in the sense that um we're we're passing around this debt asset as our

monetary base i mean that's truly bizarre yeah it really is and and going back to like pricing like it's funny that people don't realize that like interest rate is pricing the price of money and stuff like manipulating that is like manipulating prices or setting price floors or ceilings not exactly but akin to those actions and yeah i mean i i even prices themselves i don't i think people um don't understand the incredibly beautiful nature of prices which is that it can take all this information to take weather disease pesticides the traffic jams in the ocean yeah put them into put that information into a price into a number yeah into a number exactly i mean it's like the original you know neural network type idea that

You can have every single individual slightly pulling in different directions and tweaking it. And it creates these ripple effects to people across the world you'll never even know through a price. It's such an incredibly complex system. Imagine the efficiencies that can be gained on a Bitcoin standard. How would a Bitcoin standard affect this pricing mechanism or the communication of value across the world? That is something that's so exciting to me. I mean, the idea that we can have a stable, honest base and we can prevent these distortions in other markets. I mean, that's what I wrote one of my articles or the intrinsic value article about, which is like when we don't have...

Let's dive into this, please. That's what I was talking about with Dan Held when we brought it up is intrinsic value. Like stores of values today, gold, real estate in particular were the ones you harped on in this article. They have intrinsic value. gold can be used in computers and people can live in homes and real estate and they're being potentially misused as stores of value and imagine the untapped potential that could be opened up if they were just put to productive use no it's it's so crazy and exciting that we have this like pure vehicle for communicating our time and energy and storing that safely um and and you know we

think that it's natural for people to store their time in these things because that's all we're used to. But really, I mean, we're taking very important commodities off the market just because we need some sort of safe deposit box. And so I think that that's another thing that causes a lot of frustration for people. How did you come to this realization in particular? Because I had not heard this argument uh until your your article i think i got tired of peter schiff ranting against bitcoin and and i think it also goes to um my background in debate was just just like what i was i really loved doing in debate was just take whatever they say is good and say it's bad or whatever they say is bad say it's good um and so i was like how do i apply that to bitcoin um and

intrinsic value seemed one that was perfect for that because the fact that it is this pure form of money is such a benefit um and i don't i don't remember even how i i might have actually been talking to dan in san francisco when we kind of like we were just kind of talking back and forth and we're like wait a second this is a really good thing um and and kind of flipping that because i think it's a powerful thing um because people love to harp about intrinsic value and you know it's such a fuck you out grease fan it's unbelievable it really is unbelievable how people can make this argument and i think that the fact that the average person i mean it goes to like stocks and things like that too because i mean the average person for them to save

has to basically gamble on country uh companies right the idea that the average person saves for retirement by putting it all in a company's stock is such a bizarre thing right like why don't we have something to actually save our time especially in a world that's changing as fast as it is and as incoming companies are being cycled through um pretty quickly now like you're either innovating or becoming obsolete and the chariot and portfolios actually most portfolios probably buying index funds right now and just riding that wave but if you had to like be an individual stock picker you're looking to save your purchasing power over time as an individual you're probably throwing darts at the wall you don't even know what's going on

um epsilon theory put out an article about this like saying there is no alpha anymore like it's just passive is like the only way to really do it and you know i think that also goes right back to our money that's what uh so you freaks that are listening to this episode may have heard our episode with epsilon theory too which is the episode that will be posted before this episode that we're recording right now and we hope we got into that like yeah active investors getting it's not worth he gave his funds money back because he felt like unethical taking 220 in this in this rigged market like it's bizarre and you know i've talked to some of the you know biggest asset managers and there are real concerns about japanification of our economy and like

you know this this this idea and and i think this is something that was also pretty terrifying to come to realize it's like when you step back and think about it like everyone just the the way to invest anything is just throw it into a vanguard account let it ride and i mean it's it's to such an extent that like my brother's friends in high school are investing in robin hood and things like that i mean that just feels like a bubble this idea that you can always guarantee yep six seven percent return every year it's fine just let it ride it'll go up it'll go down that's a that sounds too good to be true exactly too good to be true it sounds like there's a risk free asset and you know japan learned the hard way it hadn't crashed so bad i mean 20 years later

you like broke even yeah broke even and then going back to what we're talking about earlier don't have people their birth rate's like 1.4 over there like they're not able to create new families you have a million hermits that are so ashamed that they're they're not making their family proud by attaining the the uh professional level that that uh is culturally quote-unquote acceptable there um and now they're hermits because because they've been beaten by the system i would argue yeah yeah and and how that you know we can see i don't know we'll see how it keeps filtering through i don't know how much more the system can take and in the sense of just the stock market that just keeps going up forever well you just look away from stocks and go back

to interest rates and you just look at the interest rate charts and there's only a couple ways i can go it's either a hover at zero or break through that xx access and that's when i think so like a lot of people don't try and time it don't try and time it like timing it's impossible anybody who's fought the fed in the past has lost and probably will in the future but in my opinion all you have to do is look at the fed funds rate chart and look at where it's going and in my opinion as soon as it breaks that x-axis i think a lot of people are gonna be like wait the shit's negative now like just even your layman is gonna be like this doesn't make any sense you know you it's it's incredible how little people i mean i and this goes to me too like i

didn't realize what a bizarre world we're looking at in terms of interest rates i mean the idea that you get paid to take out a loan in large parts of the world is insane and when you tell someone that they're like what negative interest rates that's a thing and you're like yeah that's that's a thing you can get paid to take out a loan no and people just really don't realize um you know what's going on so i i do hope that bitcoin can serve as a way to kind of get people to inquire i i think realistically though it won't be out of optimism that people go into bitcoin but out of desperation um the vast majority but you know i was talking to dan about this and you know he was like talking about the science fiction series where they know that the galaxy is going to have

some serious trouble and you know they see these historical trends so they see their role as how do we how do we get through this dark time we're approaching as fast and as cleanly as possible yeah it's reduce a 30 000 year travesty to a thousand years i believe is that science fiction book yeah that's exactly right yeah and i think that's a very admirable goal and i think that's so exciting um you know when you're learning about bitcoin is i think a lot of people have this yearning for adventure this idea that we you know want to do something big but you know the adventures we've been given are very cold you know they're dark souls or they're fortnight i mean that's our idea of adventure um and it feels like things are very stagnant before you learn

about bitcoin all right and again this goes back to the the issue or not the issue the the theme that i've been talking about is like bitcoin is a common mission that we're all on and we were talking about this before we hit record like i'm a thrill seeker i used to be a skateboarder surfer snowboarder still am all those things but like i like the thrill of things and bitcoin to me is thrilling because it's like fuck we get to recreate money and be a part of a modern day revolution and a revolution that is desperately needed in my opinion which makes it even more worthwhile because it's it's not just a thrill of the ride like oh we're creating something new it's like we're creating something new that i honestly earnestly wholeheartedly viscerally believe

we need to create uh or else it's a pretty dark future i i agree and and it's such a um it's such a strange historical moment i mean we are taking part in the world's first global peaceful revolution that literally pays you to join i mean that is a incredible place to be uh maybe that will be the jersey shore ad that i have go by bitcoin pays you to participate in a peaceful revolution that's beautiful right because it does pay i mean as long as more people join the revolution well not even at a certain extent like there's a there's enough capital that can keep it up you don't need as many people as you need capital if enough uh rich revolutionaries join you in this path you can you can do good things and it will pay you to to revolutionize

the world that's exactly right and and that's that's that's super exciting to me and i think that you know for the past you know i i really before i got into bitcoin another thing i really um felt strongly about was militarism that you know me too and not just the u.s military industrial complex like the 20th century was a nightmare and you know i i had learned a lot about it but i didn't think i had thought about it from a monetary perspective until i learned about bitcoin um and you know the we talk about the suspension of the gold standard a lot we talk about bretton woods a lot but you know this goes back to world war one the gold standard really disappeared uh globally when world war one went down and that's millions of people dying that is

just the most nightmarish conditions possible um and that was because the everyday citizen had their gold taken away was given fiat currency and told all right we're going to spend it we're going to put it towards the war effort and you know if you have a system that requires honest taxation i don't think you have the same outcome in world war one i don't think the militarism we've seen in the past 100 years what do you mean by honest taxation what i mean is that inflation is a form of taxation right it's a regressive tax but it's silent it's not honest it's very deceptive it's a back door in your wallet that a little bitty piece can be siphoned out every day and when you have a deceptive taxation then people can't um you know if you ask the average

person in europe all right we're we're gonna need to take some of your money to finance this this fight and uh it'll be like you know 90 plus percent tax no one would agree with that i mean it would just not have occurred um but when you can finance it in a roundabout way where people can't even figure out what's happening but they know that they were rich a couple days ago and now they can't afford bread then you know you're able to get away with this incredible destruction no one on either side of world war one cared in terms of uh the the people fighting on both sides it was the arrogance of nation states and their ability to take from people without having to pay for it to get that consent and so when you have the ability for nation states to non-consensually

take for themselves it's crazy well it is crazy and this got me saying it's like you're saying nation states nation states and it's not even nation states because nation states are a collective of the people that live within them and so this nation state in particular is 320 shit probably close to 330 million people now uh and back in world war one millions of people represent a nation state the people making these decisions are like politicians and bureaucrats they're very very small minority of the people within those nation states so i even think saying like nation states making these these uh decisions is not disingenuous but it's just it's it's not descriptive of actually what's going on you have a bunch of crazy politicians that are represent

a very very small minority of the overall population of the given nation state making decisions for millions and millions and tens and hundreds of millions of people and you literally have these thousands to tens of thousands of assholes that make up the the governments of the nation states around the world that mess it up for everybody and that's what draws me towards bitcoin is like hey these little these few assholes who are just drawn to power and are psychopaths and want to get to these positions of power not because they want to help people is nine times out of ten they're psychopathic sociopathic egomaniacs and now we're taking that power from them in bitcoin and that's like one thing throughout human history that always

blows my mind that like uh the the vast majority of the population cannot notice that it's just a few assholes that ruin it for all of us and i think bitcoin may be the first time in a long time that it can help us ignore those minority of assholes i agree it forces those people that inevitably rise to the top because they're good at being two-faced i mean um hayek talks about this in the road to serfdom which is that there's a very special type of person who's able to become a politician and it's not the person you want in charge but it's the person who naturally fills in that role and um the idea that they can't take people's wealth um without having to actually ask for it without having someone actually know that it's being taken away from now they have to

ask via pull requests it has to go through the core process if you're using bitcoin core as your repository it has to go through a development process to get implemented not likely yeah and And, you know, taxes have to come from, you know, because the thing with inflation is you look at your bank account and the number is the same. Exactly. Everybody talks about how much money they're making. Nobody talks about their purchasing power. There's an abstraction there. We've been talking about this abstraction, but the abstraction of how much money you have versus how much purchasing power you have is something that in a fiat money world,

people really need to focus on the purchasing power side when they're only focused on how much money they have in their bank account that's yielding 25 pips yeah yeah i think that's exactly right and so that's that is super exciting to me and i think that um you know this puts us in a goes back to that historical moment i mean this is like nailing the what 95 theses to the the door the church yes i mean that's that's really what bitcoin is so after the uh the recording with ben hunt yesterday that's what the the parallel we got to was um where i try to because in the episode you freaks will have heard it by now or if you've listened to it it's out by now you haven't heard it yet connor because it's not out when we're recording now but ben was a staunch uh staunchly

like uh not anti-bitcoin he's very pro-bitcoin but he doesn't think it's going to be a successful uh experiment in the long run so he thinks the state's power will clamp down on he thinks we're all going to get shot well i think that the exciting thing is the state's power comes from its monetary control so it's its power is resting on quicksand right and so if bitcoin is successful then suddenly the the power that is terrifying right now is you know what is that based on if it doesn't have access to the printing press um and i so i i i'm very hopeful in that regard because it's kind of this catch-22 it can't afford to not buy in right because you don't want to be the one holding the fiat bag but at the same time you have to give up power in order

to do so in the long term if if you're going to separate money in the state then you're looking and a significant reduction of power and an incredible increase in human freedom and human rights and that's so exciting and i think that's why i'm optimistic in that regard and not you know reading hobbes and the leviathan and like fearing tyranny so i love that reading hobbes and leviathan and fearing fearing tyranny no but i like today this last week in particular it's been like a holy shit maybe they do get it maybe there are some people in government who recognize the the fiscal and monetary state of the country and are looking towards bitcoin as maybe a release valve an escape boat if you want to skate pod if you will um and like so how can we market this to

governments we're always worried about marking it to the masses to the retail investors like how would we you connor brown you had if you had five minutes in front of in front of the committee today what would you say to the politicians that you know are incompetent uh you know probably don't have a good uh subject understanding of bitcoin in particular and and are probably uh probably tend to want to hold on to that power what would your impassioned speech to them be i think that is an incredibly difficult question but i think that at the end of the day bitcoin represents the american ideals it really does and you know it's it's not directly american but the ideas that allowed us to have the american revolution this idea that we can have

a nation built on the freedom of the individual to go about their life and the way they choose i think still resonates very very strongly with people i think that the american revolution and its ideals are something that is one of the few remaining pieces uh that are sort of a pure topic that both sides really appreciate as a moment of rejecting tyranny and taking that incredibly terrifying leap towards creating a system that never been tried before and you know i i think bitcoin looks at that in the exact same way and has those same ideals which is you know one person shouldn't have control but instead we should you know decentralize our power and i think that the the system we've created in government represents the exact same thing that the bitcoin does

in the sense that we have a constitution which is our code and we can update it and we can have pull request we have in theory uh you know separate branches of government that are decentralized and Each of them pull on each other in different ways and the best ideas rise to the top. And it changes the nature of human rights in a very positive direction because it gives them a voice they didn't have previously. And it's based on voluntary interactions.

I mean, all of these things go to the heart of the American idea that we have a disjointed political apparatus and you voluntarily vote for those people. and bitcoin's the same way um and i think it speaks to that same idea that you don't want one person in charge of your representation but you want to spread it out um but man it's it's a tough five minute pitch i think you just did a good job in less than five minutes no but i would agree and if anything and i have equated bitcoin to the constitution a lot in the in the bent but like it it does like you said it codifies those ideas and those ideals and more importantly

Those ideals of freedom and liberty and picking yourself up and making something of yourself as an individual in a country of other individuals that are side by side with you, working with you. And it's time. It's time to upgrade it. Like we live in a world stuck with industrial era institutions in a digital age. and i think bitcoin is a perfect sort of precipice to update the the i mean money is the most important tool in the world i would argue and update the money and bring it to the digital age i mean i i completely agree i mean the amendments themselves are these ideas that there are certain immutable constants in our system that must be guaranteed and you know those rights are important

to the functioning of our system and bitcoin has its own similar set of guarantees embedded in the constitution and our framework um except ours is even more immutable in the sense that it's mathematics it's not this you know sort of uh i think nick zabo calls it like wet code yeah wet code yeah um and that's that's that's super exciting and it's even harder to change you have so many more cultures and people and people from different backgrounds involved and they have different uh stakes in the system and and we'll fight to to to keep what is theirs theirs and it's not just america anymore that's another crazy thought we're talking about like languages being protocols earlier and imagine what a a sort of concise

what's the word i'm looking for a universal language of value will do for like even like the universe like the languages of communication right like it could even help us become like more like the bible says like the tower of babel confused us all like we went off to the world with many many languages maybe bitcoin is the the store of value that brings us back to uh a metric system of value that allows us to create sort of a a universal language would we want that i think we do i mean i think this is and to be to be uh completely frank we've been drinking basil hayden and uncle marty's getting drunk and cosmic right now i mean at the end of the day and this is why it blows my mind that

people think maximalist uh you know people that believe in bitcoin over alternatives are cultish or we're so toxic and it's like you know if you look at protocols just rationally protocols converge that's how the way the world is there's a reason that the entire world in manufacturing uses the metric system and not 20 different systems protocols naturally converge on things and you know language itself is something that we have thousands of languages and we're whittling them down and there's a few i mean there are lots of different languages but every year languages die and people naturally converge on something even when it's as deeply cultural and difficult to change as language so you have something like money much easily much easier to transition from

one form of money to another you have a natural incentive system it doesn't require much relearning so of course that one's going to converge even faster and even stronger and i think that's an incredible step forward for humankind this idea that we initially went for thousands of different objects being our money in so many different societies and then we went to you know different kingdoms having their own money and you know we whittled that down even further with nation states and now we're acting on a global level with one money and um you know that's that's super exciting i think it's just like the internet we can't even begin to comprehend the incredible exponential benefits that's going to bring i mean it's it's easy to be paranoid in the short term about how

things are going to shake out with central banking and our monetary system but in the in the long view i just so bullish on humankind i mean just the idea of moving to a global system the internet having the ability to access and teach yourself so many different things i mean we're evolving at such a fast rate there's no telling what's going to come and i think a monetary system where people aren't bound by borders is going to be crucial for that to really kick off so yeah now yeah and this goes this brings me back to we never got to elaborate on uh your argument about intrinsic value and like the opportunities to be opened up by like not using housing as a store of value or gold as a story like what like if we don't have to use gold for store value you don't have

most of the world's gold supply locked up in volts instead of being used in technology that could take us to space like imagine the the thing the possibilities that could be enabled if you are not wasting gold on storing your value and instead you're putting it towards productive use to go to space and then housing homeless homelessness is a big problem in the world right now yeah i mean we're in manhattan right now or we're in new york right now and like manhattan you see these massive skyscrapers being built no one's living in them and that's something i talked about in the article like a third of all housing in manhattan is just not lived in at all they don't rent it out it's chinese saudi's nationals just dumping capital

yeah and this is not uh a thing you need in new york new york like rich americans just rich people across the world just dumping money in new york real estate exactly and this is in all the different housing markets um and this is something that you can like that is so exciting to me because when you have an asset and you choose to use it for its monetary purpose and you choose to put its monetary properties to work you're doing that at the expense of using it for its you know commodity purpose and that's you know you can't use two things for one thing at the same time and so unlocking that and giving that back into the economy essentially liquidating it and buying bitcoin or storing your time and energy in bitcoin uh could be incredible for human standard of

living better medical technology with gold better computer technology i mean all of these things are super super uh exciting and uh that's why i'm optimistic long term for sure about having this sort of shared way to communicate our time communicating our time it's crazy is this the best timeline or the worst timeline would you rather be a bitcoiner now or a bitcoiner in 100 years um well it's it's hard to i mean i wouldn't want to miss the action you know i think that's why it's it's so exciting to us is that you know we are part of this hero's journey um where you know the the classic hero's journey myth of you you start you hear the call of the hero and you know you choose to go into that deep initiation and then come back the other side and it's it is

a really dark place you have to go to in a way are we on a hero's journey or do we do we just want to be on a hero's journey in our mind i think we're there i really do and i wouldn't be here if i didn't um we does a hero recognize that he's on a journey when he's on his journey though i think that's part of it i think that's near the end of the journey um you know at the end of the journey you have what's called the boon right where you come like you you understand things in a way that that wasn't possible or you see things differently and you're extremely satisfied by that and i think that there is a deep satisfaction being a bitcoiner um you know and and the classic examples is like buddha when he reached nirvana and he's like well maybe i just

shouldn't even go and tell anyone because this is so amazing and i should just wait it out i'm showing connor buddha on my phone and he's you know decided to step away from nirvana and go and tell people how they can reach it themselves it's like the uh the parable of the man in the cave as well right yeah and so you know there is an aspect where it's tempting to refuse the call to go back um and to just stay there but i think that you know that's what's great about what we're doing is that you know we could just kind of wait around for this to happen or we can share it with other people that's the beauty of it though would it work if we didn't stand around like that's the that's what keeps me going it's like if not me then who mentality that's this beautiful system

of incentives called bitcoin right because you know it's it's the hero's journey that basically to get the boon you have to not refuse the call to go back you can't refuse the call you have to go and spread the word otherwise you're not going to have the boon are we a cult at the end of the day oh we're totally a cult is it a bad thing i don't know i don't think so i don't think so either um it's not a cult we didn't have to go to some like we have to go to some meeting and and bow down to anybody outside looking in definitely a cult

inside looking out you know definitely not a cult we're not appealing to some authority we're appealing to an idea an idea a respect for humans a humility that humans don't have the ability to um predict subjective human interactions instead we just give them a nice pure protocol for doing whatever they want with it and i think that that is a really beautiful thing that respects humans instead of treats them like you know a curve that we can model right it's beautiful it's poetic on it is poetic but getting to the technical side what um like bitcoin as a protocol as a technical piece of software what what excites you about it these days and what may come what has happened

what uh from a technical aspect like what is bitcoin to you right now and in the future potentially oh gosh so so many things um i love obviously the lightning network is just incredible the people at lightning labs are doing amazing things every week it feels like um related to the lightning network um i just saw uh richard from gotenna talk about lot 49 and mesh networks and you know i didn't really know much about mesh networks at all actually and the idea that you can incentivize mesh networks which is you know really the decentralized internet that ethereum pitches itself to be in a way that you can have these communications that go both ways instead of just through telecommunications providers um it's a alternative relay network yeah and i think lot 49

and what he's trying to do there at gotenna really really cool i'm excited to see what happens there um obviously super excited about taproot and schnor i mean who isn't the idea that you can incentivize privacy make transactions cheaper by aggregating them is really really cool um wasabi wallets always doing cool stuff hardware side i love cold card wallet and uh you know what they're doing there so there's so much do you think uh are you believer in um not the fact when they do you hold the belief that bitcoin should be ossified one day as a protocol one thing i look forward to is um thinking about bitcoin as uh protected from quantum attacks that is something that um i don't think we should

take like awesome yeah i don't think we should take it lightly um because i think that um i don't i think it's i don't think it's a danger um as long as we're proactive about it i think it's it's going to be like one of those things like Y2K, which is super hyped up, turns out not to be a big deal, but it's because people put incredible amounts of effort to make sure. And, you know, so I would say not until we're definitely safe from that. And maybe quantum turns out to be nothing, but the stakes are too big.

The stakes are way too big. if we are at this potentially historical turning point in human rights to lose it because of not being proactive and ossifying too early. But I'm not an expert in quantum. I've read a decent amount about it, and I think that it's something we shouldn't take lightly. But I'm sure there's other people

that have much better things to say, more technical things to say about it. No, I would agree. um quantum is definitely something i'm not anywhere close to as being a subject matter expert on in any maybe some parallel universe i am definitely not this one maybe um but no that's something to keep but i do do agree like beyond quantum we should definitely get to a spot where it's like all right this is like what we're using for at least an extended period of time um just to give that certainty that especially if the tech works and there's no bugs show up like

yeah if we get schnor if we get taproot in my opinion like and a couple other things you can do like uh sort of off-chain smart contract stuff with graph root and all that stuff like i think like what is good enough i guess that's the better question what is good enough i think that we're really close to that i think that um i i do want to ossify it as soon as possible i think that's that's healthy i think that if we want to experiment then that's what side chains are for that's what layer two layer three is for um state chains seem really interesting really interesting shout out ruben sompson yeah thanks for coming up with that idea bro that's uh i'm still diving into it but it is uh like exchanging private keys off chain is very interesting to me yeah i i

haven't dug into it too much but i basically tried to get an understanding of the you know high level overview and it seems very very cool and you know i i think that ossify the base layer as soon as possible and then we'll have lots of different layers for you know varying levels of um varying levels of trust trade-offs yeah certain trade-offs and so i don't i don't think we're gonna have i think the idea of backed currencies is gonna go away but i do think uh we'll see a similar thing in the sense that you know there'll be lbtc and cbt btc and all these different quasi free banking quasi free banking system i'm getting drunk it's it's backed by the ability to settle on the base layer in a way yes um but it'll still be you know closely tied in a way that a backed

currency traditionally isn't and is really just subject to trusting some individual yeah i agree with that as well um we're agreeing a lot here tonight connor what do we disagree on gosh i don't know what do we disagree on i don't know let's talk about your debate career because we were talking about this uh maybe we'll find something we disagree on probably not um and is that a good thing should we find more well we have ben hunt on he disagreed a lot with me so i do try to find people that disagree with me who disagree with this ben hunt epsilon theory oh really yeah interesting again he doesn't think we're going to succeed well you know it's it's difficult to disagree with bitcoiners in a way well i don't know i kind of go back and forth

On one hand, to be a Bitcoiner, it's such an interdisciplinary thing. You're naturally just, like, you have to have so many different understandings of the world kind of line up to find yourself in the same Bitcoin camp. But I do think that the disagreement I see in the community, the fact that Bitcoiners are constantly attacking each other, is such a beautiful thing. I love it so much. And I think that... Why is this? well i mean this is um this is just how ideas get sharpened the fact that people aren't afraid to critique and just drag someone on the internet um if they feel like they're stepping out of line

is incredible and and like you know i love the people that even if i don't agree with them they're willing to have these almost borderline awkward call outs and arguments oh they're not even borderline there's a lot of overtly awkward call just vicious and it's you know i come from a debate background so i've seen that play out and that's how the best ideas are made is through ruthless criticism and attack and you know all right so let's jump into this like uh we're like early on in your debate career were there ever periods of time where you were ruthlessly critiqued and attacked where you thought oh my god how could somebody come at my idea like this you're being disrespectful you're being toxic i do not like this this is not how things should be

and did you get over that hump and if so what was it so i did a former debate called policy debate and policy debate that's what i did in college call it and policy debate is a form of uh debate You're given a broad topic and you're told, all right, find a policy that would, you know, satisfy whatever this topic is, right? So put an actual plan in place is the goal for the debate. And in college, it's kind of the Wild West. There's a lot of people who don't even try to put this plan in place. And they say that it's wrong as a community to force people to try to put plans in place. Instead, we should think of non-governmental solutions and community-based solutions to these problems.

Or even, you know, think about energy policy in a completely different context. We should think of energy as getting out of bed in the morning instead of, you know, how do we keep the lights on? Things like that. So it's an extremely open community where you're constantly arguing even what the rules of the community should be. There are no rules in the debate I did. and you know you can try to argue and you can say actually you're not talking about the topic and it's not fair but you can't just say and you broke the rules you lose you have to say and you broke the rules and that's bad because that means that I couldn't prepare for this debate properly which

means that we don't have an engaging discussion which means I'm not getting good research skills and that's bad because it hurts me as an individual in my development and you know that's kind of the background I come from which is everything has to be explained and there's no you know just pandering to authority or you know just waving your credentials around it's if you have an idea stand up and defend it and um so i think that when i saw for like the first time outside of debate that same idea which is you know everyone's anonymous we don't even know who people are they're popular because of shout out to you anons on twitter you guys are doing right all i mean it's so incredible like it's it's not about who you are you can be a space cat

you can be whatever if you have a good idea then let's hear it and if you have a bad idea you're going to get critiqued ruthlessly until you have a justification or change your mind um and another thing that was really big in the debate scene was that everything was completely open source and that was a decision the community made because they felt that discussions are better when everyone knows what's going to be said what debate scene are you talking about like the university debate landscape or is like there's like a like a knight's templar of debating that decide this so this was kind of um so this is on the college policy debate scene um there was a push by a few different teams to say you know we're tired of playing uh this game where you

just kind of like surprise someone with the arguments you're making and instead we should just put it out there make it open because steel sharpens steel and we need to you know if we want to have the best engaging conversation possible we're just going to put it all on the internet and make sure that everyone has access so that it is good for teams that have less resources and also so that you can be prepared and we can have well-prepared opponents so that our wins aren't just because we have a lot of people that we can you know come up with a lot of secret arguments um and sort of out resource other teams but because our ideas are actually good and they can stand up to challenge and not you know play tmz and just like punk people that's

why i was so encouraged by today's uh i know you didn't watch but like watching today's hearings it seemed like more socratic than people yelling at each other obviously there were some politicians that were just yelling and lecturing but towards the end of the day when they had the panel up that melton was on and a couple other representatives this team very socratic like hey let's let's test out these ideas and get a get an honest earnest or attempt to getting honest earnest understanding of of the the argument these people are trying to make and that's what i think is like lost like this is a good way to tie this whole conversation back together is like the the art of socratic debate and uh hearing out ideas for being ideas and not just coming into something

with a preconceived notion and and and and hoping that that's going to win out or you're not even hoping just like already set in your mind that's going to win out and just harping on that and harping on that instead of hearing out and and again socratic debate socratic conversation i think that that is something that is i mean and that's why after going from that socratic environment and debate and seeing you know this is the same thing as open source right i mean you just make a pull request you don't have to be anyone you justify your pull request and if it's good it gets merged and if not um if if there is someone lording over it and they're controlling it then you can just fork it and make your own right and um you know that's something that is

so exciting to me and i didn't know much about until i learned about bitcoin um like i didn't know what github was and really like what 10 months ago when i started learning um but you know, I think that's just the way forward for academia as well. I think that hierarchical systems are going to get beat out. I mean, we're seeing this in the traditional media industries where they go from, they go from controlling the narrative to basically just read to like repeating what people are saying on Twitter, on CNN, right? I hope I don't do that too much. And, you know, I think that that's really exciting. And I think that eventually, or at least my hope is that this incredibly outdated academic model that is so hierarchical

and siloed um is just struck down and and that we can build something or not struck down but just made obsolete i mean because the academic model seems it's oppressive aaron shorts killed himself in prison because he shared a bunch of fucking j store files are you kidding me the idea Yes, the idea that the knowledge we have at academia is something you have to pay to get. The idea that you have a very small amount of people who will peer review what you say that are going to be in the exact same field of study that you are. I mean, I'm seeing this in the legal field where, you know, if you have a legal article about Bitcoin or something, you're going to have a bunch of law people reviewing that

article. And there's no cross-disciplinary approach to things. And that's why I'm hoping that Bitcoin and things like it reveal what a broken system we have. And the beauty of cross-pollination of different sort of expertise brings to a field. Yes, because otherwise you're going to have world-changing revolutions. And it's a giant blind spot because it's so world-changing and it touches on so many different areas. it's it's so painfully obvious when you look at um an academic who can only look at bitcoin from one teeny tiny facet and they don't see the bigger picture and it's it's something that's ingrained

and just not to be able to see it and this idea that i mean just the idea that papers are attributable to an author or that books have an author and they are published and they are finished i mean i find that very very strange i mean i would love to see an academic model where papers are never published and finished but papers are an evolving github pages yeah exactly repositories excuse me github repos for academic ideas you don't have you know maybe you have someone maintaining that repo but you can also just fork it and essentially wikipedia for academics where you're arguing instead of stating factual conclusions and you know you could have one article or one argument in philosophy or something that gets changed you know hundreds of times or

thousands of times over hundreds of years and the original author you know laid the the foundations for it but maybe it continues to be expounded upon and you have organic natural systems of information that are in line with kind of how humans have passed down stories and traditions instead of this weird you know siloed put it out and it's done system we have right now yeah no it's in my mind just naturally drifted towards the thought of the world becoming just the natural hive mind i believe that concept it came up earlier but yeah that's what we're headed towards right imagine the possibilities when we get on that level of coordination and we're able to to move like a murmur as a society um as a human species and that's the bigger picture freaks

is we want to go beyond this world right like if we figure out how to coordinate at this level on this planet we can go fucking explore the universe and figure out why the hell we're here maybe we'll figure out maybe we'll find the on off button of the computer we're living in and and turn it off and end all this but like the possibilities enabled by this coordination and could be endless and the fact that we're we're limited to to the the the amount we can accomplish because we're so confused and so uncoordinated because we're beholden to this the system that we're in not even the monetary system just the hierarchical system that that uh our generation finds itself subject to is is mind-baffling when you when you think about the possibilities that

can be enabled like everybody thinks about like oh what can i buy on earth what can i buy on earth i want to think about what i can buy in like the the indomina galaxy or something like that oh it's crazy to think about um drew bensol from unchained capital has legend legend crazy thoughts about blockchains that i i'm not gonna say um because i think he should be the one to talk about them but no he's been on this podcast and talked about them before um his his view of blockchains kind of being a planetary system um and then each planet having their own blockchain essentially um and and being like that that will will naturally have blockchains for each of the systems we uh each of the planets we inhabit and they'll kind of like form this coordinate over

differing block times and be side chains for each other and stuff like that and hash data into each other yeah and the incentive to go to mars is going to be to start mars coin right that's what's going to be uh you know finding that new frontier is saying well if you go to mars like you can start the mars coin instead of having you can be one of those initial settlers in that that land grab of the shared uh unit of value and time and energy on that new planet and you can be one of the first people to get the slice and uh that's that's a crazy system of incentives there right would you go to Mars? Hell no. I told my wife I'd go to Mars. She does not like it. No, I'm perfectly happy here. I don't know. I mean, if it's, if it's the, you go to Mars and you don't

come back, definitely not. Yeah. If it's, you know, sightsee for a few months, I'd think about it. I'd consider it. Would you want to be? Yeah, that's the question. I don't think i'd want to go to mars either i do have strong feelings on teleportation never go into the teleporter why not i mean people this is like a classic thing we talk about in like philosophy class but in my view if you're going into a teleporter and you're getting broken down and then you know they reconfigure you on the other end then that's not really you that's just a clone of you that got created on the other side but what about the fact that our cells are regenerating and dying like you are not physically the same person that you were 10 years ago your cells have

changed yeah like not one cell in your body is the same that it was like 10 years ago which is crazy to think of but yeah i think that consciousness we're really getting cosmic here this is very fitting for tales from the crypt um i think that consciousness is sort of the um it is the experience that arises from the physical structures of the body and it's sort of this continuous experience we're having and that if that experience is halted in some way like it's uh one of my favorite phases phrases i don't know if i made it up or like when i was high one night on like not high on shrooms i've been high on shrooms in a while i've taken shrooms a few times in my life i think i might have had this revelation while in shrooms i like to say

like people are like who are you and i say i am the culmination of my experiences yeah that is who i am yes and that is the continuous uh experience that arises well there's some thunder as the thunder rumbles marty you're right that's what the gods just said but yeah so i mean this also extends to like cryo i was talking to dan about this dan's a big proponent of cryogenics but i think that the person that wakes up out of cryo is not you anymore because it's not that continuous uh physical phenomena you've kind of like ended it and now it's restarted with a new like i i think the actual lived experience of someone would be like it just ends is somebody in a coma living

i think that one's a little bit more difficult because living action is living like action or well i think that if it's if your um consciousness is the continuous you know whatever currents that flow through your physical structures if they're like completely halted when it's restarted i don't think you come back i think there's a new you that logs in basically would have the same memories that the previous you had it would have the same memories and that that's what's so tempting about the going in the teleporter because the person that comes out they're gonna talk walk

think just like you they're gonna have access to the same memories they won't even know from their experience that they just were born born they will feel like they have access to memories and you know they're the same person but the real marty would have disappeared forever hmm damn that's what i think you can get really creepy with this too you can be like well what happens let's get fucking creepy what if that happens every night what if that happens every night i go to sleep you know that version of you dies and a new version of you wakes up in the morning you have access to the same memories that your body has well but you've actually only like today sitting here you've only really this version of you has only been experiencing one day's worth

of time ever well this goes back to my articulation of that i am the culmination of my experiences like i am technically a different person than the first time i said that sentence on this podcast five minutes ago not even five minutes ago three minutes ago like my experience i've had more experiences since that time so am i technically different than that person who first uttered that statement a few minutes ago i would say yes and a different person or you're the same person i'm different or i have more cumulative experiences i mean you're different but you're you're still the same continuous experience okay same continuous that's that's my definition okay but there's no way to know that when i woke up today that this isn't a new version of connor that just for today

it was the first time and there's no way to know that when i go to sleep tonight that version ends and some you know new version of me comes up and begins again tomorrow so do you believe in simulations here are we in a simulation right now oh i have no idea is any of this worth it i don't know people say it's like more probable we're in a simulation or not it's it's crazy to think about i don't think we're in a scene i'd like to think i have some autonomy over myself i haven't looked into that debate enough i know that the argument is like things are too perfectly aligned for it not to be a simulation but let's what goes into the beauty of human life right is this the fact that it's a miracle is that things have aligned this perfectly

i mean this is this is like the ultimate philosophical question why is there something rather than nothing man then we get really mysterious like why are we like that is the most fundamental question and it's what do you say to that why is there anything at all it should be unanswerable right yeah that is what we're on is this journey to figure out why we're here that's right but and it's a very that's what disheartens me about our like current condition as humanity is like we're lost in this it's like again cycle conspicuous consumption whether it be material goods or music or i think our music's conspicuous consumption some of most of it is most of us like fucking cardi b twerk all that shit fucking terror like quote-unquote culture

fuck i mean it's the proliferation of culture i don't think that you can i think that some of it's good and some of it's bad but the fact is like there's just more of it let's talk about our favorite artist right here kanye way you guys can't hear it but we've been listening to kanye all recording we had a very deep conversation about him i love kanye kanye was i probably wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't for kanye either neither would i i mean he is someone that taught me that you know you can believe in yourself it's okay to have confidence and that there is a big distinction between having a big ego and having a lot of confidence in yourself yes and i think kanye is a prime example of someone that people look at him and find him

to be arrogant when in reality he is just confident in himself and the incredible artwork he produces and um you know i also love him for his the way that he takes the hardest moments someone could possibly experience um in his life and takes that suffering and tragedy and turns it into something beautiful masterpieces i mean there's there's something so inspiring about that and i think that's what we're at i mean would bitcoin happen would we have had this technology if we weren't pushed to find a way out of this strange monetary position we're in probably not no no and back to kanye they're like i hate being bipolar it's awesome like and this is what we talked about last week and for kanye is for me as well a huge influence in my life because i think

his whole discography from college dropout to i hate being bipolar it's awesome is to yay is fucking self-actualization like you can be what you want to be if you put your mind to it yes my raps are arrogant i'm fucking wearing versace i can spend the gas money on polos i couldn't afford and stuff like that uh but if you listen to the discography throughout from beginning to end it's all you can be what you want to be you just got to put your mind to it like he wrote the best american biopic of all time and it's all falls down like i couldn't afford a car so i named my daughter alexis that whole song is the best american biopic that's ever existed you want to talk about like our current condition like talk about college loans talk about the the

error conspicuous consumption that we find ourselves in all falls down in my opinion encapsulates that fucking feeling and that that reality better than any song or movie or book the fucking three and a half minute song encapsulates that better than any author or anybody else has up to this point in my experience and then on top of that like like you just marty like i found bravery in my bravado like that like that line in power like it is you can be what you want to be if you just put your mind to it and you say fuck the haters basically yeah i mean there's an interview with kanye where he's like i'm the sonic espresso espresso i'm what gets you going in the morning you know if you're a fan of kanye west you're not

a fan of me you're a fan of yourself because his music resonates with people who are self-starters with people who aren't afraid to stand up for what they believe in and do good work yeah graduation my junior year of high school it changed my life i listen to that fucking album every day of my life this is the story of a champion like from like from good morning to champion there's a couple barry bonds and drunk drunken hot girls yeah and even big brother would argue could be axed from that album but i agree the rest of it uh i think was very like you can be what you want to be i agree i agree and even beyond like and it's just trying to wake people up like people hate kanye people fucking hate people hate him so much because they think he's so egotistical

and he's only egotistical he's like i fucking found a way to teach you people how to fucking self-actualize and you think it's all about me but i'm getting too drunk now no i mean you're exactly right and if they listen to his music no one shits on kanye more than kanye like his actual discography goes through and just talks about how you know he's not the person he wanted to be how his fame affected him in terrible ways he's not a good friend anymore materialism like all that stuff yeah i mean my beautiful dark twisted fantasy the crown jewel of that album being run away which is basically a ballad talking about how he's such an asshole and it's this incredible paradox where he simultaneously admits that he's you know arrogant or whatever it might

be and and like disproves it in a way because at least he's willing to admit and that's something that's so difficult for people is just to admit you know that we have flaws and that we can work to fix them and and it's the same with um with all falls down i mean that was revolutionary for hip-hop for someone to say they're so self-conscious and that's a theme through his his whole discography is being honest and vulnerable to the listener and uh to say he's arrogant after that just you know just tells me i haven't listened to him he's misunderstood he is he is i mean and that's the problem of being an artist who articulates themselves through honesty honesty and art and complex themes instead of nice sound bites exactly and there's actually this song i shared

in the bent today um it's called keep it warm by eddie or flow and eddie eddie and flow i don't know it's a band from the 70s they used to be the turtles this song showed up on my uh uh discover spotify playlist this week i've listened to it at least a thousand times not at least a thousand times it's exaggerating listen to it at least 50 times in the last five days at least and but the juxtaposition of the music and the lyrics so like the the the band and the the lyrics is so beautiful and the the lyrics are very prescient for today a song that was written i believe in the late 70s or 80s uh still stands true to this day but it's it is it reminded me of kanye a little bit because it's if you listen to it and you're just listening to the music you're going to misunderstand you're

like oh this is an upbeat happy song but you listen to the lyrics this is like whoa it's one of the heaviest fucking songs i've ever listened to in my life i love music like that um there's i think one of the most influential bands i ever listened to is this band called ajj um they used to be called andrew jackson jihad but they dropped it no there's ajj and um you know they have this it's it's like folk punk type thing where it is incredibly upbeat and optimistic about humankind and human nature but you know it's this it really embraces that niche and ideal of to really get the most out of life you have to go through some serious suffering and otherwise you haven't lived and i think that you know their music is super super

positive and when you hear them perform it's this incredible positive experience but their lyrics are just terrifying because they're really describing some of these really dark times and being positive and optimistic in the face of that and almost you know laughing at you know this bizarre place we find ourselves in and i think that's important as bitcoiners like we're not this isn't going to be an easy we all just get rich and nothing happens type thing i mean this is not going to be a fun trip necessarily it's going to be a meaningful trip and that's that's much more important no and it i completely agree and i like to think things are going to get easier because it's been pretty hard personally for me and i know for you as well like being the bitcoin

friend but yeah there are many battles to be won in front of us like it is uh it is not going to come as easy like if you've thought it's been hard up to this point again the last week has shown that bitcoin is on the main stage and yeah i don't think the entrenched uh powers are going to go down without a fight so the shit is just beginning and right freaks you have to look inside and say hey do i want to fight for this honestly ask yourself yes do you want to fight for this and if you don't that's the beauty of the opt-in system you don't have to and but it is something that you should ask yourself and and really ask yourself like yourself your essence who you are like do you want to be a part of this because it is a pivotal point like if we go down this road

it is going to change the world drastically yeah the stakes are unbelievably high and you have to act like your actions matter because you know eventually we think that this is going to work out but you know it's nothing's a sure bet and we have to act in in the way that really speaks to the importance of the times and and you know we can't let apathy beat out human rights and our progress as a civilization so yeah this might be the perfect place to end it's heavy yeah this is perfect place to end it in your mind so do you have anything else to say stay humble stack sats that was tales from the crypt with connor brown everybody hey if you like it rate subscribe review peace and love freaks