We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC239: Bitcoin, Psychology & the Return of Meaning w/ Seb Bunney (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On this week's show, I'm joined by author and deep thinker, Seb Bunny, to explore how Fiat money destroys our psychology, relationships, and sense of meaning. We talk about time preference, identity, savings, fear, and how Bitcoin reorients us towards connection, creativity, and human flourishment. This conversation goes way beyond economics, and I'm really excited. to bring this to you guys because I am a huge fan of Seb and he is just super insightful as you're

Starting point is 00:00:34 going to see in this interview. So without further delay, here's my interview with Mr. Seb Bunny. Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. I'm here with Seb Bunny, author of The Hidden Cost of Money and I'm excited to have this chat with you, Seb. Oh, man, Preston, every time we hang out, every time we chat, I really enjoy where the conversations go. So, I think in the name of this episode, we were talking, we had a little bit of a chat as to what we were going to discuss. And I think the theme here is money, psychology, and the return of meaning to people's lives.

Starting point is 00:01:28 And I guess where I want to start off is just the personal cost of fiat. You do a phenomenal job kind of laying this out for people. and just how it psychologically distorts all of our incentives. And I guess let's start there and let's have the conversation there. Absolutely. So maybe like a little bit about me because I think it will make more sense. Like I started off as a man by constructor and I realized very early on like a freaking $15 $75 an hour, how am I ever going to be able to afford to have a family to be able to buy

Starting point is 00:02:00 a house to put a roof over my head? And so on reflection, looking back, I'm like, man, money really does. does, it impacts our ability to show up how we want and direct our energy to whatever it is that motivates us. And from that kind of evolution of going down the rabbit hole of Manon biking, I was like, well, I've got to figure out some other career. And so I kind of started playing around in the psychology space. I trained to become a semantic therapist, which is a form of therapy where you're moving into the body, out of the mind and healing on a nervous system level, and absolutely loved it. But all of these tools, whether it is

Starting point is 00:02:34 coaching, whether it's somatic therapy, my fascinations with the markets and finance, it starts to kind of piece together how I think the world works. And I think that what I always find fascinating about Bitcoin is in general is just this curiosity of trying to figure out how the world works. And I would say that, and you're probably on a similar page, that money is a core thread that really ties to every single facet of our lives, whether it is how we show up, whether it is the environment, whether it's our relationships. And so as I've gone down these rabbit holes, I've I started to realize just how profound and how pervasive money is throughout society. And you know what?

Starting point is 00:03:10 I'll start with one quick little story to kind of like ground the conversation. A few years back, I was kind of running this Manorike camp and this group of like unbelievably inspirational individuals who were on the camp. And some of these guys have made well into eight, nine figures. And one guy in particular, he sat down and he says, you know, through reflection, I've realized that most of us look at the world through the lens of and set goals through the lens of what are called the three P's, which are prestige, power, and possessions. We want to own the newest car. We want the Rolex. We want to be in the position where people look up to us and they

Starting point is 00:03:48 kind of, they idolize us. And so we're setting all of our goals around this idea of kind of the three P's, when in reality, if we step back and we ask ourselves the question, what actually brings meaning to life? What actually motivates me in life? It is a lot of the way. It is a not the three P's of prestige, power and possessions. Instead, it's the three C's connections, contributions and challenges. It's connecting to one another. It's the conversations you and I have had in person when we've hung out skiing in Jackson. It is the challenges where we're trying to challenge ourselves to like show up more wholeheartedly and authentically in life. And it's the contributions when we're kind of giving back to society. And so when I had this conversation,

Starting point is 00:04:25 it made me reflect a little bit. What is causing this kind of disconnect? Why in life are we constantly focused on the three P's, prestige, power, and positions, and away from what really matters, connections, contributions, and challenges. And I would argue that one of the primary factors is money. When money breaks down, we look for a way out. We're constantly trying to distract ourselves, as opposed to looking for a way in, which is like deepening that relationship with the self. Okay. So at a fundamental level, when we think about money, it's representing energy, and it's representing the exchange of energy between participants. So, you know, if we go and work together and I'm performing a job and you're my boss or whatever,

Starting point is 00:05:08 I'm performing that work. And in exchange, you're giving me these units to represent that energy that I expended. And going to this idea, which I think is super profound that you're talking about, is this prestige power possessions. You're pointing these energy units inward toward yourself. And then when you talk about the other one, the connection challenges and contributions, you're pointing these energy units or packets towards somebody else oftentimes. And I find that difference to be quite profound. And when we pull this back and even think further from first principles about this idea of these energy packets representing the work that we performed,

Starting point is 00:05:50 if they're breaking down and they're not trustworthy, you can see how a person goes into, you know, just similar to the way the biology of your body works when you are in growth mode and you're not sick and you have excess energy, you can point it outwards. But when you get sick and you're unhealthy, you have to point the energy inward and you have to settle down and you've got to retain as much of it as you possibly can and you can't share it outside of yourself. Isn't that interesting? What a profound. Where did you learn this again? Because I've never heard this before. There's both the three P's and the three Cs. It was this guy that used to own a toy company. And so he spent his whole life trying to

Starting point is 00:06:33 figure out how to create toys, how to distribute toys, how to create happiness. And a lot of it is just on self-reflection. That we have this world that's constantly focused on this outward appeasing. I'm going to build happiness by consuming. I'm going to build happiness by being in positions of power and prestige, when in reality, happiness doesn't come from this external thing that we need. Happiness is very much an internal state of focusing on how do I want to show up in life? What is it that really motivates me? How do I want to challenge myself? How do I want to contribute and get back to society kind of to the points you're making? And I would even take it a step further, which is like in psychology, there's this idea which most listeners

Starting point is 00:07:10 are probably familiar with, which is called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it's been around for a long time and you can envision it as like a five tier pyramid. And at the base of that pyramid, we kind of have our psychological needs. We need food. We need shelter. We need warmth. And then as we start moving up, we get into kind of safety needs. Well, yeah, we may have property. And then as we start moving up into belongingness and love, which is like relationships and intimacy. And then the fourth stage, you've got esteem needs, which is kind of like working on the self, personal development, meeting kind of like confidence, the ability to kind of help others, love oneself, love others, and then finally into kind of self-actualization, which is the top

Starting point is 00:07:48 tier of the pyramid. What is interesting, and I would argue is that like as purchasing power declines and our cost of living in relation to our earnings increases, life gets harder. So we start falling down this pyramid. We start getting stuck on the base layer. We get stuck focused on our survival needs of food and shelter. And you see this in society, like 74% of cancer. Like 74% of Canadians and Americans live paycheck to paycheck. That's just mind-blowing. They're stuck on this base layer, and it's very hard for them to move up into belongingness, love, self-esteem needs, or even spiritual growth through like self-actualization. And so we have a world which is stuck on this base layer. And when I went down the rabbit hole of somatic therapy, there's

Starting point is 00:08:34 a book that really stands out. And it's called The Body Keeps the Score by a lady called Bessel Vandekhalk. And there's one particular paragraph which stood out to me, which is, If an organism is stuck in survival mode, its energies are focused on fighting off the unseen enemies, which leave no room for nurture, care and love. For us humans, it means that as long as the mind is defending itself against invisible assaults, our closest bonds are threatened, along with our ability to imagine, plan, play, learn and pay attention to other people's needs. So I think that we've got a society today that's stuck on this base layer where we're just

Starting point is 00:09:11 trying to meet our basic survival needs, put food on the table, put a roof over our heads. And it's no wonder that we have like the average 30 year old today, only 65% of them live on their own. And as for those that are married, it's less than 50%. Live with children, less than 35%. And so we're seeing this society that is kind of like breaking down because we're stuck trying to survive. I get frustrated when you have folks that are in their 60s or 70s and they're pointing at these younger generations, and they're just saying their values have gone to hell in a handbasket. And it's just, you know, they're pointing it as if it's something other than this fundamental shift or change that has occurred in how humans are interacting. And, you know, I obviously think

Starting point is 00:09:56 it's at the core of the money. I'm assuming you agree. In your book, you wrote, money is how we express our values. This hits really deep. But what are you getting at when you say money is how we express our values? Now, this is such a good point. And I would say that the way I look at money is like language. It's a medium of expression. It's how we express to the world, what we value monetarily. We can use language to talk about what it is that we value, whether it's internally through

Starting point is 00:10:25 language. But where we direct our capital highlights what it is that we value monetarily. And so like, if you walk into a grocery store, you can determine what someone values by looking at where they're directing their capital. Is someone buying grass-fed beef, organic vegetables, or is someone buying cigarettes and microwave meals? Is someone spending their time in energy or their capital on spending time in nature? Or is someone just trying to meet their immediate impulsive needs and they're just buying kind of the newest thing, very consumerist approach, behavior? So I would argue that money

Starting point is 00:10:56 is how we express to the world what we value. Now, let's take a step back for one second. If we look at the interaction between a parent and child, if as a child, our parents didn't allow allow us to express certain emotions. Let's say sadness or anger. Your parents were like, you know what? We don't want these negative, heavy emotions. You're only allowed to be happy. And if you're feeling unhappy, or you've got to deal with it, go stand at a corner. That kid growing up never learns how to express themselves and what it is they're feeling internally. And what does it lead to? Leads to things like depression, leads to things like anxiety. Because what is depression? It's the depressing of emotions. It's that we never learned how to express

Starting point is 00:11:34 certain emotions. Now let's take that to money. If we have a society where money is breaking down and we're facing inflation, where our cost of living is rising in relation to our wages, life is getting harder, well, all of a sudden, we're limited in our ability to express what it is that we value. It's altering how we're showing up. If I want to go and support my family to be able to purchase things that allow my family to thrive, but life is getting harder and harder and harder, I'm no longer able to express myself monetarily. If we've got regulations in place that impede our ability to direct our capital where we see fit, they prevent us from spending money on certain things, I'm no longer able to express myself monetarily. And so just like how minimizing a kid's ability to express himself leads to anxiety, depression, a whole host of other health issues, I would argue that impeding humanity's ability to express themselves monetarily leads to so many of the symptoms that we see in society, whether it is like a breakdown of meaning,

Starting point is 00:12:32 because life is so unbelievably hard that people can't plan, whether there's a breakdown in the parent-child bond, because parents are having to work more, spending less time of their kids, and their kids are spending more time of their peers, whether it's a breakdown in greater consumerism, because we're no longer incentivized to save, we're incentivized to spend because our personal power is declining.

Starting point is 00:12:49 So these are all symptoms of a lack of expression. It's a breakdown in our ability to express ourselves monetarily. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right, I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders

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Starting point is 00:17:17 in their daily lives and what changes in their relationships, their work, their mindset as they go through this shift. I think this is such a fascinating topic. And for most Bitcoiners, they're probably intimately familiar with this idea of time preference. For those, this is the first time hearing it, you can think of it as just like a spectrum. And on one end of the spectrum, you've got high time preference. On the other, you've got low. What is high time preference?

Starting point is 00:17:41 High time preference is I'm trying to meet my immediate, impulsive needs right here, right now, in this moment. Whereas you've got low time preference, it's the flip side. I'm going to think about building the best version of myself. I'm going to think about the future. I'm going to think about prosperity. I'm going to think about showing up authentically. And what's interesting about money is that as money starts to break down, and we spoke about Maslow's hierarchy of needs,

Starting point is 00:18:05 where at the base you've got our basic survival needs, food and shelter, and then as you go up, you get into relationships and self-actualization of esteem needs. With life is getting harder and harder and our purchasing power is diminishing, we're getting stuck on our survival needs. And I would argue that as we become more fearful, as we get focused on survival, our aperture of awareness narrows, and we get hyper-fixated on meeting our immediate impulsive needs. And so as money breaks down, society becomes more and more and more high time preference. We get impulsive. We want to meet our immediate needs. We're not

Starting point is 00:18:37 looking out for others. We're only looking out for ourselves. We're only looking out for getting food on the table and a roof over our heads. And this is where I just think what is so unbelievably profound about Bitcoin is it flips all of this on its head. It flips the rule on his head because all of a sudden, when you have something with true scarcity, 21 million Bitcoin, as you see humanity's incredible ability to increase efficiency, increase productivity, innovate, as we create more goods and services in relation to a fixed unit of account, then all of a sudden, we start to see purchasing power increase and cost of living decrease. Life starts to get easier. As life starts to get easier, you have more capacity. As you have more capacity, you have more time to look

Starting point is 00:19:17 inwards. And if you're spending more time looking inwards, you're asking yourself those questions of like, what is it that motivates me? Like, what are my values as an individual? How do I want to show up as an individual? And this to me is profound because all of a sudden, our time preference starts to shift towards the low end of things where we're thinking long term. We're thinking about what actually motivates us and how do we build prosperity and we're willing to do things that may be painful or hard to do in the moment, but in the long term, it benefits us. And so I'm sure, like, if I was to flip this question around on you, since going down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin Preston, how do you think your time preference has shifted?

Starting point is 00:19:55 Oh, it's crazy. I mean, I remember what it was like prior to Bitcoin where you're totally caught up in this consumerism of you have to spend it as fast as you possibly can. It's very hard to save. And if you could save, if you did have any disposable income in and you did save, the return rate was so minuscule for most things that you could invest in. that it was just really frustrating and hard and difficult because you were just treading water with the debasement rate, really.

Starting point is 00:20:22 And whether you knew that or not, you felt it. I think that's the thing that a lot of people might not be able to quantify why they were just treading water with the debasement rate, but they could feel it and they could just sense that they weren't getting ahead. And so, yeah, it's just caught up in consumerism. I want to hit on this quote that you just said, like very casually said, as we become more fearful, our awareness narrows. I think this is like really profound. I love reading some of these books like The Secret and other things. A lot of these books profess that at the core of what you are

Starting point is 00:20:56 as a human and your soul is this idea of awareness. And so when I hear you say something like as we become more fearful, our awareness narrows or the aperture gets tighter. But it's the exact opposite. If you're able to remove that fear, if you're living in this world where your money becomes more valuable or let's just frame it this way. It actually retains the buying power and the energy that you expended. We'll just say that. All of a sudden, you don't have to be fearful that it's going to be stolen from you tomorrow and your awareness and your aperture opens up and you're now aware of more and you're able to assess your environment. You're able to understand your environment and operate inside your environment more effectively. I think is probably the best way to say it.

Starting point is 00:21:39 So I want you to expound on this idea of as we become more fearful, our awareness narrows and then the contra to that, which I think is the really important thing to think about. Well, I think to start, I would say that this isn't even just like an idea. This is something that you can factually prove, which is this idea that when we become stressed, and we know money is the number one stressor globally. When we become stressed from a neurological perspective, that stress shuts down our prefrontal cortex. Shutting down on the prefrontal cortex, the challenges our prefrontal cortex handles sequencing, speech, planning, logic. And so you have a society that is basically that just had a lobotomy.

Starting point is 00:22:20 We're stuck in this like survival mode, just trying to pull an income to put food on the table. We're not able to plan. We're not able to think logically. It's impacting our relationships. It's impacting how we show up. And that I would even argue to the extreme side of things, money being the number one stressor. Well, when we feel stressed, what happens internally inside our body?

Starting point is 00:22:39 Well, our body releases a whole bunch of stress hormones, stress hormones like epinephrine, adrenaline, cortisol. Those stress hormones, if our body is constantly flooded in them, has huge negative effects on our physical health and how we actually show up. And what I've found really interesting, I talk about it a little bit in the book that didn't cost of money, is that before we're even born, during our developmental years inside the womb, we're already being impacted by our mum's stress. So if money is impacting our mum and we are inside the womb and we're being flooded by all of

Starting point is 00:23:10 these stress hormones, then all of a sudden it's creating a hypersensitive nervous system. That means we're getting stuck. Before we've even entered into this world, we're getting stuck in bite, blight, freeze. Let's take us back a second. What are these stress response systems? Bite, flight and freeze are evolutionary response systems to maximize our chance of survival. If we're stuck in, say, freeze, for instance, this is we're walking along kind of the plains of Africa, we see a line, we realize we can't outrun this line. So to maximize our chance of survival,

Starting point is 00:23:38 our breathing rate slows, our blood flow slows, our nutrient absorption slows, well, if during our developmental years we're flooded with stress hormones and all of a sudden we're stuck in this functional state of freeze, it's impacting our long-term health, it's rising rates of allergies, our ability to digest, our ability to sleep. And so I would say that money, being the number one stress it globally has an immense physiological impact on how we even just show up from a health standpoint. And then to that neurological standpoint, it's narrowing our aperture of awareness where our prefrontal cortex is shutting down. We can't think about anything else around us. We're just stuck in a survival mode. And so to me, Bitcoin is this kind of antidote to this

Starting point is 00:24:19 kind of lobotomy that we're facing in Fiat. It's this antidote and that all of a sudden is giving us back capacity. And healing begins when we terminate this continued stress mobilization and restore our nervous system back to a place of safety. And Bitcoin is kind of giving us that safety again. It's giving us that capacity to then start moving back up that Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's giving us that capacity to start thinking again about, you know what? What does belonging love mean to me? What does, how do I meet my own internal self-esteem needs? How do I think about maybe growing on a spiritual level? And I think it is through that aspect that our aperture of awareness starts to widen again.

Starting point is 00:24:59 We start thinking more about community, thinking about how we can contribute. It's profound. It's profound money's impact on how we show up. But again, how something like Bitcoin can completely shift how we're showing up as well. If we had a listener that was hearing all this, they might agree with all of our points but Bitcoin. They would say, I agree with all these points you're talking about stress and how it's harder. and I'm making these psychological decisions because I have financial issues. But then you're telling me Bitcoin solves this, but Bitcoin has like 70 to 80% annualized

Starting point is 00:25:31 volatility and it's all over the place. And I've seen all these tech bros and greedy people running around in Lambos. And there's just this, I think this perception that an outsider has of what is Bitcoin. And so how do you square that up when you're having a conversation with somebody when you're saying all of these amazing things that totally make sense and I get it. But then you're saying Bitcoin's the solution. And in their mind, the way they see Bitcoin is what I just described, as opposed to how you and I, you know. So how do you have that conversation? This is a thing that is so challenging is that as we've just discussed, our current system, unfortunately, is pushing us

Starting point is 00:26:09 towards this high time preference thinking. We're just trying to meet our immediate needs. So people aren't thinking long term. And so when you see the whipsore of Bitcoin's price action, people are scared. But the interesting thing is when you start looking big picture, when you start reading books like Jeff Booth is the price of tomorrow, and you realize actually prices should be falling, life should be getting easier. If we had a monetary system with a fixed supply that had true scarcity, life should be getting easier. People start thinking bigger. And I would say if there's one thing that really I've been thinking a lot about over the last kind of year, two years, is this idea of make saving great again. I think that, and I don't want this to be politically affiliated,

Starting point is 00:26:49 it's more just this idea of like make saving great again because unfortunately when money breaks down, all of a sudden, it's not as if we're just going to go and keep our purchasing power in the currency. We go and flood into all of these other assets. So we go and put that purchasing power into things like farmland. We go put that purchasing power into things like real estate. And all of a sudden, asset prices, real estate, farmland skyrocket. And all of these things, they're not being used for their utility value that offers products, goods, services, whether it's like a roof over people's heads, whether it is food on people's tables. We're not using farmland and real estate for its utility purpose.

Starting point is 00:27:24 We're using it to store money. And there's an interesting one of Marty Bent's emails that came out a little while back, maybe like three months ago, he was highlighting that if you'd taken just inflation from from 1945 to 2025, $1 in 1945, we'd basically have $17.65 today while purchasing power for $1 back in $1945. Well, the average home back then was $4,000. So if you were to use that inflation rate on housing, the average house today should be $70,600. But instead, it's $530,000. So you could say that $530,000 minus $70,000, we've got $460,000 of monetary, $1,600,000 of monetary, premium. We are trying to store our purchasing power in housing. We're trying to store our purchasing

Starting point is 00:28:10 power in farmland. We're trying to store a purchasing power in all of these other assets, but money. And so I think that if we had a monetary system that allowed us to simply save again without having to think about investing, without having to all become financial experts, dedicate all of our time and energy trying to figure out the markets. If we could simply just save in the currency again, we could direct all of that excess capacity towards whatever it is that motivates us, whether it is family, whether it is community, whether it is free in sports, mountains, personal growth, spiritual endeavors. And so I would say that at the moment, when you look at Bitcoin, most people look at it as an asset. But if I was to step back, Bitcoin is just money.

Starting point is 00:28:51 It is just money, it's digital money, that allows us to get back to saving so we don't have to think about all of this investing, all of these ways to protect and preserve our purchasing power. And so if I was to say kind of one thing that has really stood out to me, it's that like the irony of Bitcoin being money is that it gets us to stop thinking about money. Money today when it's losing value, we're hyper fixated and where do I get more money. I need to optimize to make money. Whereas when money stores value effectively, we don't have to think about money. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:21 We can think about everything else. Yeah. Safeadina Moose said, this is a couple years ago. He says, it's really terrible because you have to first be an expert at whatever the operational value, your business product you're selling into the market, you have to be an expert at that first. And then you also have to be an expert at how in the world do I preserve what I've already made the first time in an investment that will just retain that buying power that I worked so hard to get. And so, yeah, I completely agree with you. I'm curious, do you think that Fiat money

Starting point is 00:29:52 has created a kind of identity crisis? People chasing careers, they hate metrics that don't matter and goals that they never chose they were like deeply thought about in the first place. Walk us through some of your thoughts and ideas on this. I would say that it's created an identity crisis from two perspectives. One, at the start, I spoke about this idea of kind of the three P's, prestige, power, and possessions. And then the three Cs, connections, contributions, and challenges. Well, I think when money breaks down, we become hyper-fixated on a way out rather than a way

Starting point is 00:30:25 in, rather than looking inwards and trying to determine what really motivates us. We just want a way out. We just want like the next thing to distract us. So we become hyper-fixated on social media or the newest car or the newest gadget, whatever it is. But the reality is that that doesn't create happiness. Those moments are really fleeting. And so we have a world today where no one really knows what motivates them.

Starting point is 00:30:48 They're not spending time in contemplation or looking inwards. And so it's no wonder we're facing rising rates of depression and anxiety. And so kind of that's the first point is that I think we're optimizing for the, the wrong things. When money breaks down, we're optimizing for a way out rather than a way in. The second point is a slightly more nuance than it is this idea that when money breaks down, parents have to go out and work more. That means they're spending less time of their kids. We've seen from the statistics that from like basically since the departure of the gold standard, we've seen a halving of single learner households and a doubling of dual owner households.

Starting point is 00:31:22 So both parents having to go out and work as opposed to one parent being able to support a whole family. Well, that means that parents are spending less time with their kids. Kids are spending more time of their peers. What difference does that have? Well, parents, especially elders, have the ability to kind of have a moral, set a moral compass, help guide that kid because they already have experience because they've been through this world for many decades ahead of that kid. So they help instill certain morals, certain values that allow that kid to show up and individuate and understand how he wants to show up in life, how he wants to be treated. Whereas when kids spend time with their peers away from their parents and their elders, well, kids, they're entering this world

Starting point is 00:32:01 with no experience. They're learning together. And so kids want to look the same, they want to sound the same, they want to dress the same. So you have this identity crisis. Kids from such a young age, because they're not having that cultural knowledge being passed down, those moral values being passed down. We have a society that has no idea who it is. And what's interesting is you take the Aborigines. The Aborigines, we have dated that dates back hundreds of thousands years showing they've passed down cultural knowledge through tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, and you're like, that is amazing. And it's because they're spending time in generational families. You then take something like the hippie movement from the 60s, we're only two generations

Starting point is 00:32:39 into that, and it's already nearly evaporated. And it's because the hippie movement was a peer movement. It was a movement built on looking the same and sounding the same, as opposed to a cultural movement trying to pass down knowledge, moral values, you name it. And so I would say that money, is breaking down, is impacting our ability for parents to meet the emotional needs of kids and spend time with their kids. And to me, that is mind-blown. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform.

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Starting point is 00:36:24 the show. What would be your recommendation for somebody that's hearing this? They're saying, I agree. I feel like I'm somewhat a victim of exactly what you're describing. What's your recommendation for somebody that is just listening to this and wanting to become more authentic, wanting to try to start trending this in a different direction? I would, you know what? I'd say the challenges, it's that today we've been put in this box where we're basically stuck in survival mode. So if we're not able to preserve our purchasing power, if we're not able to save, then we're forced to go out and work to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. And so I think the first step is just grasping something like Bitcoin, so you can have, to your point

Starting point is 00:37:06 earlier, conviction when Bitcoin's price is fricking 20, 30, 40, 50%, you can have conviction that yes, this may be short-term volatility, but in the long term, Bitcoin is, as long as we're printing money and more people are wanting to be more sovereign, Bitcoin's price is most likely going to continue its trajectory that has been on for the last 16 years. And so I'd say once you start understanding Bitcoin, you start looking at the world so differently. And it is so amazing to go to these Bitcoin events and see how Bitcoiners are showing up. I would argue that they are almost the inverse of the average individual in kind of today's society, where the average individual, we're having less kids, fertility rate is falling off a cliff, and we're seeing rising rates of

Starting point is 00:37:49 to depression, anxiety. We're seeing a loss of meaning because people have no idea what their future is going to hold. They feel like they're never going to own a house. They're never going to have security. And so people are very impulsive. And then you take the average bitcoiner and they're starting to have children again. And I know countless bitcoins that are posting pictures of the block height of their new child that they've just had. And we're seeing countless bitcoins show up. They're getting married again. They're starting to own their own house. They're going to have property again. They're starting to think about their long term future and how they want to give back to society. They're finding meaning. And so when you go down that rabbit

Starting point is 00:38:20 hole of Bitcoin, as I mentioned earlier, all of a sudden you start removing that fixation on money because you have more mind share to focus on whatever it is that actually motivates you. And so it's more about like trying to understand what is it about the current system that is impacting our ability to show up right now. And how can I reorient? And I think Bitcoin is the ability to reorient. I would say that Bitcoin to me, if I was to say it's one kind of like core characteristic, it is that Bitcoin is a spiritual tool. Bitcoin is a spiritual tool in that it gives us capacity back. It gives us capacity to look inwards. It gives us capacity to show up more authentically or figure out how and what it is that showing up authentically means to me as an

Starting point is 00:38:58 individual. And that I just don't think we talk about enough. We still talk so much about it from a monetary perspective. 100%. Yeah. Another idea that you often talk about is this idea of Fiat rewarding abstraction over reality. What do you mean by this? And give us some examples if you have them. I would say that, and maybe this is taking it a little bit away from kind of the individual for a second, but we spoke about this idea of Bitcoin or money is a medium of expression. It's how we express to the world what it is that we value. Well, what is interesting is if you were to take a step back and look at an economy, money in

Starting point is 00:39:33 a free market flows to where value is being created. And so if you want to create a new business, you have to create value. You have to create a product that people want, a service that people. people want and money will flow to you because you are creating value. Well, the challenge we have today is we have a centrally planned economy. That centrally planned economy allows, it distorts capital flows. It's like damming a river and allowing water to flow to where no value is being created. And so we've got a society that's incredibly capitally destructive. We go and prop up whole industries, whole sectors that shouldn't exist, and we allow ones that should

Starting point is 00:40:08 exist to deteriorate and waste away through regulation and in the impeding of capital flows. And And so I would say that it becomes very challenging as a society to actually create value and actually see what it is that reality is rewarding because we're altering capital flows. And how do we survive in a society when we don't know truth from fiction? And I would say that this is one of the biggest challenges we're facing today. So why do you think that the Bitcoin community is just so curious? I've met a lot of people at different conferences and yeah, there's something to this community that is just crazy, curious, just introspective, very creative.

Starting point is 00:40:49 I don't know. I'm kind of curious just your take on what's driving this and why this exists. That's a really good question. I would say that we receive a lot of training throughout our lives, whether that is the educational system that we're brought up in, whether it is through our parents and the educational system they were brought up in, whether it's mainstream media. So we tend to have a very locked-in view on how we think the world works, and it can be very hard to question some of these beliefs on how we think the world works. And what is interesting about Bitcoin is it breaks

Starting point is 00:41:22 down, I would argue, one of the poor beliefs we have, which is that the government has our best interests at heart, that our current monetary system is there to kind of support a thriving economy. We need inflation because otherwise how do you incentivize spending and growth? And so all of a sudden, when you start questioning these beliefs and you realize, huh, they're kind of built on a very shaky foundation. And then you start going down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin, you look at the world very differently. And then from pulling on those beliefs of kind of our monetary system, you start looking into things like subsidies. You start looking into subsidies. You start realizing maybe our educational system is pretty flawed. Maybe our food industry, the healthcare industry,

Starting point is 00:42:02 The, you name it, like there's so many areas of society that when you pull on those threads, they're built on a shaky foundation. So many of our foundational beliefs, we've been told this is the way it is, but if we ever actually questioned that that is the way that it is. And you know what, maybe just quickly pulling on one little thread, like a side little side tangent, it is that one of the areas that really open my eyes up when I started going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole was this idea of subsidies. And one of those, in particular was grain subsidies. So if we take a step back for a second, humans separated from apes around 60 million years ago. For 57.5 million years, our brain size stayed pretty much

Starting point is 00:42:45 exactly the same size. We were kind of scavengers, opportunists. We would eat meat if we had the opportunity to. And then all of a sudden, we developed kind of three main traits. First, we developed articulating shoulders. This allowed us to kind of throw spears, throw rocks, hunt. Second, we became bipedal. We could stand up on two legs so we could run long distances and hunt things down. And third, we developed the whites in our eyes, which allowed us to hunt in silence. Other chimps, other monkeys have black eyes, which means they're optimized for food scarcity. They can look around and see where food is without others seeing where they're looking. But what that means is they can't hunt in silence. They have to communicate. And so when we develop these three traits,

Starting point is 00:43:24 bipedal, articulating shoulders, whites in our eyes, all of a sudden we became the apex predator. And in two and a half million years, our brain size tripled because we were predominantly eating animal-based. Now, what's really interesting is 10,000 years ago, we had the agricultural revolution. We started eating grain. And the average human, pre-agricultural man went from 5-9 to 5-5 as a result of poor nutrition. We started to see spinal lesions impacting, like, showing kind of like poor immune function. We started to see kind of a breakdown in kind of cavities and decay.

Starting point is 00:43:56 And so it's like, huh, we're kind of predominantly eating animal based. Where does money come into all of this? Well, after the Depression, the US government came in and said, you know what? We need to make grain readily available. So they subsidized grain production. They started to put all of this artificial capital into grain production. We started to put all of this artificial capital into grain production. We saw the absolute boom of the grain industry. From that, because there was all of this excess grain, we saw the growth in seed oils. We saw the growth in high fructose corn syrup. We saw all of the grain monopolies, Kellogg's and Quakers. We saw the monocrop agricultural industry completely decimate all of the topsoil because they were no longer rotationally farming. And we disincentivize people to look at traditional rotational methods of farming that maintained nutrition in the soil and created like phenomenal, highly nutritious food. And so all of a sudden, because of grain subsidies, we destroyed basically our food industry.

Starting point is 00:44:55 Not only that, but then Kellogg's and Quakers, because they had all of these artificial margins, what do they do with this excess capital? They lobbied the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the FDA created the food pyramid. In the second half of the 20th century, we were told for millions of years we've been eating grain, we've got to continue eating grain, and saturated fats, animal products are bad for us. What have we seen since the creation of the food pyramid? We've seen absolute growth in obesity, in diabetes, in all of these health issues. And so I would argue that like when you step back and you start looking at money, it really is pervasive into every single aspect of a society. And even something as what you would think

Starting point is 00:45:33 as nuanced as a grain subsidy has completely altered the whole health of a nation like the U.S. It's as profound. If you're looking for a really good book that hits on some of these ideas that Seb was just talking about, Fiat food is an amazing read. We had the author on the show, I don't know, probably a year ago or something, but this is, if you're not intimately familiar with the space, This is a topic that Bitcoiners love to really get into is just food and health. And it goes to the core of the original question set, which was, why are Bitcoiners so curious and why do they go off into all these things?

Starting point is 00:46:10 But to your answer, it's when you start looking at the money, all this other stuff starts to unravel in a way that I never, ever expected to, you know, start going down some of these paths and have an interest in some of these ideas. But it was just so obvious and just so interesting, I think, is really. what it is when you start pulling the thread on some of this because it's it just goes deeper and deeper into 20 different rat holes that you never expected to end up in. Well, and I'm curious from your own perspective, maybe we'll share something quickly, which is I've noticed that Bitcoin is almost, it's a filter feature. It's like if you walk into a group

Starting point is 00:46:47 and someone says, oh yeah, I know about Bitcoin, you can ask a couple questions and you can get an understanding if they've put 10 hours into Bitcoin, if they put 100 hours, if they put 10,000 hours. Just by asking two or three questions. Yeah. And then the interesting thing is if you're like, okay, this person knows what they're talking about. Yeah. If they recognize that deflation is the key to an abundant future, then I'm curious what other aspects they've dove into. And nearly all of the time, they've dug into so many of these other rabbit holes.

Starting point is 00:47:14 Like, would you say you find the same thing? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you could ask somebody what they had for lunch and probably have a really good idea as to how deep they are down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Oh, my God. So, Seb and I share book recommendations with each other. We're both avid readers.

Starting point is 00:47:36 I'm kind of curious, you know, just learning in general, Seb, how do you personally digest and integrate everything you read when you're going through different ideas? Like, I mean, your last answer is just proof to somebody that Seb reads a lot. He really likes to ask a lot of questions and think critically about things. But what are some of your tips for people just on the learning front? How do you become a better learner? How do you do a better job of synthesizing ideas? How do you do a, this is the question. I personally have for you, how do you make sure that when you come across some great ideas

Starting point is 00:48:09 and mental models that you just don't lose them over time and that they become kind of incorporated into, you know, your daily life? Because I'll tell you, I read a lot too, but I know there's books that I read five, ten years ago that I have forgot a ton that I learned in the moment that I felt was really important, but just, you know, if you don't use it, you lose it kind of thing. So how do you think about this? How do you go about it in a productive and thoughtful kind of way? So I would say, and this is the topic that it's always really interesting.

Starting point is 00:48:36 Like we go down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin and we go down the rabbit hole of money and how the world kind of pieces together. But there's so much content we consume and most of it goes in one ear and out the other. Or even if when we were reading that thing, we were just completely mesmerized by it and fascinated by it. Two years later, we've just forgotten it. And so how do we try to retain information or at least store that information in a way that we can access it later on? And there's many individuals to talk about this idea of kind of like my second brain. And it's this idea that our brain is phenomenal at creating connections between abstract ideas. So when we read one

Starting point is 00:49:11 book about money and then we read another book about psychology and then we start to notice, huh, I'm noticing that money is triggering this in our psychological experience. We're really good at piecing together these abstract ideas. What our brain is useless at doing is trying to memorize specific facts. And so because of that, we've got to be able to a way to store this information so we can actually step back from having to memorize the facts and focus more on the abstract ideas and the connections between things. And it's almost, it's mimicking the brain's neural pathways, allowing us to connect the dots between stuff. And there's kind of a way that I approach things. First off, when I'm reading, I don't just take notes for the sake of taking notes. I only take notes on things that motivate

Starting point is 00:49:51 me and that interest me. And I'm like, that is a really interesting point. I'm going to take note on this interesting point. Once I've finished the book, I then go through and I read all of those notes and I bold the ones that stood out to me. So now I have two sections of notes. I have the first ones, regular, and then I have the bolded ones. The ones were like, well, that was a really interesting point. Then I go through one more time, read the bolded ones, and the ones that were like, That is a profound point that actually alters maybe my world perspective or how I think about something. And I go and expand and put those in my own words. And so having this three-tiered approach to taking notes ensures that you're starting to actually understand it from your own perspective

Starting point is 00:50:29 and you're starting to put those really inspirational eye-opening moments into your own words. So that's kind of like the first step. The next step is this idea that, okay, you've taken all these notes. If you just have it stored in your regular Apple notes, if you just have them stored in an Evernote, it's almost impossible to find those notes because you read a book and you're like, I don't even remember what was the name in that book? I remember it spoke about this, but I can't find it. And so then it's about creating some form of structure. So for me as an individual, I use something called Obsidian. An obsidian is an open source software that basically saves things and it's called Markdown, but it's effectively just like a text document, a basic text document,

Starting point is 00:51:07 so we can move that to any app down the line. From there, I take notes and I have these templates, It's like a book template. And so the moment I start reading a book, I then I bring up the book template and then it says subjects. And I have a whole bunch of various subjects, whether it's like health, whether it's psychology, whether it is whatever. It's kind of like a library. And then I have the book status.

Starting point is 00:51:28 Am I reading? Have I read it? And then once I've read it, I have tags as in like, was it a one star book, two star, up to five star. So now I've rated my books. I have all of the various subjects and I have the name of the book and the author of the book. And I have all my notes. And to me, this structure has profoundly. improved my ability to, one, retain information. Many times I don't even go back to review the

Starting point is 00:51:50 information, but it's the act of creating and taking note that it's allowed that information to absorb in. But two, at the back of the hidden cost of money, I think there's something like 500 citations. And people are like, when you wrote the book, you went out and you sourced all of those citations and it was like, no, I had like 10 years of reading and 5, 600 books that I had already taken notes on. So when I started writing the hidden cost of money, I was like, oh yeah, there's a connection between this and this and I think it was in this book and then I'm able to look up psychology. I can find, oh, four-star book rated, this book, Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, she talks about the impact of money in this area of life.

Starting point is 00:52:27 And then I can go and cite that in my book. And so for me, being out of structural notes, being able to organize your notes, being able to actually go back and find those notes is so unbelievably important. And the one other final point that I'll make is that I came across this point a little while back, probably about seven, eight years ago, which is that when we read, we do what's something called sub vocalizing. We're walking the word, we're basically saying the words in our head. And in doing so, we're having to read the words. That's one step of processing. And we're saying the words in our head and listening to the words, that's two steps of processing.

Starting point is 00:52:59 And when we're listening, you skip the whole step of interpreting the words and saying them in your head. And so if you can stay focused while listening, you get much better retention through listening. And so this kind of moved me over, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts, it moved me over to predominantly listening to books as opposed to reading books these days. And so I can go for a walk in the forest. As long as it's in a very low stimulus environment, I can go for a walk in the forest and I notice my retention is exponentially higher. And that is for certain books. If you're looking for mathematical stuff, I'm not listening to that kind of stuff. But I'm curious on your experience.

Starting point is 00:53:29 So I read, unlike you, I actually prefer listening, but I read this in some, this goes to the core point of my question to you, which is I read this somewhere probably five years ago or something that broke down by like a stat that like 30% of the population actually learns better through listening. The other 30% learns better through reading and then the other 30% are hands-on type people. Obviously the math is wrong on what I just said, but it's approximately somewhere in that ballpark. And the reason it's stuck with me is because I've always preferred listening as opposed to reading the physical hard copy, even though I've got a ton of physical hard copies back there. You know, depending on my environmental setup, sometimes I'll mix it with both. And that's

Starting point is 00:54:15 why I've always had the hard copies, because sometimes I needed to have the hard copy, sometimes I needed to listen to the audiobook. But what I've found is like the ultimate hack is both of them together. If I can sit down and look at the hard copy and listen to somebody reading it to me, I don't know. It sticks in my head way differently than just doing one or the other. Where I'm like a little confused, I guess, right now from a learning standpoint is just AI. AI has solved so many problems for me personally of just being able to recall or find something that, you know, you go back to books that I read 15, 20 years ago, and you'll find in the cover all my notes, all the stuff that I had.

Starting point is 00:54:58 I mean, I was like hardcore. And nowadays, like, it's not that at all. It's me just kind of going through the book. A lot of the stuff I feel like I've read somewhere else before. I'm sure you've used kind of a similar thing from a lot, especially on the business side of books. But when I'm done reading and I'm not taking notes and I'm not putting these things in there and I'm just saying, eh, I can fetch whatever I want from AI.

Starting point is 00:55:21 by saying, hey, it was in this book. This was the general idea. What was the exact quote? Or help me, help refresh me on what the three points were. I can only remember one of the three. And it just spews it out and it's pretty dang good. Like, it's good enough that maybe this is just me being a little lazy lately. And so then I asked myself, like, what's causing that? And is it somehow tied to Bitcoin's performance, right? And I think this is a area that I want to ask you next. So let's say we're right about all this. Let's say we're 10, 15, 20 years into the future and people who, you know, we're pretty early into this thing and they just got buying power for eons, how do they stay motivated?

Starting point is 00:56:05 How do they continue to want to contribute? Walk us through your thoughts on some of these things. And I guess it goes to some of the stuff we were talking about earlier in the show, but I'm genuinely curious how you think about this. This is, and maybe I'll start by just saying, I have not formed my opinions on this. strongly because I find it AI in this field intimidating. I find it intimidating in it like take mobile phones, pre-mobile phones. I used to remember every single one of my friends home phone numbers. And I'm sure you're probably pretty similar. I used to be

Starting point is 00:56:37 to go home and I can still remember my home phone number from when I was a child. I would remember the numbers by how the order on the dial pad is how I could remember a lot of numbers in the day To this day, I still know some of my high school friends' numbers that way. But I couldn't tell you, if you asked me what the numbers were, I couldn't tell you. I had to look at the dial pad and show the geometry on the dial pad. But go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Keep going.

Starting point is 00:57:02 No, no, no. And to that point is more like the physical keyboard, I can still, like, I want to send a message in my head. I know how many clicks I've got to do to get the H, how many to do the E? Like, it gets programmed into your brain. Anyway, when we think about our ability to memorize strings of numbers, It has deteriorated significantly since moving away from home phone numbers to cell phones. We just don't have to remember numbers anymore.

Starting point is 00:57:29 Well, I think we're on the transition period right now where the majority of people in the world, their knowledge, has come from analog forms of consumption. We've read books. We've taken courses. We've kind of been out in the world. We've experienced these things. We've consumed all of this information and we've created this idea on how we think the world works. And now all of a sudden, we're using AI. And that's awesome for those that have this idea

Starting point is 00:57:54 of how they think the world works, because we can check it. Is what's coming out of the AI legitimate? And as we probably know, and you've probably had the experiences, AI many times makes stuff up. It pulls information that is not accurate. But because we've spent time in, let's say, the Bitcoin space and we're questioning about Bitcoin, we understand when it is telling us something that is false or is pulling the wrong information. And so we're able to determine what is truth because we have our own source of truth. The challenge I find is that as we increasingly lean upon AI, we no longer we lose our sense of truth as an individual. And that is what I find a little scary is that I'm noticing, even in my own ability to show up, I used to spend like,

Starting point is 00:58:33 I feel really lucky that I wrote the hidden cost of money, I wrote beers for Bitcoin, most of my long form articles pre-AI. And you sat down and you really fleshed out your ideas on how you thought the world worked. And I would only talk about them once I'd fleshed them out. Whereas now I'm kind of like, wow, that's a really interesting idea that came up in this conversation. I'm going to feed it into AI and see what it thinks. And then it spits out some stuff that I would never have thought about that. That's my idea now.

Starting point is 00:58:58 And so I'm noticing that it's almost solidifying some of my ideas before I have worked through them myself. Yeah. And so that's where I'm a little nervous. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Where I'm nervous is when you read a lot of different books, you get this serendipitous information that you never intended to get from just that being a full-length book, right? I might read a book because of, you know, a core thesis or whatever.

Starting point is 00:59:21 And then as I'm reading it, I get five other ideas or mental models that I never anticipated in getting just because I'm going through the entire book. Over time, the emergent property of that is I think you're able to, especially when we think about how you interact with AI, the person who's going to be the most lethal with AI is the person who has the best conducting skills or the best ability. ability to ask questions. And to troubleshoot when it spit something out that seems like it's off, you can say, hey, did you ever think about it from this point of view? And then you get this aha moment where it's like, oh, wow, yeah. In fact, here's three other things to think about

Starting point is 01:00:01 on that specific angle, right? That person is going to be crazy lethal when they're interacting with AI because they're a great conductor of the questions and the prompts that they're giving it. And they're able to kind of work it down to this really incredible outcome. My concern is like, if you haven't done this work where you've read 500 books, it's just an example, the naming 50 a year, you know, is a really lofty target. I know that was always kind of my target for a very long time for decades, was to try to knock that out. And I think that those people, like when I think about the future, like my kids and they're

Starting point is 01:00:41 in their 40s, it's just going to be so different. And I think their lack of serendipitous information that they were able to acquire just through brute force work of trying to become more knowledgeable on a daily basis, it's not going to be there. And I can't figure out for the life of me, whether this is a good thing, bad thing, whether it'll matter. I don't know, but I don't know. I think it's concerning, but I don't know. It's challenging. It's super challenging. And what comes to mind as you're saying this is that like, I tend to believe that the longer something takes to create, usually I'm sure if you were to graph this, there'll be more quality or more value in something the longer it takes to create because someone's had to invest that time

Starting point is 01:01:24 and energy. So it's like when you read a book, sometimes you can get someone's whole life experience condensed into 300 pages, 400 pages, whereas a TikTok video that's five seconds long, there's very little value most of the time in a five second long TikTok that video. And so So the world today, unfortunately, as life is getting harder, as we're looking for a way out rather than a way in, we're looking for things to stimulate us and meet our immediate needs. So the length of content we're consuming is getting shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. And so I think that to your point that you made a second ago, the people that I think that have success in this type of society are the ones that have a broad knowledge or depth of knowledge

Starting point is 01:02:02 that they're able to look at the content that's coming out of AI and structure meaningful information. But to the average individual, they're just going to be lost because they're just going to be getting so much noise coming at them, so much stimulus, and to them to be able to find the cognitive capacity to sit down and read a book, it's just going to be too much. And so what I think is just profound about Bitcoin, and we'll kind of bring it back to Bitcoin is that Bitcoin gives us capacity again. Bitcoin, I think, gives us a time and the space to rather than looking for a way out, we start looking for a way in. And I've noticed personally that I went down the knowledge consumption rabbit hole. when I really started getting deep into Bitcoin. And at one point, I was like, I want to try and reach 100 books a year. And then I realize I'm like, how much of this content are I really like integrating?

Starting point is 01:02:48 That's a lofty goal. I'm not really consuming this content in the way that I would like to consume it. And so as I've gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and my time preference has lengthened, I'm noticing that I'm spending less time on social media. I don't want the short immediate gratification content. I want the long-form content, but specifically the stuff that makes you think, where you can read a page and then you can hit pause and you're like, you can think about that, that one page for an hour, two hours.

Starting point is 01:03:16 You can go for a walk thinking about that page and it's kind of on your mind. And so I believe that Bitcoin is shifting our focus. And even though we've got all of these distractions, Bitcoin is kind of like trying to find that signal through the noise. Yeah. It's allowing us to refocus on what matters. And that only comes about through capacity, I believe. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:35 Yeah, this idea of trying to limit some of your social media consumption is, I think, an amazing point and something that, you know, I have this bittersweet relationship with social media. For me, what it has really provided is just an ability to test an idea in an open market and get just tons of, like, candid human feedback as to whether the idea is warranted or just plain stupid. If it's stupid, man, do you find out fast? And in a way that some people were jerks about it, but then there's other people that

Starting point is 01:04:12 are just extremely thoughtful in their ability to show you and demonstrate to you why you're wrong. You know, if you don't mind being publicly humiliated, which has happened to me countless times via social media, it's a great way to learn, though. Like, you can learn something super fast that way. Do you think, and I'm curious, like, given that your follow account has grown immensely over the last kind of decade. Do you think that you self-silence at all? Or do you think what you put out there has changed? I think you definitely do self-silence because once you've been humbled

Starting point is 01:04:46 a few times, you're just way more careful in what you say. Like, I know, when you don't have a lot of followers, you'll put an idea out there and you won't get any feedback because you might not have a lot of people that are following you that have the expertise or know-how our knowledge to even reply to what it is your testing or trying to figure out. Yeah, and I would say more recently, you know, with anybody that has 10,000 plus followers, like you're going to get feedback if they're real followers. You're going to get feedback and you're going to learn things that, you know, it's going to be very humbling again. But yeah, to your point, I think you do start to be careful in what you say because you just don't want to look stupid. I mean, nobody wants to

Starting point is 01:05:27 look stupid in front of, you know, a bunch of people. And, you know, you have it happen a couple times. You think twice before posting anything. And then sometimes you still don't. You still do stupid things. But yeah. What are your thoughts? I mean, you have, I don't know how many followers. You've got quite a few followers. I would say that I would like to say that it hasn't, but I don't think that's true. I would like to think that I want to be able to show up and put myself out there from a place of humility and recognizing, look, I don't have all the answers. This is, it's kind of like the strong opinions loosely held. I'm always willing to debate someone. I'm always willing to have those conversations with someone. But if someone comes up with a better response, I'm going to

Starting point is 01:06:07 be like, huh, that's a really interesting point they made. I'd never thought about it from that perspective, and I'm willing to drop my belief. And so I think that Bitcoin, to me, has, one, because most of my followers have come about through Bitcoin, has been a test in humility and this idea that I'm going to put myself out there in a way that the world is very much my beliefs in the world is not fixed. The world is constantly fluctuating. Our interpretation of the world is constantly fluctuating and being able to have that intellectual honesty at recognizing when we're wrong. And I think Bitcoin has also, there's been some huge areas of my life that have completely shifted as a result of looking at the world from a different perspective. And that's what Bitcoin has,

Starting point is 01:06:45 but has allowed me to kind of see that perspective. And it kind of goes back to our conversation about having previously. What I think is so fascinating about Bitcoin and kind of creating this curiosity is sometimes you think the world works a certain way. We should be eating vegan and vegetarian. Then you realize, maybe you shouldn't be eating vegan and vegetarian. And then you think that the central banks and the government have our best interest at heart.

Starting point is 01:07:04 And then you're like, maybe they don't. And maybe I just need to support myself and support my community and give back. And that's how we create a flourishing world. And then you think that pharmaceuticals are there because they're treating the symptom and we need to treat the symptom. And then you're like, actually, I'd rather treat the root cause so we can actually build a foundation on health and prosperity. And so I do find, yeah, the journey of Bitcoin is a really interesting journey.

Starting point is 01:07:25 And it makes you, because it's completely reshaped how I think about the world, how I think about my values, how I show up, how I communicate. And I'm trying not to self-center a sensor because if I am censoring, then I'm not putting that view out there. So I'm not actually having that view tested. Yeah. I think the problem with the social media is just the insubes. with the likes and the retweets and the looking at the number of views can really cause a person to become egocentric.

Starting point is 01:07:54 They're chasing that as opposed to, am I trying to learn something through questioning or putting something out there? Or am I truly trying to help people by posting this comment or this idea so that more people can learn about something that you think is important for the world to know versus if I post this, am I going to get 10 new followers? followers or whatever it is, right? And if it's in that latter camp, I think social media can turn into just an absolute train wreck making you miserable and you will not be fulfilled because you're spending every waking moment just trying to get another light. And, you know, it's something that I try to think about a lot as to like, okay, am I logging in? Am I doing this to learn something new about the market? Am I trying to prepare for a show and just kind of learning what's out there? or am I doing this to look like I am, if it's in that latter category, it's like, it's time to log off.

Starting point is 01:08:50 Like, what in the world are you doing? And I guess the reason I say this is the incentives there and the way that these, and you've heard Jack, I'm sure, talk about how these systems, these social media systems are designed to capture people. They are designed to suck you in and go after the little almost like video game, you know, like button. of it's like collecting Mario coins or collecting whatever that the human nature is driving people to keep coming back for more because they feel like it's making them happy, but actually it's making them extremely depressed. So I'm curious. Like, I'm sure if I was to speak to a handful of Bitcoin is one of the traits that you

Starting point is 01:09:33 very much represent unbelievably well is just this sense of humility. I think you're one of the most humble people in the space. And I'm curious, do you think that given that social media has only come about in kind of the latter half of your life. Coming into the space, you'd already developed a sense of self. You've already developed a sense of individuation. So you're able to be grounded in that space. Or do you think it came from the way your parents raised you?

Starting point is 01:09:58 Like, where do you think this sense you know that came from? The real question, Sab is because you're so old, Preston, is that your advantage in dealing with social media? Is that the real question? How did you get? No, not at all. I honestly think that that is an advantage. I couldn't imagine if I grew up with this.

Starting point is 01:10:15 Like, I can't imagine. Like, I didn't have a Twitter until I was in my 30s, I think. Right. So, yeah, I think that that was a big advantage, not having this being wired into my mind at a very young, you know, teenage age because I think it is, I think it's going to be hard, especially all this TikTok stuff. Like, I don't have a TikTok. I don't even really realize fully what it is other than like short video.

Starting point is 01:10:43 clips is my understanding of TikTok. But it seems like it's just kind of wired these young kids into if it's longer than 20 seconds. Like, I'm sorry, I don't have time to even consider watching or viewing whatever that is. So I was talking with a younger kid the other day and they were just like, hold on a second. So like, you're creating content that's like an hour long. And I was like, yeah. And they were just flabbergasted that anybody who would want to listen to that. So, yeah. I don't know. It's crazy.

Starting point is 01:11:18 The world we live in is such a different world from even, I think, pre-pandemic and then early 2000s. I feel really lucky. Like I'm 32 years old. And I feel really lucky that I didn't have a cell phone, I think, till I was about 13, 14. And so I have vague memories of the world pre-internet, pre-technology. And I just can't imagine growing up in the world that we live in today. to your point, like I think social media creates certain incentives.

Starting point is 01:11:46 And we're just becoming so disconnected. And you know what, actually, if I was to, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. We had a conversation, and it's a slight tangent from what we're just talking about. We had a conversation when we were in Jackson and we were in the little speakeasy one night, you, Alex, myself and a couple others. And we started talking about our go-to spot. How society is pretty. We were talking about kind of society.

Starting point is 01:12:12 how we've got kind of this disconnection. And one of the things that we're seeing with this disconnection is actually a drop in people looking to religion and people kind of looking to state. Yeah. And I think that religion from a moral framework kind of passes down kind of honesty and accountability and kind of stewardship and like a sense of community. And one thing Alex mentioned that blew my mind was this idea that Bitcoin in a sense is a moral framework that can be verified. The challenge with religion is it's built upon trust. And that's not to say, I'm not going to have an argument about whether religion is true, whether God exists, it's more this idea that unfortunately there is a lot of trust in religion. And so as we're seeing this

Starting point is 01:12:53 transition away from religion, we're seeing more people look to the state to fill that loss of religion, whereas something like Bitcoin is profound because all of a sudden it's creating this transition point where now we have a moral framework being passed down. We're having honesty and accountability, You've got stewardship, you've got a sense of community that's kind of bringing people together, and it's being passed down through this framework that's verifiable. You can go and interrogate the code. You could never do that with religion. And so I'm curious to kind of hear your thoughts on this. We've got the system that previously relied on trust, and now it's breaking down and we're looking to the state to fill that spot. And now Bitcoin is kind of emerging. It's this way that

Starting point is 01:13:32 is passing down these values without the need for the state, without the need for traditional religion. I just try to think about it just very simply and from first principles, You know, if I go out and let's say I'm picking 10 apples and I consume eight or nine a day for my family and me and that sustains us and we don't have to do anything more than that, then I have a couple apples in reserve. Like, I can be more giving. I can be more kind. I can go out and I don't have to worry about where my next meal is going to come from because

Starting point is 01:14:02 I'm able to go and perform work and have access. But if I go and I do the same, you know, drill and I go into. the kitchen and the excess apples are gone. They're being consumed somehow, some way, and they're not there. And now all of a sudden, I don't even have enough for my family because they're dissipating at a rate that's way faster. You're going to find that on a net basis, if you had this scenario that I'm describing playing out with a thousand or 10,000 or 100,000 families, what I think you're going to find is that on a net, 100,000 different families, they are quote unquote less moral in what they're doing to try to survive because they don't have

Starting point is 01:14:44 enough, even though they know they're working for enough in abundance and excess. But when they go to the excess, it's not there. They feel robbed and they feel taken. And so they feel justified going out and trying to get it from somewhere else. And I'm not saying that makes it right. I'm saying that just looking at it from a sheer number standpoint that I think human nature will become, and we're using the word quote unquote moral, I think they become less moral just because of the math of what I just described from a first principle standpoint.

Starting point is 01:15:18 And I think when I look across a lot of religions, I think you have the quote unquote influencers or the people that are talking on behalf of some of these religions will point to it's a breakdown in the family values. It's a breakdown in this. And I'm looking at it more from, and of course, my engineering hat comes on. I'm just saying, I'm just looking at the numbers. And the numbers are telling me that what I'm seeing from a trend standpoint just makes sense is how I would describe it.

Starting point is 01:15:47 No. And I very much agree. And I think that it comes back to just like capacity. And I think you're always going to get Gandhi. You're always going to get these unique individuals that can step outside of their environment and create and make change. You're always going to get those individuals. But I do believe that for the average person,

Starting point is 01:16:04 people are a product to their environment. Yeah. And so when you have an environment that's just putting so much pressure on people, like in Canada, we have seen since, what is it, 1970 to present day, the average house went from three times the average person's wage to 9.7 times the average person's wage. Yeah. Like the average to buy one share of the S&P 500 went from 24 hours to 251.

Starting point is 01:16:27 When life is just getting harder and harder and harder, we just have no capacity. Yeah. Someone keeps stealing all our apples. That's right. And it's just like, you want to be able to show up and it's just, it's hard. And so I think exactly to your point, I think that the first thing that gives when life is getting harder is our ability to be compassionate, our ability to be altruistic, to be able to give back to society, to be able to think about others, to be able to think about supporting

Starting point is 01:16:51 others, putting others sometimes before ourselves because we can see a bigger picture. And it's what I feel is happening in society today. We see it in the social unrest. Like society, the social fabric feels like it's breaking down. and people just have this loss of meaning. And I think if I was to kind of really pinpoint it down to kind of one specific point, it would be this, imagine if you're a 20-year-old and you're like, I want to try and save for a house.

Starting point is 01:17:12 I want to have kids and I want to save for a house. I think it's going to take me based on my current income 15 years to save for the house. And then five years in, it's like, oh, no, it's going to take 25 years. Yeah. Like, can you find meaning under that world? No. It's so hard. Whereas in a Bitcoin world, it's the inverse.

Starting point is 01:17:27 It's like, I think it's going to take me 15 years to save for a house, five years in. Oh, you know what? I think it's going to take seven years. It's a freaking amazing. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And by the way, the house keeps getting cheaper if I'm measuring in Bitcoin. Seb, for people listening, so Seb has this incredible book.

Starting point is 01:17:44 It's called The Hidden Cost of Money. Can't recommend this enough. It's on Amazon. You can find it pretty much anywhere you buy a book. What else you got, Seb, that you want to highlight for folks that are wanting to learn more about you? Because clearly they can see you're a very thoughtful guy. I would say like, you can check me out on Twitter, which is just the first.

Starting point is 01:18:01 or X, I'm still in the habit of calling it Twitter. I prefer Twitter to X. I prefer Twitter too. Yeah, you can check me out on Twitter, which is just said Bunny and Bunny is BUNY and E-U-N-N-E-Y. I do have a blog called saidbunny.com. And on there, I talk about a lot of these ideas. And to be honest, like, I just think that money really is like everything is downstream of money.

Starting point is 01:18:22 When money is broken, it leads to all of these byproducts in life. And it's like, how do we talk more about the byproducts and the unintended consequences of money? because through that, I think people start to recognize how Bitcoin can resolve so many of these issues. And it's really easy to get fixated on the number go up technology. Bitcoin makes life a little easier. And so we get hyper-fixated on the financial aspect of money. But I'd say that's a fiat approach to money because money is breaking down.

Starting point is 01:18:48 We're constantly looking to kind of preserve our purchasing power. So I love talking about that kind of stuff and you can check out the hidden cost of money. But again, Preston, I just, I really appreciate how you show up. I really appreciate you as an individual. And I think I mentioned this on the first time we, of the second time we had a podcast a few years back, which was I started listening to you in maybe 2017 or 2018 when you started your podcast. Yeah. And I was deep down the Warren Buffett. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:19:13 And you were the absolute, like, key inspiration that led me down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin. Like, I remember being like, I don't want to invest in gold. Doesn't throw off cash flows. I need businesses. Value investing. It's the way to go. It's wild, man. It's weird to see where I suspect.

Starting point is 01:19:28 a lot of this is going and how the value investing stuff is going to eventually come back. Now, we might be five or 10 years away from that, but I think it's going to come full circle, man. I think the value investing is going to come back into the scene here later in all of this. But thank you, Sam. I really appreciate that. It really means a lot. All right, folks, Seb Bunny, we'll have a link to his book.

Starting point is 01:19:49 We'll have a link to all the other stuff that Seb's up to in the show notes. Thank you for making time, sir. Always a pleasure. Thanks, Preston. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Bitcoin Fundamentals on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, before making any decision consult a professional.

Starting point is 01:20:16 This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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