You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 33: Erik Cason - The Dawn Of a New Free Humanity

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

My guest today is Erik Cason, a Crypto-anarchist, cypherpunk, and iconoclast, who believes in sovereignty through cryptography. He’s a Bitcoin educator and the author of “Cryptosovereignty: The Encrypted Political Philosophy of Bitcoin”.  In this episode we explore the themes of resistance, courage, and questioning, while highlighting the awakening of consciousness and the pursuit of truth. We delve into the concept of anarchism and its relationship to Bitcoin and cryptography, the importance of anonymity and sovereignty in the digital age and the potential for a new political paradigm. Erik touches on the limitations of academia and the need for open dialogue and exploration of forbidden thinkers and ideas. We explore the importance of critical thinking, the dangers of complacency, and the probable potential for a dystopian future. We observe the phenomena of waking up from societal conditioning and reclaiming sovereignty, and use examples such as Covid & Climate.  Erik believes that Bitcoin provides a pathway to freedom and empowerment, but warns against the financialization of Bitcoin. He encourages the development of circular economies and the utilization of Bitcoin for direct peer-to-peer transactions. Despite the challenges ahead, he’s hopeful for a present and future where individuals break free from systems of power and control. ► If you got value, please like, comment, share, subscribe and support my work. Thank you! -- CHAPTERS – 00:00 Intro & Background 05:18 Ad Break (Trezor, Bitcoin Nashville) 08:18 Erik's Attraction to Philosophy 09:48 Covid Memory Holes 12:18 Anarchism Explained 15:45 Cryptography as State Protection  19:08 Deeper Meaning of Life & Great Awakening 26:38 The Dangers of Not Facing Inconvenient Truth 31:22 The Evolution of Modern Slavery Systems 34:15 Wake Up & Get Out 38:55 Questioning & Being With The Unknown 43:48 Climate Change - Example For Lack of Questioning 45:40 Can There Be Anonymity With Bitcoin? 46:48 Financialization of Bitcoin with ETFs - A Danger? 51:42 Prediction of Bitcoin's Future 58:42 Hope for a Brighter Future -- SPONSORS & AFFILIATES – ►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn  ►► Join me at Bitcoin Nashville with 10% off tickets (use code BTCIL): https://glnk.io/lr8q9/btcil  ►► Join me at Mallorca Blockchain Days with 50 euro off tickets (use code efrat): https://bit.ly/4bvDjwc    -- LINKS – Erik’s Twitter: https://x.com/erikcason  Erik’s Website: https://cryptosovereignty.org/  Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigson Efrat's Telegram: https://t.me/efenigson Watch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoice Support Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson⁠ Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson

Hi, and thanks for being with me once again for another episode of You're the Voice. I have the great honor of sitting here with Eric Kaysen. Thanks for coming, Eric. Thank you for inviting me. and just as the first introduction so eric first started dabbling in bitcoin in 2012 mm-hmm and in 2013 he joined coinbase to help get bitcoin in the hands of as many people as possible after leaving coinbase in 2017 he focused on writing essays on the social political and philosophical aspects of bitcoin today he works as a bitcoin educator continuing to develop his

philosophical approach to bitcoin and how it will transform the world and i have just purchased crypto sovereignty and i think i'm gonna have a lot of fun with this book yeah it's pretty esoteric And it's funny because most of your biography is like oriented around Bitcoin. Let's start with that and where you began seeing the different lies of the matrix and maybe then the lie of money. And then when Bitcoin came, if you can share a bit more about that. Yeah, I mean, I guess my journey really kind of started in 2011 around Occupy Wall Street. And that's where I first heard about Bitcoin was from some random masked anarchist who told me. And I just kind of put it in the back of my mind and late 2011, 2012, I started reading more about Bitcoin and I was acutely aware of how much money was kind of a core issue at hand.

But Bitcoin is so nascent at the point in time, it didn't necessarily seem like it could really be a solution. But as I dug deeper and started to understand cryptography and how Bitcoin's proof of work worked and other things, So I started to get really excited because I was like, oh, maybe this could be a very real solution. And for me, you know, I was really strung out in the depths of that nihilism of thinking that there was no possible solution that there could be to this problem. But as I sort of dug more and more each time, my questioning was always sincere. Like, could this actually work? I understand that most people reject it immediately. But like if if we could get them to actually acknowledge some of the problems and reasoning, maybe it could work.

So I guess really kind of by early. Yeah, but by late 2012, early 2013, I had really convinced myself that like this was the solution. It was the future. It was the only way. So I was really hungry and desperate to find some way to participate in developing a Bitcoin ecosystem. So Coinbase was really one of the few Bitcoin companies that was out there doing something. So I just kept knocking on their door until they eventually gave me a position. Yeah, and then I kind of spent 2013 to 2017 just helping build the company. And it was, for all intents and purposes, the fastest growing startup that there has actually been. So that was like a pretty overwhelming situation. And by the time the block size wars came around and my disagreements about how that played out, I left Coinbase in 2017.

and I'd been writing a lot sort of anonymously and pseudo anonymously and I have some good friends that are really interested in philosophy and uh like I had no interest in it before but there seemed to be a lot of very difficult questions that Bitcoin brought up and for me one of the great ones was like how is it possible that like magic internet money can keep its commitment to its oath of 21 million Bitcoin and not violate that like why is why is it possible for this to even happened which sort of led me down this rabbit hole of like what even is philosophically the oath and like what is this thing in language and so it led me on this kind of concourse and trajectory of history and philosophical understanding of like what all of these

different components and things were you know along with like what is the idea of law like how how do rights get fulfilled through that what like what even is the value itself and all of these things, what really led me through a concourse of continental philosophy. So by the time 2017 came around, I felt like I had a decent scaffolding to start writing more and more essays. And I had a long dialogue with a good friend of mine who eventually was like, yeah, you need to be public about this. Like, if we really believe these things, we need to take that on publicly and speak to them publicly. So yeah, I felt quite nervous about it at first, you know, because it felt like a pretty weird thing to be talking about. But I put it out there and more and more people

got intrigued and i was inspired to write more and then i really just one day was like you know i have enough content then maybe i should put together a greater book and that's sort of how crypto sovereignty got produced and uh yeah it's been really wonderful participating kind of in the greater bitcoin ecosystem and getting the lecture because uh you know even though bitcoin is kind of my starting point like this is a much greater idea about like what is value what is economic exchange like how do we create a system and form of quote-unquote rights that are protected like vis-a-vis the internet with great pleasure i'd like to introduce my sponsors they help me fulfill my mission of spreading truth freedom and sovereignty you're the voice is brought to

you by trezor the original bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013 empowering individuals with an open source device enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins i find my trezor super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family enjoy my five percent discount on trezor product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code a flat next up is bitcoin nashville if you're like me sick of the globalists and central banks robbing you blind through excessive money printing you need to be at bitcoin 2024 in nashville this july the largest bitcoin conference in the world will shed light on monetary freedom with a glimmer of hope among

the darkening reality of centralized power and control top speakers and companies will gather in nashville to take part in building a new reality i'll be there too speaking and interviewing head Head over to my link in the notes for a 10% discount using the code PTCIL. And also like now that we have the internet, it's clearly like this unequivocally powerful mechanism of communicating to one another that we can utilize in an extremely powerful way. And so Bitcoin seemed to plug into that in a very powerful way that, you know, to this day, I still wouldn't call myself a Bitcoin expert. I think it continues to be this rabbit hole that as you go deeper and deeper, it unveils more and more difficult questions that I think if you can truly allow for yourself to contemplate and consider in a meaningful way, you'll actually find some pretty profound answers. But that requires the proof of work of actually allowing for yourself to ask the questions and do the work to discover the answer to those questions as opposed to let other people tell you what those answers are. People forget how to learn and want to get the instant answers from other experts around them.

And what's your background? What do you study? In university, I studied international relations and international economics. So that was kind of, I had a little bit of scaffolding of sort of understanding how the global financial system works. And so for me, that was another one of my touch points when I started reading about Bitcoin. The fact that I had heard about people in, I guess, early 2013, they were getting around Chinese capital controls using Bitcoin. And also with the Silk Road, the fact that people would buy drugs online. I was like, these are two, you know, very, the state would not like this and would want to stop this. And if there was any meaningful financial capacity to be able to do that, they would.

So that really keyed me up of being like, wow, this is pretty powerful. people can actually facilitate these sort of things with bitcoin um but yeah my my background has nothing to do with philosophy it's all been compelled by just being really curious and it's been interesting in my pursuit of philosophy as well i realized that the the academic idea of what philosophy is is this really grotesque disemboweled version of philosophy and so uh like i read like a lot of fordidden thinkers so like who uh martin heidegger is probably the most prominent one because heidegger had associations with the nazi party and for that alone uh like i know of a very astute philosopher from the university of toronto just for the very reason that he wants to study

heidegger he was more or less ran out of the university and same thing another nazi thinker which i have some relationship with them just because it turns out that like the nazis actually had a lot of prominent philosophical dialogues that are very important, and they also have the rhizome of the critiques of Nazism in them as well, but you need to actually read and understand them in a meaningful way to be able to do that. And I found that the pursuit through any form of academia, like these thinkers are totally forbidden even to approach, which to me like that's the antithesis of philosophy. have to be able to ask meaningful questions and have all of the different dialogues that have

been had actually on the table at that point in time if we're going to do it. And so I found that through many of those different thinkers that there's been a very powerful dialogue. It was really interesting because when COVID first started, it seemed like it was a real emergency. It seemed like, you know, the propaganda was really good and hooking people. But Giorgio Ambig in this philosopher up until COVID, he would be considered a far left thinker. He wrote an essay that was absolutely damning of the whole thing and he was like this is the implementing the implementation of a state of emergency on a global scale uh it's despicable and disgusting that we've buried our dead for millennia and we're told now that we can't honor

the dead or see their bodies or be able to ritualize the process of being able to bury our own and that they're just thrown away and burned like garbage and he was like this is just unequivocally the most disgusting and despicable action of humanity and this is like the fundamental end of part of a congourse of human history of what it is meant to be free and because he was usually celebrated in far left spheres he was then put to the stake and burned what did they do to oh he was just driven out of academia all of you know yeah totally canceled all the people that he worked with wrote essays about how he had become a crazy far-right person now it was really sad like the guy who did his primary translations in english he even went to to ambigan and said i you

know in their woke way like i think what you're doing is so immoral and wrong that i can't translate your works anymore and like uh i don't know just the the absolute embarrassment that like these people are supposed to be philosophers and and now even particularly four years after this you know absolutely despicable event none of these people have came back around and said you know ambigan you seem to have actually been on point with some of this and my apologies and uh they would never well in the way that this has all gotten memory hold is pretty interesting you know The way that, you know, all of our neighbors who would call the police on us if we had folks over, you know, they just want to act like nothing happened. Yeah, of course.

You know, and it's pretty sad and it goes to show how powerful a lot of the people that are in these roles have been manipulated and how easy it is not only to push them into having particular dialogues, but also how to let them forget. exactly like after the second world war i've got so much stuff to ask you okay let's start with anarchism a lot of people just associate anarchism with chaos sure and very quickly when you say someone's an anarchist they think that it's someone that just wants complete chaos so that they can find their way in this new order and take advantage of things like it's it's drawn as a negative thing sure i want to hear about anarchism for me again

it's that irony that it's usually portrayed as this violent and chaotic movement of burning things down and destroying stuff and the deepest irony is that like anarchism is a fundamentally non-violent movement that acknowledges that like all the state is is a monopoly on violence and that if we're actually to have consensual relationships with each other as humans we can't have this apparatus in between us that is allowed to conduct violence under the guise that it's legal you know and it's very important also to understand that anarchism uh is a pejorative term that came up after i think it was uh president garfield was assassinated by an anarchist and so they when was it this was uh i think 1892 wow and so the term anarchism was used at that point

moving forward for what had prior been known as libertarian socialism, because actually the anarchist and the communist movement were a singular entity all the way up until the Workingmen's International Council, where they first got together and said, you know, we want to make an actual workingman's movement. And it was only after Marx had wrote the Communist Manifesto that the leader of the anarchist contingency, or the libertarian socialist contingency, Mikhail Bakun, read about the dictatorship of the proletariat and this idea of seizing the state and participating in parliamentary politics that Bakun went and he said absolutely not we can never have a relationship with the

state and we can never participate in parliamentary politics because that then gives us a monopoly on violence which is the very thing that we want to destroy but similar to communists anarchists also want to create a stateless society it's just the approach to this is fundamentally different Anarchists believe that first and foremost, we need to tear down these structures of society that ask us to participate in their monopoly on violence. Whereas communists say we need to seize this for ourselves in order to try to implement our own form. Well, what we saw in the 20th century was the horrific outcome of what happens when communists seize the state. And it turns out it was about 100 million lives that get lost in the absolute terror that they implement from that. And so one of the biggest problems with anarchism is it never had a meaningful organizational format specifically around a mode of exchange that could actually be operable.

So it really fell into disuse and disrepair throughout the 20th century. And now that we have the Internet and this truly transglobal anarchic formation where it's not violence, but consensual agreements that kind of create all of the things. And now that Bitcoin's imbued with it, I think that there's an opportunity for a totally new political paradigm that is anarchic and that does involve technology and Bitcoin. But as the title of my book suggests, it is cryptography at its heart and core that allows for us to achieve a new form of sovereignty through the Internet by us knowing and understanding what the techniques of cryptography offer us. So I'm going to read a part from the book about that. In order for legal power to secure footing, the first engagement of power must be one of identification. Through identification, the physical form can be found and power projected onto the subject in any of the nearly infinite techniques the panopticon can use to project the gaze and its power on the subject.

Once identified, the process of selection can begin. The subject can then be labeled as friend for inclusion in the camps or enemy for isolation, destruction and liquidation. However, through the digital, which can only and explicitly be expressed in non-physical medium, there is space in which the subject can abscond into a total anonymous existence of its own creating. In making the final turn away from the panoptic machine and giving oneself entirely as an anonymous citizen of the digital cosmos, man once again finds the ideals from which he can create the new order of the ages. So you're saying, first of all, that we need to understand that identification is the core of the digital system. They have to identify us in order to know who we are in order to control us. If cryptography allows us to conceal ourselves or to become anonymous, then we can start fighting them in a different way.

We don't have to take part in that society anymore in the old-fashioned way of being identified and playing that game. Yeah. So by being able to use cryptography to anonymize oneself on the Internet, there's now this new technique to go out and participate, to speak truth, to be able to actually formulate a new identity that the state can't know or identify or be able to locate in a way. So that when I start saying things about, you know, that the vaccine is actually a toxin that's designed for a depopulation movement or that there is a cabal of, you know, systematic child sacrifice that's going on at the highest levels and maybe even providing proof and a whole chain of tangible evidence of these things or anything else that might be so evoking and threatening to the establishment that they would really want to actually find you and either intimidate you, jail you, do whatever. you actually have the capacity and ability to simply have them not know who you are, not be able to identify you, not be able to come and destroy your wealth. And I think Bitcoin relates to this very importantly, because now there's a way to actually conceal the amount of wealth that you have for that if you are known in some way, and they come to destroy your livelihood, as we saw with millions of people throughout the

pandemic, yourself included, that there's an actual ability to be able to still hold some of your wealth in a self-sovereign way that they can't take no matter what happens so i think that these techniques are sort of the base rhizome of a new form of political movement that allows for people around the world to start creating this new structure that's going to allow for a greater amount of freedom than we've had in prior ages do you think it's really going to happen yes i mean there's an essay in there called bitcoin is messianic and i go into it's not that bitcoin itself as messianic but that this return to the ideals of truth i mean like i've been here i don't want to say quite from the beginning but you know maybe chapter two if you will and that uh it was

just a few people and nerds there was no greater conversation of a consciousness awakening or anything and now i'm here on this island in the atlantic with thousands of other people that would self-identify themselves as bitcoiners and we're having these robust and powerful conversations about the conscious awakening of what it means to reclaim our sovereignty and work together. And very little conversation has actually been had about Bitcoin, but it's about food sovereignty, about health sovereignty, about medical sovereignty, about knowledge sovereignty, about educational sovereignty. And it truly is a global awakening that's happening,

that people realize that the Internet is actually connecting us and our peoples in a meaningful way so that we can actually make ourselves into a new ethnos, and ethnos in the classic latin terminology of not an ethnicity as most people mistranslate it but an ethnos is a group of people that have committed themselves and made an oath towards a new and different form of life and that seems to be what's going on and you know i feel more confident than ever because uh look like i'll take one bitcoin over a thousand cattle any day over the week and like these the cattle are just that like the these are spineless people that haven't took the time effort or energy to think critically about really much of anything in life

and again i'm not trying to be pejorative and hateful to them because at the end of the day like to me like they're one of us they just haven't done the work they haven't actually allowed for them themselves to think and they haven't allowed for themselves to recover from the endemic nihilism that's captured them. You know, I come here and talk with people and everyone's happy and motivated and feels great about the future and is really developing themselves and their own unique identity in extremely powerful ways. And I go back to the old world with people who don't see that at all. And all you get is a very mundane, superfluous level of existence where if you do ask these deeper questions, like what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Like,

is there a greater purpose or struggle to be had and they're just like like let's dude like it's too much you know like i can't like let's just watch some tv together netflix please yeah and like they just want to shut off and like i find it really sad and like that's their right to be able to do that but you know like you're you're a being of light and love and infinite power if you allow for yourself to and you you want to be this yeah you want to fill your mind with this propagandic garbage that makes you feel small and weak and think that uh life are these fantasies that are lived inside of uh some kind of contrived media offered to you well like i'm really sorry that's unfortunate and then you lose hope and then you don't want to bring kids yeah and that

then it works for them that we bring less kids and that humanity becomes this weakened completely desensitized version of itself i have good liberal friends who you know made the decision to not have children because that was the ethical one and it's it's really insane to me of that like first of all like you you you're going to cut off your own genetic dynastic extension into the future and that you're going to do that under this guise an idea that it's somehow ethical to do that and that you just abandon the future for what it is because you don't believe that something better is possible. Like, frankly to me, like, that sounds quite pathetic,

and I feel really sorry for you. You know, the world's going to end anyway with climate change, so... Yeah, and, like, it's, like... It's not just ethical, it's also, like, what for? Yeah, and, like, this is all such a dark viewpoint, and, like, I just don't accept that. And in that same dark viewpoint, you bring up the idea of, Is it possible that God could love us so much that maybe something else is possible?

And they sort of laugh and snicker like, oh, God, who's this invisible person that you made up? There is no God. There is no greater meaning. And it's like, well, I'm really sorry that that's how sad your life is, is that the idea that this ineffable being that has been talked about through all of the ages that you've literally abandoned because you think with your science that you're so smart, and yet somehow that science is continually wrong repeatedly somehow there are still these questions that are offered by the universe that allows for us to contemplate and consider and pour over and you you think that's too hard to consider again like you know like i i'm i'm not

going to be forceful or hateful to it and maybe it's just i've uh kind of gotten themself out of me over the last decade but yeah i i personally just feel really sorry for them and furthermore like these are non-playable characters like that viewpoint you'll never have value in contributing to being able to change society in a meaningful way so like i don't i don't need nor want you to join our party over here that is committed to actually changing the world in a meaningful way and reclaiming the sovereignty and the divinity that each of us have as you know children of god and love and light but you just need to remember that's what you actually are but instead of remembering you'd rather be told that you're something else and buy that believe that yes

but i think more and more people have the opportunity because of the crises that are being either engineered or happening throughout the world right now to wake up if they choose to and a lot of people say yes because it's easy yeah i just get to wake up i go to my job i do what I'm told. I end the day. I go watch some Netflix. It's comfortable. It's easy. I don't have to do hard things. If you look at the truth, there's a radical different path where suddenly you realize, oh my God, I'm being fed poison. I'm having my life forstolen to go work and slave away, staring at a computer screen, doing absolutely worthless garbage for humanity. And that instead of me actually being a true person of self-sovereignty that's contributing

to the world and creating and getting to live a beautiful life that i'm empowered by i get to be enslaved by somebody else i agree with you but i think my view is that until they accept to take that more courageous path and seeing the shit show for what it is they're gonna just get more and more cases like these when where they are faced with more horrific things that are happening to them in their lives because it's karmatic power you know it's just gonna face another lesson for you to learn from you learn you move on to the next bigger better lesson you don't learn it's gonna happen again and again and i'm seeing i wouldn't be saying that if i just believed in that and not see that manifest in the world but i am seeing that manifest in the world so much in the last

few years that i'm really it's i'm not just believing in it i'm seeing it like people if you don't wake up it's going to hurt a lot more it's going to happen again and again and again and this relates back to what we were talking earlier about you know your family's background in the holocaust and it's very important to understand that a lot of these people go well no if we just if we just go live in the ghettos like they want like things get better because now like we're with our own people and and we're doing what they're telling us and we'll be left alone and they don't realize that this is a slow process of generalized entrapment of where one day it's finally like no we just have to get on the trains they're going to take us to a new ghetto where

we'll be with more of our own people and it'll be safe and fine instead of them actually stepping back and going no this actually seems like it's a much larger plan to actually eliminate all of us and they go that's conspiracy talk how could they kill millions of our people that this is crazy Like, sure, the Jews have faced problems over time, but they've they've never just tried to kill all of us off that like that's crazy talk. You can't say that. But it turns out that the actual reality is that's exactly what was happening. And that you and your cowardice to actually face what the truth is, you're actually serving the agenda to put yourself into a place where one day you finally realize, oh, I'm going into the camps now for selection. And I'm probably not going to make it because, you know, that's how this is going to play out. And it's sad because particularly with the development of the digital panopticon, this all-seeing global surveillance device,

I think one day there's going to be a lot of people that are going to find they go to swipe their bank card or whatever and they realize they can't spend anything and they call their bank and they go, well, what happened? And, well, you were in a private conversation over at John's house the other night after having several drinks. And you said that maybe the prime minister is actually a corrupt piece of shit and you guys should do something about it. And we can't have you saying those kind of things. So we've taken your money away for the next month. And if you say anything bad in the next time, you're also going to need to go to the reeducation camps. And that's when they'll finally go, oh, I want out.

oh, I can't get out. And that's a very real danger that's coming. And I think most people will get caught in it. It's going to be pretty sad and terrifying and difficult. And in all honesty, my job isn't to save them. My job is to speak to the people that are willing to go, well, maybe this guy has a point about something. My job is to speak to them and say, follow that thread be curious ask yourself the question deep enough to reason your way through it yep is it actually possible that we could have been given experimental medication not for any deep crazy conspiracy theory or cabal but maybe it's as simple and banal as that these are corrupt people that want to make money and all you know you're probably familiar with the philosopher

hannah ardent and the idea of the banality of evil you know it's really important to understand that she said, look, like Eichmann shipping millions of people off to their deaths in the Holocaust. This wasn't some horrible man who had all of these wicked and evil desires. He was just stupid. He just sincerely couldn't actually think hard enough for himself to go, wow, maybe what I'm doing is unethical. Maybe what I'm doing is wrong. He had no capacity to do that in the same way that when you ask somebody to think about these deeper things about the vaccine, they go, that's conspiracy theory. They literally lack the cognitive capacity to actually try to reason their way through it. And that's what makes them evil. And so the real question of when we

encounter this sort of radical evil in the world isn't about how they respond to it. It's how we respond to it. And to understand that they don't have that ability to work their way through it. And so we have to be the ones to ask ourselves, how are we going to respond to their inability to do that. And I think most of us are doing that with things like refusing to have taken the jabs with choosing to put our money into Bitcoin, with choosing to grow our own food, with understanding that the additives that they're putting into these beauty and makeup products are actually designed to destroy parts of our body so we can't reproduce. And again, it seems like it's so maniacal. How could somebody do something so evil? Yeah, because they can make money.

And I'm sorry, I wish there was some big sophisticated agenda, but it truly is that they can make some money off of it. And maybe then people understood how money works and what the money system is. They would get that this is just a modern slavery system, that they don't need any chains or camps, literal camps to put us in. They just use the monetary system, the fiat monetary system, in order to lock us down once again and make us these modern day slaves that produce energy for them to latch on and feed off of and produce more fear in us so that we can continue doing our productive work even better. Absolutely. My lecture that I gave last year at Baltic Honey Badger, which is the conference, it's the oldest European Bitcoin conference that they do out in Riga. And so they were just like, hey, talk about whatever you want. So my lecture that I did was the historic development of the Panopticon and the architecture of surveillance.

And so I did the development of first starting from the original panoptic prison design that's for surveillance to then the prisoner of war camps that were designed to congregate prisoners of war to control large populations to the original concentration camps that were developed during the Boer War, then to the death camps that were developed during the Holocaust, and now to modernity where we actually have the Chinese reeducation camps. And I was like, the Chinese re-education camps are the perfect model for a genocide because this isn't about actually killing people anymore. It's about destroying their culture, destroying their language, destroying their religion, destroying any individual identity, hollowing them out through techniques of absolute fear, terror, and Pavlovian conditioning. And then at the end of that, when you have completely vacated them of any individual being, you go, and now we'll put you back out into the world where we will always be watching you no matter what and if you ever step outside the bounds of what we do we will capture you again we will torture you and perhaps we'll kill you and your family so be a good little Uyghur citizen and

speak your Mandarin and do your job because know that we're always watching you and so now slavery becomes something that's self-reinforcing because when we look up at the camera we go oh maybe i should walk in the crosswalk today i don't want to get a fine you know when we're speaking with our friends and we have a little too much alcohol maybe we go oh it's time we got to be quiet now we can't we got to watch netflix because we're we're entering into dark territory and and that's part of the whole process is that it is a technique and projection of power onto us to ensure that we're going to self-enforce these parameters of a prison system that they want us and force on it's super sophisticated and it works i think they're just fucking up being sloppy

trying to do those first cases of uh you know show the show society what's coming to the western world with implementing such systems on people like jordan peterson for example in canada they'll they'll like take him through re-education on social media because of stuff he said online when you try to do that with someone as big as him on such a topic that is controversial already like he said stuff about transgenderism etc many people are going to wake up because of you doing that the way you're doing it to him rather than what you started doing at covid which was much more efficient you'll have those camps that you've built in australia and in other places around the well then you bring people there because they may be a danger to society because they're sick now i

think that is a smarter strategy on their side than trying to take figures like jordan peterson and put him through re-education it's it's shooting themselves in the foot in a way sure but i mean like you know i i don't i don't think this is a terribly smart grouping of people first of all you know i'm like uh i also think that in their sloppiness they think they can do that because they have the hubris of both believing that they're right and also believing that they are smarter and you know it's it's just sort of an ironic twist of fate that in that hubris that they would unveil their cards so readily and openly because you know they they believe that we all are that same cattle

that they have bred us to be and they don't realize that some of us remember that that's not who we actually are yeah and so in that process you know they've sort of unveiled their hand, which in a lot of ways is waking a lot more people up in a much more radical way than before. And I think, uh, while COVID sort of the primary example, there's a lot of space and territory in society where a lot of people are waking up in different ways. And it's really important and powerful because, uh, it's those same people that are going to go around and say the same crazy conspiracy stuff that it turns out when you actually take that bit of risk, if you will, to start initiating these conversations with

other people, perhaps it's rejected out of nine out of 10 people, but one out of 10 people go, what you said about the, you know, getting canceled and having your bank account taken away. Like, I'm kind of worried about that because, you know, I believe that using vitamin D3 to treat my skin condition is actually the best way to do it rather than using all these pharmaceutical chemicals and I'm afraid that they'll cancel me for that at some point in time you know and you go great let me help you there's a pathway here I think it's really important that like as they create this sort of digital panopticon in cages there's going to be people that like on

the way in they go oh shit like we're actually going into the camps hopefully there's a contingency of us that are going to be on the outside being like there's a hole that we've made in the fence and you can fucking run for it but like you gotta do it and i get it's a risk and they could catch you on your way but like this is on you there is a moment that you can take the responsibility onto yourself to try to extricate yourself from the system but there's a risk to it yeah you know it's not it's not going to be free and it's not going to be easy but it's possible and it's only if you want it or you can trust if you go in there that they're going to give you a kind of safety and security that will really serve you but i think you can see what the results of that actually

are there's a capacity of redemption for all beings in my opinions even as far away as they may be you're very compassionate i think you're you're probably a lot more exercised than me in seeing the for probably longer my changes happened you know more than a decade ago and it's taken a long and difficult road you know like pretty much everybody i knew from from my before life, like, you know, we're not associated anymore. It's sad and painful, but it's fine. I've developed a new and different life that's much better and serving for me. I have a lot of compassion for people that, you know,

imagine being so afraid of what COVID is that you choose to not only sacrifice your health, but you choose to sacrifice your friends, your society, your family, that you engage in these hateful dialogues of calling the police on somebody because they took their dog for a walk outside. That's a really sad way to live. I think there's a lot of very, very deep cognitive dissonance that has been Pavlovian-ly trained in us since birth. And it's very hard to sort of escape that general paradigm.

It's funny, I've just found so many dialogues just by being outside of the Overton window really fascinates a lot of people. Yeah, like everybody's pretty acutely aware that there's something very wrong, but they can't really put a finger on it. And the other is that, you know, from the same Pavlovian training, like I'm very pedantic about the fact that like nobody actually really understands what thinking is. Like they think thinking is just having a right answer. So like they can't actually engage in the process of trying to like assemble a chain of logic. They just try to like plug in answers that they got and they don't understand that like the actual application of reasoning and logic itself is like this this practice that you do to actually like

build up logically and because of that same pavlovian training you know like this this idea like i don't know enough that like the science knows and like the experts know more than me so like they must have you know like their right answer even though i don't understand it is right And it's like, well, like, how is it possible that we can have a safe and effective vaccine that's never actually been tested because there's a brand new virus that doesn't that doesn't make sense? But they can just go, no, like, we don't know enough. Like, we're too stupid to understand that. What you're saying is really good because what I found during those few years is that people can't be with the notion of not knowing, of not having an answer, being in the void of investigating something. They are so afraid that the earth beneath their feet will move a millimeter from what they already know or what they've been told that they cannot engage in the practice of learning or thinking.

Questioning. It's actually, it's sincerely questioning. But then on the emotional, mental, and even spiritual level, they cannot be with the unknown. Why is it so daunting for people to not know something, to not have an answer? I was so many times during the past few years without answers for stuff I didn't know and I was fine not knowing I was fine having my whole world collapse around me and like kind of destabilizing my faith in everything I thought that was true and my beliefs and every time I got another belief shattered I was kind of happy oh that is not true as well oh money oh that's a lie too oh the structure of that is a lie too and i was happy to discover another lie and another

lie because i was feeling like i'm rediscovering truth again why is it so scary scary for people to to go through that process that's i think it challenges the very uh nihilistic world view that we've been given uh like if yeah if it turns out that what we think to be true and that's like you know there is no purpose there's no reasoning there's no god like there's there are higher powers that tell us what to do if we obey them we'll live a safe and happy life and if it turns out that that's not true it compels a true existential angst of so i've been living in a lie my entire life that i've served a regime that hates me that wants to kill me on a moment's notice if i'm not subservient to them like what does that mean that i implicitly participate in

that i put my children in that that i've invested my entire life in that like that that's a hugely daunting and terrifying thing particularly if you're captured in a way of like there's no escape in any meaningful way yeah so if even if i know that this isn't true you know and like it reminds me a bit of that scene from the matrix where cypher's eating the steak and he goes i know this isn't real i know that it's just my taste buds in a simulation but it i love it it tastes so good you know and i think for a lot of people that's what it is is that maybe and particularly i think people that have integrated well into the system and that works well for them that maybe they can see around the edges that things aren't necessarily as they've

been told but like if i start challenging it and rocking the boat like what's what's the point i lose my safe and comfortable life i lose the friendships that i've developed you know this whole form of life that i've committed myself to suddenly starts to shatter so yeah in reality when that stuff starts to come up it's much easier to say well that's just conspiracy theory and now I've cut off the need to think because I've said the appropriate Pavlovian line that I've been trained to say when it's time to stop thinking that's conspiracy theory let's move forward yes I love it climate change is a wonderful example of that there has been nothing more

damaging to the environment than this idea of climate change for the way that It's created this sort of radical commitment towards corporatism and this idea of EGS. Like meanwhile, like there's, yeah, ESG, well, there's this very real, like pollution is endemic, like, you know, the spreading of garbage, deforestation, like all of this really crazy messed up stuff that's like super directly related to environmentalism, that it's fine to be sacrificed in the name of the agenda of trying to control the weather, you know? and it's just kind of comical that it's like in your commitment to the climate you're willing to like sacrifice the environment they are but like wasn't that the thing that you were trying to say

well in the same way because they don't give a fuck they don't give a fuck about like in the commitment of wanting to save my health so desperately and being so committed to being healthy like i'm actually destroying my fucking health because it's all inverted yeah and that that's precisely what it is like the it's an inverting function of that through this very strange obfuscation you actually get an inverted form of things uh you know like you'd ask earlier like why can't people be with the unknown yeah a good question is like can we actually ever know god or like know what divine consciousness looks like like isn't that truly the most unknown thing that there is that can only be contemplated and considered you know and like a nihilist

point of view can't integrate that it just has to have a dead emaciated god that is incapable of anything because we can know that you know but we can't we can't know the affable unknown that could actually be the divine essence that is our being in this existence yes you know i think that's part of it so i want to ask you about the anonymity and concealing your identity with bitcoin Is it really possible when we're relying on a blockchain that is exposed that we can see many things? Yeah, I'm sure from a technical level we can get there, but it's a question for me that I'm not yet 100% convinced. It's becoming increasingly dangerous, particularly with the amount of surveillance that's going on. But between the techniques of being able to do submarine swaps, mixing and other techniques, you can definitely get anonymized Bitcoin and you can keep that and hold that in a methodology that can't be tracked in a sophisticated way.

And the fact that Bitcoin is the most robust and powerful blockchain that's utilizing the most proof of work, to me, that unequivocally allows for much greater techniques to happen. And we're still seeing continued development. And in the continued development, there are becoming new and more sophisticated techniques that are allowing for more and more robust privacy. To me, the greatest danger is the financialization of Bitcoin, of people believing that if I buy my Bitcoin on exchange and hold it there, or the idea that if I'm buying into the Bitcoin ETF, that that is in some reasonable way Bitcoin, and that's not. It's just some strange financially derivative product. you know for me personally when i have people in my lives who are like hey i really want some bitcoin how can i get some i go great what can you sell me what kind of stuff do you have that

you would like to get rid of you know what what's something that i have a use for they're like do you need firewood i'm like yeah i totally need firewood why don't you sell me three cords and i can pay you in bitcoin like so how does this work i'm like it you can download this wallet and utilize it it can either live on your phone or on your computer here's the way that you can actually They secure it in a meaningful methodology, and you just kind of hold their hand through the basic process. And then they go, well, like now I want to get dollars for it. And I go, why the fuck would you want dollars for it? And they go, well, it went up in value.

Go find another one of our neighbors down the road who, you know, like I buy my eggs from them. Use your Bitcoin to buy eggs from them. And it's about developing a circular economy amongst people themselves who actually understand how to use Bitcoin in a direct method to facilitate that exchange as opposed to this financial product idea. And so to me, like that's where the real power comes in is utilizing as something that truly escapes the banking system on a whole in order to facilitate commerce and exchange between individuals, not between corporations or companies or any of that other stuff. Like I'm not interested in that slant of bitcoin i'm interested in giving it to individuals and using that to empower

themselves and more and more we're seeing communities like bitcoin jungle pop up where they you do have developed circular economies where you can just hold your bitcoin the other individual holds bitcoin and everybody chooses to transact and that is their medium of exchange this is an ideal beautiful future but with what's happening now with the financialization of bitcoin with etfs it it's almost inevitable for me that that is what's going to drive the growth and the adoption because most people don't as we said before stop to think they don't they're you know I don't want to be nasty, but they wouldn't get that that's the most important thing about Bitcoin. They still look at it as a mechanism to make more money.

And that's the Trojan horse. People don't understand that number go up isn't about number going up. It's about getting people curious enough to understand that there's something important and different here. And once they actually get that curiosity, they can start studying deeper about what that actually is. And furthermore, because there is a radical contingency of Bitcoiners who will never put their Bitcoin on exchange and that right now, 80 percent of distributed Bitcoin is in the hands of individuals off exchanges and not parts of ETS. Again, I believe it's about 80 percent of all Bitcoin is held by private individuals. um again like it is a a true turn of irony that very much in the same way in the tale of the trojan horse the greeks told the trojans actively the the horse is so great grandiose and powerful

that you could never take it into troy and it's sacred so if you were to do that that would forsake it well these dumb motherfuckers go look get that horse into troy as quickly as you can not realizing that Odysseus and crew are in there waiting for them. And in that exact same vein of thought, they're going to pull the horse into Troy. ETF goes to a million bucks. We've all made so much money. Let's fucking party and get drunk. It's going to be amazing. And what these dumb motherfuckers don't understand is that Odysseus and crew is sitting there waiting. They're waiting for the ETF to rip to a million dollars and then $10 million and then $100 million. And it's not because it's worth $100 million. It's because a gallon of milk now costs $10,000. It's because

now there's actually a hyperinflationary event that happened explicitly because these dumb motherfuckers started buying up the only asset on the planet that has a real denominator that makes it very clear that everything else does not, which forces that into hyperinflation. They literally create the conditions for their own downfall. And we even told them it would do it, and they still did it. It's because of the very real same hubris that the Trojans had to bring the Trojan horse into Troy, even though they were told it was too large and powerful for them to ever control. But maybe that's what needs to happen. Maybe we need that hyperinflation. We need that crash. We need people to fall on their faces and understand where they're living. Maybe

that's the acceleration of the inevitable fate yeah of of humanity yeah it's very important in this day like you said nobody's coming to save them and people need to have the experience of when they go to their local grocer and they try to give them dollars to go all right no like i we're not going to accept that and they go what do you mean you're not going to accept that they're dollars and they're like yeah but the exchange rate has gone up 50 since yesterday that's not enough to buy a stick of gum here now when they finally go what do you mean my money isn't worth anything they go yeah your money is it's not worth anything now and when they finally have this encounter with an existential crisis of that all of the things they've saved for in the life they've

tried to develop is completely threatened and disappearing because they haven't actually considered or thought about what money savings or value is about perhaps then they'll be ready perhaps and the nicest thing is is that i think there is even within this going to be a subset of people that are developing these circular economies and that will exist on the fringes and threshold i don't have hope for the majority because i think most people are still going to redouble into trying to ask the government for help and frankly i think they're going to find that it's going to be a pretty dark dystopian surveilled controlled world that yeah it's going to suck and i'm sorry but you know the the best we can do the best that we can to educate

and assist in the way that we can and that's all we can do you can only lead the horse to the water you can't make them drink yes i align completely with your approach i wanted to take you one step further and ask what's then going to happen to bitcoin if we go down that path where we're facing hyperinflation and people realize that the ETFs are just toilet paper because when everything collapses, what they get back is not actual bitcoins, but actually fiat and their fiat is worth shit. Then those masses may turn around and say, oh, so that Bitcoin is a scam because I didn't get what I was supposed to. And that would make a very bad reputation for bitcoin not that there's not enough of it already and then what's the danger to bitcoin

but then my answer to myself is like bitcoin doesn't care it will still carry on and it will be fine right sorry for all that monologue that's pretty much how it goes and bitcoin will still be able to work as a medium of exchange and as a storage of value governments will seize it from ets they will start to utilize it for international and global commerce between themselves you know very similar to how gold had been used in the 1950s onward and that did not make that didn't devalue gold in fact that made gold much more valuable than it ever had been before and in the very same way it's still going to be inter-exchangeable i think there's probably going to be a kind of political fork where if you can't sort of kyc and prove where your bitcoin's been maybe

you can't uh repatriate it into this system but why would you want to that's repatriating and into this system of surveillance that you know most people want out of it in addition to the fact the free market's a brilliant mechanism there's going to be somebody that figures out methodologies to run between the two of those and there's probably going to be a strange between between fiat and between what i'd call kyc bitcoin and real bitcoin and people and there probably be some strange floating peg that you know like if you have free floating bitcoin that's worth you know say 1.2 etf bitcoins or whatever and like this isn't going to be an actual real fork that happens in the bitcoin network but it's more of that like if i want to go uh buy my

apartment in san francisco i need to have a kyc bitcoin and because all of my bitcoin i've been storing off exchange in somewhere else, when I bring it back into the system, it'll turn out that instead of it being, you know, say a 10th of a Bitcoin, it'll actually be a 20th of a Bitcoin because it turns out that non-KYC Bitcoin is actually more valuable than KYC Bitcoin because KYC Bitcoin will also inherently have paper Bitcoin integrated into it, which will have, again, an infinite denominator in the same way that paper gold has an infinite denominator, not because there isn't a finite amount of gold but because there's a lot greater ability to commit the fraud

of saying that there is a greater amount of gold held in banks and other places than there actually is. In the exact same way that today, if you total up the amount of supposedly available Bitcoin on exchange, the math doesn't add up. Interesting. I didn't think about that. okay eric uh do you think do you think that that doom and gloom future for the masses that are not going to wake up is going to happen within the next one two three years or you think it's going

to be take longer for the powers that be to exercise all their crazy plans it's right now it's happening right now for sure but then it's accelerating go to any major american city and just look around on the street you know like that to me like that's what's pretty funny is that like it like the future is now you know like the the sufferings now the surveillance now all of it's going on you know it's just a matter of to what degree do you want the pain to get dialed up to you know and so like i think there's always going to be people trapped in that system you know i'm like uh i i don't believe that we will ever live in a bitcoin majority world in the same way that we never lived in a gold majority world with fiat being around i have my

own particular hopes for that there can be a greater sort of politicization of whatever this general movement we're in is happening and that that can sort of renew the ethos of the revolutionary wave uh but even within that you know like there's being asleep it's easy you know like a the the reason people watch their netflix isn't because it's a challenging and self-empowering thing they do it because it's easy so i think throughout all of human history many people have chose to take the easy path and i think many people will continue to choose to take the easy path so again i'm my concern isn't with them my concern is with the people that want to actually try to struggle and those are the ones we're trying to help i want to ask you to end up on

a message of hope. You know, this is a pretty dark time in my eyes, and I'm not afraid to look at the darkness because I think it's necessary to look at it in order to see the light and bring out the goodness in society and in humanity. Where do you draw your hope and motivation from? Look, it's only in the darkest of night that the smallest of lights can shine the brightest. And that's where we're at. We have Bitcoin. It's deployed. It's decentralized.

It works. It's robust. Its cryptography is sophisticated. It's only up and to the right. We're winning. And every single day, more people get on our system and more people leave their system. Our system offers hope and theirs offers despondency. For me, like, it's not dark at all anymore. Like, we're moving towards the dawn of a new humanity where we can truly be free of all of the isms of the past and open ourselves up to a totally new world, you know?

And the Internet itself is in the process of rebuilding itself on robust, decentralized cryptographic protocols that will become the fundamental substrate of the future. And so whether it takes 30 or 300 years, I don't know, but we're moving into a new era and age where people have a radical new form of empowerment. in the same way that we moved out of the Dark Ages because we had the invention of the technology that was the printing press. And now suddenly, from people needing to go from the authoritarian decrees of the state, they could go and read the Bible themselves and go, my God, the stuff they've been telling us is complete and utter lies. And they were actually able to think for themselves

about what it meant to be a child of God and a Christian and to read the Bible or the Torah or the Koran, and they could actually determine for themselves what that actually was. So for me, I'm convinced that we're moving into an extremely hopeful future because this stuff can't be taken away. It can't be rolled back. And so that's just up and to the right for everybody. And so to me, it's more about choosing to take on the evangelical approach,

the very real spreading of the good news that is not only Bitcoin, but the capacity that there are other people out there that are seeking to free themselves from the system of power, control, abuse, and exploitation, and you can find them. But again, like, you have to do that on your own, you know? And so for me, it's all hopeful, and it's a really beautiful and wonderful place that we're going into. And it doesn't mean that the darkness isn't there.

It's just, it's fading, you know? And I think we have passed the midnight hour, and we're moving into that new dawn, so. Love it. i was um not sure whether to invite you to do this interview before madera because i still hadn't read the whole book so i wasn't sure whether i should do it because i wanted to read it before i interview you but i am so happy i did because i first of all got to know you i you know i was really nervous before i approached you because i said please make him say no because I do want to be prepared for a conversation with you because I feel like...

I don't know if any podcaster has read my book. No, I'm going to definitely read the book. Not because I need to read it because I now interviewed you, but because that's exactly the kind of ideas, the kind of spirituality, the kind of empowerment that I've been discovering and searching and finding everywhere around me. This is the stuff that I live on. you know i i get those ideas naturally organically from my life the title crypto sovereignty has a double entendre of that like it's referring to cryptography as a form of sovereignty but it's

also referring to the hidden sovereignty that really is the spiritual awakening that we all have and it's hidden because we can't see it until we actually ask ourselves to ask what the truth is and while the truth of what's going on the world is that there is radical evil activating itself and moving forward it's also that we have the tools to defeat it and we're on the side of good and so like you know we know how this story plays out and it seems you know i was talking to friends about this last night like every time that i step back and look at what's going on i have to like rub my eyes and be like holy shit this is actually real you know i'm like yes yes and i'm like how is it that there's an insane narrative going on where like i'm a playable character really in a

story that's about the conquest of humanity over and the triumph of evil and what the that triumphant return to the truth of being and what its existence means you know and it's a truly glorious thing you know and like uh and like the funniest part is in particular the bitcoiners is like uh like the opening move was to make us rich like that wasn't that was just like the beginning of the narrative right and you know and and for me it's of a particular irony it's like that wasn't to make you rich, that was to free you from the system of slavery, to allow you to go contribute to what's really, in my opinion, going to be the conquest of the political system through the individual choosing to re-empower themselves with their own sovereign forms. And furthermore,

to reintroduce, I don't know what it is, but it's going to be some very interesting new technological form of democratic republicanism that integrates technology and cryptography and a number of sort of fluid overlapping systems that's going to be weird as fuck but like it's all being developed right now yeah and it's pretty cool because like these are real people that i'm friends with and have dialogues with and so for me like i feel like i just showed up at the epicenter of this radical change in humanity yep for some unknown reason i get well you chose to reincarnate right here right now at this time probably to take part exactly in that and as you said before all we need is just to remember who we are and what we came here for and i guess

that's what you need to remember you probably chose this you just don't remember sure you know Like that's just all my own fucked up human stuff of my own upbringing and background. And last night me and Jeff Booth had dinner and I was just telling him, you know, like the development of our relationship together and the way that he really appreciates me and speaks to that has been really healing for me. Because all of my own fucked up human stuff of my upbringings of, you know, not having a father of all of the difficulties of these sort of things has truly been healed by being around these other people that can really see who I am and celebrate that and allow for me to love myself in a way that I was never able to do. And through seeing myself through their eyes, it heals me. And it also raises me up to the task of that, like, I want to meet them in the way that they see me. And I want to give myself to them in that way that allows for me to be bigger and more powerful and more courageous in a way that I could have never done on my own or in an egotistical way.

Yes, yes, amen to that. I truly identify with that from a lot of great people around me. So I know exactly what you mean. so just to conclude on that i'm super happy that i asked you to talk because in many ways you voice and say the things that i think in such a succinct way in such a beautiful way and you speak my word so it's really moving for me and it's really great for me to have this conversation with you wonderful i'm very happy that we got to connect and yeah it's always a very beautiful experience when you meet somebody who's on the same wavelength of the same uh darmedic path yes and where can

people find you if they want to continue following uh best places is if you can follow me on twitter it's just my name eric casen uh you can also pick up my book you can use the evil empire amazon if that's what you want or otherwise how can they buy it or you can support uh my publisher bitcoin magazine you can find it on their website or if you're a real dgen that likes to use the internet you can find it on libgen uh the free resources online i've had friends that have tore and upload the book online so you can find it for free to read it on your own totally support that because fuck copyright and uh yeah and and to me the real causes is uh it's just really important that to me that people really understand that uh again you know with the double entendre of the word crypto

sovereignty like this isn't about number go up and get rich this is about freeing yourself from a system of exploitation and slavery because you are truly a divine being of light and love that has forgotten the true essence of your nature because of how this system abuses you so remember that and i hope that people truly investigate bitcoin not as a number go up technology but truly a tool of sovereignty that can help become part of their packaging of how they're going to free themselves from this exploitation. Amen. Thanks, dear. Thank you so much. Thank you.