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Discovering Bitcoin with Nolan · Discovering Bitcoin

• 0:00
  You know Bitcoin isn't so much about opting out as it is about
• 0:03
  opting in to responsibility, to understanding, to long term
• 0:09
  thinking. Hard block, Australia's longest
• 0:11
  running Bitcoin exchange exists for people making that choice
• 0:15
  intentionally simple DCA, honest fees, no hype.
• 0:22
  Yeah, I see the world through an entirely different lens.
• 0:26
  It doesn't just give you confidence, but it gives you.
• 0:29
  Hope. Take like we're squandering our
• 0:33
  energy, our life force. So Bitcoin is changing that.
• 0:37
  For me this coin is like it's healing energy.
• 0:40
  It gives you a kind of. Of a Zen.
• 0:44
  Feeling right? Well, deep and deep and deep,
• 0:50
  and the immortal words of the doors, the time.
• 0:53
  To hesitate us through. Discovery.
• 1:20
  Nolan, what's going on, man? I love life DJ.
• 1:24
  Can't complain man. Man, you're a, you're a man off
• 1:28
  to my own heart in terms of loving life.
• 1:29
  But my gosh, you, you do the work every morning with the
• 1:33
  great awakening and you, you've thrust yourself into the fray of
• 1:41
  Fiat clown world. And I was telling you off air,
• 1:44
  just, you know, I, I, I watch it, but it stresses me out
• 1:49
  because it exposes me to the shit show that is.
• 1:52
  And I try and shield myself mentally from that as much as I
• 1:57
  possibly can because it does nothing for me psychologically.
• 2:01
  And, but I feel like an, a need to at least glaze over it.
• 2:08
  And I think the way that you deliver a lot of that
• 2:11
  information is a lot more soothing for for folks like me.
• 2:19
  Well, I, I, I appreciate that DJ, but I, I'm, I'm upset to
• 2:22
  hear that it stresses you out because my design behind the
• 2:26
  show is to de stress people because I imagine that there's
• 2:31
  all kinds of Fiat anxiety that runs through people's veins each
• 2:35
  and every morning. And that was the idea behind the
• 2:38
  show in the 1st place, was to help break it down so that
• 2:41
  people don't spend their time doom scrolling and can come to a
• 2:45
  place with Bitcoiners and feel like there's some humor, at
• 2:50
  least in the Fiat apocalypse. And that's what I try to do.
• 2:54
  I try to take those stories that I think are the most stressful
• 2:58
  and the most anxiety inducing of this time change that we live
• 3:03
  in, you know, the liminal space. The time between times that we
• 3:06
  live in right now is a stressful time for many.
• 3:10
  And so that's kind of the point of the show.
• 3:12
  So I'm sorry to hear you don't get the de stressing benefits.
• 3:16
  Oh yeah, let let me be clear, you definitely de escalate and
• 3:20
  de stress in your delivery, but. It's true, you can't avoid it
• 3:24
  all together. But it's a me problem.
• 3:26
  It's I, I spent a good chunk of my, my change in that kind of
• 3:31
  world in the news cycle and stuff.
• 3:35
  And it, it just does nothing for you, man.
• 3:38
  It's a, it's a horrific, it's a horrific realm and a way to
• 3:43
  spend your day. I can tell you that much.
• 3:47
  Yeah, I can remember actually, I had one of the most exciting
• 3:51
  days in a newsroom. It was like a 12 hour shift and
• 3:56
  there was, it was all happening, man.
• 3:58
  It was like it was the most high energy day I think I've ever
• 4:02
  experienced. And then I realized a few days
• 4:04
  later that in order for me to have that high energy day, it
• 4:07
  required like the death and destruction of, of like an
• 4:11
  entire city because of a, a tidal wave and a, and a, and a
• 4:19
  nuclear power disaster. And I was like that.
• 4:22
  That's not good. No, no, no, that's true.
• 4:28
  It definitely gets newsroom scurrying and it gets in the old
• 4:32
  days when they still had paper boys, it got them paid.
• 4:34
  So there's definitely a an industry around Fiat failures,
• 4:40
  and I mean just failure and strife in general, right?
• 4:43
  Yeah, if it bleeds, it leads. That was the motto.
• 4:45
  You got it. That was the motto.
• 4:48
  Well, thanks for coming on, man. Let me ask this all important
• 4:52
  question. How did you discover Bitcoin?
• 4:55
  Well, I, I, I mean, it might even have to do with this
• 5:00
  newsroom failures or at least having a front row seat to
• 5:06
  observe just how the sausage was made and how fake news was
• 5:10
  packed and created. And so when I first learned
• 5:15
  about Bitcoin, I was working in politics, actually in Canada.
• 5:20
  I was working in the, you know, out of various jobs in Canadian
• 5:23
  politics at the time. I had been a law student in 2006
• 5:29
  when there was a change of government to conservative in
• 5:31
  Canada, and it was not a typical Conservative government.
• 5:35
  It was a little bit more like a populist government and it was
• 5:39
  primarily based in Western Canada.
• 5:41
  It was the Stephen Harper Conservative government.
• 5:44
  And it was a weird confluence of events.
• 5:46
  We were up against U2. They came and literally
• 5:48
  campaigned at the height of their popularity in the early
• 5:51
  2000s against our political party.
• 5:54
  And there was some local Canadian things that got me all
• 5:56
  involved in it. But Long story short, we won the
• 6:00
  2006 election in Canada while I was a freshman in law school.
• 6:05
  So it created a, a, a kind of strange confluence where you had
• 6:11
  a government turnover, so almost everyone in the capital of
• 6:15
  Canada, Ottawa, the Liberal government had been in power for
• 6:18
  13 years. And so there was all this
• 6:21
  strange opportunity. And even though I was just a
• 6:24
  freshman in law school, the weird nature of balancing
• 6:29
  federations, and I'm an English Quebecker, and Quebec didn't win
• 6:33
  a lot of seats for that Conservative government, but
• 6:35
  they won every seat in the city that I was living in.
• 6:37
  So I had tremendous access, kind of asymmetric access to a lot of
• 6:42
  the new government. And a few years later, I was
• 6:46
  working for the Senate Banking Committee.
• 6:48
  Now, the Senate Banking Committee is sort of the
• 6:50
  original parliamentary committee in Canada in the sense that
• 6:54
  Canada wasn't created like, I mean, Australia, you know, there
• 6:58
  was all kinds of reasons, it's out there, you go get stuff and
• 7:02
  it made sense to make in Australia, but Canada wasn't
• 7:05
  created for those reasons. Canada was created really
• 7:08
  because of want of banking and because the United States was
• 7:12
  about to grow after the civil war and London cut the money
• 7:16
  off. So any money they would have
• 7:19
  invested in Canada would have just been plunder for the Grand
• 7:23
  Army of the Republic. So there's nothing coming from
• 7:25
  England anymore. So the people who created Canada
• 7:29
  copied US federalism almost exactly, except they made
• 7:32
  banking a federal jurisdiction of federal power.
• 7:36
  And the original parliamentary committee, the reason for which
• 7:39
  Canada was created was for the purposes of federalized
• 7:43
  centralized banking in order to build East West infrastructure.
• 7:46
  So to bind the country together. Yeah, that's that's why Canada
• 7:49
  was great. That's why all of our founders
• 7:51
  in Canada, it's not like we don't call them the founding
• 7:53
  fathers like in the United States.
• 7:55
  The guys who created Canada were really just kind of shit coin
• 7:58
  salesman trying to do rail stocks and shit like that.
• 8:02
  And they were running all these crazy experiments with money and
• 8:07
  printing new money, minting new money.
• 8:09
  It was a real fiasco. Hence your boy Carney, who is
• 8:12
  the current Prime Minister. That's kind of.
• 8:14
  Yes, yeah, No, no, exactly. That's that's exactly why he is
• 8:17
  Prime Minister. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, it's a
• 8:20
  strange thing. So this Senate Banking Committee
• 8:24
  that I worked for, we actually met with the Australian Senate
• 8:26
  Banking Committee during our study.
• 8:27
  So, well, I'll get to the study in a second.
• 8:30
  But So what happened was I did a study on the money laundering
• 8:35
  regime. And like I said, this was a
• 8:37
  committee. My job was to sort of report to
• 8:40
  the executive branch and the Prime Minister and to keep these
• 8:42
  parliamentary committees creating wedge issues.
• 8:45
  So by wedge issues, you know, you, you use a study, you get
• 8:49
  parliament to do some work and then creates a headline and then
• 8:52
  other people report on it and then you can make policy out of
• 8:54
  that. But what we had heard from our,
• 8:57
  we have these state Co-op chartered banks and they were
• 9:00
  whining and complaining because the nature of their corporate
• 9:04
  charter basically limits them from being able to have
• 9:10
  compliance. So the whole $10,000 you know,
• 9:14
  do you have $10,000? Did you transact?
• 9:16
  And 10, the thing you signed on the airplane, you know, $10,000
• 9:20
  the, the whole plan basically with anti money laundering stuff
• 9:23
  and terrorism financing stuff is this $10,000 threshold.
• 9:27
  So what we were hearing was in this Banking Committee was all
• 9:32
  these small provincial Co-op charters, because of the nature
• 9:37
  of their corporate charter, are not allowed to send compliance
• 9:40
  work to sort of head office. So the federally chartered
• 9:44
  banks, they can just all send everything to Toronto, the head
• 9:47
  office like would be the case in Australia, send it all the
• 9:49
  Sydney type of thing. And, you know, maybe there's a
• 9:51
  one floor of just people doing compliance.
• 9:54
  The problem with the the state charter banks, the provincially
• 9:57
  chartered banks, is that because they can't do this, every branch
• 10:01
  has to hire a compliance officer.
• 10:03
  And they're often doing that instead of a loan officer.
• 10:05
  There's only so much money to go around.
• 10:07
  They can't hire people infinitely.
• 10:08
  And so some of these are in really rural small towns.
• 10:11
  And they would say things like, well, you know, I know Zhang Yi
• 10:14
  down the road just wants to buy a tractor.
• 10:16
  I know he's not a terrorist yet. I've got to go hire a compliance
• 10:19
  officer. So this just seemed like a great
• 10:21
  wedge issue to us. And this was really fat if and
• 10:24
  all the same things we hear about all the time.
• 10:26
  And the populist government in Canada at the time under Stephen
• 10:29
  Harper literally hated these people.
• 10:31
  And they came to us, our FINTRAC, which is like FinCEN in
• 10:34
  the United States. And they wanted the Australia
• 10:36
  Rules. They wanted 'cause I guess you
• 10:37
  guys have like $1.00 reporting thresholds or something like
• 10:41
  that. And like it couldn't be lower.
• 10:42
  It's like at the like every transaction of money in and out
• 10:45
  of the continent as I understand in Australia is tagged in this
• 10:48
  anti money. Laundering which should be right
• 10:50
  mate. So, so we started this study on
• 10:57
  money laundering and it was a revelation.
• 10:59
  It was a total scam. The Prime Minister hated it.
• 11:02
  I found out that they were never prosecuting anybody that it was
• 11:06
  all a big scam and fraud and wasn't working.
• 11:09
  Everything we know about the anti money laundering regime in
• 11:12
  Bitcoin I learned about before Bitcoin because of this study
• 11:16
  that we did. And it just was a weird thing
• 11:19
  that during the study this would have been 2012.
• 11:21
  It was not not long. It was around the time that Silk
• 11:24
  Road was getting going and we had some folks from the FBI in
• 11:28
  the study and they said where do you get a load of this Bitcoin
• 11:31
  thing? And now because I'm kind of
• 11:32
  obsessed with money laundering at the time and I had just
• 11:37
  actually heard about Bitcoin like many people a few months
• 11:40
  earlier, someone had said, did you hear about this Bitcoin
• 11:42
  thing? And I said that sounds I felt
• 11:44
  bad for the guy, you know, poor stupid idiot.
• 11:46
  Like I'm in banking, I'm in the Banking Committee, This guy is
• 11:49
  telling me about some stupid currency.
• 11:51
  So, but when it came up again in this money laundering thing,
• 11:54
  because I was starting to recognize just how fake and
• 11:57
  stupid that the system was, I and and simultaneous to this
• 12:03
  working in politics, you know, to, to bridge the conversation
• 12:07
  to what we're talking about earlier with the fakeness of
• 12:09
  media and just how insane Fiat newsrooms really are.
• 12:15
  I was watching the system start to create Justin Trudeau and I
• 12:19
  had a feeling the fake news was going to try and meme him into
• 12:22
  existence. And so I was already starting to
• 12:25
  give up basically on politics. I just thought the whole thing
• 12:28
  was stupid and I had this job still in, in the in the
• 12:32
  committee. And then I learned about
• 12:34
  Bitcoin. And so this sort of
• 12:36
  reinvigorated my entire worldview almost instantly.
• 12:40
  I got once I found out about the money laundering implications
• 12:43
  when this FBI agent warned us about Bitcoin, saying where do
• 12:45
  you get a load of this Bitcoin thing?
• 12:47
  He was saying in the sense that none of these rules are going to
• 12:49
  work going forward and that we're not going to be able to
• 12:52
  keep deputizing the banking system to do the criminal
• 12:55
  investigations, that it's going to have to go back to police
• 12:57
  work and not just bank go do this for us.
• 13:00
  And so yeah, yeah, that it got me thinking.
• 13:06
  And so in 2013, the Bitcoin price started to really spike.
• 13:12
  And now I'm already kind of addicted.
• 13:14
  And now it's actually happening. So the price is moving towards
• 13:18
  1000 US trash tokens for the first time ever and everyone's
• 13:23
  talking about it. It was and we kind of forget it
• 13:27
  was kind of a a peak in pop culture awareness about Bitcoin.
• 13:31
  It was being mentioned on television a lot back then.
• 13:33
  It's sort of just became this pervasive everywhere subject for
• 13:39
  the first time in its history as it often does during bull
• 13:42
  markets. But this was one of the first
• 13:44
  iterations of it. So I ended up getting the
• 13:47
  Senate's Banking Committee to do a year long study in 2013 on
• 13:53
  Bitcoin and not, you know, what are the criminal implications
• 13:57
  and all this stuff. I mean, what are the positive
• 14:00
  implications? What does this actually mean?
• 14:02
  We got Andreas Antonopoulos to come and testify and we brought
• 14:06
  in the original ATM Bitcoin machine and bought Bitcoin live
• 14:10
  on television to demonstrate the facility.
• 14:13
  And we spent about a year studying Bitcoin publicly and
• 14:17
  the public hearings allowed us to engage with people from all
• 14:21
  over the world, all over the Canadian ecosystem.
• 14:24
  Canada was really hitting above its weight class at the time and
• 14:30
  had a disproportionate amount of Bitcoin involvements.
• 14:35
  A lot of Bitcoin Core was coming through Canada back then because
• 14:38
  Block Stream was based in Canada.
• 14:41
  We had one of the original Co working spaces where when I quit
• 14:45
  my job with the Senate, I went and worked out of there.
• 14:47
  It was where Bitcoin Magazine was actually started, where the
• 14:51
  Ethereum yellow paper was published.
• 14:53
  It's where Vitalik Buterin was working at the time on in this
• 14:57
  Co working space. It's where the original ATM in
• 14:59
  Toronto was located and so I started working out of that
• 15:04
  place. Within not much time.
• 15:06
  I ended up moving to New York City because Coindesk had just
• 15:08
  been bought and was moved to New York City.
• 15:11
  So I went down to New York City and helped build the early
• 15:14
  Coindesk machine. We had the price of Bitcoin that
• 15:17
  was our major product back then, the quotable indexed price of
• 15:20
  Bitcoin. And so that's that's how I got
• 15:23
  into it. Basically it was money
• 15:24
  laundering and an interest in how corrupted the system was and
• 15:31
  a lot of pessimism about the future of politics and just how
• 15:34
  fake the news was, which were remedied by an interest and and
• 15:40
  cultivation of Bitcoin media, Bitcoin content and that kind of
• 15:45
  stuff that made me optimistic about the future.
• 15:50
  I've often wondered how the Canadians punched so far above
• 15:57
  their weight class with respect to Bitcoin.
• 15:59
  There is an enormous cohort of of highly capable and
• 16:03
  intelligent and really forward-looking people within
• 16:09
  the Bitcoin arena space coming out of Canada.
• 16:13
  People like Dave Bradley and Francis from both Bitcoin and
• 16:18
  obviously Ben and yourself and and and many, many more.
• 16:23
  And I guess that public research that you did into Bitcoin that
• 16:30
  may have helped spread that signal a little further or?
• 16:34
  I don't know. A lot of them were around.
• 16:35
  We had, we already had. Francis is one of the people who
• 16:38
  came and testified during the study.
• 16:40
  He had the Bitcoin embassy in Canada.
• 16:42
  I I think the reason more lies in that Canada is one of the
• 16:46
  fakest countries in the sense that it is the most Fiat.
• 16:49
  Just as I said, Canada was created.
• 16:51
  You know, Australia, being a continent in the middle of
• 16:54
  nowhere, has a natural force that joins people together into
• 16:59
  some kind of collective, can't say ethnic identity, but
• 17:04
  something akin to a national identity just because of how far
• 17:07
  you are, versus Canada, which has this huge continental
• 17:12
  identity in America right there. And so because it rejects that
• 17:16
  American identity and tries to carve out something else, it
• 17:20
  really goes back to the the conditions that created Canada.
• 17:25
  The traditions that created Canada were want of banking, and
• 17:29
  in particular want in this case of Fiat banking, because that's
• 17:32
  what they created from almost the start.
• 17:34
  And so Canada, it's the reason why, you know, this famous book
• 17:38
  that a lot of Bitcoiners read, it's part of the Bitcoin rabbit
• 17:40
  hole, if you will. It's part of the Bitcoin
• 17:43
  library, which is the sovereign individual.
• 17:46
  And that book, The Sovereign Individual predicts that Canada
• 17:49
  will be the first country to dissolve.
• 17:51
  And he predicted this in the 1990s and it would be the first
• 17:54
  country to dissolve in this new digital world.
• 17:57
  And, you know, 'cause it's not a, it's not a normal thing that
• 17:59
  people organize around national identity.
• 18:02
  That's kind of a repercussion of the Napoleonic wars and the
• 18:07
  centralization and the costs and economics around violence.
• 18:12
  And so, you know, ethnicities, yes, you're on an island.
• 18:15
  Yes, there's, there's all kinds of reasons why people do form
• 18:19
  personality traits and and cultures around which they can
• 18:23
  organize. But in the case of Canada, it
• 18:26
  really was the economics, if you will, of the country that laid
• 18:31
  this foundation. And they're very fake.
• 18:34
  Building east to West was not a natural way.
• 18:38
  You know, you know, a rail line from the Pacific Ocean to the
• 18:41
  Atlantic Ocean on the Canadian side.
• 18:43
  Not really the natural way you would imagine things going to be
• 18:46
  built because there was no one in the middle.
• 18:47
  There was literally no point to join the two.
• 18:50
  You could have joined them through Chicago and been just as
• 18:53
  well off. And we chose not to to avoid the
• 18:58
  Americans building NS resource integrations from the bread
• 19:03
  basket in the middle of the country and the West Coast and
• 19:07
  the East Coast. So because of the geography of
• 19:10
  North America and we, we created this Fiat country on top of it
• 19:16
  and subsidized through the centralization of banking all of
• 19:19
  this artificial East West infrastructure which we stopped
• 19:22
  building, which is the reason why Canada's so vulnerable to
• 19:26
  collapse now, which is probably why it won't make it because
• 19:29
  it's just not an if you centralized the banking for the
• 19:32
  purposes of building, you better build because all you're left
• 19:35
  with them is the banks. And I think that's more the
• 19:38
  reason why Canada hits above its weight is because we're for all
• 19:43
  intents and purposes American in our awareness of pop culture,
• 19:48
  but we have a larger economic failure on our hands.
• 19:51
  So we're being sandwiched into Bitcoin at A at A at American
• 19:56
  speeds and we don't quite have the US dollar on our side as
• 20:01
  Canadians in order to fall back on.
• 20:04
  And so we're left with the situation we're left with, which
• 20:07
  is a fucked to death burning pile of shit Fiat country that
• 20:11
  isn't going to make it much longer.
• 20:14
  Far out. Bitcoin doesn't announce itself.
• 20:17
  It reveals itself. Not in the moment you buy, but
• 20:20
  in the moment you stop thinking of it as a trade, start sensing
• 20:24
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  hardblock.com dot AU. Framing it up like that is yeah,
• 21:12
  obviously I've never, I've never thought about it like that.
• 21:15
  I've, I've I've been to Canada once and I I observed the
• 21:21
  cultural bleed like actually I kind of, I kind of dug it a
• 21:25
  little bit more like it was kind of reminiscent of sort of
• 21:29
  Australian laid backness, perhaps.
• 21:34
  I don't know if that's a thing, but with big F1 fifties and Z70
• 21:42
  ones rolling around and, and Alan Jackson murals, I, I
• 21:49
  appreciated all of that and, and I was like, oh man, this, this
• 21:52
  is, this is not a bad little place.
• 21:54
  But yeah, obviously being such close proximity to North
• 21:58
  America, there's a huge cultural bleed and you can't escape it.
• 22:02
  I mean, you can't, you can't escape it in media nowadays
• 22:05
  anyway. Like even here in Australia and
• 22:08
  the UK and Europe, et cetera. But being geographically so
• 22:14
  close has to sort of amplify that.
• 22:17
  But yet you don't have all of the benefits of, yeah, like a a
• 22:22
  global monetary system. And, well, that's just it.
• 22:25
  All these other things. We speak like them, but the
• 22:27
  Americans sit on top of U.S. dollar privilege and American
• 22:31
  bitcoiners sit on top of the privilege of and that's the one
• 22:34
  privilege which really does exist.
• 22:35
  I, I don't think there's this white privilege and all this
• 22:38
  privilege, but there is rich privilege and there is U.S.
• 22:40
  dollar printer privilege. That's a real privilege.
• 22:43
  And Canada just doesn't have access.
• 22:45
  That's an American thing. And in many ways that's what
• 22:48
  keeps America. And that's what, you know,
• 22:51
  that's a limiting factor on the amount of people driven to
• 22:54
  Bitcoin because Wall Street for some people works quite well and
• 22:59
  there's no reason for them to go looking for another system.
• 23:01
  Whereas Canada is a little more screwed, a little more out there
• 23:06
  and a little more exposed. And so especially our
• 23:10
  generation, especially that generation that came of age, you
• 23:13
  know, if you did the math and what I just described, obviously
• 23:15
  I came of age professionally during the financial crisis.
• 23:19
  And so while I had a great job at the Senate Banking Committee,
• 23:23
  you know, I certainly could tell around me things were not so
• 23:26
  good. And you can see why that was
• 23:29
  fertile ground for Canadians to find Bitcoin early at
• 23:33
  disproportionate rates that that part is absolutely true.
• 23:36
  Canada is way hits way above its weight for that reason, I think.
• 23:41
  And and and again, you know, in the same way that Canada was
• 23:44
  created for want of banking, it will die because of the type of
• 23:49
  banking that it chose. And that's what's created this
• 23:52
  off ramp for so many Canadians, to be orange peeled and to be
• 23:55
  bitcoiners and to eventually be a big part of what breaks Canada
• 23:59
  into pieces. Interesting.
• 24:01
  So the is that an unconscious sensation, an unconscious
• 24:07
  feeling amongst most Canadians? I mean, you guys did have
• 24:11
  Trudeau, you know, in for quite a while there and he's the old.
• 24:16
  Peninsula of all time, the greater there's never been a
• 24:19
  greater I I every bit of content I did, you know, here, here's
• 24:24
  The funny thing is that you know, I was there for the
• 24:27
  creation of Trudeau. His office was just across the
• 24:30
  hall from mine when I worked in Parliament, and I'd see him all
• 24:33
  the time, right? He actually ripped off an idea
• 24:36
  of mine, and it's what he rode into leadership.
• 24:40
  I, I yeah, I continue to say that it basically was
• 24:42
  eavesdropping at my office and figured out a plan.
• 24:45
  And the media just held the frame of him as this democratic
• 24:48
  reformer and, and allowed him to become Prime Minister on those
• 24:53
  means. I'd already quit knowing it was
• 24:55
  coming and and knowing that Canada was heading off a Cliff.
• 24:58
  You know, I would speak with Conservatives and they'd say,
• 25:00
  well, we're governing so well. We're making so much money, The
• 25:04
  country's so rich energy superpower.
• 25:06
  And I said, do you think people care if they run a million fake
• 25:09
  news stories on the leadership? You guys are toast if you're not
• 25:12
  willing to destroy the Central Broad, the Canadian Broadcasting
• 25:15
  Corporation, the you have the ABC in Australia.
• 25:17
  The. Whole thing, right?
• 25:19
  You're not willing to RIP that down.
• 25:22
  You're not being serious. You're not you're not actually
• 25:25
  attacking the real problem you're entering into this frame
• 25:29
  and there's no way you're going to win this frame.
• 25:31
  You're not going to be rewarded for being nice and fair.
• 25:34
  You don't live in that world. And so when I saw all of this
• 25:39
  transpiring and I could tell that that Trudeau was coming,
• 25:44
  it's one of the reasons why I was so adamant about getting
• 25:47
  into Bitcoin because I just didn't see the country having
• 25:50
  any potential. But then Fast forward to a few
• 25:53
  years later and when the Bitcoin conference really starts to get
• 25:59
  political, I started programming the Bitcoin conference years
• 26:02
  later when Bukele came and the events started to become very
• 26:06
  political. After 2021 when we had Bukele
• 26:09
  make his announcement, when the trucker situation happened in
• 26:13
  Canada, I started to say in 2022, well, I think that Justin
• 26:17
  Trudeau is now the greatest orange pillar in the history of
• 26:20
  the world. And inevitably, you can actually
• 26:22
  trace Justin Trudeau's actions because one year later in 2023,
• 26:28
  if you recall, we had Robert Kennedy Junior as our keynote
• 26:33
  and he actually on stage said that Justin Trudeau made him a
• 26:36
  bitcoiner, that Justin Trudeau created the trucker's
• 26:40
  environment, which Orange built him.
• 26:41
  It's what made RFKA complete and total Bitcoiner.
• 26:46
  And you can just chart the consequences of that straight to
• 26:48
  Trump. Trump comes the next year and
• 26:51
  now inevitably you've got an American strategic Bitcoin
• 26:54
  reserve coming. And these are the very things
• 26:56
  that has Canada existentially in danger.
• 26:59
  And I actually gave a talk at the Bitcoin meet up two days
• 27:04
  after Trump was elected in 2024. So that would have been, you
• 27:07
  know, whatever, November 8th or something like that, 2024.
• 27:11
  And I told everyone that morning or that that day that you woke
• 27:14
  up this morning and in Canada was in existential danger and
• 27:18
  that I believe, and I said it publicly, then Canada is not
• 27:21
  going to make it. And this was before Trump.
• 27:22
  It started on 51st date and Governor Trudeau and any of that
• 27:26
  stuff that all happened later, but, but Trudeau did more to
• 27:30
  make Canadian Bitcoiners than anyone maybe in the world.
• 27:34
  Maybe he is the greatest. And the funny story is, is that,
• 27:38
  you know, Justin Trudeau's brother actually helped me with
• 27:41
  the Bitcoin study in 2013. His brother's a big Bitcoiner, a
• 27:44
  big fan and helper of the Kennedy campaign and all kinds
• 27:48
  of stuff. So Bitcoiners in the family of
• 27:51
  the Trudeau's. How funny.
• 27:54
  Isn't it? How funny.
• 27:55
  Meanwhile, he's now dating Katy Perry and that's fake.
• 27:58
  That's fake and backing up I. Mean they might get along, but I
• 28:01
  think that's one of these agents.
• 28:03
  Put them together because it drives people crazy and it'll
• 28:05
  get people talking. Yeah, let's hope so.
• 28:08
  They might have real chemistry, you know, I hope for him.
• 28:11
  He's got some real chemistry. Yeah, well, I mean, I don't
• 28:14
  know, like that's, that's a whole other rabbit hole.
• 28:16
  I don't, I don't really. Yeah, it's it's it's crazy.
• 28:23
  I mean, I want to get to the, to the to the key, the key question
• 28:26
  here in a SEC. But I, I just wanted to pivot
• 28:28
  back, I guess. Well, elsewhere you did this
• 28:32
  career guide to the Fiat apocalypse roughly about a year
• 28:36
  ago. And you know, I think that the
• 28:41
  text held holds up like enormously well.
• 28:45
  I'm not like the AI is obviously dates, you know, and this is the
• 28:48
  thing about the the AI thing. I got to redo the audio.
• 28:51
  Everyone struggles with that, but the content and the actual
• 28:54
  meaning in the message is, is is phenomenal, but it's full of
• 28:59
  esoteric language and the psychological concepts as a way
• 29:03
  of sort of explaining the diet that, you know, the dark and the
• 29:06
  light forces of Fiat and and Bitcoin.
• 29:10
  And not to date the episode, but I was watching a recent episode
• 29:15
  of the great awakening. You travelled back from from
• 29:20
  Mother's Day and you left early. You you mentioned that on on the
• 29:24
  air. And then I was, I was putting
• 29:26
  those two things together and I was like, how do you get on in a
• 29:29
  conversation around family and maybe pre Bitcoin friends,
• 29:34
  friends that haven't quite discovered Bitcoin yet or, or
• 29:36
  whatever? Because I know what it's like
• 29:38
  for me, right? It's it's hard.
• 29:42
  But given your clear articulation of the problem of
• 29:48
  Fiat and obviously the solution of Bitcoin, which, yeah, it
• 29:53
  resonates with people like me and, and pretty much every guest
• 29:56
  that I've ever had on this episode, on this podcast.
• 29:58
  Do you have any tips or tricks you might want to share on how
• 30:02
  to sort of be around people that think you're an insane human
• 30:07
  being and you can't articulate in esoteric terms?
• 30:11
  You're in luck in that The Career Guide to the Fiat
• 30:15
  Apocalypse is a kind of continuation of a book that I
• 30:20
  had written maybe three years ago now in 2023, I'm going to
• 30:26
  say, and that book is called The Bitcoiners Guide to NP and that
• 30:36
  was written for Thanksgiving weekend.
• 30:39
  I wrote it to help people with exactly this conversation,
• 30:42
  exactly these circumstances. So the career guide to the Fiat
• 30:45
  apocalypse is more just, you know, AI and don't worry about
• 30:48
  it. And the old jobs are the new
• 30:49
  jobs to summarize that right, the old jobs, mother, brother,
• 30:53
  you know, father, all outlaw, trickster, all these archetypes
• 30:58
  matter. Now the, the idea behind this,
• 31:01
  the frame of this book, the archetypes comes from my book
• 31:04
  The Bitcoiners Guide to NPC Management.
• 31:08
  So in that book, I say it's our arguments don't work right.
• 31:11
  The sludge people, the NPC's, you're not going to be able to
• 31:15
  just give them an argument and then suddenly they're going to
• 31:17
  go, you know, like I can even, this was a real lesson I learned
• 31:23
  in that 2017 Bitcoin market. So of course, I was
• 31:27
  excommunicated in Canada in 2015 because not only did I leave my
• 31:33
  job and start working, I got rid of, you know, I had a secretary
• 31:37
  in a fireplace and all these things, you know, fancy BMW's
• 31:43
  and, you know, fancy meetings and suits and.
• 31:46
  Freebie suits. And black shoes and the whole
• 31:49
  life when I went to the Bitcoin world of it shocked a lot of my
• 31:54
  credentialist friends, a lot of my professional friends.
• 31:58
  And then I did something even crazier, which is I fully
• 32:00
  embraced Trump from day one. Mexican rapist not sending us
• 32:04
  their best speech. I thought it was the greatest
• 32:05
  political speech I've ever heard.
• 32:07
  I had given up on politics. I was already 100% in on
• 32:10
  Bitcoin. And then I heard Trump do that
• 32:12
  each, and I said, wait a minute, this is good work.
• 32:14
  This is great stuff. And so the two problems that
• 32:20
  Canadian aristocrats had with me that the people I grew up with
• 32:24
  where I was now, this Bitcoin guy and also a mega Trumper
• 32:29
  circa 2015. And so I was basically just
• 32:33
  excommunicated and kicked out of society.
• 32:37
  And so I moved to New York City. Anyway, I didn't really give a
• 32:39
  shit, right? I had new things were going
• 32:41
  great in Bitcoin and we were having a lot of fun and I wasn't
• 32:43
  worried about what people thought about me, but I actually
• 32:46
  was stupid enough. Think about this.
• 32:48
  I was so dumb, but I thought that all of the success and
• 32:51
  being right, you know, Trump got elected and then Bitcoin mooned
• 32:54
  in 2017 and my startup became famous.
• 32:59
  Coindesk was famous. I was on TV every day in New
• 33:01
  York City. I spent over a year just driving
• 33:04
  around in limousines in New York City going to the Stock Exchange
• 33:08
  and giving media hits and going on Squawk Box and CNBC and going
• 33:12
  on all the all the time. I was on media every day.
• 33:16
  Anything I said was getting covered in the newspapers
• 33:19
  because success, right? That's what ends up happening.
• 33:21
  And I was so stupid that I thought that my friends who
• 33:25
  excommunicated me in 2015 would have gone.
• 33:28
  Oh, Nolan, Oh, my God, you were right about everything.
• 33:31
  I'm, I'm going to change my world view now because of how
• 33:35
  right you were. Trump got elected and Bitcoin
• 33:37
  clearly is working. And, you know, what do you think
• 33:40
  happened? Do you think anything like that
• 33:42
  happened? Of course not, right?
• 33:43
  My friends just doubled down on their mental retardation.
• 33:47
  And so it's a big, it's a big wake up pill about what actually
• 33:52
  persuades people. And so I just happened to be a
• 33:55
  little ahead on the curve as a bitcoiner when you're like, that
• 33:59
  didn't work. You know, like, how much more
• 34:01
  can I prove? Like, how much more can I
• 34:03
  possibly do to prove to these people that I'm right and you're
• 34:06
  fucking wrong? And so then you realize that
• 34:09
  being right and wrong have nothing to do with persuasion,
• 34:11
  that those are, you know, not factors at all.
• 34:14
  So what do you do? So I wrote the book Bitcoiners
• 34:16
  Guide to NPC Management, basically as a way of using
• 34:21
  Bitcoin and persuasion techniques to actually
• 34:24
  penetrate. Because the problem is cognitive
• 34:27
  dissonance. That's why people through all my
• 34:29
  success with with predicting Trump and then early Bitcoin,
• 34:33
  why it didn't persuade us, because it triggers people's
• 34:35
  cognitive dissonance. They'll double down on the
• 34:36
  stupid ideas, they'll go further, they'll ignore you.
• 34:39
  They'll do word salad, they'll make excuses.
• 34:41
  They're not going to change their opinion.
• 34:43
  That's too hard. So how do you actually do this?
• 34:46
  How do you get people to change their minds?
• 34:48
  And cognitive dissonance is a part of it.
• 34:50
  It's perpetual cognitive dissonance, which realizes that
• 34:53
  Fiat is kind of a magic spell that loads people into a kind of
• 34:58
  hypnosis, and you need to fight that hypnosis in the dark magic
• 35:02
  of Fiat with the bright and lightning magic of Bitcoin.
• 35:06
  And it's not arguments. These things are not arguments.
• 35:09
  So I wrote a book basically saying you can use people's
• 35:12
  fears, the reasons for which they say Bitcoin will fail, as a
• 35:16
  way of diagnosing the NPC type. There's archetypes of NPCS and
• 35:22
  that each individual NPC archetype has a counter spell
• 35:26
  with Bitcoin. Usually a Bitcoin meme.
• 35:28
  Again, not logical. Don't look for logic here.
• 35:31
  This is just how to reframe and change people's minds about
• 35:34
  stuff and persuade. So logic again doesn't work in
• 35:37
  the 1st place. So we're not seeking logic.
• 35:39
  So an example would be a credentialist.
• 35:41
  So first of all, you use Bitcoin to find out what type of NPC no
• 35:45
  Bitcoin origin story like your like this podcast, right?
• 35:48
  What's your Bitcoin origin story?
• 35:49
  So that's how the test begins in the Bitcoiners guide to NPC
• 35:52
  management. What's your Bitcoin origin
• 35:54
  story? No Bitcoin first contact
• 35:57
  automatic NPC. So obviously if you meet someone
• 36:00
  in 2026 and they're like what's Bitcoin?
• 36:02
  You don't really you don't got to take out the big guns.
• 36:05
  This is an obvious NPC and. Shut it down.
• 36:09
  Documentary type of clay that you're going to deal with plenty
• 36:12
  you can do in that case. Now what you do next is you take
• 36:16
  their reaction to first contact with Bitcoin and that will give
• 36:20
  you a bit of an insight into their fears.
• 36:22
  It'll give you an insight into what they're afraid of.
• 36:26
  And you use this, this, this mirror to the, I call it the
• 36:33
  mirror of disbelief where whatever reason, it'll give you
• 36:37
  an insight into the nature of their worldview.
• 36:40
  So a credentialist, for example, would say the government's going
• 36:43
  to ban that Bitcoin less so. But when I wrote the book in
• 36:45
  2023, it was still very much possible.
• 36:48
  So right away there, they actually believe that, you know,
• 36:51
  diplomas and fancy jobs are enough to stop Bitcoin.
• 36:54
  Like they actually believe that. They actually believe that
• 36:57
  someone with a degree, because I know you can't Bitcoin anymore.
• 37:00
  You can't do that and the people are going to listen.
• 37:02
  So that's already a type of mental illness.
• 37:05
  So with those people, instead of arguing, someone who says who is
• 37:08
  clearly a credentialist, you pity them.
• 37:10
  That's the worst thing you can do that causes entire mental
• 37:14
  breakdowns. If someone is bragging about
• 37:17
  having gone to this college or that college and this job and
• 37:20
  they're this kind of credentialist, actually having
• 37:23
  pity for them will be more persuasive and might drive them,
• 37:27
  you know, over the top and absolutely crazy and angry.
• 37:31
  But you don't have to do anything and argue and get
• 37:33
  sucked into it. You just say you really believe
• 37:34
  and then you just kind of left. So you believe the news, Like
• 37:37
  you believe that the government that they can do this stuff.
• 37:40
  And then you just act totally like you're shocked that someone
• 37:43
  would even believe credentialist worldview.
• 37:46
  And that actually can persuade someone towards Bitcoin.
• 37:50
  I've got a few more, you know, I use sports baller as one, which
• 37:53
  is I don't understand any of that Wall Street stuff.
• 37:56
  Oh, that's all complicated, right?
• 37:58
  So that one you can just use have fun staying poor.
• 38:01
  That usually works, right? That's OK.
• 38:03
  Well, I guess you're happy with, you know, you don't want to be,
• 38:06
  you don't want to make money. That's fine.
• 38:08
  You know, a follower would be another archetype.
• 38:11
  That's the archetype that will say, oh, people lost money on
• 38:15
  that. That's usually at the crypto
• 38:16
  association. Oh, I know my brother, he didn't
• 38:19
  work out well. He got into crypto and it didn't
• 38:22
  work out well. He lost a lot of money.
• 38:24
  And so that one with followers, right, you know, it's the same
• 38:30
  thing. You can use these Bitcoin
• 38:33
  archetypes, these Bitcoin memes, pardon me, in order to fight
• 38:37
  against these archetypes. And each of them usually can
• 38:41
  both induce cognitive dissonance and if repeated enough can
• 38:45
  actually persuade people. Not easy.
• 38:48
  It can be a dangerous game, but and very volatile.
• 38:52
  But that's what I practice. I practice this version from the
• 38:55
  book, which is to induce what I call it toxic micro dosing.
• 39:00
  It's a toxic micro dosing. Instead of being a toxic
• 39:03
  maximalist, I use cognitive dissonance and Bitcoin memes to
• 39:08
  toxic micro dose people into awakening to the bright good
• 39:14
  magic of Bitcoin. It's like anti venom.
• 39:18
  It's anti venom. I got Karen's was one of the one
• 39:25
  of them. Nihilist is another, right?
• 39:28
  Everything's corrupted, Epstein files, that kind of stuff.
• 39:32
  So each of them has their own counter spell.
• 39:36
  It's like a judo move and you kind of use it's judo move
• 39:38
  there, it's judo, it's judo. Interesting.
• 39:40
  It's judo. Arguing again, do not argue.
• 39:44
  Do not engage. Do not engage.
• 39:49
  Do you have you used those? Have you found yourself using
• 39:52
  some of those techniques, like in in situ, like with immediate
• 39:57
  family or extended family or my my?
• 40:00
  My immediate family has had the benefit of me being around for
• 40:04
  and being this way for enough time now that I don't really
• 40:08
  have to go with the details with them.
• 40:10
  So that's my immediate family. But I have, you know, I guess
• 40:13
  immediate family. Yeah, I guess in laws and and
• 40:15
  stuff like that. Not, not parents in law, but
• 40:18
  brothers and sisters in law and stuff like that that are
• 40:21
  probably still plugged into the Fiat matrix in Canada.
• 40:25
  And I do use it on them a lot. And it allows you to say what
• 40:29
  you mean. You don't have to self censor
• 40:32
  and you're you're able to, you know, not not get into
• 40:37
  unpleasant conversations, but still get your point across in a
• 40:41
  way that's satisfying and a way that usually leaves them having
• 40:46
  to decide if they want to engage in more debate, which they're
• 40:49
  just going to keep losing or because they don't understand
• 40:52
  the game that's being played. When you go to these Bitcoin
• 40:54
  memes and you try and induce cognitive dissonance in this
• 40:58
  way, because you're not arguing anything.
• 41:00
  You're not trying to be right. You're just trying to spur on
• 41:03
  this awakening and realization, usually through pointed
• 41:07
  frustration and minor insults. I guess you can say using these
• 41:12
  Bitcoin. OK, how do you combat the
• 41:17
  pacifist? Let's say the pacifist partner,
• 41:21
  maybe you have a wife and I'll, I can think of like if I was to
• 41:26
  use these judo moves and these techniques in a very polite and
• 41:29
  affable way, that's coming from a good place, but can it can
• 41:34
  come across potentially like I always get in trouble.
• 41:36
  It's not what you're saying, it's how you're saying it.
• 41:38
  So maybe I need to work on my tone, but but you know, that can
• 41:44
  then tend to amplify a bit of angst and consonation in the
• 41:47
  situation where what you're trying to say is like you,
• 41:50
  you're trying to do the judo move, but you just come across
• 41:53
  as an asshole and you and you watch like, dude, just chill.
• 41:58
  Come on. Like we're at a family
• 42:00
  gathering, man. Like, come on.
• 42:02
  We got to be nice to these people.
• 42:04
  Yeah, I, I mean, you know, in my case, I don't, My, my wife is,
• 42:11
  you know, been pretty supportive over the years with all this
• 42:15
  stuff. And so I, I guess I haven't come
• 42:18
  across that, you know, she's negotiated with me before social
• 42:22
  events about what I can and can't say or what I should and
• 42:25
  shouldn't say. But I feel like keeping it on.
• 42:29
  Yeah, I feel like keeping it on Bitcoin as a proxy for all the
• 42:34
  other subjects. You know, people tend to if
• 42:40
  they, you know, if you're, if you're going with Trump as the
• 42:42
  lead, you're not going to get anywhere.
• 42:45
  But Bitcoin can be used and it's pretty malleable.
• 42:47
  So in itself it doesn't drive people crazy and in itself can
• 42:53
  cause people to learn about things they didn't mean to learn
• 42:55
  about. And so it is a bit clandestine.
• 42:58
  Like my wife has never said to me, oh, no Bitcoin stuff, even
• 43:00
  though, you know, basically anywhere I go, you're going to
• 43:04
  find me talking about Bitcoin in some way with someone.
• 43:06
  So I feel like Bitcoin doesn't quite, you know, the worst case
• 43:11
  scenario is it annoys people and that's fine.
• 43:15
  That's not the same as creating unpleasant social events and
• 43:20
  gatherings. But for example, I'm able to use
• 43:24
  Bitcoin to I never shut my mouth about the 2020 US election.
• 43:30
  From January 7th on, I never had to censor myself because I said,
• 43:36
  well, can you audit the election?
• 43:39
  And people would say, what do you mean?
• 43:40
  Can you audit the election? I was like, do you, do you
• 43:42
  believe there's a way to audit the 2020 election?
• 43:45
  And people say, of course there is.
• 43:46
  And I'd say really, you really believe that, that there's a way
• 43:48
  to audit the election? And people will start wondering
• 43:53
  and they might go Google it, they might go look it up and
• 43:56
  they quickly find out you can't audit an election.
• 43:58
  And I said, well, I come from the Bitcoin world where all I
• 44:00
  have to know is don't trust verify.
• 44:02
  I don't need proof that the US 2020 election was stolen.
• 44:07
  I don't need this story and who did it and who did what.
• 44:11
  All I have to know is is there an audit of this election?
• 44:14
  If not, it's just a bunch of Ethereum transactions.
• 44:17
  That's all you need to know. And so and, and to a Bitcoin or
• 44:21
  that makes sense. So, you know, wasting, I guess.
• 44:23
  I guess this would be a great example in that I never spent
• 44:27
  any time because that's what people would say about the 2020
• 44:30
  election. They say, oh, but that story in
• 44:32
  Georgia was fake. And, and what about the Kraken
• 44:37
  that Sydney Powell was talking about?
• 44:39
  It was fake. And so I, I never said I would,
• 44:43
  you know, you're going to hear thousands of accusations of
• 44:46
  election fraud. Less than 1% are going to be
• 44:50
  actually true. Most of the election fraud
• 44:53
  stories are going to be fake. So I would agree with them on
• 44:56
  that. So that's just a bit of pacing
• 44:57
  and leading, right? If you pace and agree with
• 45:00
  people about a certain amount of points and don't argue about
• 45:02
  peripheral things, you'll be more persuasive to them.
• 45:04
  So you can pace and lead people when it comes to these things.
• 45:07
  So pacing and leading is one of the most powerful forms of
• 45:11
  persuasion out there. And so right away I agree.
• 45:14
  I don't I don't know where it was stolen, right.
• 45:17
  I don't have the answer. I'm not, you know, one of the
• 45:20
  things you'll notice as well with, you know, really
• 45:22
  understanding cognitive dissonance and how it manifests.
• 45:26
  So one of the ways it manifests is word salad, right?
• 45:29
  People start describing things that are absolutely insane when
• 45:32
  they're having cognitive dissonance.
• 45:33
  They'll start saying crazy shit, right?
• 45:35
  You, me, everybody. You can't actually diagnose
• 45:37
  yourself with cognitive dissonance.
• 45:39
  It's impossible, right? Someone else can do it.
• 45:41
  It's not easy when it's you, that feeling you get in your
• 45:43
  stomach when you're angry about what someone said, that is
• 45:45
  cognitive dissonance. Whether you're right or wrong
• 45:48
  doesn't matter. It's when what you're seeing in
• 45:50
  reality and what you believe in your head don't match.
• 45:53
  It'll turn cognitive dissonance over in your stomach and you'll
• 45:56
  start to feel either anger or you'll spaz out or you're trying
• 46:01
  to correct a person. Now the objective reality and
• 46:04
  your internal opinion might align.
• 46:06
  So you don't have the type of cognitive dissonance that's
• 46:09
  going to create toxicity and spread out and create mental
• 46:12
  illness. It's just in that one
• 46:14
  conversation, one of you is right and one of you is wrong.
• 46:17
  What'll end up happening is the person, the way to judge between
• 46:21
  whose worldview is more accurate in these instances where we're
• 46:26
  having a difference of opinion and there is an objective
• 46:29
  reality, and whose internal opinion is closer.
• 46:34
  Usually the person who has to hallucinate and AD information
• 46:38
  is the one who's wrong. So if you and I are both hanging
• 46:41
  by the conversation right now and you swear there's an
• 46:44
  elephant in this room with us and I'm like, well, I don't, I
• 46:47
  don't really see it. And so I disagree.
• 46:52
  Usually the person who has to add the elephant in the room is
• 46:55
  having cognitive dissonance. Usually the anything that's
• 46:57
  extra, not all the time, but usually that is the case.
• 47:02
  So what you have to do is not fall into those traps.
• 47:06
  So even though you're right, if you start hallucinating, if you
• 47:10
  use word salad, you're exhibiting the typical signs of
• 47:13
  cognitive dissonance that we all subconsciously know how to tune
• 47:16
  out and we all subconsciously know as losing a debate or an
• 47:20
  argument. Or really, you know, we
• 47:22
  shouldn't think of them as debates or arguments.
• 47:23
  They're really just persuasion and counter persuasions that
• 47:27
  we're always performing on each other because we don't want to
• 47:30
  be not aligned with the people around us at a holiday or
• 47:32
  whatever. We want people to see the world
• 47:34
  the same way we see it so that we don't have cognitive
• 47:36
  distance. And so usually when they add
• 47:39
  information, when they hallucinate new things.
• 47:41
  And so with the elections, for example, in 2020, I don't know
• 47:46
  how they were stolen. I, I, I still don't know.
• 47:48
  I mean, it looks like we have a bigger picture and a better
• 47:50
  picture, but I don't really know and I don't really care.
• 47:54
  I don't need to know. I know they were stolen because
• 47:56
  100% of the time, if you can steal something and there's no
• 47:59
  way to get caught, guess what happens?
• 48:01
  It gets stolen, right? If you can't catch people
• 48:02
  because there's no audit, there's no election.
• 48:05
  We never had anything like an election.
• 48:07
  And so I was able to clearly talk about the 2020 election
• 48:12
  even at its most tense in America, which would be after
• 48:16
  January 6th, when it was sort of, you know, you were basically
• 48:20
  killing children if you denied the elections.
• 48:22
  You were an elections denier at that point, right?
• 48:25
  I never had to stop because my system of talking about the 2020
• 48:29
  election was so simple. It came from a Bitcoin world
• 48:32
  view. It was don't trust verify.
• 48:34
  We can't audit the election. I don't need to know anything
• 48:36
  else there. There was no election.
• 48:37
  Something happened, people went and voted.
• 48:39
  There was an Election Day, but there wasn't an election.
• 48:42
  We don't no one knows anything about what happened.
• 48:44
  So using that frame is generally how I am able to interact with
• 48:50
  all these sludge people all the time and not really have to
• 48:54
  censor myself, but aware indeed that I can have cognitive
• 48:58
  dissonance. And again, that's that anger
• 49:00
  that you feel in your in your stomach when someone says
• 49:03
  something that you don't agree with.
• 49:04
  When someone says something stupid on the Internet and you
• 49:06
  start going, fuck, I got to stop them.
• 49:08
  They said something crazy on the Internet.
• 49:10
  I got a comment that's cognitive dissonance.
• 49:13
  You might be right. Irrelevant, absolutely
• 49:16
  irrelevant. It's not about right or wrong.
• 49:19
  It's about just traversing those moments and and how to find
• 49:22
  persuasion and alignment, because ultimately persuasion
• 49:26
  will end cognitive dissonance because the person with whom
• 49:29
  you're disagreeing will no longer disagree with you and so
• 49:32
  erased the cognitive dissonance. The the the Bitcoin is eternal
• 49:37
  struggle to resist the slide into CC day explanations.
• 49:45
  It's it's real, Yeah. That's exactly it.
• 49:48
  It's the you got to look at the board.
• 49:50
  Didn't you see it right? Can't you see?
• 49:53
  And the pleading and you know that that's the least persuasive
• 49:56
  voice in the world. The the pleading, begging voice,
• 50:00
  that is. The oldest break.
• 50:02
  People don't want to hear. It I've done the work.
• 50:04
  Look at all the dots. They're all connected, man.
• 50:06
  Come on. Yeah, it doesn't work.
• 50:08
  It's 0. It's a 0.
• 50:09
  It's an absolute 0. But you know, nonchalantly
• 50:14
  saying, yeah, well, I don't, I don't buy the 2020 election
• 50:16
  because don't trust verify. What the fuck does that mean?
• 50:19
  You'll have all they'll start asking questions, right?
• 50:21
  So that's the difference. You can you can find these non
• 50:27
  confrontational ways that induce one way cognitive dissonance.
• 50:31
  If I say don't trust verify, I I don't, I don't, I'm not spazzing
• 50:35
  out. I'm not hallucinating facts.
• 50:37
  I'm not saying, but you didn't see the Kraken.
• 50:40
  The Venezuelans influence the 2020 election, which is probably
• 50:45
  true, by the way, which is probably true, but without
• 50:48
  proof, you don't want to go around spreading that you don't
• 50:51
  you don't have to also argue that with someone because you're
• 50:53
  going to lose that, especially six years ago now or five years
• 50:58
  ago now, though it's you can do it, but better off still keeping
• 51:02
  it simple with the Bitcoin meme. Don't trust verify in that, you
• 51:05
  know get them to do research on their own.
• 51:08
  If you inspire someone to go and find out that the US elections
• 51:12
  aren't auditable, you'll have done more to make them a
• 51:14
  bitcoiner than handing them Bitcoin, honestly.
• 51:18
  Because if they understand that the elections are not auditable,
• 51:23
  that there's no, that no one's even trying to make them
• 51:25
  auditable, there is no way of knowing who voted when, where,
• 51:29
  how. There's no such thing.
• 51:31
  And so once people understand that, they end up orange peeling
• 51:35
  themselves, as it were, because truthfully, that's the only way
• 51:38
  we can ever do it. I'm sure every time you hear on
• 51:40
  this show, you've been through enough of these stories.
• 51:42
  It's not like someone says, oh, and then I learned about it
• 51:45
  because someone explained it and I listened very closely and then
• 51:49
  I changed my world view that that never happens, right?
• 51:51
  There's always some instance of something failing, someone
• 51:54
  needing Bitcoin, someone being drawn to Bitcoin because some
• 51:58
  calamity, their mind was open to some related subject.
• 52:01
  And then suddenly they figured out Bitcoin because the rabbit
• 52:05
  hole was finding out, for example, that the US elections
• 52:08
  are not auditable, that that can actually create a Bitcoin.
• 52:12
  How has discovering Bitcoin changed you?
• 52:17
  Well, I mean, first of all, like I said, I thought at one point
• 52:20
  that being right about stuff persuaded people.
• 52:22
  And I thought that, you know, humans would actually
• 52:25
  acknowledge that I was right about stuff and then go, oh,
• 52:28
  maybe I should listen to him more.
• 52:30
  No one's on the TVI must believe him now he's not.
• 52:33
  On the DNA. So that would be the start, but
• 52:36
  I guess, you know, ultimately it is.
• 52:40
  And that's something that I wrote about in my book, The
• 52:43
  Career Guide to the Fiat Apocalypse.
• 52:45
  It really is the, you know, it's a Christian thing.
• 52:47
  Of course, know thyself. So that's one way of describing
• 52:50
  it. But to put it in, I guess you
• 52:53
  can say modern psychological terms, union psychology has a
• 53:00
  lot to do with individuating and confronting your shadow.
• 53:04
  It's the feedback loop between the dark sides of yourself and
• 53:08
  the things that are keeping you down and the things that you
• 53:10
  need to integrate into your personality in order to grow, in
• 53:16
  order to evolve. And so the process of
• 53:19
  individuation and union psychology begins with
• 53:22
  encounter. It moves to assimilation,
• 53:24
  finally, integration of the shadow so you can be reborn if
• 53:27
  you will. And it starts with that idea
• 53:32
  again of accountability. And one of the reasons why
• 53:35
  mental illness in places like Canada or Australia or America
• 53:39
  is so rampant is because of the Fiat system.
• 53:42
  Because when you don't have those feedback loops, when you
• 53:45
  don't have counting, encountering, right encounter is
• 53:48
  a is a tally. It's a type of type of Ledger.
• 53:52
  It's a type of score. And if you can't encounter, if
• 53:55
  you can't measure your mental illness, your failure, you're
• 54:00
  not managing it. If you're not measuring
• 54:01
  something, you're not managing. It's an old adage in MBA
• 54:04
  classes. I don't know if it exists in
• 54:06
  Australia, but it's a thing for all the people who got their MBA
• 54:08
  in America. If you're not measuring, you're
• 54:09
  not managing. So you got to measure things if
• 54:11
  you're going to manage them. And that's what COVID ended up
• 54:15
  exposing in America or all around the world.
• 54:17
  We have all these unhealthy people working as health
• 54:21
  ministers. We have all these poor
• 54:23
  university professors teaching economics and Marxism.
• 54:27
  And so it's an inversion of reality across the board because
• 54:30
  of this. Because, Simply put, we're not
• 54:32
  integrating our shadow. We're not encountering the
• 54:35
  shadow because we're not even taking any measure of it.
• 54:38
  So Bitcoin definitely helped me in my personal life when it
• 54:42
  comes to this integration. You get a better sense, you
• 54:45
  know, when I measured my career based on the fanciness of my
• 54:49
  office or the perks and privileges I had at my job.
• 54:54
  It's kind of useless stuff. Only in Bitcoin when I was able
• 54:59
  to measure my personal success in a much more transparent and
• 55:03
  easy way did I did I really start benefiting from this
• 55:07
  shadow integration and, and from the process of individuation.
• 55:11
  So you know, all, all Long story short, right?
• 55:14
  Bitcoin is a psychological commodity.
• 55:16
  And I mean, that's objectively true.
• 55:18
  And its value is simply based on what people are willing to pay
• 55:22
  for it, to spend on it, and on all that stuff.
• 55:25
  And so as a psychological commodity, the psychology of the
• 55:30
  people using it is important. And that's one of the reasons
• 55:33
  why I predict that we're winning the entire world economy and
• 55:37
  flipping it to a Bitcoin standard simply because our
• 55:41
  mental fitness is higher because of Bitcoin, our ability to
• 55:45
  traverse this World War three, that we're all living through
• 55:48
  the economic and psychological war that's raging all around us.
• 55:53
  It really has us all well positioned in this fight.
• 55:56
  And so we have for the most part understood.
• 55:59
  And that's what, you know, Austrian School of Economics
• 56:02
  really does think of the world in this way.
• 56:04
  It's the credentialists and the Keynesians that that think that
• 56:07
  economics, because there's numbers has something to do with
• 56:11
  math there. There's nothing math about
• 56:13
  economics at all. It's all psychological.
• 56:15
  Now there's math underlying Bitcoin.
• 56:17
  But again, Bitcoin is the psychological certainty that
• 56:21
  there's only 21 million. So that's as far as the math
• 56:23
  really goes out. You can, the algorithms, Shaw,
• 56:26
  all this other stuff. Sure, sure, sure, sure.
• 56:28
  But choices that are made in consumption and saving money and
• 56:32
  all these things are much deeper and psychological.
• 56:35
  They're really and just about persuasion, right?
• 56:37
  Just we want things, we're afraid of things.
• 56:39
  And that's how we make decisions, not from logic and
• 56:42
  reason. We're nothing of the sort,
• 56:43
  right? In the same way that logic and
• 56:45
  reason don't persuade other people, they don't persuade you
• 56:48
  yourself in your real everyday life.
• 56:50
  They do not persuade you, but altering what you want and what
• 56:54
  you fear through changing your time preference, through
• 56:58
  delaying gratification, through the type of psychological
• 57:01
  changes that come with this whole idea of union psychology
• 57:07
  and individuation and encountering your shadow and
• 57:09
  counting it and having a tally and a score.
• 57:12
  Those things do allow you to modify subconsciously what you
• 57:16
  want and what you're afraid of, and that has a big effect on
• 57:20
  your decision making, inevitably.
• 57:22
  So economics have little to do with math, even though there's
• 57:26
  numbers. It has more to do with
• 57:28
  psychology and it should be taught that way.
• 57:30
  I I don't understand why they still teach economics with
• 57:33
  spreadsheets and math. That's like a Fiat Keynesian
• 57:36
  thing. Austrian school of economic was
• 57:38
  very clear that economics are 100% psychological and Bitcoin
• 57:43
  is manifesting that in the real world.
• 57:46
  And it's one reason why, you know, bitcoiners with the
• 57:48
  dieting and the time preference, all of these things manifest
• 57:51
  themselves. It's not logic, it's really just
• 57:54
  that Bitcoiners want to be fit in this way.
• 57:57
  They don't have as deep a hole in their consumption heart and
• 58:00
  their pit of their stomach as a lot of Fiat consumers do because
• 58:04
  they're just running on different psychological fuel.
• 58:06
  And over time it has an effect that we see and can measure in
• 58:10
  almost every Bitcoiner. It's something that that all
• 58:12
  Bitcoiners end up saying. It's I think Max Keiser who says
• 58:15
  it a lot. Bitcoin changes you and that
• 58:18
  ends up being what happened to me and I think very typical and
• 58:22
  and in line with what many Bitcoiners have experienced.
• 58:26
  Yeah, it's a, it is a common theme over the 170 odd episodes
• 58:32
  of of this podcast. And and it's a remarkable theme
• 58:37
  because, I mean, we are just effectively talking about money
• 58:41
  at root or indeed a protocol. And yet it has these
• 58:47
  metaphysical effects, these psychological effects on
• 58:50
  individuals all across the world.
• 58:52
  And net, net tends to affect them for the better, which is,
• 58:58
  which is remarkable. And I mean, it sounds like, you
• 59:00
  know, you've come from, you know, the, the deeply material
• 59:06
  world of, of having the black shoes and the phones and the
• 59:09
  meetings and the, the, the, the, all of the schedules and
• 59:13
  everything that goes with that. And it's not to say you probably
• 59:18
  didn't enjoy it either, but was there maybe a nagging sense of
• 59:23
  is that all there is? Like is there something else?
• 59:26
  Quick break just to say if you're enjoying the show and
• 59:29
  digging what you hear, please consider supporting discovering
• 59:32
  Bitcoin by shooting Boost and sending or zapping the show some
• 59:36
  stats. If you're listening via
• 59:37
  podcasting 2.0 apps such as Fountain, Pod Verse or Breeze,
• 59:42
  it's easier done than said. All you got to do is tap the
• 59:45
  boost button or set an amount of stats to stream per minute while
• 59:49
  you're listening. Alternatively, if you want to
• 59:52
  ZAP me direct via lightning address, please send zaps and
• 59:56
  sats or zaps of sats in support of the show to discovering
• 1:00:01
  Bitcoin at primal.net. Thank you for listening and
• 1:00:05
  thank you for your support. Yeah, a little bit.
• 1:00:10
  It was, it was, it was, you know, I guess even through I
• 1:00:16
  don't think I would have stopped with that.
• 1:00:17
  Like there was, there was no, it, it wasn't the lack of
• 1:00:21
  satisfaction with that life. It was that I knew it wasn't
• 1:00:24
  going to continue because of how stupid conservative and populist
• 1:00:28
  of politicians were in Canada and that they weren't willing to
• 1:00:31
  fight to destroy the CBC, for example, to me just said that
• 1:00:36
  something's going on here that is more existential than, than,
• 1:00:43
  than logic or, or even choosing a fancy lifestyle over what I
• 1:00:50
  ended up choosing, which was to go into the Bitcoin startup
• 1:00:53
  world at the time. You know, I, it, it, it, it
• 1:00:57
  wasn't that I was disgusted with that part of the world or
• 1:01:01
  anything far from it. It, it, and, and it wasn't that
• 1:01:04
  I needed it or anything like that.
• 1:01:06
  I, I sort of, I've been in that environment for, for long enough
• 1:01:11
  time. It was that the, when I saw the
• 1:01:17
  creation of Trudeau, I could tell the system was so rotten.
• 1:01:22
  So it wasn't lack of satisfaction with the system, it
• 1:01:24
  was dread of what the system was producing because Trudeau, I
• 1:01:29
  mean, I grew up with the guy. He's, you know, older than me,
• 1:01:32
  but you know, I had friends who went to school with him, older
• 1:01:36
  brother friends, older brothers and stuff like that.
• 1:01:38
  And I'd seen him interact around Montreal growing up on the party
• 1:01:43
  scene. You know, Montreal is a can be a
• 1:01:45
  small town in some sense, especially amongst the English
• 1:01:48
  people who live here. And so I'd interacted with them
• 1:01:52
  many times and not impressed to say the least.
• 1:01:58
  And I guess that's where this happened, is that I had spent my
• 1:02:02
  life looking up to prime ministers, thinking they were
• 1:02:05
  all great people. And, you know, so it wasn't so
• 1:02:08
  much the trappings of the office.
• 1:02:09
  It was more the reality of what I was seeing and that I was as
• 1:02:16
  sure as I was that Trump was going to be prime our president
• 1:02:18
  of the United States in 2015 when he made the Mexican rapist
• 1:02:22
  speech. I was sure that Trudeau was
• 1:02:24
  going to be the Prime Minister of Canada from the minute he
• 1:02:28
  became the leader of the party. And the implications of that to
• 1:02:31
  me were dark, really dark. It it meant that the media was
• 1:02:36
  going to go out of its way to create Justin Trudeau.
• 1:02:40
  And something about that to me said, I don't understand what's
• 1:02:45
  actually happening in the world. And I if I don't understand it
• 1:02:49
  and, and nothing I do will make a difference in this world, then
• 1:02:54
  I've got to find a place and a way that I can make a difference
• 1:02:58
  for my own self-interest and benefit so I can survive.
• 1:03:01
  Because I just didn't understand the world.
• 1:03:04
  Like I couldn't get why they didn't want to destroy the fake
• 1:03:07
  news to prevent the mimetic creation of Justin Trudeau.
• 1:03:12
  And so that to me says you're just, you're not, you know,
• 1:03:16
  you're, you're not, you don't want to live, you don't want to
• 1:03:19
  succeed is what I thought about the political system.
• 1:03:22
  And so it became impossible for me to predict a future for
• 1:03:26
  myself in that world, even selfishly.
• 1:03:28
  Like I said, you know, it, it meant that there was it meant
• 1:03:31
  that I knew the government was going to be out of power and
• 1:03:35
  people aligned with power. I, I wasn't interested in being
• 1:03:39
  a opposition to Justin Trudeau political hack in Canada.
• 1:03:43
  That was not where I was going to get any enjoyment in life.
• 1:03:47
  And it was fun to work for the Prime Minister when we were in
• 1:03:50
  power. But I got the hell out of there
• 1:03:52
  the minute I knew and I quit, you know, before he lost the
• 1:03:56
  election because I just, there was no question in my mind he
• 1:03:59
  was going to lose. No one predicted it.
• 1:04:02
  If you go back and look at that election in 2015 in Canada,
• 1:04:06
  everybody, how did this happen? No one could have predicted it.
• 1:04:11
  No one saw it coming. Trudeau was Prime Minister.
• 1:04:15
  It was from day one obvious to me that it was going to happen.
• 1:04:19
  And that meant that that world that I had been working in was
• 1:04:23
  over for me. And so I had to start doing
• 1:04:26
  something else. And luckily I found out about
• 1:04:29
  Bitcoin and was heavily inspired and really saw a path to
• 1:04:32
  completely alter the system. That's when I started
• 1:04:34
  understanding how Fiat could persuade people and why the
• 1:04:38
  media was corrupted and how that happened and how you could get a
• 1:04:41
  system that can create the CBC and the ABC, why they would
• 1:04:44
  create them in the first place, why they were so protected,
• 1:04:47
  because they're instrumental to the Fiat system.
• 1:04:50
  They are the nodes. They are literally the minors of
• 1:04:53
  Fiat, the public broadcasters and the fake news.
• 1:04:56
  And that's how it perpetuates the Fiat means government
• 1:04:59
  declarations. And for government declarations
• 1:05:02
  to operate around the world, the consensus model that they use is
• 1:05:08
  just propaganda. That's how they propagate.
• 1:05:11
  If Bitcoin miners propagate Bitcoin around the world, then
• 1:05:15
  propagandists propagate Fiat around the world because that's
• 1:05:19
  how it has to work. And so I was able to understand
• 1:05:22
  that pretty early on. And you know, for self
• 1:05:26
  preservation, really. Yes, Mr. Bernays, there's a
• 1:05:31
  documentary called Century of the Self by Adam Curtis.
• 1:05:36
  I I talk about him a lot on my show.
• 1:05:38
  Mr. Bernays or Curtis? Yeah, the the tortures of
• 1:05:42
  freedom. Bernays.
• 1:05:43
  That's one of the one of the greatest cigarette campaigns
• 1:05:47
  ever. Lamps of liberty, my man.
• 1:05:49
  Lamps of Liberty, yeah. Yeah, we talk about Bernays all
• 1:05:53
  the time on our show. He's he, Yeah.
• 1:05:57
  I don't know evil. I don't know Arimonic.
• 1:05:59
  There's some Arimonic energy in there, yeah.
• 1:06:01
  I don't, I, I don't, I mean, I don't try to.
• 1:06:04
  I mean, I do get into a lot of esoteric stuff on my show.
• 1:06:07
  But if I was alone with him and Eisenhower in the 50s and you
• 1:06:13
  think about the deal they made together, right, which was to
• 1:06:15
  turn America into consumers, it wasn't evil in in fact, it was
• 1:06:22
  Eisenhower in a sense. You know, he's warning about the
• 1:06:24
  military industrial complex and Eisenhower's plan using Bernays,
• 1:06:28
  Bernays helps them do this. It's to create and cultivate the
• 1:06:33
  consumer mindset in the American because he didn't want to give
• 1:06:36
  the money to the military. He wanted to keep the money in
• 1:06:38
  the private economy and have the Maytags and the Fords pivot back
• 1:06:42
  to military if they need it. And Bernays helped him set that
• 1:06:46
  up. So that is kind of noble in a
• 1:06:47
  way. You know that that's what goes
• 1:06:49
  wrong with Kennedy. Kennedy lets the fox in the hen
• 1:06:52
  house because Kennedy, of course, gives tons of power to
• 1:06:55
  the military industrial complex. And when they don't like him as
• 1:06:58
  president, they kill him. And so in the case of Kennedy,
• 1:07:02
  Kennedy got elected on the missile gap question.
• 1:07:05
  He got elected on. We don't give enough money to
• 1:07:08
  the military industrial complex, which is exactly why Eisenhower
• 1:07:11
  warned against it as he was leaving office.
• 1:07:13
  It was to warn that Kennedy had won because of that.
• 1:07:16
  And that really bothered Eisenhower, cause Eisenhower
• 1:07:18
  knew exactly what kind of tricks the military was up to 'cause he
• 1:07:22
  was a military man. And Bernays helped him, I think,
• 1:07:25
  set up an order, a world order that got destroyed.
• 1:07:29
  But it was one that at least was going to keep the manufacturing
• 1:07:34
  base in America. And it was 1 that wasn't going
• 1:07:37
  to leave us with just the Fiat sludge shovelers that we ended
• 1:07:41
  up getting after 1971. At the time, it seemed like it
• 1:07:46
  could all work out. So I don't know.
• 1:07:48
  I mean, it's it's definitely some kind of dark magic, but I
• 1:07:52
  don't know if I would have made a different decision than the
• 1:07:54
  one if I was in the room as a political advisor to Eisenhower
• 1:08:01
  and Bernays is sitting across from me in the Oval Office.
• 1:08:03
  I probably agree with that decision, even with what I know
• 1:08:06
  today. Count Magnanimous.
• 1:08:08
  I love it. You have a real knack for seeing
• 1:08:11
  around corners so well, it seems that way.
• 1:08:15
  Anyway, after the conversation, what do you wish more people
• 1:08:18
  knew about Bitcoin? What?
• 1:08:23
  I wish people knew more about it.
• 1:08:26
  Well, you know, one of the things, one of the things I do,
• 1:08:32
  you know, and this is I'll, I'll generalize.
• 1:08:34
  I'm, I'm not sure if it's entirely true, but I have
• 1:08:37
  observed this and I think Aaron Redwing talks about this a bit
• 1:08:42
  as well, in that, you know, males and females kind of
• 1:08:46
  manifest their Bitcoin worldview very differently.
• 1:08:51
  And you know, in the case of my wife, for example, she she just
• 1:08:55
  flipped a switch and everything in her world is Bitcoin and you
• 1:09:00
  know, many years ago, but she doesn't seem feel the need to be
• 1:09:04
  so poetic about it all the time or so existential about it to do
• 1:09:09
  a show every day. And you know, I think I can make
• 1:09:12
  things I don't know about more complicated.
• 1:09:15
  I can add a lot to a Bitcoin conversation when in the end
• 1:09:19
  Bitcoin is kind of dead simple. And you know, I like the way
• 1:09:24
  that you can approach it as dead simple.
• 1:09:27
  And it doesn't have to be a part of your identity every minute.
• 1:09:30
  It doesn't have to be a part of everything you talk about.
• 1:09:33
  So I guess what I wish I I don't want to stop people from
• 1:09:38
  enjoying Bitcoin the way I enjoy it.
• 1:09:40
  So this is not a nag. I just wish people knew that
• 1:09:44
  that because of the way that I project Bitcoin, it doesn't have
• 1:09:48
  to be that way. You know, you can, you can sort
• 1:09:50
  of have a completely normal life and Bitcoin can just be this
• 1:09:55
  money system that's around and doesn't actually have enough any
• 1:09:58
  other effects on your life. So it, it can be it, it's got a
• 1:10:03
  lot of portability in that way, psychologically, I guess you can
• 1:10:07
  say, and you don't have to write a ode to Bitcoin just to be a
• 1:10:13
  Bitcoin. This is so.
• 1:10:15
  Although if you want to write a note to Bitcoin, go ahead.
• 1:10:17
  I do them all the time. I love.
• 1:10:18
  Those boots, Yeah, yeah. I'm not the person who can tell
• 1:10:22
  you that though, you know. I guess some people have
• 1:10:25
  fanatics and obsessives and and others which is like, you know.
• 1:10:29
  Mostly as men. Mostly as men.
• 1:10:31
  We are the ones that seem to be seem to have to dress up our
• 1:10:38
  Bitcoin love and all kinds of different.
• 1:10:40
  Outfits, yes. Yeah.
• 1:10:45
  What does Bitcoin mean to you? What does it mean to me?
• 1:10:51
  I, I mean, I don't want to go with the, the, the cliches, but
• 1:10:55
  it's what comes to mind. It's the hope thing, you know,
• 1:10:58
  the, the, the Michael Saylor piece, you know, these are
• 1:11:02
  really dreadful times that we're living in from a institutional
• 1:11:06
  collapse point of view, from a reality collapse point of view.
• 1:11:09
  And that we have this course that we can take this path that
• 1:11:15
  we're on with Bitcoin that really does promise a golden age
• 1:11:18
  at the end on Earth. Not one of these, you know, and
• 1:11:21
  I, I'm a Christian, so I don't want to poo poo on the heavenly
• 1:11:25
  promise, but you don't want heaven to always be in some
• 1:11:31
  afterlife that you're never going to, you know, that that's
• 1:11:33
  not, you know, in your temporal time here on earth.
• 1:11:37
  I like the idea of creating a heaven on earth and, and
• 1:11:40
  consecration, it's called, and you can see this as a potential
• 1:11:45
  heaven on earth framework. And so to me, it is, it is a, a
• 1:11:51
  possible conduit to creating a heaven on earth.
• 1:11:55
  And I don't think any other system did that, you know, and,
• 1:11:58
  and to tie the, the, the bow on this, you know, I've been
• 1:12:04
  describing Satoshi's invention for many years now.
• 1:12:07
  As you know, he invented money. We didn't have it before.
• 1:12:10
  We had some things that you could cobble together and it was
• 1:12:14
  good enough to work as money for a generation.
• 1:12:17
  Nick Zabo has chartered all of them in time.
• 1:12:20
  But they're all these really weird, You know, even today in
• 1:12:23
  our Fiat system, it's like you need the news and then the bank
• 1:12:27
  and then the fractional reserve system, and then you need the
• 1:12:30
  Wall Street and then you got to have the courts and you got to
• 1:12:33
  have this and that. All of it together sort of
• 1:12:36
  creates money, maybe if you squint, Whereas I think Satoshi
• 1:12:42
  literally invented money. I, I, I think that that the,
• 1:12:46
  the, the protocol simplicity, the elegance of the design and
• 1:12:51
  the balancing of the technology that's used in it really does
• 1:12:54
  produce enough magic for me to say for the first time, Satoshi
• 1:13:00
  invented money. There were things that looked
• 1:13:03
  like it before, but this is it. We actually did it now and now
• 1:13:06
  it work. You know, it's AP to P market.
• 1:13:08
  So it's not just Satoshi all of us together using it is what
• 1:13:11
  actually makes it money and saving is using.
• 1:13:16
  But this this idea that we created money for the first time
• 1:13:22
  and now have this path with this money to create heaven on earth
• 1:13:27
  is that whole hope archetype and and and meme that you hear from
• 1:13:32
  Sailor all the time. I I agree with that.
• 1:13:35
  Yeah, that is an excellent articulation and and the hope
• 1:13:40
  thing does make me squirm sometimes, but it is ultimately
• 1:13:45
  what it is just because as you said, it is, it's a very
• 1:13:50
  distasteful time disruptive reality.
• 1:13:53
  The veil is, is, is falling and, and that can be extremely
• 1:13:59
  disheartening and discombobulating and all of
• 1:14:03
  those other things. But as, as the great poet
• 1:14:06
  Belinda Carlisle said, you know, they say in heaven, love comes
• 1:14:12
  first. We'll we'll make heaven a place
• 1:14:14
  on earth. Great song.
• 1:14:16
  It's a great song. We love the 80s.
• 1:14:19
  Who doesn't love the 80s? Get the fuck out if you don't
• 1:14:22
  love the 80s like this. It's 80s and 90s and that's
• 1:14:25
  about it. Culture peaks at the 2000 and I
• 1:14:29
  think it was the 2000 VMA's. Might have been 2002 VMA's but
• 1:14:34
  that's that's my thesis. I need to write that down at
• 1:14:36
  some point. When when Jim Carrey was getting
• 1:14:39
  the awards and every one of his award show appearances were
• 1:14:43
  couldn't have been funnier. Couldn't have been funnier.
• 1:14:45
  Just just just cheerful, cheerful and light.
• 1:14:49
  And yes, there was darkness obviously happening behind the
• 1:14:51
  curtain, but I didn't. Yeah, we didn't know about it.
• 1:14:53
  We're kids. And all of reality let us you
• 1:14:57
  know that the that the the projected reality that we had.
• 1:15:00
  And this is what what the problem with the veil falling
• 1:15:02
  really is, is that, you know, we we're under the impression that
• 1:15:09
  progress was kind of inevitable, like water and a river, and the
• 1:15:12
  direction it was headed in was just not going to change.
• 1:15:15
  So we're clearly evolving the end of history.
• 1:15:18
  Yeah. And we find out that actually
• 1:15:22
  we've been devolving for 100 years and we're way worse off
• 1:15:26
  than we were 100 years ago. Is it's it's it's pretty bad
• 1:15:32
  medicine, man. It's not easy.
• 1:15:35
  Well, Nolan, thank you so much, man, for spending some scarce
• 1:15:38
  time finite energy telling us the tale of how you discovered
• 1:15:41
  Bitcoin. This is enlightening.
• 1:15:43
  I I appreciate the opportunity, DJ.