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Discovering Bitcoin with Brian · Discovering Bitcoin

• 0:00
  You know, it's funny, Bitcoin teaches you a strange
• 0:03
  relationship with time. It's like the longer you hold
• 0:06
  it, the less rushed you feel. Hard block is built around that
• 0:11
  idea. Steady buying, clear fees, no
• 0:14
  pressure. If you're discovering Bitcoin
• 0:16
  slowly, hard block makes that easy.
• 0:21
  I see the world through an entirely different lens.
• 0:25
  It doesn't just give you confidence, but it gives you
• 0:28
  hope. Think like we're squandering our
• 0:32
  energy, our life force. So Bitcoin is changing that.
• 0:36
  For me, it's like it's healing energy.
• 0:39
  It gives you a kind of. Of a Zen.
• 0:43
  Feeling right? Deep and deep and deep and the
• 0:49
  immortal. Words of the doors, the time to
• 0:53
  hesitate us through. Discovering.
• 1:20
  Brian, how's it going, man? Hey, good.
• 1:24
  I don't know. Is it tomorrow for you?
• 1:26
  Good. Good day, Sir.
• 1:27
  A good day. Yeah, It's, it's, it's a day
• 1:30
  that it's too dark. It's too dark out.
• 1:33
  This is maybe listeners won't know, but part of the course for
• 1:37
  recording down Under is that you, you generally tend to stay
• 1:43
  up late or get up early to accommodate, you know, a
• 1:48
  Northern Hemisphere guest. And that's a good thing, because
• 1:52
  it means I get to start my day nice and early and get shit
• 1:56
  sorted, or it's a nice quiet house to record in in the
• 2:00
  evening. But are.
• 2:02
  You normally are you normally an early riser or just is this like
• 2:07
  hell for? You not by choice, but I like to
• 2:10
  get up early just to take advantage of that 90 minutes
• 2:14
  between say half four and 6:00 AM and everything's quiet.
• 2:18
  The house is quiet. I can think it's.
• 2:20
  Like you own the world. Those are the hours where you
• 2:22
  own the world. Yes, 100%.
• 2:25
  Now I'm working on a project at the moment and, and just trying
• 2:30
  to squeeze in time during regular days and working hours
• 2:33
  and stuff is it's impossible. So you got to want it.
• 2:37
  So you just get up early and and get it done.
• 2:40
  But yeah, man, this is, this is good.
• 2:43
  So I I never should kick off. I mean, obviously I kick off
• 2:48
  with the with the all important question, but before we get
• 2:50
  there, I was going through because I'm, I heard you on
• 2:54
  magic Internet math, the podcast that you began with Rob
• 2:58
  Hamilton. And I was thinking to myself,
• 3:02
  this is this is what I needed. This is what I need with respect
• 3:05
  to math, mathematics and me. We don't go way back.
• 3:09
  You know, someone somewhere along the line screwed that up
• 3:14
  for me. I think like they presented it
• 3:16
  in an incorrect fashion and it didn't resonate.
• 3:20
  And I split off into the liberal arts category and and I went
• 3:24
  over there, but then I was listening this pardon and, and
• 3:27
  you're like combining liberal arts and math.
• 3:30
  And I appreciate the maths and people like Michael Dunworth
• 3:33
  have presented mathematics in a way that's elegant and
• 3:38
  interesting. And I mean, even Rudolf Steiner
• 3:41
  talks about math quite a lot and it it is, it's fascinating.
• 3:45
  But yeah, I must have got fucked up in my childhood and and
• 3:48
  didn't didn't hit. We all did.
• 3:52
  It's time for all of us to like, maybe we don't know.
• 3:56
  Like we don't know math. We think we know them.
• 3:58
  We think there's some demon from our past, but it's actually an
• 4:01
  image that somebody created for us that's supposed to look bad.
• 4:05
  And it's time to it's time for all of us to re establish our
• 4:08
  relationship with this character called math.
• 4:12
  So like the magic Internet Math podcast is actually Part 2 of
• 4:18
  something I attempted to try last year with my friend average
• 4:22
  Gary. We did a whole year of something
• 4:24
  called motivate the Math. And so it was a math podcast
• 4:30
  that was, I guess it's just a prior, prior iteration, but it
• 4:33
  was during that, it was during that time that a listener who I
• 4:38
  now consider a good friend, his name, his name is called Ape
• 4:41
  myth Randier. And people might know him, but
• 4:46
  he turned me on to a book. It's like a it's not really a
• 4:50
  book. It's like a long essay, but it's
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  called the Mathematician's lament.
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  And this author completely described, he just completely
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  put the words everything I anguished about my life, about
• 5:01
  math, which was like, imagine trying to learn an art.
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  Like imagine and imagine growing up and being told you have to
• 5:10
  learn an art. But and it was like mandatory,
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  like it wasn't optional. You know, like you had to learn
• 5:15
  blacksmith. And if you didn't, and if you
• 5:16
  didn't do it, you were like, no matter how successful you were
• 5:20
  academically, it would be a scarlet letter for you if you
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  screwed this one up. And like, it just would make you
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  hate the art and take all the beauty out of it, even if you
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  liked it. And if you didn't like it, it
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  would make you hate it. As opposed to like you could
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  ignore blacksmithing. Most people ignore the arts that
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  don't speak to them, but like, making it mandatory and teaching
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  it like as it's just so strange that they did that.
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  But this is like a universal experience people had in the
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  world of just fucking ruining something absolutely beautiful.
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  And sometimes I wonder if it was done on purpose because I think
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  there are moments where the people in power understand how
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  powerful mathematics are. You know, maybe in today's
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  world, they're like, afraid you're going to build a bomb or
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  like another Manhattan Project. But like the way I like to
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  approach it is that we're developing conviction in our own
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  reasoning, and that makes us very dangerous people.
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  It's entirely possible. I don't know.
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  I'm still on the fence about the they, despite evidence to the
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  contrary, particularly recent evidence that's come to line in
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  the world. But yeah, I mean, it's entirely
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  possible that, you know, I mean. Look at look at the last 60
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  years. We'll just say of like, I don't
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  know how it is in the world, but at least in the United States,
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  the top, the top mathematicians all got built, all got sent on a
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  wild goose chase called string theory.
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  Like they get like they just gave them this absolute go
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  nowhere thing to focus on. I, I mean, I believe they just
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  didn't want another bomb being built.
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  I believe that's why only a third of the world has access to
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  power. I believe that's probably why,
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  you know, every, all the everything we learned about
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  Bitcoin and how banks, you know, banking system is so
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  constricted, so constrictive around the world.
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  I think it's just to keep, you know, keep somebody from
• 7:29
  building a nuke right on their ADIY.
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  DIY nuke. Damn the man, we want DIY nukes.
• 7:37
  So you mean I don't want people to build that either.
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  I don't want people to build that either.
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  But I mean, you know, it's like the kind like the kind of
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  tyranny we have. And the impact of not of just
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  trying to prevent people from doing that is, I think, pretty.
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  If you accept my, you accept my premise.
• 7:54
  Well, yeah, I mean, it reminds me of someone like Julian Simon
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  and his book The Ultimate Resource, which is the human
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  mind effectively. And you know, if you can quash
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  that or throttle it around the world, then you're going to
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  limit the amount of nice things you have, basically.
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  And that's kind of what it boils down to is, is, yeah, maybe
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  there is an intentional habitus that that that compels like that
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  that is part of the system itself.
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  And people participate in that system itself without even
• 8:31
  realising it. And they just do the things
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  because it's almost like a ritual.
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  It's an unconscious ritual. And when you get initiated into
• 8:40
  whatever field that you, you know, you're interested in,
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  there is a certain rule set effectively and a way of being
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  within that field that tends to be encouraged to be replicated.
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  And, and if you break those rules, you generally get
• 9:02
  ostracized. And so maybe in order to sort of
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  scale the heights of that power and everything like that, you're
• 9:09
  unconsciously of participating in that system.
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  And so maybe the they was long ago and maybe the the rule set
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  was set long ago. And yeah, maybe it's just not
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  politically expedient or culturally expedient or
• 9:26
  sociopolitically, culturally, whatever it is expedient to
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  break those rules because you're not going to get anywhere.
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  And I don't know, maybe, yeah, it all just kind of circle jokes
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  on itself basically. And it's just it's just, yeah,
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  the the end goal is obviously communism.
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  And that sucks, because that's how you don't get any nice
• 9:47
  things at all, ever. Yeah, I do tend to think it was
• 9:52
  long ago, but here's what's interesting about it.
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  I just, OK, so like, I could talk about this from the context
• 9:58
  of being part of a Waldorf school community, but like, I,
• 10:02
  I'm, I've been part of, I've been part of a lot of like
• 10:05
  rebellious communities that don't understand.
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  Like they don't, they forget very fast that they're a
• 10:10
  rebellious community. So like focusing quickly on
• 10:14
  Bitcoin, obviously it's a rebellious community, right?
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  The it's, it's a state like Bitcoin itself is a statement of
• 10:20
  rebellion, right? But like people seem to forget
• 10:24
  this. And it's also in order to like,
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  what are you rebelling against? I think people understand that.
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  But Bitcoin is a mathematical protocol.
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  And so if you want any say in what actually is happening on
• 10:41
  the protocol, yeah, you really do have to understand that you
• 10:45
  really can't tap out too much. And that's why I'm doing this.
• 10:51
  Unfortunately, bad news. The podcast I was telling you
• 10:53
  about that I think I'm going to have to give up is we is the RIP
• 10:56
  I did with Rob this morning. And we were talking about like
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  these papers come out all the time, right?
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  These papers about quantum or you name it, right?
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  These papers that that explain, they tell us there's some risks
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  and how to deal with them or, you know, oh, there's a new
• 11:16
  solution that doesn't require any protocol changes, isn't it?
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  Right. And we're supposed to read these
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  papers and, you know, come to some conclusion for ourselves as
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  to whether or not they're legit or worth, you know, developing
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  on or whether or not they're worth our time.
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  It's just that like it's the same 10 people that only that
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  read these papers. They're not accessible to
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  regular people, right? They're not accessible to
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  regular people because you have to know something about the math
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  that quantum's breaking or, or threatens to break.
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  I should say you have to know something about that to
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  understand what they're saying. And I let's, that's what I aim
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  to do. What I aim to do is to make that
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  10 number a lot larger, right? I, I want, I want to be in a
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  Bitcoin community where it's fair like where it's more like
• 12:09
  sports. It's not limited to the elite,
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  right? It's more like more like sports
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  ball where we can sit around in a bar and talk about these
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  things. And we, it's not because we are
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  laymen, it's because we are, we are people motivated to
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  understand the things we have based our life savings around,
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  right? So, so we're maybe laymen that
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  are a little bit better than math than your average layman
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  because we have to be. That's that's what I'm after
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  here. It's a, it's a noble pursuit.
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  And that's actually, you did mention that in one of the
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  earlier episodes. That was kind of the approach.
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  And I'm the kind of person that if I don't get a subject, I
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  won't dismiss it out of hand. I'll just listen to a podcast or
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  whatever. Generally, if I can listen and
• 13:04
  do something else at the same time, then that's that's better
• 13:07
  than rather than sitting and and pushing through like I'm not at
• 13:10
  uni anymore. I don't have to do that, right?
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  But I'll just let it wash over me.
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  And then whatever clicks, clicks.
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  And if it resonates, it resonates and bully.
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  But yeah. And that was kind of the
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  approach I took with with listening to you and Rob.
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  And, you know, there are elements and times and moments
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  when when Rob will just go off and start articulating something
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  super complex. And I'm like, oh, no, like I'm
• 13:35
  just going to focus on mowing the lawn at the minute.
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  And then I'll come back to this at some point.
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  And, and but it's interesting and something stays with you and
• 13:45
  it digests and it percolates and it pops up elsewhere.
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  And you mentioned that in the earlier pod, one of the earlier
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  episodes was like, this is sort of being able to go back to the
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  bar, as you said, and, and being able to have that casual
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  conversation. It's not, it's not esoteric
• 14:06
  knowledge that you have to be initiated into and you have to
• 14:09
  be 1 of the, as you said, the 10, the 10 special people.
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  And I mean, you're absolutely right.
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  They put out these papers like as if anyone gives a shit.
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  And most of the time it's all nonsense anyway.
• 14:21
  Like, you know, if you have half a a mind to read them, it's it's
• 14:26
  all puff and blow anyhow and and it's kind.
• 14:30
  Of so how do you even know Yeah exactly it it most of the time
• 14:33
  it is total like totally funded some kind of funded point of
• 14:37
  view that. And if you say anything, you,
• 14:42
  you're like, well, you know, you, you, you don't actually
• 14:44
  understand it as deeply as I did.
• 14:46
  Did you read it? Yeah.
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  It's like, yeah, I remember when Jason Larry used to do that to
• 14:52
  people when anyone try to criticize this world.
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  Did you read the whole book? You'd be like, Oh yeah, you
• 15:00
  could. Well, then you're not fit to
• 15:02
  criticize. You're not fit for critique.
• 15:04
  You didn't read the whole thing. I mean, but so, yeah, I am about
• 15:08
  like expanding beyond the priest class here 'cause I think it's
• 15:13
  very doable. I really do.
• 15:15
  I think it's like literally like 1 notch over, like if I can get
• 15:19
  one notch over like a pretty good reach 1 notch of an
• 15:22
  upgrade, meaning like if you're, if you're a one get to A2, if
• 15:26
  you're an 8, you get to a nine, right?
• 15:30
  Just a 1 notch upgrade across like, you know, 5-10 thousand
• 15:33
  people in our community would be pretty remarkable feat.
• 15:39
  I think for us. I think it would strengthen, it
• 15:41
  would strengthen Bitcoin so much.
• 15:42
  It would. It would make me feel much
• 15:44
  better about my future. I think so.
• 15:47
  I think so. It's what we need to do.
• 15:50
  As you said, it's it's based on math and like it or not.
• 15:54
  We forget that we see, we seem to, we do seem to forget that
• 15:57
  though, right? We end up in these like, I guess
• 16:02
  people who really are not technical tend to, I'm going to
• 16:07
  use an, I'm going to use a very risky analogy right now, which
• 16:11
  is like, I happen to be Jewish, right?
• 16:14
  And so the people that are like, well, I'm going to go to heaven
• 16:16
  anyway. Like, you know, trying to tell
• 16:20
  it that to people who clearly don't think that's how it works
• 16:25
  right now. I could be wrong, right?
• 16:27
  So it's like, I, I don't think I'm going to heaven, by the way,
• 16:30
  I don't, we don't do that. We don't have a, we don't have
• 16:33
  that concept. But my point was if I thought
• 16:35
  that that was sort of that would be sort of like the cope that
• 16:38
  people who are non-technical are having with the fact that they
• 16:41
  kind of need to understand some that you can't just you can't
• 16:44
  reject the technical didn't need to be technically adept.
• 16:49
  And it's not just math. It's like knowing how
• 16:51
  transactions work, understanding the structure of, you know, of
• 16:56
  Bitcoin transactions. There's also something I'm
• 16:58
  working on teaching. It's also, you know, all these
• 17:00
  things are like, they're pretty important, right?
• 17:03
  I mean, we're all going to have these arguments anyway, whether
• 17:05
  we know what we're talking about or not.
• 17:07
  That last year proves that right.
• 17:10
  Bitcoin doesn't announce itself. It reveals itself not in the
• 17:14
  moment you buy, but in the moment you stop thinking of it
• 17:16
  as a trade, start sensing it as a discovery.
• 17:21
  This episode is supported by Hard Block, an Australian
• 17:23
  Bitcoin exchange built for people finding Bitcoin in their
• 17:27
  own time, without pressure, without performance, without
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• 17:39
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• 17:47
  If you've been listening to this part for a while, you already
• 17:48
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• 17:51
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• 17:56
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• 18:00
  hardblock.com dot AU. Yeah.
• 18:05
  I mean, like, I think of it in terms of like an analogy of
• 18:08
  mechanics, you know, I'm not when I was a kid, when I was
• 18:13
  younger, I actually blew up my, my first car.
• 18:17
  It overheated. Yeah, it was a super hot day.
• 18:22
  I just didn't check the I just didn't check the, you know, the
• 18:25
  water engine coolant and yeah, blew a gasket.
• 18:31
  Thanks for coming. And it was, I remember my old
• 18:35
  man was like, Oh, well, this is an opportunity for, for, for son
• 18:39
  and I to fix this machine and, and we can, we can rebuild this
• 18:44
  engine. We'll buy all the parts and
• 18:45
  stuff. And much to his disappointment,
• 18:50
  I'm almost certain I just didn't care.
• 18:52
  I just didn't care about building the engine.
• 18:55
  Like, you know what I mean? I just wanted to play my guitar
• 18:59
  and. Do I really care about this?
• 19:02
  Do I? You know, and, you know, like
• 19:05
  for an immature mind like that, you know, and I was just
• 19:08
  concentrating on other things and it sucked.
• 19:10
  I didn't have a car and I could see the, you know, I was
• 19:13
  appreciating the fact that he's going to put the time and engine
• 19:16
  to do this. And we we rebuilt it and we got
• 19:18
  it back on the road. And I say we very loosely there.
• 19:23
  It kind of just, you know, consisted of me handing various
• 19:26
  tools and stuff to to the old man.
• 19:28
  But yeah, I just didn't care about how the engine worked.
• 19:33
  Fundamentally, I didn't care. I didn't care about how the
• 19:36
  engine works on Formula One. I do a little bit nowadays
• 19:39
  because it sucks and it's shitty and I just want the V twelves or
• 19:43
  the V10 naturally aspirated engines.
• 19:46
  I care because the sound is cool.
• 19:48
  I care because when it flies past me at pace, those supercars
• 19:52
  or F ones that I can feel that. But I don't care really how it
• 19:55
  how it how it works under the hood.
• 19:58
  You know what needs to. Are you getting it?
• 20:01
  Yeah, I think you're actually getting at something pretty
• 20:03
  important because like whether or not you care how it really
• 20:07
  works, I think that reveals how much of your life livelihood is
• 20:12
  depending on the thing. Correct, right?
• 20:15
  So, yeah, you don't have to know exactly how a car works.
• 20:19
  You don't. It's not like you're not a car
• 20:22
  manufacturer, you're not a professional driver, right?
• 20:26
  You're not in like your, your livelihood doesn't depend on you
• 20:30
  mastering the automobile. And I guess the same kind of
• 20:34
  goes for Bitcoin, you know, sort of rejecting the notion that you
• 20:40
  need to understand these things is for, I'll say, privileged
• 20:44
  Westerners who for whom, you know, maybe there's a little bit
• 20:48
  of freedom going on, but it's mostly kagger NGU type.
• 20:53
  Like it's a luxury. It's it's like a luxury.
• 20:56
  It's like halfway between a luxury and a a really great fear
• 21:00
  of the future, right? But it's not they're not all in.
• 21:03
  I I can't, I can't imagine being all in and not and saying I
• 21:07
  don't care how this works. Exactly.
• 21:09
  That's that's insanity, that's losing, right.
• 21:12
  So like you're just that that is a loser's mentality.
• 21:16
  Yeah, it depends its. Mentality.
• 21:19
  It's either that or just, or you're a passenger along for the
• 21:22
  ride. And So what, what I'm, I'm
• 21:25
  trying to ring the bell of people who are actually like,
• 21:28
  dude, this is going to, you know, this is life or death if
• 21:34
  you're all in. Like if you're actually all in.
• 21:36
  And I don't mean all, you know, I mean people can various things
• 21:40
  mean all in, right? There are there are people for
• 21:43
  whom being 100% allocated to Bitcoin means all in.
• 21:47
  I'm saying all in meaning like you're you're not accepting,
• 21:53
  you're not accepting the current system as the future for you or
• 21:57
  your family. And you have structures like
• 22:01
  you've, you've cut the cord with the old world and you now are,
• 22:06
  you have to make it right. And if you have to make it like
• 22:11
  you, you better understand how this thing works.
• 22:15
  How else are you gonna help? How else are you going to
• 22:17
  participate in discussions about the future of this thing, right?
• 22:23
  It, it, it doesn't compute for me, right?
• 22:26
  So it's this is, this is for people who find themselves in
• 22:31
  that situation. I want to I want to give them a
• 22:33
  way to do that. There is a responsibility
• 22:36
  particularly nowadays and it as early as we are, even though it
• 22:40
  may not feel like that everybody's early cohort 1 as
• 22:47
  super early, you know, we have a responsibility to shield it
• 22:54
  effectively, to nurture it, to usher it.
• 23:01
  I yeah, I mean, I guess I after this conversation is just goes
• 23:06
  different for me after witnessing the past year, you
• 23:09
  know, like I think we have a responsibility to ourselves.
• 23:13
  Oh yeah, I'm not going down that whole fucking rash.
• 23:15
  I could. I could kill like, yeah, like
• 23:18
  protecting the thing. Like that's kind of like playing
• 23:20
  God, right? And so it's like, don't play
• 23:23
  God. Protect yourself.
• 23:25
  Think about what you need. Think about what Bitcoin means
• 23:27
  to you and what you need for your own life, right.
• 23:30
  And, you know, having these abstract height like I like, I
• 23:34
  find moralizing that that's not what you were doing.
• 23:37
  But like that when we say protect it, that definitely like
• 23:41
  wakes up a certain portion of the community that's like, yes,
• 23:44
  it's our moral duty. And responsibility and moral
• 23:46
  duty are not the same thing. Responsibility is basically like
• 23:51
  something that I will just raise my hand and say I'm going to
• 23:55
  make myself responsible for something, right?
• 23:59
  It's not a moral, it's not a moral duty.
• 24:01
  It's that I want the responsibility.
• 24:04
  Exactly. No, there's, there's a big
• 24:06
  crusade goes on and and it's almost like people just need to
• 24:10
  do something with their day. And it's like, yeah, no, I I was
• 24:15
  more talking about just ensuring that it works and it works and
• 24:18
  does what it says on the tin. So that when you do talk about
• 24:21
  it to somebody else who has no clue about it, you could show
• 24:24
  them and it works and they're like, oh, that's kind of cool.
• 24:27
  I dig that, you know, or someone who actually needs it, they can
• 24:31
  go, damn, I didn't know about that.
• 24:32
  That's amazing. I need that.
• 24:34
  I'll use it, please. And and you don't have to worry
• 24:37
  about, but maybe download this particular version or, you know,
• 24:42
  do this or do that. It's like, no, just just make it
• 24:45
  work. OK, Turn the key and drive down
• 24:48
  the street. Well, if you want to worry about
• 24:51
  certain versions, you just need to understand what you're.
• 24:54
  You still the first. The first thing you have to do
• 24:56
  is verify. Well, I would say that's the
• 24:59
  ethos. That's like the, there's a
• 25:01
  couple of common things we agree on that I think are already like
• 25:07
  natural functions of Bitcoin. One is the 20, you know, 21
• 25:11
  million. We all agree on that.
• 25:12
  I don't think there's anybody in the community that disagrees on
• 25:16
  that. I could be wrong, but you know,
• 25:19
  that's definitely one of the core things.
• 25:21
  And the other one is don't trust verify or at least verify.
• 25:26
  And that's the one where man like there there is no limit to
• 25:32
  the rabbit hole of what's the there's, you know, there's
• 25:38
  sayings that aren't true. They're just they're more
• 25:40
  ideals, OK, right. Like in the United States, we
• 25:44
  have this thing called the Declaration of Independence.
• 25:47
  Like we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are
• 25:50
  created equal, right? And that is something that's not
• 25:55
  that's not true, right? But it is aspirational.
• 25:58
  And I think that it's like declaring that as an aspiration
• 26:02
  has made the United States better than it otherwise would
• 26:06
  have been. It's, I think drove the vision,
• 26:08
  but it's not like it's not where we are.
• 26:12
  And you can like you can complain and say, Oh, you know,
• 26:17
  we're a bunch of LARP's because we don't live by our credo,
• 26:20
  right? But the credo was out out there
• 26:24
  to to be held accountable to right.
• 26:26
  Like I think stay humble stacks stacks stats is another one of
• 26:30
  those kind of credos that is out there that nobody does, but they
• 26:35
  at least aspire. They at least aspire to do it.
• 26:39
  And it drives a mentality that I think is helpful.
• 26:42
  And I think don't trust verify is similar, but we act like we
• 26:48
  act like we're there. We're not.
• 26:50
  And I can peel that. I can peel that apart very, kind
• 26:54
  of very blatantly, right. But you don't want to like think
• 26:56
  you don't want to think you're there when you're not.
• 26:58
  That's like that. You're going to get getting
• 27:00
  really screwed. And if you don't, I guess really
• 27:04
  what, what it comes down to here is like the knowing the math and
• 27:08
  it's not that hard. You can spend like 20 hours
• 27:10
  learning it, but knowing it is is a.
• 27:16
  It's a big factor in whether or not you're even capable of
• 27:18
  verifying. How did you discover Bitcoin?
• 27:24
  Oh man. Well I've discovered Bitcoin as
• 27:32
  I paid attention to it for the first time in in 2021.
• 27:35
  When I saw people like leaning their countries, I saw it more.
• 27:41
  I saw it kind of a sociopath, like, man, people are using
• 27:45
  Bitcoin to like flee tyranny. That's really interesting.
• 27:48
  I'm guessing a lot of people are going to want this.
• 27:51
  You know, I think a lot of people are going to really want
• 27:53
  Bitcoin because it's helping people flee tyranny.
• 27:57
  That's pretty amazing. And then, you know, at some
• 28:00
  point, I'm like, I might need this.
• 28:04
  And it's just, you know, it's hard to say like that.
• 28:08
  That year was such a pivotal year in my life, in a lot of
• 28:12
  people's lives. I'm sure like a lot of people, I
• 28:14
  think dealt with like reorganization of friends,
• 28:19
  family, allies. I certainly did.
• 28:24
  And like for me, it all broke, you know, just like anyone who,
• 28:29
  anybody who had an inkling that there wasn't something quite
• 28:32
  right with the with forced vaccinations found themselves
• 28:36
  probably in a massive reorganization of their social
• 28:40
  family life. I don't know if that tracks for
• 28:43
  you, but like that that, you know, that definitely happened
• 28:47
  for me. And I don't, I don't know what I
• 28:49
  can't tell you exactly the connection between that and just
• 28:52
  discovering Bitcoin like right after, like right after this
• 28:56
  awakening, you know, and by awakening, I mean, like for me,
• 29:00
  it's an awakening that like everything I built my life
• 29:02
  around, all the people I built my life around were fake
• 29:04
  hypocrites. And they all kind of deserted
• 29:08
  me, right. For I, I was, I was, I was like
• 29:12
  a woke champion, if you can believe it, right.
• 29:15
  I was, I was AI was a super woke.
• 29:19
  I'll never apologize for caring about like justice.
• 29:22
  But like, I had my head totally up my ass by 2020, you know, by
• 29:26
  2020, the propaganda had very much gotten to me, you know, and
• 29:29
  I felt, it's like I felt a little validated.
• 29:32
  I'm like, oh, my God, our time has come.
• 29:34
  It's here. This has always been the right
• 29:35
  thing. This is crazy, right?
• 29:37
  And then I I didn't realize how much I was being manipulated.
• 29:41
  And the thing that happened in 2021 was that I just saw the
• 29:45
  vaccine mandates as an injustice and nobody else did.
• 29:49
  And, you know, I'm like, yeah, OK.
• 29:52
  But, you know, we care about injustice, do we not?
• 29:55
  Right. Don't do we do not care.
• 29:56
  We don't we don't like think, we don't ask like if we like the
• 29:58
  people that justices are happening too, right You're.
• 30:01
  Trying to square that circle. How dare you.
• 30:04
  Like, I mean, up until that point, this is that that's the
• 30:08
  thing I gotta say. Just pointing out the the
• 30:12
  self-awareness to to recognize that and the and the humility
• 30:17
  not to sort of like poke fun or anything.
• 30:19
  And not many in any way, shape or form like that.
• 30:23
  You've obviously clearly gone through this, this transition.
• 30:25
  You've gone holy shit, like, like I was, this all made sense.
• 30:30
  I was championing the right causes, blah, blah, blah.
• 30:33
  But this isn't really sort of aligning with kind of what we
• 30:37
  were talking about before. Like, oh, you're, you're like,
• 30:40
  and this is the thing, like I think a lot of people like who
• 30:43
  thought they were potentially centre left or left.
• 30:47
  All of a sudden we're like shifting at the ground
• 30:49
  underneath and was literally shifting across and all these
• 30:52
  people that they were friends with or colleagues with or
• 30:56
  whatever shifted even further left.
• 31:00
  And there's a there's a lot of people out there that were just
• 31:03
  scratching their heads. Gone.
• 31:05
  What? And yeah, the the humility to
• 31:10
  recognize that. I mean, the whole, I mean, you
• 31:14
  only have to my buddy, my choice.
• 31:16
  Yeah, OK, cool. No worries at all.
• 31:18
  But that has to apply to all levels.
• 31:20
  Like, I'm sorry you can't just like pick and choose here.
• 31:24
  So I mean, I'm, I, I can't fully explain why Bitcoin showed up
• 31:29
  for me like right after this awakening.
• 31:31
  Maybe it's because I didn't have, you know, I wasn't hanging
• 31:37
  out with friends anymore as I like I had, you know, I was
• 31:42
  stuck in my home now with, you know, pretty much ostracized,
• 31:45
  right. And I don't know, it's like
• 31:48
  Bitcoin tends to fine people in that state.
• 31:52
  I, I like, I tend to think that my, you know, my time in the
• 31:57
  justice game cost me seeing Bitcoin.
• 32:00
  So I'd, you know, maybe this is false for me to attribute it to
• 32:04
  getting over this. But like it happened, right,
• 32:10
  right. When this all took place,
• 32:12
  Bitcoin just showed up as I guess, you know, part of it is
• 32:16
  maybe I, I really am empathizing with people who are fleeing
• 32:19
  their countries and seeing that they were using Bitcoin to do
• 32:22
  so. And it caught my attention and I
• 32:25
  learned about it. And the more I learned about it,
• 32:27
  the more, you know, you know how this goes, right?
• 32:30
  So I spent the majority of like the end of 21/20/21 learning,
• 32:34
  learning about it. I was doing You know who nobody
• 32:38
  Caribou is? Yes, I think so.
• 32:41
  I mean, I yeah, I know the IT. Was the main character of like
• 32:44
  the, the trucker protest really, you know, and it ends up that I
• 32:50
  did every single one of his like YouTube classes.
• 32:54
  And then when I was done, essentially it was January of
• 32:57
  2022 and he started streaming from the trucker protest.
• 33:01
  And that just became that was like the capstone of my, my
• 33:05
  Bitcoin education. And that's that was my entry
• 33:08
  point right there. Unreal.
• 33:12
  I don't think I've ever had a guest mention the trucker
• 33:15
  protesters like a, or at least, I mean, there's a, there's a,
• 33:19
  there's a lot of guests that have been caught up in that time
• 33:22
  and they've found themselves scratching their head and then
• 33:25
  having a lot of free time to kind of dive in deep with this
• 33:28
  thing. But yeah, in terms of, I mean, I
• 33:33
  don't think I've had very many Canadians on.
• 33:36
  Shout out Sly Goomba if he's still listening.
• 33:39
  Oh, yeah. But I'll make sure if you
• 33:42
  listen. And my boy Boomer.
• 33:46
  But yeah, I mean that that whole time was was wild and crazy and
• 33:50
  insane and disappointing basically.
• 33:55
  But what was it about Bitcoin that kind of?
• 33:59
  Oh, OK, so I mean something, well, you know, for whatever
• 34:04
  reason, maybe, you know, I I've done a lot of things in my life,
• 34:09
  but when it came to how I was as a social justice man, I was not
• 34:14
  a LARP. You know, I, you know, I really
• 34:18
  had it in my heart. I thought this was a little I
• 34:20
  thought my grandkids, my great grandkids would read about me.
• 34:23
  Like I really had that idea that I was doing something very noble
• 34:28
  that mattered to me. It mattered to just mattered to
• 34:30
  me a lot. And you know, I guess in my
• 34:35
  travels, in my time, I thought a lot about having to flee my
• 34:39
  situation. You know, a lot of that is like,
• 34:41
  I guess is my whatever, you know, whatever victimized trauma
• 34:46
  every Jewish person gets in their education, right?
• 34:50
  You're always kind of. It's kind of like what most
• 34:52
  dudes do when they, you know, they just sort of Daydream about
• 34:55
  being Rambo or, you know, Jean-Claude Van Damme, something
• 34:59
  like that. It's like, yeah, I could take on
• 35:00
  that bet easily. I mean, yeah.
• 35:03
  I think culturally it's like, dude, we might have to, we might
• 35:06
  have to get the fuck out at some point in time.
• 35:08
  And that's always been in my head.
• 35:10
  And that's maybe why I noticed these people fleeing.
• 35:13
  And that's really stuck in me. And you know, in the book I
• 35:16
  wrote book Bitcoin for institutions, it's it's I had
• 35:21
  two key anecdotes in there. One was the truckers protest
• 35:25
  because it had that did have a big impact on me.
• 35:30
  And also, like, it's a message to like, that was a message to
• 35:36
  like executives that what gives Bitcoin value is that people's
• 35:42
  dreams of being free. That really is.
• 35:45
  And these people are gonna, you know, they're gonna outbid
• 35:49
  institutions I think all day long, all the time, because to
• 35:54
  them, it's just a fucking return.
• 35:56
  OK. So like, they're, they are
• 35:59
  passengers, those guys. They're absolutely, you know,
• 36:02
  they're passengers on like a bus where they can get on and off
• 36:05
  whenever they want. But for people like, you know, I
• 36:09
  saw people put their lives on the line for that trucker's
• 36:11
  protest, you know, and I wanted like executives to understand
• 36:16
  and to actually say, if you want, if you want to be in
• 36:18
  Bitcoin and you want it to be valuable, you want to defend
• 36:21
  this property. If it stops being like a proxy
• 36:24
  for people's dreams of freedom, Bitcoin will not be worth
• 36:29
  anything. You'll have 21 million worthless
• 36:31
  tokens. So that was like a big thing I
• 36:33
  emphasized in the book. And the other one was this story
• 36:38
  about my how my great grandmother got to the United
• 36:40
  States. She was put on a boat at the age
• 36:42
  of 10 by herself from Ukraine with five diamond stones sewn
• 36:47
  into her pillowcase. And I guess it's like, you know,
• 36:54
  what Bitcoin means to me is if I just rewind the world and
• 36:58
  imagine people moving, right, without, without that kind of
• 37:03
  risk and without like, it's an absolute miracle that my that I
• 37:07
  exist, right? It's an absolute miracle.
• 37:09
  She got to where she got safely and unharmed and, you know,
• 37:13
  probably sold the diamonds no problem, right?
• 37:18
  And. All that.
• 37:21
  And you told by herself, right? Like so she could have just been
• 37:23
  like singing a song with her 12 words to herself, not even
• 37:28
  knowing what they were for, just saying, you know, just just
• 37:30
  learn this and tell the people when you get there, right.
• 37:35
  And nobody would have, you know, nobody would have searched her
• 37:39
  or found like, you know, you can never go through anything like
• 37:41
  that now. I would guess right.
• 37:44
  I would guess like that would you'd automatically be robbed.
• 37:49
  Yeah, right. I mean this doc man.
• 37:54
  Like that means a lot. These things meant a lot to me.
• 37:56
  Like these are the things that I observed in the late stages of
• 38:00
  21. And I started thinking about,
• 38:03
  you know, I hadn't thought a lot about my grandmother, my great
• 38:05
  grandmother. I didn't really think too much
• 38:07
  about it, but I knew the story. It was like a nice little story,
• 38:11
  you know, like it didn't mean anything to me until I saw until
• 38:15
  I saw this going on. So.
• 38:17
  Textualized it. Yeah.
• 38:19
  So like, this thing started to mean a lot to me, right?
• 38:23
  It meant a lot. And then as I learned about it,
• 38:25
  I'm like, oh, OK, this is like, this is real.
• 38:29
  Yeah. This is actually.
• 38:31
  This actually works. It's.
• 38:37
  Those are the those are the like that's what Bitcoin is for.
• 38:41
  I mean, yes, it's fun to pop down to the to the local market
• 38:45
  and onboard your local merchants.
• 38:47
  That is cool. That is what Bitcoin is for as
• 38:49
  well. But for those like incredibly
• 38:53
  extreme, out of the ordinary times, yeah, just it's
• 39:01
  flabbergasting to me that that that, that that threat kind of
• 39:06
  still exists in the 21st century.
• 39:08
  I mean, perhaps even more so than it did towards the end of
• 39:11
  the 20th century. I don't know.
• 39:13
  But yeah, like if if we didn't, if we didn't have Bitcoin
• 39:20
  sitting and humming in the background and doing what it
• 39:22
  does, there's a lot of what are the like black pilled people out
• 39:29
  there that would just be hopeless.
• 39:32
  Hopeless. Yeah.
• 39:33
  And I'm talking W developed, undeveloped, whatever it is like
• 39:38
  that anyone with half a mind if if they didn't have this thing
• 39:43
  to kind of. And then we've got to be so
• 39:46
  careful too, because hope is the thing that kills you.
• 39:49
  Yeah, wonderful. But my gosh, Bitcoin.
• 39:53
  Bitcoin could have been created by by the lizard to keep us at
• 39:57
  Bay, right? Because no, don't come and don't
• 40:01
  come for our heads yet. You know there's.
• 40:04
  Yeah, let us move some more jazz pieces another.
• 40:06
  Way that I mean, you know, like that my mind will tell me that,
• 40:10
  but it's like fine, right? It's like if you want to if
• 40:13
  you're a tyrant and you're going to give you're going to give me
• 40:16
  Bitcoin, You're you're a stupid tyrant, OK, you're a bad tyrant.
• 40:24
  You're an incompetent tyrant. And I think we've a lot of
• 40:28
  tyrants are incompetent. They're all, they're all.
• 40:31
  I love that Terence McKenna quote.
• 40:33
  We are led by the least among us.
• 40:36
  Yeah. And it's so accurate.
• 40:38
  It's so true. They you know as I.
• 40:41
  As I was telling the story about my situation in 2020-2021, I'm
• 40:47
  guessing, like, I'm guessing there's people going through
• 40:49
  this now, like right now who? Because, you know, they felt
• 40:55
  validated the same way I did when Trump started saying, you
• 41:00
  know, like when the power of the US got behind Bitcoin, they
• 41:03
  started feeling validated. And that's the feeling validated
• 41:06
  is like the first step of putting your head up your ass.
• 41:13
  You know, I can tell you this for sure.
• 41:15
  And I think a lot of Bitcoiners fell into this and are now like,
• 41:20
  you know, losing their minds because of, like, you know, how
• 41:23
  could he be going completely against?
• 41:26
  How could he be doing this right now?
• 41:27
  And yeah, right. And it's like, you got me again,
• 41:33
  you know, But like, I really want to warn Bitcoiners, like
• 41:35
  don't even seek this validation. It's a poison pill.
• 41:41
  Yeah, Pray we never. Yeah, pray we never get it.
• 41:45
  I really. And this is where this is like
• 41:49
  this is where my fish experience comes into play because the
• 41:53
  first, the first podcast I ever went on was a high hash rate.
• 41:57
  And this is what they wanted to. They wanted to talk about fish.
• 42:00
  But like they were asking me about like hyper bitcoinization.
• 42:03
  This is back in 2023 and I remember saying at the time,
• 42:07
  like it, I want it to be the way it is like with fish where it's
• 42:11
  like we all wanted them to make it big and we all wanted that
• 42:15
  fame and all that stuff for them.
• 42:18
  But you know what? It turned out nobody ever cared.
• 42:20
  We get to go to our shows every year, we get our music, we get
• 42:23
  everything. We really get everything we want
• 42:25
  and nobody cares. That is the that is the best
• 42:28
  thing we could hope for with Bitcoin in my opinion.
• 42:32
  Oh man, so back in like January 2025, I looked this up.
• 42:42
  I don't know how it came about, but I, I think I was down to
• 42:46
  Snarky Puppy rabbit hole. And then someone mentioned,
• 42:49
  well, if you like Snarky Puppy you should probably listen to
• 42:51
  fish. So I went over to Spotify and
• 42:56
  put on fish and I gave it a chance.
• 42:58
  Man. I tried farmhouse sampling jar.
• 43:03
  It's the antithesis of, well, sampling a jar.
• 43:05
  It's a really terrific song. But The thing is, with Fish,
• 43:10
  it's like it has to be live. So like a live Fish show is kind
• 43:17
  of like holding real Bitcoin in your own in in self custody.
• 43:21
  Whereas listening to Fish, a studio album on Spotify, is like
• 43:25
  owning STRC. We're like, OK, it's like it's
• 43:31
  it's you know, it's not, it's not the way to do it.
• 43:34
  Now, I'm not telling you your result will be different.
• 43:36
  I'm telling you though, that Fish is built for a live for the
• 43:41
  live setting. Well, it's kind of like the the
• 43:43
  being introduced to math all those years ago and it was just,
• 43:46
  it was just, it was the wrong framing and it and it ruined me.
• 43:51
  It's like the worst people trying to get you to listen to
• 43:53
  fish. That's usually how my experience
• 43:55
  how it goes. Well, I tweeted out why do
• 43:57
  people listen to fish? They are terrible.
• 44:00
  And then it's like Gumbert tweeted like he could have added
• 44:03
  you in the chain. And I think that's how we
• 44:07
  initially connected. But.
• 44:09
  We can add it to him I. I don't want Bitcoin to end up
• 44:16
  like fish. I get it.
• 44:18
  You mean like you have to be high to to like it?
• 44:22
  No, I mean, look, dude, I'm I, so I'm pretty late to the party
• 44:26
  here, but I finally came around to the Grateful Dead, right?
• 44:29
  Yeah, OK. And I don't know why it took me
• 44:33
  so long, 'cause it just, you know, a 20 minute noodling
• 44:37
  guitar solo is just incredible. He doesn't love that.
• 44:42
  But yeah, maybe maybe the setting's all wrong.
• 44:45
  It's it's kind of like AFL. We have this sport over here in
• 44:48
  Australia called Aussie Rules and it's a spectacular sport if
• 44:52
  you're there live on the TV. You're talking football.
• 44:56
  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a bit. I love love Aussie Rules.
• 45:00
  Yeah, OK, there you go. Yeah, I got to a point really
• 45:03
  boring. Oh, I got to.
• 45:05
  But I I mean, because American football has gotten so gay.
• 45:09
  Well it's too many ads man. You guys cut to an ad break
• 45:12
  every 5. Seconds No, but they like I got
• 45:14
  the they, they've done so much to just get the, the raw
• 45:19
  violence out of the game. They've they've gone overboard
• 45:23
  and the game is, it's basically like watching people play chess
• 45:27
  at this point. Tag, you know.
• 45:29
  And it's, it's really a shame. And so I became, I started to
• 45:33
  really enjoy watching Bossy Rules.
• 45:39
  You know, I get that it can be boring.
• 45:40
  I, I think I have a hard time watching an entire game because
• 45:43
  it is repetitive, But I, I love that.
• 45:45
  Like, I don't know, I was like, I liked football.
• 45:48
  Like those defensive struggles, low scoring games where it's,
• 45:53
  you know, you wait for that one moment where just the team
• 45:57
  breaks the other team. Yeah, well, that's why I like
• 45:59
  football. Like proper football.
• 46:01
  Soccer. Yeah, similar.
• 46:03
  There's a pace. Very similar, right?
• 46:05
  And a low time preference there. But yes, yeah, I look, I think
• 46:11
  it all just comes back to framing.
• 46:13
  You know, that first touch point, first touch point for me
• 46:15
  in math didn't go so well. First touch point for people in
• 46:19
  Bitcoin sometimes doesn't go so well.
• 46:24
  You know, usually it's a bit of a feature if you think about it
• 46:28
  right. Can you, can you be resilient
• 46:30
  enough to, you know, having a part of having a low time
• 46:35
  preference is not you have to be a good discriminator, I think,
• 46:41
  well, that's not much. That's not a low time preference
• 46:44
  thing. That's just being a winner.
• 46:45
  I think if you heard of being a winner is being a good
• 46:48
  discriminator. And yeah, yeah.
• 46:52
  And you but you don't want to have too quick of a trigger on
• 46:54
  something you don't understand, right?
• 46:58
  So you want to yeah, you want to have quick.
• 47:01
  Like it's like, OK, communism, that's easy.
• 47:04
  It's easy. Fuck that right the fuck out of
• 47:08
  here. But like, there are things that
• 47:11
  come up that sounds stupid. You know, it's kind of, I liken
• 47:17
  this all to cryptography in general.
• 47:18
  They look, it's like plain text hiding in ciphertext, right?
• 47:22
  I, I part of my big thesis with Fish is that they were meant to
• 47:25
  look like nonsense, right? They were the ultimate looking
• 47:30
  like nonsense band with absolute the absolute depth and staying
• 47:34
  power that nobody could have expected.
• 47:39
  Interesting. You know, and so if you missed
• 47:42
  out on that signal. A superpower is hidden in plain
• 47:47
  sight, I mean. Yeah, and they're annoying.
• 47:49
  That's annoying to deal with. If you don't, if you're not like
• 47:52
  there, don't get it. It's super annoying, right?
• 47:56
  The Bitcoiners are super annoying.
• 47:57
  They must be. They must be insufferable.
• 48:00
  Insufferable, particularly when we're right about a lot of
• 48:03
  things. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's, I
• 48:07
  mean, the same thing. I just want to hit on this point
• 48:09
  and be a little indulgent here. Like the band Snooki Puppy.
• 48:13
  I don't know if you're familiar with those guys, but it's a
• 48:16
  shit. I know of them I'm.
• 48:18
  It's a terrible name, I know, but the music, I think Canadian.
• 48:21
  Phenomenal. They're Canadian.
• 48:23
  No, no, no, no. They're from, well, they're from
• 48:26
  all over, but I think they originated.
• 48:28
  The band formed in Houston in Texas, but they're like music on
• 48:34
  kids from Brooklyn and and. That sort of thing.
• 48:39
  Yeah, and it's the same kind of deal.
• 48:40
  Like you listen to their like their studio albums, which they
• 48:43
  generally tend to record live actually, which is kind of fun
• 48:47
  for them, you know, And they they do it in front of an
• 48:49
  audience. But you you just like you can
• 48:52
  look up a live show on YouTube and there's a bunch of them.
• 48:56
  But yeah, once they get into their groove and they start sort
• 48:59
  of communicating with their instruments and it'll just go on
• 49:01
  for it'll be a percussion solo for like 20 minutes or
• 49:05
  something. Like this is really cool.
• 49:07
  But the band name is terrible. Like it's a real big hurdle to
• 49:10
  get over, I guess in a similar way to Bitcoin.
• 49:13
  Like Bitcoin sounds silly. Bitcoin, like what are you
• 49:16
  talking about? But I don't know, like E gold, I
• 49:19
  don't know who knows going to have something, right?
• 49:22
  It is. It is.
• 49:23
  The name is the least of its barrier, of its barriers, right?
• 49:27
  Yeah, true enough, True enough. I'm.
• 49:30
  Just going to say it's autistically accurate Bitcoin.
• 49:38
  It's the reason. So why do we call it SAT then?
• 49:42
  Like can we just call it bits? That's a that's a debate that
• 49:51
  I'm probably more open to it now than I ever was in the last
• 49:54
  three or four years. Don't get me.
• 49:55
  Wrong. I'm down with the colloquialism
• 49:57
  like sats is cool. But.
• 49:59
  I have to, I have to like, I have to explain it.
• 50:03
  Whereas bits it's like a bit of a Bitcoin done.
• 50:07
  Yeah, I think SATS is more alienating actually than BITS
• 50:11
  because it's like, oh, you name look, this is where you get into
• 50:14
  the cult shit. Like, oh, you named it after the
• 50:17
  founder, you named that that you actually named the unit after
• 50:22
  and he didn't do. It right no like it sounds cool.
• 50:26
  I like. Operating.
• 50:27
  I like operating in whole numbers.
• 50:29
  I don't like saying something is .0000005 Bitcoin.
• 50:34
  That sounds so that's hard. Like no one ever does that.
• 50:37
  Do you mean like that's? Absolutely horrendous.
• 50:40
  Yeah. But.
• 50:42
  Anyone that thinks that's that's OK, that that's normal, you need
• 50:46
  to get your head red. You need to get a hobby like go
• 50:49
  listen to fish. There's no like there's no fish
• 50:52
  equivalent for, I don't think for anything that alienating,
• 50:55
  you know, where you have to, you have to submit to that type of
• 50:59
  like SIOP really, you know, there's nothing like that.
• 51:05
  How has discovering Bitcoin changed you?
• 51:10
  Oh man. Oh God, yeah, it's all right.
• 51:19
  I'm, you know, I'm in my 50s now, right?
• 51:22
  And I don't know, I like, I was, it's hard to, it's, it's hard to
• 51:28
  do a full attribution to say, well, this was due to
• 51:32
  discovering Bitcoin. But like, I just can look at the
• 51:36
  time that this time period, right, of the last, you know, 4
• 51:40
  1/2 years, whatever I went through to get here, I think
• 51:46
  probably had as much to do with it as discovering Bitcoin,
• 51:49
  right? But it's there.
• 51:50
  There's a before and after, right?
• 51:52
  And in the before, I'm either like, you know, I'm either sort
• 51:57
  of like an autistic teenager, underachiever or an adult that
• 52:03
  found his way in, woke in wokeness, right?
• 52:07
  Started a family and all that. But like, that's the before now
• 52:12
  the after is like kind of bad ass motherfucker, you know, like
• 52:19
  I'm fucking doing podcast, wrote a book, quit my job.
• 52:24
  I didn't quit my job. I got fired.
• 52:25
  But like. That's cool.
• 52:29
  I decided you're just an inside of a.
• 52:31
  Bitcoiner, all of a sudden you're just like I had to look.
• 52:34
  Yeah, we value what you work, Brian, but fuck me.
• 52:36
  Stop talking about Bitcoin. You got to go.
• 52:39
  It pretty much, you know, that's actually pretty close to how it
• 52:42
  happened. No, you know what it was?
• 52:46
  It was that I don't I no longer how do I articulate this?
• 52:52
  The line for me of what I accept and what I don't accept got a
• 52:55
  lot thicker. OK, it got.
• 53:00
  And so I just started drawing lines and, you know, I happened
• 53:04
  to build a life with people for whom I didn't have those lines
• 53:09
  very thick, right. So they, I've trained them that
• 53:12
  they could, that I was malleable.
• 53:16
  And then one day I was not right.
• 53:19
  And it, it was a, it was a process, right?
• 53:21
  It wasn't like, hey, I just took my first sats off of the
• 53:26
  exchange and put them in my cold wall.
• 53:27
  And guess what? I have a, you know, now I have,
• 53:30
  I have boundaries now. It was, you know, it didn't go
• 53:33
  like that, right? But it was a little bit of a
• 53:35
  slow process to kind of deciding what I would and wouldn't expect
• 53:41
  or sorry, what I would and wouldn't accept.
• 53:44
  And you know, it was in real time with people who were not
• 53:48
  accustomed to me drawing those lines right.
• 53:52
  And so it's, I always say I, I did an episode of Rock paper
• 53:55
  Bitcoin called Bitcoin Rex relationships.
• 54:00
  I think this is one of those things that like no one tells
• 54:02
  the truth about and you know, you don't there's not enough of
• 54:05
  that kind of talk around here. You know, I mean, it seems so
• 54:09
  obvious, right? It's.
• 54:10
  Like still trying to get girlfriends Little inn.
• 54:13
  Get a relationship little inn. But imagine being married for
• 54:17
  Imagine being married for 20 years and then coming home one
• 54:20
  day and telling your wife, hey guess what?
• 54:22
  I have really good news. I have been enlightened and
• 54:28
  which is great, right? I'm sure that's we all want
• 54:31
  wanted that, but great. I don't have to try and fix him
• 54:34
  anymore. This is fantastic, tell me more.
• 54:38
  OK, I have more because as a result of my enlightenment,
• 54:42
  we're going to look at money completely differently going
• 54:45
  forward. You know how we used to feel
• 54:47
  like we had a lot of money and we felt that like money was
• 54:50
  abundant. Good news.
• 54:52
  That's over. That is absolutely over and it's
• 54:58
  going to be so awesome. You know, we're going to be
• 55:00
  totally all of the things we like and the luxuries, they're
• 55:05
  gone. You know, I don't accept having
• 55:07
  them anymore. You know, I we need to buy
• 55:09
  Bitcoin as much of it as possible.
• 55:12
  OK, And that's the way it is. You should be very happy.
• 55:16
  And that's, I mean, I'm guessing that's not an uncommon way it
• 55:20
  goes, right? And it's so more it's not, it's
• 55:25
  like, it's not what Bitcoin does.
• 55:27
  It's what like the discovery of your own self determination
• 55:31
  does. So I think Bitcoin opened up a
• 55:33
  window for me into my ability to be self determined.
• 55:37
  Like I'd given up on that and that, you know, like I'd given
• 55:40
  up on that at some point in my life.
• 55:42
  Like I'm never gonna be self determined.
• 55:43
  Really. That's insane.
• 55:45
  That's just, that's just ridiculous to think that.
• 55:47
  And I, you know, I think for some reason Bitcoin just lit
• 55:51
  that flame again. It made me see that it's
• 55:54
  possible and I didn't. I no longer accept a path that's
• 56:01
  not leading me there. This is, yeah, I mean, your
• 56:06
  wife, God bless her, she's probably hoping you'd pull out
• 56:09
  like E Pray Love or Chicken Soup for the Soul, something like
• 56:12
  that, like you're enlightened. And then next minute, no
• 56:14
  austerity, baby. Sorry.
• 56:17
  I can tell you exactly what that God bless her and she's been
• 56:20
  really great. But like she definitely thought
• 56:23
  this was going to be a phase, right?
• 56:28
  Well, this is, I've had a lot of phases, right?
• 56:31
  I've done a lot of things that I got into.
• 56:33
  I did stand up for, you know, three years and then walked away
• 56:36
  and I've done, you know, just a lot.
• 56:38
  I was into super into poker for like 3 years.
• 56:41
  Then I walked away. I was super into like the paleo
• 56:44
  stuff. I was obsessed with forced
• 56:49
  vaccines for a couple of years. You know, I was obsessed with
• 56:52
  that shit and that. So I think she kind of thought
• 56:55
  that this would just be a phase that would go away.
• 56:58
  And now and then what happened at the two year point was my job
• 57:01
  going away, not me. So then it's like, it really is.
• 57:06
  It's either, it's either me or those things, right?
• 57:10
  And I refuse to go away. That's, that's what it is now.
• 57:14
  I refuse to walk off this path, which means that things that I
• 57:18
  had held, I was huddling before are gonna have to go right?
• 57:22
  It's basically me, my family and my and my stack and everything
• 57:26
  else is up in the air. And my friends.
• 57:27
  I'd say, you know, me, my stack, my friends.
• 57:30
  And like the things I hold truly dear to my to to me.
• 57:33
  And then everything else is gonna be up to chance and maybe
• 57:38
  up to those up to up to circumstance, right?
• 57:41
  Like even for my wife, she's was gonna have to choose newly to be
• 57:47
  on this path that I'm leading because, you know, it's not
• 57:50
  changing. It's, it's a real difficulty
• 57:53
  that Bitcoin is go through in this process.
• 57:58
  Like being obsessed with things is a superpower.
• 58:01
  I've been, I've gotten obsessed with certain things over the
• 58:03
  years. And I used to, like, my family
• 58:07
  would be like, oh, you have an obsessive personality.
• 58:09
  And they'd always, always be worried that, you know, I was
• 58:12
  going to obsess over crack cocaine or something at some
• 58:15
  point, 'cause it's like, oh, you know, like the, the, the, the,
• 58:18
  the feeling of getting high. Not, not in the literal druggy
• 58:21
  sense, but just like Maslow has this book Peak Experiences.
• 58:28
  And it, it's, it's all about basically like being in an, an
• 58:31
  experience that is, yeah, it's peak.
• 58:34
  It's you get high, but then you always come down again.
• 58:37
  And Ram Dass talks about this a lot.
• 58:39
  This is what sort of initiated him into the LSD scene with
• 58:42
  Timothy Leary. He liked the notion of being
• 58:45
  high and they would get high for like 2 weeks.
• 58:47
  They did this one experiment. They just would take LSD every
• 58:50
  three, 3 or 4 hours, whatever it was for two weeks straight.
• 58:54
  And he couldn't get over the fact that no matter how high you
• 58:58
  got, you always came back down. And those sorts of obsessive
• 59:02
  personalities, they can use that, provided it's channeled
• 59:06
  correctly into like superpowers. You can learn so many things
• 59:10
  because it's innately just being a curious individual.
• 59:15
  It's not it's not obsession. And I think a lot of early
• 59:18
  Bitcoiners, particularly in this cohort, you know, like, we're
• 59:22
  just very curious individuals that want to find out what's
• 59:25
  going on around that next bend. But the difficulty is that it
• 59:31
  doesn't give you like you don't get a different opinion with
• 59:35
  Bitcoin. Instead, it sort of reorganizes,
• 59:40
  I guess, the, the context or the conditions of how your opinion
• 59:46
  like gets formed, you know, and, and you don't feel as certain
• 59:49
  about things as you may be used to.
• 59:53
  And so all of these old assumptions, they get, I don't
• 59:57
  know, undermined. And then you start asking new
• 1:00:02
  questions and. You know, the consensus goes
• 1:00:06
  away, basically. And you just, you somehow, yeah,
• 1:00:11
  you kind of cut adrift effectively from what what we're
• 1:00:15
  talking about for the field, the habitus.
• 1:00:19
  And you can still, you know, you can still show up.
• 1:00:21
  You can still smile and wave, boys smile and wave.
• 1:00:25
  But there's a part of you that's just no longer feeling the same
• 1:00:31
  way as you once did and it and it's heartbreaking if those
• 1:00:35
  people around you that you love and careful don't appreciate
• 1:00:40
  that, can't see that, and maybe even are willing to cut that
• 1:00:43
  away. And then you're like fuck.
• 1:00:47
  They, you know, the people in your life.
• 1:00:50
  Here's something I, I discovered, at least for myself,
• 1:00:52
  because I'm a very fast mover. You know, I, I change, like, I
• 1:00:58
  become a different person very fast, you know, like, 'cause
• 1:01:02
  that's, I do the work very intensely.
• 1:01:04
  And, you know, your family, the people closest to you are the
• 1:01:09
  last to see who you actually are because they're seeing the light
• 1:01:13
  the star gave off from years and years ago.
• 1:01:17
  And they're just, you know, doing like a linear regression
• 1:01:22
  and saying, well, OK, I can. The person I'm talking to is
• 1:01:25
  basically the expected value of this person, of the person I
• 1:01:30
  knew plus time, right? And what I see.
• 1:01:34
  And, you know, they, when you do something new, they get all
• 1:01:37
  scared, right? They're like, oh, I don't, I
• 1:01:40
  don't want you to become a different person.
• 1:01:42
  I know you and I like you. I don't want you to become
• 1:01:44
  something I don't I don't understand, right.
• 1:01:47
  So they try to like tell you, oh, you're, you know, or they
• 1:01:51
  either try to, you know, dissuade you or they right, they
• 1:01:55
  dismiss you and say you have an you have an obsessive
• 1:01:57
  personality. You're not really interested in
• 1:01:59
  this. You just, you know, you're just
• 1:02:01
  super obsessive. Or that's how they deal with the
• 1:02:04
  cognitive dissonance of themselves not growing as fast
• 1:02:07
  as you, right? And I've come to be patient with
• 1:02:12
  the people in my life, right? Because it's just, you know,
• 1:02:17
  it's always gonna take time. It's always gonna take time for
• 1:02:19
  them, but it's like at the same time I can never seek their
• 1:02:26
  validation either, right? So like if being self determined
• 1:02:30
  is an addiction, then it's an addiction, you know?
• 1:02:34
  Yeah, it's it's a good one to have.
• 1:02:37
  Yeah, it's a damn good one to have.
• 1:02:38
  Like I could have had way worse ones, you know?
• 1:02:43
  There's a line in the. But what it ends up, what it
• 1:02:46
  ends up being though, is like, who the fucking hell are you?
• 1:02:49
  Who are you to be self determined?
• 1:02:52
  We all want to be self determined.
• 1:02:53
  Who the hell are you that you think you could do this?
• 1:02:56
  You're out there doing it. Yeah.
• 1:02:58
  It's it because it's confronting, because it it it
• 1:03:00
  it's an example of like, well, hang on a SEC.
• 1:03:02
  If Brian can do it, like I can do it, but then they have to
• 1:03:06
  confront. Do you want to do it?
• 1:03:08
  Do you have the balls? Do you have the cojones?
• 1:03:11
  Can you actually go out and do it?
• 1:03:15
  What they don't tell what I tell, like what I tell my wife
• 1:03:17
  is you don't have to do it. You just need to trust my frame,
• 1:03:23
  right? Don't get in the it's like lead
• 1:03:25
  follower to get the hell out of the way, right?
• 1:03:28
  You want to be on a self determined path.
• 1:03:31
  By all means. I'm I can help you with that.
• 1:03:33
  Be my partner and all that, but you don't have like I don't, you
• 1:03:36
  don't have to be. You just need to accept that
• 1:03:39
  this is what I am. This is the this is what I am
• 1:03:41
  creating for the family. And you, you know, you do have
• 1:03:45
  to trust me. You cannot.
• 1:03:48
  It's not gonna work to like, oppose and undermine what I'm
• 1:03:51
  trying to do. Yeah, and and this is difficult.
• 1:03:55
  Let's learn together. I mean yeah, that what is this
• 1:04:00
  There's a line in there. I've been reading the Bible
• 1:04:02
  lately. Anyway, hands up.
• 1:04:04
  Thanks. Yuko Khanna A prophet is not
• 1:04:07
  without honor except in his hometown and in his own
• 1:04:09
  household. Like that is rings so true in
• 1:04:12
  terms of, you know, you found yourself being self determined
• 1:04:16
  and you know, you, you wanna. But the people that know you the
• 1:04:19
  the the most the most intimately, they know you as a
• 1:04:22
  particular version. And if you start shedding that
• 1:04:24
  skin and shifting into a different version, even though
• 1:04:28
  you're the same soul underneath it all.
• 1:04:33
  And and that's the work that they have to do 'cause you are
• 1:04:39
  growing, evolving, ascending, whatever.
• 1:04:42
  And it's a good thing net, net. But some people get confronted
• 1:04:46
  by that because they'd prefer, no, like things just need to be
• 1:04:50
  stasis, like we can just keep watching the TV or like, how can
• 1:04:55
  we do the sports ball anymore? I still am, but like you, I get
• 1:05:00
  it. Like I'm still into sports.
• 1:05:03
  Me too, I've come back. But like, but how come you're
• 1:05:07
  not into racism anymore? Like you used to be, right?
• 1:05:12
  How come you're not into that anymore?
• 1:05:13
  How come you're not into all of that stuff?
• 1:05:17
  Like why do you mute the commercials when you watch
• 1:05:19
  sports on TV? Who the fuck doesn't mute the TV
• 1:05:23
  when the commercials on I? It blows my mind when I go to
• 1:05:26
  people's houses, particularly some family members, and it's
• 1:05:30
  this it's on and it shouts at you and it's irritating.
• 1:05:33
  I'm like, you know you have a mute button, right?
• 1:05:36
  You just have to carry it around with you and you just hit it and
• 1:05:40
  then hit it back off again. Or, I don't know, subscribe to
• 1:05:42
  something that doesn't have fucking ads.
• 1:05:44
  Jesus. I mean, you're fighting a force
• 1:05:48
  that is way better at like, influencing you than you are at
• 1:05:52
  not at avoiding it. And, you know, ultimately, like
• 1:05:59
  with certainly with my wife and I, you know, the people closest
• 1:06:03
  to me. The other, I guess, really
• 1:06:06
  interesting thing that's come up for me in the and it's not, I
• 1:06:11
  don't know if it's since discovering Bitcoin or if it's
• 1:06:13
  really happened since I left Fiat.
• 1:06:17
  Life is the like my relationship to God has been extremely front
• 1:06:25
  and center. And I think it's because I'm in,
• 1:06:29
  I'm a man in need, you know, like I, and now I'm on my own.
• 1:06:33
  I can't afford to be wrong. I can't afford to go on wild
• 1:06:37
  goose chases. So like, if my mind is telling
• 1:06:39
  me I got to study math 6 hours a day, like that's a high stakes,
• 1:06:44
  that's a high stakes signal to follow because right.
• 1:06:49
  Because if, if that doesn't pay off for me, at some point,
• 1:06:54
  that's going to, you know, I will have squandered a lot of I
• 1:06:57
  will have, I'll have done the wrong thing with my time and
• 1:07:01
  then gotten wrecked. So like the only way I reconcile
• 1:07:05
  these things is to is for myself.
• 1:07:08
  Do I have, do I have like a clear relationship to God and to
• 1:07:13
  the truth? And, you know, it's very high
• 1:07:16
  stakes for me. And then so this is like as much
• 1:07:22
  as say, my wife just can't stand the way I'm living my life,
• 1:07:29
  right? She's never seen this.
• 1:07:33
  She's never seen a, a like a man that's so driven by God.
• 1:07:38
  I've never seen it. And it's actually made me
• 1:07:40
  realize that the whole system I was in before it was like a it's
• 1:07:43
  like a deal with the devil because it was meant to make
• 1:07:46
  that all invisible. I never, I never talked like I
• 1:07:49
  never cared. I don't care what God wants.
• 1:07:51
  I would care, but like not that much, you know, not not so much
• 1:07:55
  that like it's guiding almost every like the entire way I live
• 1:07:59
  my life. And so it's really through God
• 1:08:03
  that both of us are kind of finding each other now because
• 1:08:08
  we don't know each other, right. Not knowing your partner is
• 1:08:12
  actually a quite a gift. Most relationships end because
• 1:08:15
  you know them. You think you know them and it
• 1:08:19
  gets pretty boring and fixed and static.
• 1:08:21
  Like it's kind of sucks, right, when no one can grow not knowing
• 1:08:26
  your partner, right? Or it's kind of like considering
• 1:08:30
  that all your models are broken, including what you think you
• 1:08:32
  know about your spouse, your partner, your wife, your
• 1:08:35
  husband, right? Opens up an age of discovery.
• 1:08:40
  Like we can discover each other. And but then it's like, are you
• 1:08:44
  the kind? Are you, are you the kind of
• 1:08:46
  person they want to discover? And that's actually turning out
• 1:08:49
  to be, yes, right, Like somebody who is driven by, driven by God.
• 1:08:58
  That's that's where we're really connecting.
• 1:09:01
  It's a miracle. It really is one of these
• 1:09:03
  miracles that like has brought light into the darkness for us.
• 1:09:11
  You know, not working for two years has been quite a dark
• 1:09:14
  cloud, right? And then this, this, this focus
• 1:09:18
  and emphasis on God for both of us has brought light into that.
• 1:09:22
  And that's like the only pathway we realize.
• 1:09:24
  It's like the only pathway that we're ever going to really find.
• 1:09:27
  Find who, find who each other, find out who each other are.
• 1:09:31
  We have to go through God and discover ourselves.
• 1:09:35
  There's a, a shared experience element to it, I'm sure as well,
• 1:09:40
  where you're, you're doing something that's a lot deeper
• 1:09:45
  than you know, enjoying a movie together or whatever you're,
• 1:09:49
  you're sharing this, this new discovery, this new experience,
• 1:09:53
  this new information. You can discuss it, talk about
• 1:09:56
  it and touch it, feel it, think about it.
• 1:10:00
  And literally anything we talk about that's not, this is 1/3
• 1:10:06
  rail disaster like that, That's because I'm no longer, you know,
• 1:10:12
  like I've just idealistically moved off of the things I used
• 1:10:16
  to think were super important. And I, I not only moved off of
• 1:10:20
  them, I reject them outright. You know, like God, it's, it's,
• 1:10:24
  it was a hard pill for me to swallow that I allowed myself to
• 1:10:27
  be controlled by communists my entire life.
• 1:10:29
  Like my entire life, dude. Like when I, I was a kid, all I
• 1:10:32
  did was watch TV. Like I watched everything up
• 1:10:36
  until my mid 40s. All I did was watch TV.
• 1:10:40
  So like, it's so clear to me how much I got shaped by that.
• 1:10:44
  And you know, like for, for example, you know, if you grew
• 1:10:49
  up in the 80s, seventies, 80s, nineties, and you just watched
• 1:10:53
  like all the sitcoms, the SIOP that the SIOP that got implanted
• 1:10:57
  into you is that like every, if you lie, right, or if you do
• 1:11:04
  anything outside that you shouldn't, you will get found
• 1:11:08
  out immediately. You'll get found out by the time
• 1:11:10
  the episode ends and it'll go very badly for you, right?
• 1:11:14
  And I think that's a powerful thing that the government wanted
• 1:11:17
  people to believe, right? They can self regulate
• 1:11:19
  themselves. It's not a terrible thing to
• 1:11:23
  worry about. But like, think about how many
• 1:11:25
  people are psyop into compliance just because they watched so
• 1:11:30
  many sitcoms where anyone who went out of line or did anything
• 1:11:34
  dishonest lightly was immediately found out.
• 1:11:36
  Discovered in the most embarrassing way.
• 1:11:39
  Yeah, well, it's always like those those storylines as well
• 1:11:43
  of like a deadbeat dad, you know, who just wasn't upholding
• 1:11:49
  his end of the bargain. So mum, you know, splits up like
• 1:11:53
  this around on Christmas time was watching Santa Claus and I'd
• 1:11:57
  forgotten the the storyline altogether.
• 1:11:59
  But like Tim Allen, the character, you know, he's a
• 1:12:02
  deadbeat dad and, you know, he has to try and do something for
• 1:12:06
  his son 'cause he never sees his son.
• 1:12:08
  Or like in Hook with with Robin Williams, he's a deadbeat dad
• 1:12:15
  who's constantly at work all the time.
• 1:12:16
  And the one time they're all together as a family, he's on
• 1:12:19
  his phone trying to secure a deal or whatever it is.
• 1:12:22
  And and that that kind of trope was pretty prevalent throughout
• 1:12:27
  the 90s. And then there's deadbeat dads.
• 1:12:31
  Yeah. Or like, even if they are
• 1:12:33
  together, maybe they're just like a fat slob that doesn't do
• 1:12:36
  anything but is just interested in the sports ball.
• 1:12:38
  And, and, and they're not, they're not like married with
• 1:12:41
  children, right? Like Ed Bundy is, is that
• 1:12:43
  quintessential character. And then that got replicated
• 1:12:47
  with like Everybody Loves Raymond and all those shows
• 1:12:50
  where it just paints the, the, the male figure in the household
• 1:12:54
  as like just just a waste basically and a joke.
• 1:12:59
  And. Like sort of malleable.
• 1:13:02
  That has an effect. That has to have an effect
• 1:13:04
  somehow on the culture, Yeah. When you, it's because these are
• 1:13:08
  your role models. You don't realize it, but this
• 1:13:10
  is like your image, you know, look, you're in the world not
• 1:13:13
  knowing what to do. And so you grab you, you latch
• 1:13:16
  on to imagery that you're comfortable with.
• 1:13:18
  And it's like, OK, this is the image of what works, right?
• 1:13:24
  It's true. I did eat the, I did eat the
• 1:13:28
  cereal. I'm so, you know, I did do the
• 1:13:30
  yes, dear I, I'm the idiot. That's literally a line from the
• 1:13:35
  show. I'm almost one of the shows.
• 1:13:38
  I don't know which one, but it's got to be, right?
• 1:13:40
  Yeah, like it's got to be. But what you know what's
• 1:13:43
  happened now is we've don't. Try keeping a secret.
• 1:13:47
  We've gone don't ever. Ever try to keep a secret?
• 1:13:50
  No, no, no, no, not at all. But we've gone so far the other
• 1:13:54
  way with that Louis Theroux documentary was talking about
• 1:13:57
  manosphere or whatever it's called.
• 1:14:00
  And like they're they're just hyper males now and they're so
• 1:14:06
  hyper competent and they've got these hyper competent podcasts
• 1:14:09
  that they're actually misogynist and they're just assholes
• 1:14:13
  basically. And it's just the pendulum swung
• 1:14:15
  so far the other way. What bothers me about the
• 1:14:17
  culture is how we can't just keep a little centre, a little
• 1:14:22
  bit of equanimity, a little bit of balance.
• 1:14:25
  We just got a swing from one extreme to the other and it
• 1:14:29
  doesn't serve anybody. I think that's how we find
• 1:14:33
  balance though, like, and that's how like I'm again, I was always
• 1:14:36
  dismissed as an extremist, you know, like, oh, you're such an
• 1:14:39
  extreme. You go, you go to extremes, you
• 1:14:41
  get super into, you get obsessed with these things, right?
• 1:14:44
  And I get told in extreme and but it's like, yeah, I think
• 1:14:48
  it's what you were saying before.
• 1:14:49
  Like, no, you know, you, you go to extremes to find the peak and
• 1:14:54
  then you kind of come down and pull it back and you're like,
• 1:14:59
  yeah, I guess. I guess that's not really, I
• 1:15:03
  really don't want to live in that world, but I needed to know
• 1:15:06
  what it was like. I needed to see it.
• 1:15:08
  You know, like I'd say I did stand up and I remember like I
• 1:15:11
  remember the day in my brain that it was going to be over
• 1:15:14
  because I've I crushed. It was like the one time, first
• 1:15:17
  time I did so well, like I just was so Dang good.
• 1:15:22
  And when I listen to the tape, my friend is sitting next to my
• 1:15:25
  wife and I can hear him saying damn, he's killing.
• 1:15:28
  You know, like I knew it when I was on stage.
• 1:15:31
  I just like knew it and I knew that was the beginning of the
• 1:15:33
  end. You know, like 6 months later I
• 1:15:36
  was absolutely done because I stopped writing that stuff.
• 1:15:40
  Like once I hit that peak, you would that this is what you, you
• 1:15:42
  just made me realize. Like once I hit that peak, I
• 1:15:44
  stopped caring. And I think that we go to
• 1:15:47
  extremes to see the peaks or to find out what we're capable of
• 1:15:51
  in that in this world, right. And even like hyper male
• 1:15:55
  misogyny is like, you know, I think it, there's a time, there
• 1:15:59
  comes a time where we have to allow generation to go through
• 1:16:04
  it. You know, it's it's like you
• 1:16:08
  can't, the pendulum has been stifled.
• 1:16:10
  We have to like let the pendulum run so that people can see, you
• 1:16:15
  know, can find their comfort zone.
• 1:16:18
  People don't want to be on extreme ends, right?
• 1:16:20
  They're usually on an extreme end 'cause they're opposing some
• 1:16:23
  other extreme, right? I mean, it's like, I don't like
• 1:16:27
  going to extremes. I only do it because it's if,
• 1:16:30
  when I feel like it's necessary, like some people have to know
• 1:16:33
  I'm willing to do it, right. But like nobody wants to be on
• 1:16:39
  the extreme end of anything in my I, I don't think so At least,
• 1:16:42
  you know, you know, there's a portion of like being, you have
• 1:16:45
  influencer culture, I guess that's promoting this extremity.
• 1:16:50
  Now it's sort of at the point where you don't get noticed.
• 1:16:52
  You don't, you don't have a voice if it's not like super
• 1:16:54
  extreme or, you know, but, but even that like, I mean, I, I, I
• 1:17:01
  can't really speak to this for somebody in that world, but like
• 1:17:04
  for myself, I, I'm noticing myself operate differently now
• 1:17:12
  that I'm no, I feel, I no longer feel like I have to get people's
• 1:17:15
  attention. Like that's just the math
• 1:17:17
  Academy. I would say wild things about
• 1:17:21
  math like 3 years ago, you know, like wild extreme things like,
• 1:17:24
  oh, you know, you're never going to be secure, blah, blah.
• 1:17:26
  You know, things like, you know, and it's like you say, you might
• 1:17:30
  say extreme things when you're trying to get attention, but
• 1:17:32
  then you, at some point you get to that level and now you just
• 1:17:35
  want to be effective and you want to reach people and you
• 1:17:38
  stop, you lay off, right? You're like, oh, I won, I won.
• 1:17:43
  I got past that first boss, which is really hard.
• 1:17:45
  Like the first boss is the hardest boss for everything,
• 1:17:48
  right? And once you get past that first
• 1:17:50
  boss, you're like, OK, now I really want to just reach people
• 1:17:53
  and be effective. So I'm going to just kind of
• 1:17:56
  pull it back. A few weeks ago, maybe a couple
• 1:18:01
  of months, I don't know. Time's a flat circle.
• 1:18:04
  I, I had some spare time and I thought, let me waste this guest
• 1:18:11
  best time that I've got. And so I went over to grok and I
• 1:18:14
  said, can you write me a bunch of engagement baiting, rage
• 1:18:19
  baiting tweets in the formula of like talking about Bitcoin and
• 1:18:26
  and I made them as extreme as I could get them.
• 1:18:29
  And then I went over to Nosta and I posted them.
• 1:18:31
  And normally if I post something on Nosta, I might get a few
• 1:18:34
  likes here and there, a little bit of engagement and more often
• 1:18:37
  than not, not without Tooting my own horn here.
• 1:18:39
  But like you know, it's not dumb shit right?
• 1:18:43
  Anyway, very rarely do you get like too much engagement.
• 1:18:47
  I copy pasted literally word for word.
• 1:18:50
  Didn't even take out the long haifens or anything like that.
• 1:18:53
  Just post it on Noster and I got more engagement than I like
• 1:18:56
  normally do. And I was like wow, even people
• 1:19:00
  on Noster are retarded. Like, OK, and this is the game,
• 1:19:04
  right? It's it's like when no one's
• 1:19:05
  immune to it, the more extreme you are that the more engagement
• 1:19:10
  you're going to get. And then that's a shitty
• 1:19:12
  incentive. It's the biggest tragedy of the
• 1:19:15
  Internet, I think, is just how centrist speech has become, you
• 1:19:21
  know, penalized. Nobody wants to be irrelevant.
• 1:19:26
  I think you'd have to have a really strong frame to resist
• 1:19:29
  it. I mean, I made AI made a video
• 1:19:31
  yesterday and I think the video has a lot of potential to to
• 1:19:38
  it's a hard hitting video about what I find wrong with this
• 1:19:43
  notion of digital credit. And from my experience as an
• 1:19:46
  actuary, from my experience and insurance, and like I see this
• 1:19:49
  thing and it has problems, but it's also kind of nuanced.
• 1:19:53
  You know, there's a lot of very low signal discussion around
• 1:19:56
  strategy and everything they're doing, they're either a Ponzi or
• 1:19:59
  they're the greatest thing that's ever happened.
• 1:20:00
  It's like it's, there's no right.
• 1:20:02
  It's like you're on these two poles.
• 1:20:04
  And I have a very, what I think is centrist.
• 1:20:07
  It's like a hot knife going through the butter of this low
• 1:20:11
  signal noise. And I reached out to a good
• 1:20:13
  friend of mine who will probably listen to this, but you know he
• 1:20:19
  is experienced in. Making like successful YouTube
• 1:20:24
  sites and stuff like that. And he's just like, look, dude,
• 1:20:27
  if you want it, if you want engagement, you're going to have
• 1:20:30
  to, you're going to have to slop it, slop it up, slop up the
• 1:20:33
  title. You're going to need to use
• 1:20:35
  capital letters and say things like. 10 days left.
• 1:20:41
  It was like, and I was, I remember I said to him, I'm
• 1:20:43
  like, I can't do it. I just can't do it.
• 1:20:46
  And he's like, OK, it's just going to be slower for you.
• 1:20:50
  And that's I accept that. I can't do it.
• 1:20:54
  I can't, I can't do that slop. I can't have that on my, you
• 1:20:57
  know, I guess I'm of a generation or I can't even have
• 1:21:01
  that on my name once. I can't have a receipt out there
• 1:21:04
  that I submitted to that. Submitted to the slop.
• 1:21:07
  No, it's, it's bad, man, you know, and it is it's slow.
• 1:21:11
  I mean, like, I don't, I don't, I don't do this for the for the
• 1:21:15
  payday or anything like that. You know, this is a slow burn
• 1:21:19
  discovering Bitcoin. It's mostly for the chats just
• 1:21:21
  to have a record of the people that are around in this time
• 1:21:25
  discovering this thing and how that's personally affected them
• 1:21:28
  and therefore had a net benefit on themselves, the world,
• 1:21:31
  whatever you know around them. It doesn't have to scale
• 1:21:34
  globally as in like every person discovering Bitcoin almost has
• 1:21:39
  to change the world. It's like, it's like that old
• 1:21:41
  fallacy of like, well, how are we going to feed the world if we
• 1:21:44
  don't use synthetic agrochemicals?
• 1:21:45
  And it's like, well, you don't have to like, just feed your
• 1:21:48
  community that's in front of you.
• 1:21:50
  You're fine. You can have strong values, you
• 1:21:52
  know, you don't just have to do the easy thing.
• 1:21:55
  And you know, I know that it's probably really hard not to, but
• 1:22:01
  like I don't, I don't allow like, I don't know, I don't
• 1:22:05
  have, I don't let people off the hook like that, the way a lot of
• 1:22:08
  people do, like I, and that's why I hate so much of the talk
• 1:22:11
  in Bitcoin around like, you know, it's not your fault.
• 1:22:14
  The system made you take all that risk, right?
• 1:22:17
  The system made you borrow all that money and buy real estate
• 1:22:21
  with it. And you know, and I like, I
• 1:22:23
  don't know, I don't accept that premise for some reason.
• 1:22:28
  I just don't. I think people should be, I
• 1:22:30
  think you, I have a high enough opinion of people that they can
• 1:22:34
  be personally responsible for themselves.
• 1:22:37
  But I, you know, you hear that all the time.
• 1:22:39
  Like, you know, what do you expect?
• 1:22:41
  It's not, it's not your fault. You know, the Fed is evil and
• 1:22:44
  you know, you had to do all those irresponsible things.
• 1:22:48
  And I don't know, I just don't, I, I, I don't like, I don't like
• 1:22:52
  it. And the reason I do podcasts for
• 1:22:55
  the most part is to hold myself, actually hold myself accountable
• 1:23:00
  for my world view. You know, I want it out there in
• 1:23:03
  the public and then I own it. And two years later, somebody
• 1:23:07
  asked me, didn't you say this two years ago?
• 1:23:11
  And I'll say, yes, that's what I thought then.
• 1:23:12
  And here's how it changed. Here's why it changed.
• 1:23:16
  And I think there's something really powerful for me in doing
• 1:23:20
  that. And that's why I love going on
• 1:23:21
  podcast. I like being I'm probably a more
• 1:23:25
  candid person about my life on podcast because I don't know,
• 1:23:30
  like I feel like this is my only pathway to to winning.
• 1:23:36
  It's, it's something I think about a lot, like listen to this
• 1:23:39
  in the future. Maybe not me because I don't, I
• 1:23:42
  don't really listen to the episodes back at all unless I'm
• 1:23:45
  editing them. But my kids, they've, you know,
• 1:23:50
  they've got a treasure trove here of the old man losing his
• 1:23:53
  mind in real time. And, and I'm very hype and
• 1:23:58
  mindful of, of, of not saying anything too retarded, but like,
• 1:24:02
  I, I just swear. And I and I'd say retarded and
• 1:24:05
  eyes don't suffer fools. And, you know, they'll get a
• 1:24:08
  sense. But yeah, I don't know, like
• 1:24:12
  it's not performative. I, I just some, some people,
• 1:24:16
  yeah. Look, everyone's just driven by
• 1:24:18
  their own incentives and they can, they can feel their boots
• 1:24:20
  however way they wish. It's, it's not for me to say.
• 1:24:24
  But yeah, we, we just live in a culture of extremes.
• 1:24:27
  And you know, it would be cool if we could.
• 1:24:30
  Just like we didn't even have to go to an ashram and sit in
• 1:24:35
  silence for 8 hours a day. We didn't have to do that
• 1:24:38
  either. But maybe like 10 minutes a day
• 1:24:41
  would be nice. It's pretty powerful dude. 10
• 1:24:45
  minutes is enough time to grapple with yourself.
• 1:24:48
  Totally. I watched this video the other
• 1:24:50
  day. This guy took himself to a
• 1:24:53
  silent retreat and I think it was like a week long silent
• 1:24:57
  retreat just him in a room and not even like a big room, like a
• 1:25:01
  very small cell effectively with a mat, just a little little mat
• 1:25:07
  and and that's it. Just him.
• 1:25:10
  And he said by the third day, like your brains just losing its
• 1:25:13
  mind and the ego screaming at you to do something, distract
• 1:25:18
  me, something, something. And then the 4th day, everything
• 1:25:21
  goes quiet. That's amazing.
• 1:25:24
  Yeah. I mean, I my the closest thing
• 1:25:26
  I've. I've never done anything for
• 1:25:28
  multiple days, but I used to go to these float tanks.
• 1:25:32
  Yeah, yeah, I've done them. And they're, you know, the one I
• 1:25:35
  go to, it's totally dark and the water is like 99° so that you
• 1:25:39
  don't feel it. It's the same as your skin
• 1:25:41
  temperature. And you get the sensory
• 1:25:44
  deprivation experience. And like, it's always the first
• 1:25:48
  like 3 minutes. Like I remember the first time I
• 1:25:51
  started doing that, I I like would see in the darkness.
• 1:25:55
  I would like see demons and be like what?
• 1:26:00
  Like did you ever see the movie Ghost with Patrick Swayze?
• 1:26:04
  Yeah, Demi Moore, 100%. Demi Moore You know, and you
• 1:26:07
  remember when, like those bad guys died and all the demons
• 1:26:09
  kind of came out of them and just were attacking them?
• 1:26:13
  That's kind of what it felt like when I was in the tank for the
• 1:26:16
  first, like first several times I went and then at some point I
• 1:26:21
  had this realization that like, it's OK if all those demons live
• 1:26:28
  inside my head, there's nothing I can do about it.
• 1:26:32
  And they went away the second the second I got OK with it and
• 1:26:38
  I spent my entire life wild, right?
• 1:26:40
  Like I spent my whole life trying to avoid these thoughts
• 1:26:43
  and avoid seeing it. And then at some point in the
• 1:26:45
  flow tank, I'm like, you know what?
• 1:26:48
  Just it's like Chinese finger cuffs, right?
• 1:26:51
  It's like at some point I just accepted it.
• 1:26:53
  And then I'd never saw, I'd never saw it again.
• 1:26:55
  And I almost miss it. I'm like, no, show it to me
• 1:26:57
  again, you know? Just turning towards, yeah, the
• 1:27:02
  the obstacle is the way like turning towards that that demon.
• 1:27:05
  I got a friend who was on a he accidentally took a bit too many
• 1:27:09
  mushrooms than he originally had planned.
• 1:27:13
  And he was tripping pretty hard. And he said there was like a
• 1:27:16
  demon following him around. And he kept, you know, if I'm
• 1:27:22
  recalling the story correctly, he kept kind of ignoring it and
• 1:27:25
  trying to wish it, wish it away. And I was like, did you just
• 1:27:29
  turn around and tell it to fuck off?
• 1:27:31
  He's like, Nah, I was too. I was too scared.
• 1:27:34
  I was like. Hey, want to smoke a cigarette
• 1:27:37
  with me? Yeah, like I think.
• 1:27:39
  They, I think they prey on people who that's how they have
• 1:27:44
  power over. You.
• 1:27:44
  What do you want man? Come and sit down.
• 1:27:46
  Let's have a chat. Yeah, they pray of the power
• 1:27:50
  that they get of people being afraid of them, and then they go
• 1:27:54
  away and move on to somebody else when you accept them.
• 1:27:58
  Attention seeking wankers. Yeah, that was a powerful.
• 1:28:03
  So like that was like a really powerful realization for me.
• 1:28:06
  Also, just in terms of like when I say 10 minutes is enough
• 1:28:11
  because it's like you're going to deal with what when you put
• 1:28:18
  yourself in the dark with no, you know, nowhere to go, no
• 1:28:21
  refuge, nowhere to escape, right?
• 1:28:24
  You're going to deal with something and you get, you know,
• 1:28:28
  if you give, if you give yourself the hour that you, you
• 1:28:32
  might actually like what it takes to, you know, what it
• 1:28:35
  takes to sit that out and see it through is you're going to see
• 1:28:37
  something very powerful. Yeah, and it's not just about
• 1:28:41
  sitting down and being in the dark.
• 1:28:44
  Like there's work involved. It takes work to sit there and
• 1:28:48
  to bring back the mind to the present, you know, and, and
• 1:28:54
  employ all the techniques, focus on the breath, etcetera,
• 1:28:56
  etcetera, etcetera. Like that, that it isn't just
• 1:28:59
  about like, well, I'm just going to fuck off for 10 minutes and
• 1:29:01
  sit down. Like and but.
• 1:29:04
  Most people can't do that. Any like who can do that?
• 1:29:06
  Most people can close their eyes for about four seconds before
• 1:29:10
  they start asking where their phone is.
• 1:29:13
  So, right, I mean, most people can't, you know, they probably
• 1:29:18
  couldn't last five minutes, honestly, right?
• 1:29:21
  I mean going through something excruciating.
• 1:29:25
  I mean, guided meditations are, are kind of a salve for that
• 1:29:29
  because they can at least give you a, a, something that you
• 1:29:32
  might can attach to for the moment.
• 1:29:35
  But I mean, I, I have slowly, I think it was Cosmo, Cosmo
• 1:29:41
  Crickster. It's telling me about this.
• 1:29:43
  But every now and again I'll go to time chain calendar and, and
• 1:29:48
  set the bell And so that every time a block gets mined, it'll
• 1:29:52
  Ding a bell. And that's kind of like the same
• 1:29:54
  as being in a, in a, in a room trying to meditate.
• 1:29:57
  You know, the bell just goes off and it brings you back to the
• 1:29:59
  present. It's quite effective actually.
• 1:30:02
  It sounds kooky, but it it it is a thing.
• 1:30:08
  So, yeah, my main, I used to have these strategies.
• 1:30:11
  If I had to sit somewhere, I would try, I would play, you
• 1:30:16
  know, I would go through long fish, fish songs in my head, you
• 1:30:20
  know, like that's that was one strategy.
• 1:30:23
  I was saying this morning on the math podcast that like recently
• 1:30:26
  I had to go to a funeral and I had to I I didn't know the
• 1:30:30
  person's like from my wife's was like in front of my wife's.
• 1:30:32
  I didn't know them, but you know, you want to.
• 1:30:35
  You want to be there and not be disrespectful, right?
• 1:30:38
  Like writhing around looking at your phone and all that.
• 1:30:41
  And I figured out that I can like sit there and do math in my
• 1:30:45
  head for like a good hour, an hour and a half.
• 1:30:49
  And I could just basically sit there, stone faced, not moving
• 1:30:52
  and not drawing attention to myself, right?
• 1:30:55
  That's a superpower. That's awesome.
• 1:30:57
  Yeah, like just arithmetic. Like doing like basic arithmetic
• 1:31:02
  in my head, like still things I'm trying to discover.
• 1:31:07
  And it's a wild thing to like, oh, I can do that now.
• 1:31:10
  I don't have to like, argue with my wife.
• 1:31:12
  Like, I don't want to go to this thing, you know, I can just go.
• 1:31:15
  You just go show up. Which is like another change
• 1:31:18
  that that's, that's like another change that is a positive.
• 1:31:23
  That's a positive change in me, right?
• 1:31:27
  Like I'll actually stop opposing.
• 1:31:29
  I'll actually stop saying I'm not going to XYZ and I'll just
• 1:31:32
  go, 'cause I can just sit there and do math in my head.
• 1:31:37
  What do you wish more people knew about Bitcoin?
• 1:31:41
  What do I wish they do? I Yeah.
• 1:31:44
  You know, I wish that people could connect.
• 1:31:49
  I wish people could connect it to a, to some possibility in
• 1:31:52
  their life. I mean, that's really, I guess
• 1:31:54
  if I'm personalizing it. I think about a lot of people,
• 1:32:01
  like a lot of people in my communities.
• 1:32:03
  You know, I live in an anthroposophic town.
• 1:32:07
  Like we have our doctors, we have the school, we have the
• 1:32:09
  Waldorf school here. We have.
• 1:32:11
  A whole town with anthropothesis rolling around and this sounds
• 1:32:15
  like a dreamscape for me. Well, like it exists.
• 1:32:19
  It's more like, yeah, it's more like a, you know, like a small
• 1:32:22
  block of kosher stuff, right. We do have the doctor's office.
• 1:32:26
  We do have, there used to be a big library, a big
• 1:32:29
  anthroposophic library. Now that's moved into the
• 1:32:31
  doctor's office. I'm not sure where those people
• 1:32:33
  went, but like we used to have all the, we used to be bigger.
• 1:32:37
  But my point though, about it was there are a lot of people in
• 1:32:41
  in my town that do seek freedom. And it's actually tragic to see
• 1:32:47
  them not have the like it it, it, it really sucks their life
• 1:32:53
  force out not having a tool. And I wish, what I wish people
• 1:32:58
  could see is how Bitcoin could be used as a real weapon in
• 1:33:01
  their fight instead, instead of this wet noodle that they're
• 1:33:06
  swinging around. Oh man, that's 100%.
• 1:33:11
  I could such a useful and effective tool just from a like
• 1:33:16
  a time expanding point of view alone.
• 1:33:22
  As in, you know, if you start stacking today, then in a few
• 1:33:28
  years time you might have a little bit more space, a little
• 1:33:31
  bit more option. And instead of having feeling
• 1:33:34
  obligated to do that particular thing so that you can then earn
• 1:33:39
  the thing to pay the thing, maybe you could say, yeah, I'm
• 1:33:43
  kind of, I'm good. I'm going to actually take a
• 1:33:45
  couple of hours this afternoon, head off to this meeting and try
• 1:33:49
  and make some connections here and talk about certain things
• 1:33:53
  here. We've got we've got a there's a
• 1:33:54
  crew of us in in where I'm at and I haven't I haven't been in
• 1:33:59
  a while because they haven't had the time to host it.
• 1:34:03
  Like no one can show up because of us having to work because
• 1:34:06
  fuel's twice the amount and all this shit.
• 1:34:11
  Well, so the Waldorf school that my kids go to, they, they, they
• 1:34:16
  take Bitcoin. So there, there was a visionary,
• 1:34:22
  I'd say very visionary. Yeah.
• 1:34:25
  They have an Unchained wall that that you pay it into.
• 1:34:28
  And, you know, I'd say that the Dean that worked with me to do
• 1:34:34
  this was visionary. And, you know, he really started
• 1:34:37
  going. He was in his own rabbit hole
• 1:34:38
  about discovering Bitcoin. I think he'd be a good guest for
• 1:34:41
  your podcast. Actually.
• 1:34:44
  He started writing a lot about threefolding with he was like
• 1:34:47
  in, you know, he was having these defy and threefolding
• 1:34:51
  discoveries. But you know, in his mind, the
• 1:34:53
  word defy meant Bitcoin. But you know, he was just having
• 1:34:56
  his own, you know, he was having his own discovery about it.
• 1:34:59
  But at some point the board just didn't like the idea.
• 1:35:03
  Now now when I pay that he has to sell it and it it's a bummer.
• 1:35:07
  And so like, and it makes me kind of not care anymore a
• 1:35:10
  little bit, you know about it. And but to your point of like
• 1:35:16
  this community didn't even really have to do anything.
• 1:35:19
  If you just let the school accumulate Bitcoin, that's going
• 1:35:21
  to all of a sudden create a vector of freedom for the whole
• 1:35:24
  community. Just imagine.
• 1:35:28
  Yeah, in a few years, man, It's just.
• 1:35:31
  I've thought about this a lot and.
• 1:35:33
  Just it's heartbreaking. You could just drop school fees
• 1:35:36
  because all of a sudden you've got like a decent chunk of
• 1:35:37
  change sitting there as a treasury that you can draw on
• 1:35:41
  for fixing things around the school, blah blah blah blah
• 1:35:44
  blah. Maybe you don't have to charge
• 1:35:45
  us high school fees like it's, it's all net benefit as you
• 1:35:49
  said. Or you said a beacon out there
• 1:35:52
  and people who are who view Bitcoin as a pathway to freedom
• 1:35:58
  are going to come into my town and want to work at our school.
• 1:36:02
  That's to me, that's what it was going to do.
• 1:36:05
  That was going to be the, that was like going to be the glide
• 1:36:07
  path, right? They were going to, we were
• 1:36:08
  going to set, put the beacon out there and say, you know, if you
• 1:36:12
  are like, I think the anthroposophic community has
• 1:36:16
  suffered a lot in the last 5-6 years at least.
• 1:36:20
  Like the Waldorf school my kids go to, Like they barely, I think
• 1:36:24
  they barely teach Steiner anymore.
• 1:36:26
  It's a lot of communism actually being totally overtly taught in
• 1:36:29
  the school. Very upsetting.
• 1:36:31
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's very woke, but the
• 1:36:37
  disingenuous of the disingenuous kind, in my opinion, it's.
• 1:36:41
  Completely antithetical to the actual like the cornerstone
• 1:36:46
  book, The Philosophy of freedom. You just have to read that.
• 1:36:51
  I, I read that like a couple of years ago and immediately
• 1:36:55
  started interlinking it with people like Mises and the
• 1:36:58
  Austrians. And I was like, these guys, I
• 1:37:00
  don't know if they're contemporaries, they weren't,
• 1:37:03
  but like, and then that's kind of what really kicked off the
• 1:37:07
  whole anthropop thing for me anyhow.
• 1:37:09
  It was that because before I was just dabbling in biodynamics,
• 1:37:13
  but when I saw that interconnection and then when I
• 1:37:17
  learnt about how there was certain subset of anthropos,
• 1:37:24
  anthropothesis, kind of a difficult word to say, you know,
• 1:37:29
  that we're adopting these kind of left-leaning woke shit.
• 1:37:34
  And I was just like, no, no, this doesn't work.
• 1:37:36
  I'm sorry. Like it doesn't it's it doesn't
• 1:37:38
  jive. Yeah, anyhow.
• 1:37:41
  I tried, I tried to, I, I like, I really tried to impose my will
• 1:37:47
  on the school when I was being like when I was being woke and
• 1:37:51
  they resisted me and I was, I, I had a moment where I was like
• 1:37:55
  glad that they glad that they did.
• 1:37:57
  I was like, wow, that was actually the right thing to do.
• 1:38:00
  This is before my awakening even I was like, you know, I kind of,
• 1:38:03
  I'm kind of impressed that the school is able to resist my
• 1:38:06
  demands for certain woke things that I was looking to see.
• 1:38:13
  I'm embarrassed about it now. And it's, it's weird because
• 1:38:16
  most people there and even on the board or anything like that,
• 1:38:19
  they view me much more as that than, you know, they're,
• 1:38:23
  they're, they're only seeing that like from them, They
• 1:38:25
  haven't, no, no one's really kept in touch with me.
• 1:38:27
  So like, you know, I, it is a bit of a barrier 'cause it's
• 1:38:31
  like, oh, that guy is the guy that's like leading Bitcoin now.
• 1:38:34
  They don't even know what to make of it.
• 1:38:36
  You. Know all their models are
• 1:38:38
  broken. I have no idea what to, what to
• 1:38:40
  actually make of it. But what I, there's a lot of
• 1:38:44
  remnant like what I call Steiner remnant.
• 1:38:47
  And This is why I think I talked to you about, I have an
• 1:38:49
  intention to start going. They all go to a church.
• 1:38:52
  It's an anthroposophic church and they, they meet, they, they
• 1:38:56
  meet at this church like it's on a Wednesday morning and on a
• 1:39:00
  Saturday morning. And I've been, I've had this
• 1:39:01
  intention to go. I haven't done it yet, but I do
• 1:39:04
  have an intention to go. I've, you know, I feel a little
• 1:39:07
  strange, but just, I feel like an interloper being Jewish and
• 1:39:10
  going to a church and I don't, I have to get over it.
• 1:39:13
  I have to get over that and just go and just be my standard.
• 1:39:16
  Row one, baby, it doesn't matter.
• 1:39:19
  But. Like I really, I wanted to get
• 1:39:22
  these people. I want to get I want to be part
• 1:39:24
  of that community and, you know, just eventually talk, you know,
• 1:39:32
  be be the change and have them see hopefully see self
• 1:39:36
  determination with Bitcoin is an ally, not a obviously is a, you
• 1:39:40
  know, not some be all end all solution, just as an ally.
• 1:39:42
  That a big missing piece for people who are already like
• 1:39:46
  these. I call them the Steiner remnant.
• 1:39:48
  You know, they quit the school when they were school was being
• 1:39:51
  totally shitty about the vax and all that stuff.
• 1:39:58
  And, you know, the materials that I'm creating around the
• 1:40:01
  math Academy are all injecting Steiner's.
• 1:40:05
  I have so much Steiner in literature loaded into my bot
• 1:40:09
  that I force it to make connections.
• 1:40:13
  So every, all the math books I make have these call out boxes
• 1:40:18
  that say that are like Steiner's lens, you know, and it'll say
• 1:40:21
  something like a circle is an object, even though it's a group
• 1:40:25
  of infinite points, it, the brain can see it as one thing.
• 1:40:28
  You know, it's like the IT has these little Steiner lens call
• 1:40:32
  out boxes that will sort of put his spin on whatever it is we're
• 1:40:36
  teaching. And I love it.
• 1:40:41
  Have you? And I think this is Have you
• 1:40:42
  read a lot? Have you managed to read the
• 1:40:47
  Fourth Dimension, Sacred Geometry, Alchemy and
• 1:40:49
  Mathematics? No.
• 1:40:53
  What is this? Yeah.
• 1:40:56
  I I keep getting stuck on it, to be honest.
• 1:40:59
  It's it's send it to me. What's the GA?
• 1:41:04
  Tell me the GA number because what I do is I load a.
• 1:41:08
  What is it? 324 A you can you can find it.
• 1:41:11
  I'll I'll flick it over to you. But I've been trying because
• 1:41:15
  I've read that book for like a couple of years now.
• 1:41:18
  Or at least listen, listen to it quick break just to say if
• 1:41:21
  you're enjoying the show and digging what you hear, please
• 1:41:24
  consider supporting discovering Bitcoin by shooting, boosting,
• 1:41:27
  sending or zapping the show. Some stats.
• 1:41:30
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• 1:41:33
  fountain pod verse or breeze, it's easier done than said.
• 1:41:37
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• 1:41:41
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• 1:41:44
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• 1:41:47
  address, please send snaps and sats or zaps of sats in support
• 1:41:52
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• 1:41:57
  Thank you for listening and thank you for your support.
• 1:42:02
  Well, I found one of the great uses of my website,
• 1:42:05
  magicinternetmath.com is I have about I've I've imported so many
• 1:42:11
  of the Steiner like lectures that are really hard to read.
• 1:42:14
  They're really hard to read. They're like these aren't book.
• 1:42:17
  These are translated speeches usually that he gave, like these
• 1:42:21
  are translated transcripts that he gave in German.
• 1:42:25
  And it's very hard to read. I've really, I really tried to
• 1:42:31
  read a lot of Steiner when I especially when my kids first
• 1:42:35
  went to the Waldor school. I was super into it, you know,
• 1:42:38
  and I found his, I really did find like his ideas so
• 1:42:41
  interesting And I, it was so it was just really hard.
• 1:42:45
  And I think I found a great use of my website is to actually
• 1:42:49
  make these courses out of those transcripts.
• 1:42:53
  So if you, if you go there now Magic Internet, math.com and you
• 1:42:56
  scroll to the sort of the bottom of where the a lot of my courses
• 1:43:00
  are, you'll see Rudolf Steiner. You'll probably see 10 or 12 of
• 1:43:08
  his works to click on. And then you'll see it's sort of
• 1:43:10
  like it's set up with like this UX of like it's outlined, it
• 1:43:15
  calls out like key points. And then there are these quizzes
• 1:43:18
  at the end. It makes it a lot more
• 1:43:21
  digestible. This is what this is what, yes,
• 1:43:25
  what the world needs. Because his ideas are
• 1:43:28
  phenomenal. Yeah, I can see them.
• 1:43:29
  OK. Right.
• 1:43:31
  Because, yeah, like the, the, the ideas are so on point, so,
• 1:43:37
  so rounded and and balanced. I mean, it's interesting that
• 1:43:42
  Anthroposophical church you were mentioning before, because I
• 1:43:46
  mean, that's kind of like Anthropothy is often translated
• 1:43:50
  as spiritual science, which is a paradox.
• 1:43:52
  But it there, there isn't, there isn't actually a religious
• 1:43:57
  element to it. There isn't a theological
• 1:43:59
  element to Anthropothy. So to find out that there's like
• 1:44:02
  a church is, is kind of curious to me.
• 1:44:04
  I'd have to find that cause, like, he used to be part of the
• 1:44:08
  Theosophical Society back in like the late 1800s before he
• 1:44:12
  broke from those guys 'cause he realized they were all kooks.
• 1:44:15
  You know, Madame Blavatsky, and I think some of her works is
• 1:44:20
  cool, but, you know, they had Krishnamurti there.
• 1:44:23
  They were thinking he was the incarnation of Christ and all
• 1:44:26
  this sort of stuff. And, and Steiner was like, yeah,
• 1:44:29
  no, like you guys are way, way too kooky for me.
• 1:44:33
  And so he was trying to find balance between, you know, the,
• 1:44:37
  the notion of spirit and the notion of science and
• 1:44:41
  approaching the spirit world with a scientific lens so that,
• 1:44:46
  you know, you can sort of join those two together and create
• 1:44:48
  harmony. And it sounds paradoxical, but
• 1:44:51
  the more you read about it, the more it makes sense.
• 1:44:56
  Well, here's the interesting thing for us about that some a
• 1:45:02
  book that my AI made that I imagined I asked for this.
• 1:45:05
  I asked I'm, I'm focused on proof, like, how do you know
• 1:45:09
  you're right about how does a human being know they're right
• 1:45:12
  about something? And I asked to create a book
• 1:45:14
  that like looked in the past of the great thinkers and, you
• 1:45:18
  know, try to thread them together.
• 1:45:20
  And it made a book where it went back to like Euclid.
• 1:45:23
  I don't know if you know how much you know about like Euclid,
• 1:45:25
  but Euclid wasn't like known as the greatest mathematician ever,
• 1:45:28
  but he used, he proved everyone's.
• 1:45:31
  He, he laid down the proof And that's why it, mathematics
• 1:45:34
  developed after his time for like 2000 years.
• 1:45:38
  Really. It was like 2000 years between
• 1:45:40
  Euclid and like the age of Fermat, Euler and Gauss, because
• 1:45:44
  Euclid went and proved everything.
• 1:45:46
  OK, so like you have this idea that you, you have, you've proof
• 1:45:49
  on paper, right? And like Gauss comes along and
• 1:45:53
  says, well, no, you know what? I had proofs written in my mind
• 1:45:56
  before I ever wrote them on paper.
• 1:45:59
  And that was an interesting and new concept.
• 1:46:01
  He's like, all I had to do was write it down, but the proof was
• 1:46:03
  done. So like, you can, you know, you
• 1:46:05
  can have something, you can have knowledge, right, that's not
• 1:46:09
  written out or explained. And you then draw this line
• 1:46:13
  through to Steiner, right, who basically said you can actually
• 1:46:16
  can prove things in the spiritual realm or the invisible
• 1:46:20
  realm. I think Steiner might have said
• 1:46:25
  that like man has not evolved yet to actually do it, but there
• 1:46:29
  is a there is a framework in which this is possible.
• 1:46:34
  Yeah, that sounds like knowledge of high worlds, sort of like
• 1:46:37
  cultivating. Crapoins and stuff.
• 1:46:39
  Well, Fast forward to 2008. Satoshi builds a framework for
• 1:46:47
  proving things in the invisible realm.
• 1:46:51
  Is it a spiritual realm? I don't think so necessarily,
• 1:46:55
  but that's that's up for debate. But it's it's not up for debate
• 1:47:00
  that we have the ability to prove something in in in the
• 1:47:03
  that's metaphysical. And so that that like set of
• 1:47:08
  connections to me is incredible. And you know, when I think about
• 1:47:13
  how do we, again, what do knowledge is metaphysical,
• 1:47:17
  right? But very real, but nobody would
• 1:47:19
  ever dispute its existence, right?
• 1:47:22
  But you'd never see it. You can't put it on a table.
• 1:47:25
  It's metaphysical. And so this is where I think
• 1:47:30
  Steiner is a key, key, key person in our world.
• 1:47:36
  If you're into Bitcoin and you're interested in this
• 1:47:40
  question of how do we know, right?
• 1:47:43
  This goes back to have, you know, verifying as aspirate an
• 1:47:46
  aspirational statement, right? You may want to.
• 1:47:51
  You may want to look into Steiner too.
• 1:47:55
  I think so, man. I've been banging, banging on
• 1:47:58
  that drum for a couple of years now and I'm, I'm trying, I'm
• 1:48:02
  trying to sort of bridge those two worlds together in a sort of
• 1:48:06
  a meaningful way. The threefold, I'm very blurred.
• 1:48:10
  They're neurosocial organisms, I think right up our alley.
• 1:48:14
  It talks about money, actually. The, the, the privilege I have
• 1:48:19
  for, for me to know, like I don't even have to question,
• 1:48:22
  like I don't have to spend any time questioning whether
• 1:48:25
  Steiner's a person of interest. Like I just know that's a
• 1:48:28
  blessing. You know, there are, I'm sure
• 1:48:32
  there are people who I should be studying.
• 1:48:33
  That's not so present for me, but like I'm here to tell people
• 1:48:39
  that they should look into Steiner.
• 1:48:41
  If you're in this world of trying to understand something
• 1:48:46
  metaphysical, which Bitcoin is a metaphysical phenomena, right?
• 1:48:53
  Very real, but it's like knowledge, right?
• 1:48:56
  You can't see it or touch it, but it is very real.
• 1:49:01
  Then you probably want to engage yourself in people who have
• 1:49:05
  thought deeply about these things, and there aren't that
• 1:49:07
  many of them. They really aren't.
• 1:49:11
  What does Bitcoin mean to? You it, it means I can own
• 1:49:25
  something and it means people can discover what actually
• 1:49:30
  owning something really means. So it's a which is really like
• 1:49:35
  we were babies and human beings were babies until they discover
• 1:49:39
  they can truly own something. And now that knowledge or that
• 1:49:44
  that knowledge that like I can't, it's not that I do own
• 1:49:46
  something, it's that I can and that means I can be self
• 1:49:50
  determined. So like Bitcoin is an awakening
• 1:49:56
  that I can be self determined because I can actually it.
• 1:49:59
  And it's mostly because I just learned what ownership of
• 1:50:02
  something really is. That was a very obtuse answer.
• 1:50:07
  But like that I, I, I don't know if that landed, but like the
• 1:50:12
  fact that I could be self determined is a sacred.
• 1:50:14
  Like that's a sacred. It's a sacred idea for me.
• 1:50:19
  Like that's not something that people walking this Earth have
• 1:50:23
  had the ability to think for themselves prior to prior.
• 1:50:28
  I don't, you know, I don't think that's a a idea that had any had
• 1:50:32
  a shelf life. I think that had a shelf life
• 1:50:34
  that like rotted faster than milk, you know, like I'm in the
• 1:50:38
  1500s or in the last 100 years. I'm sure there are people that
• 1:50:41
  had this idea or like, you know, maybe if you were in the ruling
• 1:50:44
  class, you would have this idea, right?
• 1:50:47
  But if you weren't in the ruling class, you're gonna have this
• 1:50:49
  idea that you could have a self determined life.
• 1:50:52
  To me, that's, that's bananas, right?
• 1:50:55
  And even if you did, it would just be a pipe dream.
• 1:50:58
  And you would like the first, the first sign of you know, of
• 1:51:04
  an adverse scenario, it would go out the window, right?
• 1:51:08
  And what Bitcoin represents to me is something, it's a
• 1:51:13
  structure for that, like for that idea, it's actually a
• 1:51:18
  structure that gives that idea life.
• 1:51:23
  It's so nuts that yeah, I mean to think, to think in
• 1:51:28
  metaphysical terms, this is this is where I come unstuck amongst
• 1:51:31
  most of the technical minded Bitcoiners is like a tune out
• 1:51:37
  because, but it is at heart a metaphysical thing it and we
• 1:51:43
  interact with it. You can't touch it, but you can
• 1:51:47
  feel it. You can see it working.
• 1:51:50
  You can't like hold the bar of gold like you can't, you know,
• 1:51:53
  you can't hold a Bitcoin like you can a bar of gold unless
• 1:51:56
  it's a Kasakis coin, but that's a whole nother story.
• 1:52:00
  But you know you can, you can, you can feel it if you can think
• 1:52:06
  about it. And ultimately like that is
• 1:52:09
  knowing that that is that is what makes it real.
• 1:52:11
  The fact that you can picture it in your mind, it's as real as
• 1:52:14
  anything. It's as real as love, knowledge,
• 1:52:19
  growth with them. It's as real as any of those
• 1:52:23
  things carried. The whole lot.
• 1:52:25
  And so the premise of my podcast Rock Paper Bitcoin is actually
• 1:52:32
  this trichotomy of physical, abstract metaphysical rock being
• 1:52:39
  rock representing physical paper representing sort of
• 1:52:42
  abstractions, right? And Bitcoin representing
• 1:52:47
  metaphysical. And then you can look at almost
• 1:52:49
  any system as having these three properties.
• 1:52:54
  And it was my way because when I discovered Bitcoin, I realized,
• 1:52:58
  I don't know, I don't, I don't, I don't really understand
• 1:53:01
  anything anymore because everything I learned in my life
• 1:53:04
  was in the absence of this thing.
• 1:53:06
  And now the now that this thing exists, it's like now what?
• 1:53:09
  I have to rebuild my understanding.
• 1:53:11
  And this is the way I did it. This rock paper Bitcoin
• 1:53:14
  construct of this trichotomy of understanding, this physical,
• 1:53:18
  abstract and metaphysical is a way that I rebuilt my
• 1:53:21
  understanding of systems in the world.
• 1:53:26
  And I recommend it. I recommend like there's a like
• 1:53:30
  I have a piece of an essay on my blog called Rock Paper Bitcoin.
• 1:53:33
  That was the original sort of idea for it.
• 1:53:36
  And we don't really talk about it on the podcast too much, but
• 1:53:39
  it's, it was sort of a cool name, you know, but once, once
• 1:53:43
  that clicks with people, you know, that like rock is like
• 1:53:46
  gold, you know, and paper is like Fiat and yeah, Bitcoin is
• 1:53:51
  like Bitcoin. And but there we we have, we
• 1:53:53
  have these three element, these three sort of states of matter
• 1:53:58
  in all of our systems. Bitcoin are the scissors that
• 1:54:01
  cuts through both. Well, cut cut through rock in
• 1:54:05
  the game, technically. It's basically to me, Bitcoin
• 1:54:10
  repairs the damage that paper does to rock.
• 1:54:17
  Dig, dig. Yeah, Brian, thanks.
• 1:54:22
  Man, what a epic conversation. We've traversed some ground, as
• 1:54:28
  I knew we would. I had an inkling and I'm almost
• 1:54:30
  certain that if I wasn't so hyper mindful of us being like
• 1:54:33
  recording and on air that we would have spun off into way
• 1:54:37
  more esoteric subject matter, which we might be able to do
• 1:54:41
  offer at some point. Just on a one to one call.
• 1:54:44
  I think I want to pick your brain a little bit more about
• 1:54:46
  this, this community that you live in.
• 1:54:48
  But for now though, man, thank you so much for spending some
• 1:54:52
  scarce time, fun and energy telling us the tale of how you
• 1:54:54
  discovered Bitcoin. Thanks for having me.