Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 155 of the Free Cities podcast.
Hello indeed and yes I am back from the wonderful Prague bubble that is or that was I should say
the Free Cities Conference 2025. For me that was eight days of completely intense discussion,
amazing meetings and wonderful socializing what can i say well to be honest it's hard to know
where to start if you were there you know how good it was it was amazing
everyone i spoke to agreed with me everyone who was there was just super pumped to be there
massively bullish on the free cities ecosystem from my perspective purely as a content producing
trip I'd say it was my best one ever loads of new people from the space and of course some of the
old favorites I wouldn't let them slip through the cracks socially well reconnecting with old
friends making new ones mission accomplished there there were certainly new people that I had not
met before who were coming in to the free cities movement if I was to sum it up well do you know
what and you can take this from me because I do end up speaking to most people in this ecosystem
on a regular basis. According to me the free cities movement has entered a new phase in its
evolution. Something akin to the very beginning stages of a parabolic rise of these ideas and of
these governance technologies that we all love. This is a sense shared by the majority of the
people I met at the conference, the people who are living and breathing this stuff on a daily basis.
We can feel it and I'm sure you can. The number of new projects coming online, the awareness of the
ideas in the general public, the appearance of new prototypes and marketable technologies,
They are all there to be seen and felt.
It's happening.
Believe me, we're in a new paradigm.
Be thankful that you are here.
Be grateful that you have the opportunity to participate.
Anyway, in the spirit of new paradigms, of moving on,
we are also, as many of you may already know,
saying goodbye to the wonderful city of Prague,
the city that has served us so well for the last four years of this conference.
Many thanks indeed to Prague and especially to my excellent Airbnb at Jindriska number 20.
You've been the source of nearly 60 episodes of this podcast and I thank you for your service.
If you've been an interviewee, you'll know the place.
It's just around the corner from the conference venue.
The scene of many an interview about Free Cities next year, of course.
In case you haven't heard, the Free Cities conference is moving to one of the premier locations in the Free Cities ecosystem.
Yes, that's right, folks.
Prospera, September the 3rd until the 6th, 2026 on Roatan, Honduras.
we're moving it a little earlier than this year in order to get good weather. You're not going to
want to miss this one and we are limited by numbers and as a result I would predict this is going to
sell out. So if you really want to attend the conference in 2026 get your tickets as soon as
you can. This event will sell out. We know how many people came two years ago, we know how many people
came last year we know how many people came this year and it's going up each year and next year
it's a smaller venue so it's going to be more intimate so really think long and hard about
getting your tickets and then get yourselves off to latin america in 2026 talking of latin america
this episode of the free cities podcast is brought to you as always by our wonderful sponsors of the
show Veritas Villages. Veritas Villages are freedom-oriented energy self-sufficient communities
designed for people who want to enjoy peace of mind and real freedom in these uncertain times
and if you came to the conference this year you would have no doubt seen Patrick and Alex Voss
from Tipolis mentioning Veritas Villages quite a lot. They were very active at the conference
more of that to come in the following weeks in the meantime if you're interested in what they're
doing www.veritasvillages.com forward slash free cities go and check them out and don't forget to
tell them we sent you right on to today's show and it is part two of last week's very long
conversation with swedish doctor joni appleberg i would advise you obviously to listen to part one
before you listen to this if you haven't already it's literally just a continuation of that episode
word for word let's just cut straight down the middle at a slightly opportune moment
quick ai summary to whet your appetite in this wide-ranging conversation
yoni appleberg discusses integrating alternative healing modalities into his medical practice
Bitcoin as a tool for societal healing and the future of humanity as a species of explorers and storytellers.
Key topics covered.
There's five of them.
Integrating unconventional medicine in practice.
Bitcoin as a cultural and monetary phenomenon.
Civilizational decline and the fiat system.
The human experience and purpose and the Kardashev scale and future technologies.
next week i will start putting out all the content from prague it's going to be a good few months
people it was a mind-blowing week for interviews for me and actually for the podcast itself
watch this space lots of good things happening for the podcast as we grow larger and larger
many continued thanks of course to my subscribers on fountain.fm you know who you are and i would
just like to say once more your monthly contributions are massively important to the
running of the show and i'm deeply grateful for all your support uh by the way if you're wondering
where the video version of this episode is it's not on fountain uh go and check out our youtube
channel where you can see the full three and a half hour video of yoni part one and part two
together there's only audio on fountain.fm one last thing before i go do me a favor if you're
listening to this on apple podcasts or on amazon podcasts or on whatever podcasts which you almost
certainly are can you give us a review please click the number of stars you think this is and
write something about us. I'm told it helps the visibility of the podcast. Many thanks for your
continued support, everyone. Right now, it's time to dive into the show. And I would implore you to
make sure that you are comfortable, as always. And you have a moment away from the hustle and
bustle of your very busy life, I hope. Remember, folks, this is a 1x podcast. And by that, I mean
And you listen to it at normal speed, not two times, not one and a half times, 1x.
So just sit back, relax and enjoy part two of my conversation with Yoni Appleberg.
and what about your practice back home how are they taking this or are you not bothered
you're obviously trying to find a way to implement this in your current life your
mainstream life, let's call it.
Yeah I don censor myself I talk very openly about what I think I just don care i just i can be bothered to care about what other people think and if you vibe with what i say awesome we are the same tribe
if not i don't care if my if my employer uh doesn't think what i'm doing is wise or has
opinions about it i don't care but what about actually as a practitioner doctor
at that it'd be very difficult for me as a doctor to not incorporate all this stuff immediately in
my practice and the first person that i saw come in i'd be like if you just tried lying down and
relaxing and feeling your body just do it five minutes a day i do i do uh implement some some
things when I meet certain categories of patients. I changed how I treat depression, PTSD, anxiety,
chronic pain, for example, these types of conditions. The people that often feel let down
by the traditional healthcare system, I approach them differently now. And I also work for another
clinic a cannabis clinic where we deal mostly with chronic pain and my hope is that we can
introduce psilocybin to the clinic as well eventually and then i am i also have a thing
on the side where i am a bitcoin doctor for bitcoiners because we are we're essentially a
cult and we are kind of like the jewish people bitcoiners want a bitcoin doctor the way same way
a jewish person wants a jewish doctor so i'm providing that service do we want our own homeland
though that's the question probably we want a citadel don't we but i don't think we all want
to live to in the same homeland though no no we're too disagreeable for that
a decentralized homeland but you're right if if if i know someone's a bitcoiner i want to work
with them you're absolutely yeah exactly but that's mainly because i i know that they understand
a bunch of things we have done the same journey yeah we know that we're awake to the same things
mostly and that translates also to how we look at health and life in a lot of ways so it makes sense
that a bitcoiner would want a bitcoin doctor so i do online consultations um for bitcoiners
um normal stuff you know like kind of i've got a problem with my leg i can call you yeah
Yeah, for smaller stuff as well.
But most of the time, it's things, again,
where people feel let down by the traditional healthcare system
and things where I can actually provide some help,
whether it's panic attacks, anxiety, depression, PTSD,
even stuff like chronic pain.
tell me then using psilocybin to deal with that kind of stuff are you using the psilocybin to
sort of loosen yourself up a little bit just to detach from being too judgmental of the stuff so
that you can actually look at it and start dealing with it i'm not talking about like
you know physical ailments i'm talking about the sort of because you know when i think of
say panic attacks um i would imagine that psilocybin and panic attacks aren't the most
obvious friends because i know that the only time i've ever felt anything remotely like a panic attack
was when i had a bad trip on mushrooms when i was younger you know for example and i know what that
that can do i know that that that those kind of drugs what what they do is they which we were
saying earlier it's very important what you take into that your intention before you go in what did
you say the three things you need a nice place though set and setting right yeah um your intention
in going in is tantamount because it's almost like once you start the trip you better make sure that
you're not reflecting too much about why you've done it after the after the action because you'll
overthink it and the next thing you'll be spiraling inwards into some hellhole yeah you know yeah and
so yeah i'm interested to know how how you use psilocybin to help people deal with those kind of
delicately delicate things like anxiety so there are two aspects to this one is um for myself uh
to remain grounded um and stay present and stay aligned just as uh as a teacher to continue to be
on this spiritual journey.
Life comes with a lot of lessons.
One of the most important ones for me is about letting go.
Letting go of youth,
letting go of all the things that you are going to have to let go of,
eventually body and life.
And you can go through life kicking and screaming
and learning that lesson,
or you can do it just flowing through it.
And just being in a flow state, being present,
that helps me be the best person that I can be for others.
When my cup is filled, it's so much easier to help others
and do it well and do it with passion and love.
so that for that reason i can sometimes do these uh these trips under guidance so you're guiding
no no have other people guide me but what about you yes so that's the other aspect of it
so uh in my own when i do medical consultations there are going to be consultations i'm not going
to be treating people because I don't have a business set up where I have insurance or
I can be liable.
I can make recommendations.
And if I were to, I can either confirm nor deny if I do this.
Okay.
That's a disclaimer.
If I...
If you were to.
In the hypothetical scenario where I guide somebody and using psilocybin as a medicine, we would have to set up the dose setting first and foremost.
And we would focus on the thing that that person wants healed.
And it can be a useful tool for some people, but it's a rare medicine to employ.
because most of the time it's not at all what we need.
Most of the time it's about lifestyle factors,
fixing fragmented sleep, fixing diet, fixing exercise,
recalibrating a high sympathetic nervous system state,
refixing your HPA axis, your internal hormonal stress system.
and all of these things taking care of the fundamental physiology.
Physiology comes first.
And when you've dealt with that, fixing your breath, fixing your HBA axis,
you're fixing your nervous system, just recalibrating it to a base state
where you're back to healthy homeostasis.
That's when the body can heal itself.
I find weed or cannabis to be a tremendous tool for a lot of healing.
Because what the endocannabinoid system, this is fascinating.
Ask any doctor about the endocannabinoid system and they will have no clue what you're talking about.
Yet, this is one of the most important systems that we have in our body.
It's one of the most important systems that we have in our body.
Yet very few doctors have even heard about it because of political reasons.
This is crazy.
That's a sign of a broken system if I ever saw one.
So what the endocannabinoid system does,
a lot of people have the experience that cannabis takes care of their pain,
fixes their sleep, helps them relax,
takes care of their anxiety or their appetite.
In fact, cannabis does none of those things.
But what it does is that it nudges the endocannabinoid system
to fix all other systems.
What the endocannabinoid system does and is,
is it is a conductor of the body.
It governs all other systems.
It governs every organ in your body.
It governs all other systems.
So there is no such thing as healthy pain Pain is a good mechanism We need pain That part of our physiology But there is no such thing as healthy chronic pain
or healthy overwhelming pain.
When pain is overwhelming or chronic,
something is wrong.
And what's usually wrong then
is that the ascending pathways
from, let's say,
let's say you have a herniated disc in your back.
That place is going to,
when you have a herniated disc in your back,
the pain, it comes from three different components.
It comes from the disc actually breaking.
It comes from the inflammation caused
by the fluids leaking out and affecting the nerves.
And then it comes from the actual pressure on the nerve.
So it's a nociceptic pain,
which means just tissue damage pain.
there's an inflammatory pain, and there's neuropathic pain,
pain within the nervous system.
Very complex pain.
So the ascending pathways from the spinal cord
delivering pain signals to the brain,
if pain is essentially the only sensory stimulus
that doesn't fade with stimulation,
if you look into a bright light,
you're eventually going to stop seeing
because the receptors in your retina get overwhelmed.
So they stop signaling.
If you put pressure on a piece of body
or if you caress your skin,
eventually you stop feeling it as much.
The first bite of a meal
tastes more than the second and the third.
Every sensory input diminishes with more stimulation
apart from pain.
Pain is the only one that increases with persistent stimulation.
So when this pain doesn't go away, when it doesn't heal, it just continues and it ramps up.
So in the ascending pathways, you will have turned up the volume of the pain.
And eventually you'll also have the descending pathways,
which are going down from the brain to the injury site that prevent the sensation of pain,
that are the body's own pharmacological way of diminishing pain.
Those don't really work anymore.
So what the endocannabinoid system does
is that it nudges the pain system
to turn down the volume of the ingoing pain signals
and turn up the volume on the inhibiting signals.
so it lets the body fix itself by correcting imbalances that's what cannabis does it puts
your body back in proper homeostasis back into balance so that it can heal itself that's why it
often takes a few weeks for cannabis to start working on your chronic fatigue syndrome or your
chronic pain or your stress syndrome or whatever it is you're struggling with but it can be a
tremendous tool if used correctly are you saying that your body can heal itself from forget physical
trauma whatever do you say your body can heal itself from anything not anything uh but we are
vastly under uh appreciating the body's own healing potential like go back to the aging cell
we're talking about other stuff and you think that this new frontier of science is about
devising therapies against the hallmarks of aging
but will your body is that is the aging cell happening because of
dis-ease or is it happening because it's inbuilt into the getting old algorithm or whatever
yeah that's probably going to be something we discover along the way of entering the third
medical paradigm. What we know now is that in 2013 came a paper titled The Nine Hallmarks of
Aging that looked at decades worth of the biology of aging. And we now know that there are nine
diseases at the cellular level. Things like DNA breaks, telomere attrition, intracellular signal
pathways that are disrupted, epigenetic alterations, these types of things. And some of them happen
because of toxins. Some of them happen because of radiation. Some of them happen just by pure
chance we don't know why. So there are like mitochondria, like all of these things that we
now cause aging in the cell.
What we can do now is start to,
now that we have identified these diseases,
is that we start to design therapies and treatments
against these diseases at the cellular level.
And then that's a way of immunizing
against age-related illnesses.
The body can heal a lot.
I don't know how the body would heal these types of diseases.
We might discover that it can at some point if we just nudge it in the right direction.
I mean, presumably, it's easy to argue.
Sorry, we do have a lot of enzymes that actually take care of telomere attrition and DNA breaks and so on.
So we have a lot of already working mechanisms to repair.
but when those are working and in place, then we age at the rate that we do now.
So we are trying to reverse that.
Evolution works in a way that it keeps you healthy until you have served your purpose,
which is to have kids, take care of the kids, and then be a grandparent and pass on your wisdom.
But after that, the diseases start accumulating very rapidly.
That's what I was going to say.
Presumably the aging cell is an evolutionary adaptation,
which keeps generations flowing.
What you don't really want is, well,
what the evolutionary force obviously didn't want
was people living too long,
because then the generational change would be slowed down somewhat.
But then again, you could have more children.
Yes, yes, yes.
I mean, if we're afraid of overpopulation and stuff like that, we would have other mechanisms for that to take care of itself, if that were a thing.
So why do we die then? What's the point? Why do we need to die?
Tim, we don't know. Death is very, very mysterious.
Something that I've seen in deep psychedelic states is when you get to peer beyond the veil of reality, when you get to look at the source code of reality, when you have that experience of reality starting to glide and then you're no longer in this place and you start to see that time isn't time.
physical space isn't physical space it's all an illusion this none of this exists
yoni appleberg doesn't exist this is just a character that i have created i am not
yoni appleberg experience in the universe i am the universe experiencing yoni appleberg
and i'm i'm quite happy with that i like this character
so when when you have that experience of just reality gliding away from you
and you see that oh nothing exists time is is just uh it's just an illusion like we have this idea
that we are coherent individuals we have we have the illusion in our mind that we have an identity
We have memories like a string of pearls creating this coherence.
We have this voice in our head.
We have all these mental modules that create a cohesive organism.
None of that is real.
We are not individuals.
We are the illusion of an individual.
We have the illusion of time.
We have the illusion of physical space, but none of this exists.
And when you go into that place and you just have your worldview completely shattered,
and you're in that place with probably fairly high anxiety and you're terrified,
seeing that time is not what we think it is.
Physical space is not what we think it is.
You as an individual doesn even exist And then you come back from that and you have to make peace
that nothing is as it seems. That can be a real challenge, and it can be quite anxiety-inducing.
I mean, I'm not in that place at this exact moment, so I'm talking about it intellectually,
So I can't put the emotion behind it that it deserves.
But I also know that I've been there and I've had to make peace with the idea that time isn't real, physical space isn't real, I'm not real.
And then come back from that and start building a life from within that pain and make that life worth living despite all of that pain that those realizations bring.
I suppose the question, though, what is it all about?
I mean, with that experience, it would be very easy for me to hypothesize that, A, we live in a simulation, a computer-generated simulation, especially now what we know about computers and what's coming.
Because you can kind of predict a little bit into the future of computers.
It would make sense that it was just a bit of an experiment.
Because the way you described it was that, really, it doesn't matter.
None of this is real and none of it matters, which you kind of get a sense of if you actually
spend a quiet moment on your own away from it all.
It's very easy to look around and go, yeah, right now, this is just, this is just is what
it is.
I fully accept this.
And actually, it doesn't matter.
Like, do I even, you know, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Staring death in the eye.
Death looks at, laughs at all of us.
All we can do is laugh back.
so when we look death in the eye and make peace with it and when we have if you have the courage
to make peace with the fact that everything is it just isn't real and not just end up in a
psychotic state if you have the courage to go on that path i think it could be worthwhile
but it's not for everybody but but some many people would say what you're you're you're a fool
if you carry on at that point.
If you realize everything's, nothing matters,
not in a nihilistic way, just in a, you know,
it's not like I don't care anymore.
It's like, it's not important.
If I was to fail right now, it wouldn't matter.
Exactly.
So you can look at it like, holy shit, nothing matters.
What the hell are we doing?
Or you can look at it like, holy shit, nothing matters.
Fucking awesome.
I get to decide.
you can you can leverage to your uh to your benefit as well but leverage what that nothing
matters every everything you you make of this exactly what you want you have the human experience
body gives you the human experience and you make of it exactly what you want here's here's uh here's
a secret that no one is telling you there are no laws there are no rules there are people that think
that there are laws and rules.
But you are a human being on this planet.
You get to decide.
You do life exactly as you want.
And we are living,
it's very easy to look around you
and realize we're living in a world
where the tension is between control and freedom.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
It's very easy.
The way you described it there is,
if you were to tell yourself that,
what you just said the only reason you would is because you know people are trying to control you
other people or other forces are going to control you and the antidote is i'm pretty exactly and
that's a mental shift and when you see these things when you meet death when you meet the
source code of reality you can just laugh at all that who who another grown man is telling me
a grown man what i can and cannot do with my consciousness that is absolutely ridiculous
this the consciousness is the most intimate thing that we have and people are trying to control that
my consciousness is my consciousness and nobody has any say in what i do with it but what about
physical um control yeah what about you're locked in a cage you're in you're in auschwitz
or whatever you're you're locked in a cage somewhere you're you're being controlled by a
very a crime against god right but but how do you and you know you know man you know man's search for
meaning obviously yeah are we gonna are you gonna go down that route when i say how do you deal with
that kind of thing yeah that's so that's about having a why uh that's that's essentially uh
victor frankel's message you can bear anyhow if you just have a why and finding a why but with
regards to that you were saying i agree with you when you say when you when you actually spend the
time to to go into it you realize yeah i'm free i'm free it doesn't matter what the government
says it doesn't matter what my partner says it doesn't matter what that guy over there wants to
beat me up says it i'm free you know but there is a physical reality that we have to address and that
is i can't get out of this room without opening a window or a door because there's a barrier there
but i mean i'm not against believing that i can walk through that wall i'm really not my mind is
open to the possibility i know it sounds ridiculous but if you said to me no but tim really you can
walk through that door a bit like the matrix or something i could probably be brought to a point
where i really believed it so much who knows i might be able to walk through that wall i don't
actually know it sounds stupid and crazy and ridiculous but really theoretically you could go
there we're bound to the physical world as physical beings we're bound by its
laws and that said if you if I were ever were to find myself incarcerated for
whatever reason and I did not joy enjoy the physical world that I found myself
in I would I would free myself spiritually in a in take the opportunity to go deep into a spiritual
realm where I am free and it doesn't matter where I am or when I am because I would be free and I
would have all the things that I can provide for myself which is peace love and happiness there's
those things don't come from achievements or from uh the exterior world they help
the external world uh as you architect it can certainly put you in a place that you appreciate
more there's beauty in the world that we can appreciate yeah but what about if you're being
tortured yeah in some hell hole in afghanistan i don't know you're you know you're you're captured
by the and you're tortured and how did you know i know this is an extreme but i do want to
understand what's possible because i know the theory and my life is sweet but really when you
look at the amount of um the amount of of pain and suffering that i have to endure it's really
under my own control if i choose to suffer it's because i go out and i climb a mountain and and
it hurts or whatever i don't i don't enjoy i don't even get into those scenarios where i
but but but sorry but it's probably coming actually when you think of it i mean if you
look at the state of the world as someone who appreciates freedom and as you do the world is
coming in it is is encroaching more and more and more um i don't really like being told what to do
obviously, especially not by people who I don't respect and who I don't feel like it's a fair fight.
You know, I'm thinking about just even the state would be a good example.
It's getting crazy. It's getting ridiculous.
The rules, the regulations, the laws, the quagmire of nonsense is ramping up.
more and more every day you hear the most ridiculous story of incompetence or ridiculousness and in the
end i think we all fall foul of the state so we all become illegal we all become criminals i'm
almost a criminal i mean obviously on a day-to-day basis we're all criminals we all do think we'll
break rules and break laws but not in an overt way i i'm but i'm starting to notice that that's
happening. You know, I, we were talking about the online safety bill in the UK
this morning and everyone, I was already using a VPN anyway. It didn't really
matter, but thousands and thousands of Brits are now using VPNs that weren't
before that act. Cool. Problem solved. When they ban VPNs, I'm a criminal and
I've been using a VPN for years and I'm a criminal. Not because I'm trying to
skirt the, this rule, even though I would use it for that, obviously it's no, and
If I want to go to an over-18 site, it's literally none of anyone's business except my own.
But I'm now a criminal, and I'm an overt criminal, because it would be very hard for me not to,
on this podcast, when someone says, I'm saying, fuck it, no.
Nothing changed.
I was Tim Allen surfing, as Freddie said this morning, surfing the Reddit forum for craft beers.
Two weeks ago, I didn't need to present my credit card.
Now I do, because it's a craft beer.
Did you know this?
This is how ridiculous it's getting.
This online safety bill in the UK.
It basically has earmarked a bunch of sites as not safe for children.
and if you want to go to them and you have a british isp you have to now put your credit card
details in and everyone thought oh it's porn hub it's whatever it's not no it's for example it's
the ai i use venice.ai was the first one my daughter came to me and said dad look it's asking
me for i was like what are you looking you know and i'm like oh jesus it really is she had a vpn
set her phone i gave her a phone and she has a vpn on it and it was set to england which is what
we kind of do we're only i'm only interested in the privacy at the point i don't need to be jumping
around the world looking at different tv stations and all this kind of stuff um but but but um yeah
the it this umbrella term of keeping the children safe means that now if you want to go on the
reddit forum for craft beer because it's an over 18 type thing you need to do that i mean this is
late stage soviet union now right like we we have been in uh civilizational decline since the 1970s
i think probably yes i was born in the 70s oh yes yes yes congratulations
1971 in uh okay that's what the fuck happened in 1971 mate
when everyone talks about that wtf 1971 it's like i was born bitch yeah
yeah so in in in my uh abundance through scarcity thesis i argue that we
peaked as a civilization in the 1970s and uh since then we have declined fairly rapidly i mean we've
had technological development and economic development since then so that sort of masks
the decline. But it's the natural state of any civilization to ebb and flow in and out of decline
and progress. So that just goes in waves. But the decline can sometimes become dangerous.
And it becomes particularly dangerous when we have a trifecta of disease, war, and natural
catastrophes coinciding. Because those three events, especially when they coincide, become
too expensive for any society. We can't muster the resources to take care of all of them at the same
time. We can often deal with one or two, but when they come at the same time, it becomes very,
very challenging to deal with them. And this is what we've seen in many civilizations that have
fallen. That is those three things that coincide. And what every state then does is that they start
devalue the currency, produce more of the currency with the same face value, which means that they're
confiscating the purchasing power of the people of today, but also the purchasing power of people
of tomorrow. So they are stealing from onboard generations to bolster the government and the
military so that we can deal with these threats now. But it never works. It never works. And when
it doesn't work and we lose the purchasing power of money or the functions of money, that means we
lose the ability to coordinate resources, coordinate the workforce, and continue to build.
We lose the ability to cooperate. And that just leads us further down on the decline.
And that's where we are now. We start to see symptoms of civilizational decline.
And that comes in stages. And those stages are predictable. And we can just put a line through
them and see where we are and compare it to previous civilizations. We see it in, when you
have a debasement of money, you are debasing civilization itself. We see it in our education.
We see it in our food, in our architecture, in our relationships. We see it in our health.
We see it in our culture, in everything. And then we see it in our population numbers.
when population numbers start declining.
That's a late symptom of civilizational decline.
And right now, if we look at Europe, for example,
you need 2.11 children per woman to maintain a steady state.
Whenever you go below 1.9,
we don't have any historic example, Tim,
of a nation or an empire or a civilization
that has gone below 1.9 and that has recuperated.
Every civilization that's gone below 1.9 has fallen.
Greece, 1.2, dead.
Germany, 1.4, I think, dead.
France, 1.4, dead.
Sweden, 1.4, dead.
But that doesn't bode well for feminism then, does it?
Because arguably the reason that population is declining
is because women have choices now.
And when a woman has a choice,
I mean, I don't know if this is true, I'm not a woman,
but when a woman has a choice, she doesn't have six kids.
That seems to be what's happening here.
But a lot of people would say that's not civilizational decline.
No, so what typically happens is that when we go from, say,
a poor society like a hunter-gatherer society
or an agricultural society into an industrial one
or a digital one, we have prosperity,
is that we go from about eight kids per woman
to about 2.5, 2.2.
Do we?
Yeah.
But we stabilize around 2.2.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So we don't go below that.
When we start going below that, that's pathological.
And in our case, do you know what it is?
Say, pick the US probably.
Do you know what it is currently in the US?
It's the fiat system.
No, do you know what the...
Oh, the numbers.
It's hard to talk about the U.S. as one place.
All right, pick a country.
Just give me an idea.
Yeah, so Greece, 1.2.
Really?
And Greece is, right.
The South Korea, I think there's something like 1.0.7.
So explain to me, break down then,
why the fiat system is causing birth rates to go down in Greece.
What are these incentives?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so the fiat system forces us into short-term thinking.
We all know that money is a mental operating system that governs time preference.
Language is a mental operating system that governs how we see and experience the world.
Money is a mental operating system that governs how deep into the future we value, think, and plan.
and when the money erodes, when we can no longer save for the future
and when money is broken, the debasement of money leads to our intellectual,
a debasement of our intellectual understanding of money.
So that we start to think that things like taxes, inflation, surveillance,
and these things are natural.
They're not.
and when money stops working and we are forced to survive here and now we're no we're not concerned
with our meditation routine our gym routine or building something for the future we see it very
clearly in every society that has devalued their currency that they stop building for the future
right now when we build a structure when we build a home we're happy if it stands in a few decades
we hardly care what it looks like and then we go back to ancient rome 2 000 years ago they had
very good money for a few centuries and we see it we see it in their morals we see it in their
architecture they had inscriptions in on their pantheon coliseum their aqueducts that say things
like I built this structure to stand for 10,000 years.
Who thinks like that today?
Nobody thinks like that today
because we don even have the ability We see it in their military We see it in their philosophy We see it in their education good money breeds a good civilization when money breaks and you don have the ability to save
anymore you're only you're stressed you're afraid and you are just struggling to keep your your head
above the surface that forces you into survival mode and that creates a world where we have broken
education, broken relationships, where we swipe Tinder instead of dating and building families.
Food deteriorates over time because with rampant inflation, food gets more expensive
to produce. So we switch out good food for bad food because bad food is cheaper.
and so we have bad education bad relationships bad food poor architecture and we have a lot more
tension and social unrest we have wars coming from this over resources eventually there there
will be you are now busy getting a long educations and working yourself to death you're not building
families. And you don't even want to have to put kids into the world as it looks under an advanced
fiat system. And when I say advanced, I mean a fiat system that has progressed long enough to start
deteriorating civilization. So you don't want to put kids into this world. You can't put kids into
this world because you can't afford it. And you are busy trying to survive. So this leads us to
having fewer and fewer children over time. And that's a late symptom of civilizational collapse
when we have a decreasing fertility rate or when we end up below replacement rate. And this is,
I mean, we know for a fact that we need more people to sustain civilization.
no civilization has survived when we when their money breaks none and when we see is what we see
is that population numbers decline and that's when it starts to really happen then it's then
it's gone too far there's been zero examples in history where we've gone below 1.9 and a lot of
countries in europe are already below 1.9 and we already have the the the the worst money in human
history we have successfully monetized debt which is the opposite of money which is the reason we
can create an infinite amount of it from thin air it's a dire situation but we have bitcoin
and bitcoin gives us this alternative monetary system that is almost ready to go
and that can allow us to again start coordinating our resources and the workforce and and and foster
cooperation across continents and generations in a way that we can do the only logical and possibly
the only thing that could possibly heal civilization in decline,
which is to continue to build.
To continue to build until the pendulum swings
from decline to progress again.
It would be unprecedented
if we manage to get out of this situation.
I personally don't see that Europe can exist in 100 years.
not in the way that we think about Europe.
What we're having is essentially an Islamification of Europe.
In France, they have 1.4 children per French native woman,
but 8.1 per Arabic woman.
Really?
Yeah.
Eight children?
Yes.
And so we have mass immigration.
we have it in uk we have it in sweden we have it in a lot of countries and we
we can no longer preserve the traditional european values and culture
that is just a fact we we might need the immigration to to uphold the institutions as they
are now because we need the people we need the workforce and so on but europe as we think of it
is not going to exist in 100 years.
Yeah, I'm not sure about the Islamification thing.
I think I know the argument and even the statistics,
but it'd be interesting to see if that really does occur.
I know a lot of people say it,
but a lot of people who I don't necessarily trust seem to say that as well,
which does tar it a little bit for me.
because often when people are quite dramatic about something you get you know you get this a
lot in the climate change brigade we've got seven years to you know as soon as people start acting
like that you know that they're someone you probably shouldn't listen to because you know
and i get a little bit about the islamification thing certainly in british cities you see huge
islamic communities i remember and even you know birmingham in the uk i remember i went there with
my wife a number of years ago it was quite a long time ago you know five or six years ago
to go to see something at the theater and i when i walked through the center of birmingham
i was quite shocked actually so a lot of islamic preachers just you know like they used to see
the old guys on the street corners with the bible and stuff i did find that a bit weird and
you do see a lot of that on social media but it i'm i'm i'm i'm suspicious number one because
social media loves showing you all that stuff to get you feeling 100 yeah and two the people that
are often shouting about it are people that like i wouldn't if greta thunberg told me the world was
going to end i'd be like okay she's got a history of anxiety really so that's an anxious person
talking well we've got we've got to fix this it's like okay you get to understand right the person
you don't want to listen to is the one who's the most scared of a certain outcome you want someone
who's very level-headed in that scenario
and the people that shout about that in that way.
So I don't know whether it's...
No, I agree with you.
I don't know either that there is an Islamification of Europe.
What I see is, what I believe is that
with the current birth rates,
we're not going to have the Europe that we think of today.
And I think that the Islamic people are much more resilient,
that they can come here and build a different kind of Europe.
I don't see that the countries that we have now
are going to be the countries that we think of them as now.
Agreed.
But what that means, I don't know.
Exactly.
I don't know if that's important or, you know, if that's...
because you know like you said nothing's nothing's stable nothing has ever been stable things have
always changed when you you know you're talking about the roman empire earlier you know how many
hundreds of years did that go on for and it's gone yes it's completely gone yeah you know well
you could argue that we are an extension of it but they're true exactly they saw they saw collapse
and i call that the definition of collapse is a rapid simplification of a complex society and you
what happens when a civilization falls and what's going to happen when europe falls
what does that mean though what does that yeah what it means what it means is that we have built
a lot of complexity into society so a complexity is uh is a spiral so you introduce a new technology
say that you introduce a steel and with steel you you get skyscrapers with skyscrapers um you you
you need to introduce uh you get new problems for every complexity that you introduce you need to
take care of electricity and garbage disposal with skyscrapers. And then you have airplanes,
and now you need new laws and regulations on how that works. So with every new technology that we
introduce, you introduce more complexity, and you can never reach a solution, a resolution,
where everything's just solved and we have everything we need. Complexity is a continuous
spiral and it gets more and more fragile and more and more expensive.
So what happens in a collapse is that we lose a lot of that complexity and along with the complexity we lose a lot of knowledge wisdom culture and technology A lot of that is lost
often forever. We don't know exactly what we lost with the fall of the Roman Empire.
And then society breaks down into these decentralized hubs, essentially, where the
communication is sparse, and we go back to a much simpler society, and then we start rebuilding
again so we could see something like that a modern version of that with europe where where
we break up and we lose a lot of the thing about the islamification thing is if you look at the
middle east it's islamic and dubai and charjah and a number of those emirates are phenomenally
modern let's say you know like i'd say there's a lot of complexity there and a lot of it
for sure is foreign talent putting its mark on a place but but i suppose what you're talking about
in europe is is is not islamification because otherwise you would say is well what why is dubai
so you know you're talking about a debt more like a certain type of person coming who doesn't care
about yeah islamification is a loaded word and it's not exactly what i mean um do you know what
mean though it's like it's more that like because you could you could have islamic scholars coming
to the uk and you would have beautiful architecture presumably uh i don't i don't really know i i'm
very suspicious of all that stuff i for sure there's many more middle eastern people living in
say my country the uk than there ever were um what that means i'm undecided upon at the moment
i am because because i know from working in the media that if you see something on the tv or on
your app um it's probably been put there on purpose to enrage you and you need to put it
into context and say okay if i was to look at a thousand things how many of them would be this
that you know if i took a thousand pictures around the uk how many of them would show me this
probably none of them actually um and but but but it it is interesting to to know what where that
where that's going because it brings up the the problem or the the i suppose it's a problem of
this very unfashionable idea in this day and age that your culture is fine and you don't want to
dilute it and you want it to stay as it is which which for someone like me through probably many
many subconscious triggers since i've been alive because there's been this real push to to say
you know like to the point now where you you you unless you live in Poland or
if you're lucky it's not very fashionable to say I love British culture you know you can say I love
Polish culture because they've really just unabashedly just said yeah we are we are we
you know but but we've all lived through a time when I don't know about you how old you are but
I lived through a time when British culture was very specifically something that it did almost
is not now 100 not now you know there was there was not only a much more of a kind of racial
homogeny to it but there was just a there was just a cultural homogeny to it and it's changed to
the most diverse culture on the planet kind of thing it's changed that's what it's become
if you come to where i live now british culture is still kind of alive and kicking and albeit
it quietly it's very it's very and i don't just mean it's all caucasian people which it is but
it's it's the cultural side of it it's the way that little english villages operate in a in a way
that only you would know as a brit you almost certainly have the same thing in your own country
when you go to those places where very high trust but no strangers very particular about the
cultural things that happen that make you feel part of something uh you know those things
definitely still exist but as a nation and this is probably true of most nations i don't really know
i know about my own is what what we are being tempted to think is our culture is absolutely
not my culture in the slightest right you know and but but it's being projected as british culture
and it may well be
I may be in the minority
now
I don't really know
if we don't
have immigration
from the Middle East
or anywhere else
we are definitely
going to fall
if we take Greece again
for example
Greece is
not going to have
a society
they're not going to be able
to
uphold their institutions
unless they have
a lot of immigration
it is
what does that mean
there's not enough people
to man there's not enough there's not enough people yeah but like to do what i mean governments
are way too big aren't they maybe the maybe you know i often think that especially thinking of
greece because of its rich history of governance when you go back it's simple it's simple math if
if there are no more people being born we need to take in people from other places doesn't it just
mean you get a smaller population yes smaller institutions yes yes smaller government is that
a bad thing i mean that's that's like well yes aging cell aging isn't it well we have you could
argue that we have an overpopulation problem and we do in a lot of sense but we have a much bigger
underpopulation problem i don't think we've got an overpopulation problem maybe you mean too many
people living in cities close right yeah i mean some people will argue that we have an overpopulation
problem i don't well they never flew over russia because you can fly in a plane very fast over
russia for hours and see nothing but forest right right so no we're not there's plenty of room on
the planet there's plenty of room absolutely um but if we want to maintain uh society as it looks
today and maintain the complexity that we have today we need uh at least replacement rate um
and we don't right now, which means that we are dependent on immigrants
to keep society going.
And so the countries that don't take in immigrants,
they're going to fall much faster.
And what this means for quite a lot of countries
is that we're going to have more homogeneity.
And I don't think that that's a bad thing.
I think that can be a very good thing,
but I also know that there's going to be a lot of tension.
There's going to be a lot of tension because it comes at a cost.
It comes at a cost of we are becoming something new in Europe.
A lot of countries are under a transformation where we have to let go of what we think of them as being.
It's the very same thing with a personal transformation.
You can only get to your new life by saying goodbye to your former life.
And that's the cost.
The cost of your new life is your former life.
And that can be a very painful process.
And whether that means that some culture, some wisdom, some knowledge, some, I don't know, things can just disappear from society.
And that's the only normal state that society has ever been, where we shed some things and move on to something new.
That's just how things progress.
but yeah the question people would probably rise at that raise at that point would be
is it progress though right if you're if you consider your culture is in decline
and what's replacing it is according to you worse then that's just is that just the ebb and flow of
you know using the analogy of the cell is that is the state it's like a cell or is the country a
cell and it it functions until it doesn't and then a new cell is born well it's probably not
good actually cells don't work like that but think about i mean i often think of all these
things a bit like a breath you know there's a there's an ebb and a flow of of most things
the state is a good example you know it built into the complexity of the state is its demise
because it begins with all the best intentions it can begin and it always ends at some point
in the situation we find ourselves in now which is incentivizing the worst people to rise to the top of the thing that is giving out the rules And it this self cycle of just bullshit
And, you know, the quagmire just gets thicker and thicker and thicker until it
collapses under the weight of itself.
Right. That's exactly what happens.
Right. So society collapses under the weight of its own complexity.
Yeah.
And eventually we don't have resources to maintain that complexity.
So progress is probably what, that's what doomed a lot of civilizations in history.
They expanded beyond their socioeconomic capabilities.
They exhausted their resources, their easily accessible resources,
until the point that they couldn't progress.
So they started declining.
And what you're saying as well is the symptoms of that overstretching is a decline in birth rates as well.
That's a late symptom.
Because it's adding stress to the population, which is basically incentivizing people not to have as many children as you would.
If you were en masse, people are probably looking at the world going, it's not the greatest time to bring too many kids into the world because I can't afford it.
They can afford it too busy, yeah.
And they don't want to, yeah.
so so that that's what we're seeing now so why if if the islamic thing's true going back to that
sorry it's not only islamic or whatever if the immigrant but but the reason that is interesting
is because you said there was a they were averaging eight people eight children that's
that's one statistic yeah and i think it's a it's a bit cherry-picked all right but even if it's more
why aren't they doing the same thing under the same pressure yeah that i mean i thought that
was down to feminism i assumed that that was education women's education and women it's
emancipation that's giving them the option to not have children which is prior to things like the pill
and education women just got pregnant as every continuously until they couldn't and that's kind
of how things operated i don't know i don't i really find all that stuff completely um just
i don't think the word's mesmerizing i just can't think about it i've got no idea i i find it hard
to stretch my understanding out to this kind of mass of people and i i really find it it's only
easy to think about my own situation in that and my family and the people around me and that's about
it kind of stopped there really do now i i i i just stop at the people i know and care about
and and going forward i think i'm realizing that that's who you need to look out for probably right
and position yourself well if you believe there's some kind of a collapse coming which
i i think on paper i probably would but in reality do things collapse i don't know it's
very difficult to say you know what you have to take into account is that collapse is slow
there's no single generation that ever notices a collapse the romans didn't know they were
collapsing and they collapsed for 500 years is that right yeah it takes time to collapse
it's such a slow process
what you wouldn't notice
but how do you quantify the end of a collapse
how do you quantify the end of the Roman Empire
that's
that's the job of historians and anthropologists
they say
there are a variety of dates
suggested
there's no real consensus on when the empire
ended
and same will be true for
us
they might say that we have already collapsed now
I don't think that. I think it's early. But what you notice when you go through collapse is that
you don't have as big a claim on the economy as your parents did, for example. Or you may be eating
food that is different. Or the architecture looks different. Or relationships have taken on a
different nature. You notice these kinds of things. And that may create a longing back to
a time that you never experienced, where things were just radically different.
But apart from that, there's not going to be looting, fire, and rioting, and screaming in
the streets. That's a Hollywood version of a collapse. That's not how it happens.
It happens over centuries.
But we now have technology to make our decline go faster because we have the printing machine.
We have the money printer.
So we can debase the money.
And when we debase the money, we lose our ability to uphold our institutions and coordinate workforces and resources and foster corporations and so on much faster.
You mean since the kind of digital age?
Yes.
Because fiat currency has been around for a while, hasn't it?
But since the digital age, it's been supercharged.
Yes, yes, yes.
It's been supercharged since the digital age.
I mean, you know, when I end up having these kind of conversations about the state of the world, I often come back to the fact that the internet is the forcing function with all this shit.
Just like the printing press was the forcing function for a hugely chaotic period after it was invented.
And in many ways, it's the release of information.
The printing press did the same thing.
and then look at all the shit that happened after that historically.
Now you've got this explosion of information and it's changing people's minds on so many things.
And now it's also confusing a hell of a lot of people.
And in our age, you link that with this technological advancements in travel, in, you know, all this stuff.
It's a recipe for disaster.
I mean, it's, you know how people always say, historians, you look back at history and then it all makes sense.
For me, it's making sense right now.
I feel like we're in the thick of it and it all makes complete sense.
I think that's because you're a Bitcoiner.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah, you may be right.
You may be right.
I've got something to compare it to.
I have.
Yeah, it could be.
But, you know, I've stopped accepting the answer that Bitcoin fixes this.
It's not good enough for me anymore.
Because Bitcoin might fix it in 300 years,
but Bitcoin doesn't fix your inability to spend Bitcoin because of KYC, for example, right now.
Yeah.
No, and I don't think that's the point.
We have come to a point in Bitcoin where we have very carefully taken care of a flame in a wind.
And that flame has been very fragile.
So, Hopium, all these smaller meetups, when we have conferences and we cosplay these citadels, which is exactly what we're doing.
We are just caring for that flame.
But now that flame has grown.
to a point where we don't need that anymore.
Bitcoin doesn't need me.
It doesn't need you.
It doesn't need Michael Saylor.
It doesn't need more conferences.
Bitcoin can stand on its own legs now.
So we are just at the stage
where we can begin talking about
the risks of Bitcoin,
of hyper-Bitcoinization
and what it doesn't fix
and how we can make it better.
Because Bitcoin has a lot of problems
and it's going to cause a lot of problems.
And it's not Jesus coming to save us.
We treat it as a cult and we kind of should
because there is mythology embedded in it.
Dude, you say it's not Jesus.
What is it that, you know...
One time, one of the first things I asked ChatGPT, actually, when it first came out, it was good.
I said, name some cultures that have a myth around the year 2000.
And it gave me a few.
And I thought, well, there's some I haven't heard of then.
So I put, name 50 cultures, 50 myths about the year 2000.
And it gave me 50.
this tribe from South America, this Christianity, the second coming, the Mayan calendar, loads.
I mean, there are literally so many mythological examples of something around the year 2000
causing a change.
What happened around 2000?
It's either the internet or Bitcoin.
And if you were to say, you know, like, oh, the second coming of Jesus, the Christ, it
would never appear as a guy who has a beard.
But never.
That's not cool.
That's not how you do it.
Like, Jesus wouldn't appear as a guy with a beard,
because no one would believe him, would they?
If you came out and said, I'm Jesus, which people have,
they'll say no.
Come back as a digital store of value?
Who knows?
Yeah.
For all I know, Jesus can be different things to different people.
Yeah.
But take any of the 2,000 predictions.
For sure.
Okay, we could absolutely entertain the idea that Bitcoin is Jesus.
And I'm not against that idea at all.
But I do also see that Bitcoin comes with a lot of problems and it's going to cause a lot of problems.
Same here.
He turned the tables in the heat, didn't he?
The money traders outside the temple caused a lot of problems.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Yeah.
I mean, revolutions are bloody.
Well, put it this way, right?
something that's undeniable about bitcoin which you all all bitcoiners know is it does change your
the way you interact by by account of following it like you would a religion
the morals in inverted commas of the bitcoin ecosystem cause you to fall in line with them
And they are a certain ideology, longevity, trust, honesty, those kind of good attributes that we all think of.
You do need to fall in line with those.
And Bitcoin is due.
And people that do change from low-time preference thinking, high-time preference thinking to low-time preference.
I've seen that in my wife.
Yes.
Yeah, that's a real thing.
It's a very real thing.
I've seen it in one of my best friends as well.
And I think a lot of people underappreciate the importance of that.
Well, no, I would say I would easily believe that that's the whole point of it.
I think we reached this point in history from a, if you were, if you go fully spiritual, macro spiritual and say the world was reaching this point, either naturally this thing arose to counteract it because that's one of the laws of the universe.
or somebody said right i'm going to counteract this myself i probably believe it's a natural
thing because i think you know yin and yang just function together and everything tends towards
equilibrium but then it you know i would say it was highly necessary and it without it we would
be hurtling in the same direction with nothing no way of predicting how to bring people back to the
idea of long-term thinking and all the stuff that goes along with it you know i would easily believe
that yeah time preference lowering our time preference is how we avoid stagnation and it is
the uh it is part of the engine of our cultural cultural and technological evolution as a species
we cannot progress without continuously lowering our time preference if we instead go the other
direction and we increase our time preference then we end up uh in in a falling society in a
declining society without children and without making any progress which is where we are now
that's where we are now and everyone does think in a high time preference it's obvious you see it
around you yeah everywhere you see it you see it in more the place i see it the most is in
architecture and buildings yeah buildings get thrown up overnight pretty much my house that i
live in now built in the 1500s the walls are as thick as that they're like that thick yeah um
you didn't need to build them like that the contrast is very evident in our situation it's
also if you look at food like we we have gone from from whole foods to fiat food and that's also a
radical change in how we live our lives yeah i think it's also very evident in our relationships
um young people are not dating young people are not having sex and people are swiping
instead of building families this is also because of high time preference
i think yeah i'm feeling the conversation ebbing but i don't want to end on a bad note
Do you know how long we've been talking?
Tell me.
Two hours, 55 minutes.
Okay, perfect.
We're almost over three hours.
So let's turn this around and talk about something much more positive.
Yeah, go on.
You choose.
I feel like we never finished the Kardashev arguments.
Okay.
Should we go there?
Yeah, go on.
Let's do it.
All right.
Okay.
so we ended up describing the the the three levels of uh of the kardashiev scale we have a planetary
a stellar and a galactic type of civilization and we are currently at 0.6 or so so yeah 0.6 0.7
so we have a long way to go before we come but how do we know that this scale is correct though
for example so so uh no this was actually um so uh nikolai kardashan he introduced the scale then
carl sagan uh the renowned uh astrophysicist and author he uh made some mathematics from it
so there is an actual scale that you can look at look at and you look at the energy output
of a civilization how the hell do they work that one that sounds a bit dubious well you can you can
look at the math and I don't understand it
at depth, but it's there.
And then you can also just look at it
by analogy and just
say that, okay, a planetary
civilization is one that
you have a planetary
stellar and a galactic civilization.
You can just simplify it to that as well.
Colt say you just put numbers on it.
So
we have,
I would argue,
we are approaching the the uh cardish of type 1 civilization by introducing type 1 technologies
already now well there's one that i haven't personally made up my mind on if it's a if it's
a cardish of type 1 technology so i'm going to skip that but the first real one the first real
cardish of type 1 technology that we have is the internet that's our first planetary truly
planetary technology and that's an oh okay yeah what's the other one roads and i haven't really
made up my mind on that well if you say roads you have to say arrowheads wouldn't you it's a
planetary phenomenon it's a planetary phenomenon but it's nothing that that allows us to work
together as a species as as other i know a road in the uk doesn't help you in america exactly
that's that's why i'm uh like even if we have a global shipping yeah uh i mean i'm i'm on the
about these types of technologies but um so i considered in the internet to be uh the first
cardish type one technology what would be another one can you like a yeah well yeah exactly so
another one would be a global hive mind for example but that's the internet again right
It is in a way, it's an extension of the internet, but where we communicate with thoughts.
And because internet 2.0 is not web three or whatever, it is us communicating directly with thoughts.
Is that a transhuman thing?
It's a transhuman thing.
It's an extension of the internet where we already have the technology to send texts with our minds.
Really?
Yeah.
Are you talking about Elon and…
Neuralink is one example and he's not first with this.
uh but yeah they're making great strides and so so we have the technology to actually text each
other but we don't have like telepathy it's not magic it's an engineering problem
so telepathy for you is not me tapping into your brain no it's us communicating
with our thoughts no i mean it's not it it's a function of the technology it's not yes it's you
i sitting here not moving our lips and mouths i'm not detecting your thoughts your thoughts are
being transcribed into digital forms sent to me yes okay yeah which is not really a tell
maybe that is telepathy it's one form uh i mean we could go back and forth on what the why would
we do that do you think that's more liberating it's all about um taking away friction in
communication we need faster if we can communicate at the speed of thought that would vastly improve
communication yeah I'm pretty sure I can keep up with my own thoughts yeah you
know when I you can't you can't come yeah it's much harder to because thoughts
are abstract and and if we can find a way to communicate directly without
forming words we would have an entirely new language eventually where we don have to articulate the words and transmit the words but we can actually have abstract ideas just moving into each other mind like the mobile
phone pad where you just make a shape kind of like that yeah so so that would be another type of
kardashiv type one technology and but we have a second one and that's bitcoin
bitcoin is our second kardashiv type one technology is it yeah i think of it as the
internet again i mean it's the same this all this is this is i would say the the k1 technology is
the digital realm because all these things are like the digital realm was something we could
never access until now right and it's a frontier it's full of nothing you can do all kinds of
things and now we're colonizing it we're colonizing the digital world and now people are trying to
also police it already yes yes it was quite quick it's only 30 years and they're already trying to
say you can't do this here yes it's like it would really was an empty free frontier for you know
so what the the internet is essentially also just an extension of of gutenberg's printing press by
further democratizing information freeing freeing the the written and spoken word to the to the
people well the spoken word is the that's the revolution that is the revolution absolutely we
already had that and what the internet did for information we now have bitcoin doing for value
um and i mean we can we can also look at like we're gonna need money for quite a long time
going forward and bitcoin we can use as uh as a type one a civilization because we can use it on
the moon we can use it on mars with some difficulties and some trade-offs transmitting
it over long distances isn't it you've got it has to work as a time chain doesn't it you have to be
able to like if you go further than that you're not going to be able to sync with uh with the
network very well so you're going to become a second-hand uh bitcoin citizen if you do well
you would be a different currency i think you'd have it have to be and wouldn't it because you
could come back essentially you can play with the idea like say that australia was cut off
from the internet for a few weeks.
And then they come back online.
All the transactions that they have made,
they would sync with the blockchain
and the blockchain would heal itself.
It's kind of like the same if you go into deeper space.
You would need some time,
but the time chain would heal itself over time.
But around Mars, we reach the hash horizon.
So it's very difficult to use Bitcoin beyond that point.
But we can use it as a planetary monetary system.
It's the first truly planetary monetary system that we have in the sense that it aligns with what a type 1 civilization would be.
A civilization free of coercion, a civilization that is free.
is that what is that the is that the governance side of type of a type one it's abundant so much
abundance well no no you said that we'd still use money i don't think you can have a true type
one civilization and not have it be free but i mean the time comes and probably not that long
where money becomes far less important because the marginal cost of things is almost zero
you know once once ai robots are also mining things as well as building themselves and
you know who knows what the marginal cost of those things will be yeah and then the question
is what what are we to do or what is money what is money even necessary like bitcoin may well be
our last money i think i think yeah i think bitcoin is final money i absolutely do i think
bitcoin is the last form of money that we will need as long as we're bound to this planet and
we need money in the sense that we need it now.
But that doesn't mean that I think money is going to go away.
I think that we, I mean, we're probably moving into a social economy
where what we truly prize and value is human connection, interaction.
Hopefully.
Yeah, I think we're going towards that.
I think we're getting rid of all the menial jobs and essentially every repetitive task that we don't want to do.
What will you do being a philosopher full time?
This is, again, the question of radical self-alignment.
What I would do is I would spend time in nature, or I would do essentially what I do now.
I would spend time in nature, but I would do differently.
I would have conversations with people.
I would write.
And I don't want an AI or a robot to do my art
so that I can do my laundry and my dishes.
I want an AI, I want a robot to do my dishes and my laundry
so I can do my art.
And I would do that.
And I would do all the things that I enjoy.
I would play chess.
I would write books.
I would have conversations with people.
I would see places.
I would spend time in nature.
I would build a family.
I would live freely and have peace, joy, love, and happiness.
I hate to try and burst your bubble, but at various times in my life, I've lived with that much freedom.
and what i've realized is that i need the struggles because it stops feeling like it stops
being meaningful without the struggles yes yes i'm not saying get rid of the struggles i think
they're part of the human condition regardless of how you live your life the struggles give
life meaning and um i think they're just going to take on a different form they're not going to come
from having to wake up before you're fully rested.
They're not going to come from you having to pay your bills.
They're not going to come from disagreements
with a boss you don't want to work for.
They're going to come from different things.
They're going to come from raising children,
building things,
and becoming a better version of yourself,
performing the will of your community or your God or whatever it is.
Struggle is part of the human condition.
It's part of the trajectory that we're on as spirits on this planet.
It's part of the lessons that we go through.
So I don't see us ever getting rid of our struggles.
And the struggle is going to be that whether we want them to or not, because we are bodies, we are emotions, we are thoughts, we are all of these things that come with inherent struggling.
And just being in the human condition is a struggle in itself.
It just doesn't have to come from the type of life that we have right now.
It can come from a vastly different type of place that can be so much better than what we have now.
don't you get the feeling that if you look at this community here in riga now that we're with
and the freedom community in general let's say it's it's part of its allure is that we're all
fighting for something and when you get that thing um what happens because you see a lot of
struggle groups i think this has happened a bit in the in the gay community we need to fight
yeah right so what do we fight for when we've got it i think the gay community have got what
they wanted and then some yeah and it's not really so so it's really to have gay pride and things
like that i suppose it's fine it's a good excuse for it's like an excuse to go out and party but
really um you you don't need it no one no i don't know about you but no one cares about that fact
anymore i don't anyway right and i'm quite normal you know but but what what a bitcoin is do when
when we're living on a bitcoin standard and everything's cool i think we just want to
experience progress i think that's it i think we want to experience progress and that means fighting
But well, I'm going to word it differently because I think what I've noticed about myself, when you take away those things that require struggle and bullshit and all that kind of stuff is I end up further in service, what I would call service.
So doing for example doing this my belief in doing creating this show because it doesn make me money it costs me money but i believe i don but i can still get by so it not a problem you know but i feel like i i
i'm learning and someone else will learn someone might listen to say this conversation and have a
real turning point in their life probably not it's all over the place but but but that's of
That's service. And service is something that's easier to do when you take away the need to get up at seven o'clock and go into some bullshit job, for example, which is going back to your sort of scarcity mindset, abundance type thing.
When you have abundance, the ability to be in service seems much better.
And I think it's the most primordial meaning you can have in life.
Right.
Service.
Yes.
Even when you relate it to things like, like the kid, my kids are my most important thing in my life. It's still about service. It's still service to others. It's like, I, I look after them. I do things for them. I teach them. I pay for them. I, you know, it's not the kids. It's the service to the kids. That is the thing that gives your life meaning. And it can be serviced as a, you can be a philosopher and you can talk and podcast for your living. And, and it's the service you're, you're, you're hoping that people come with you on the day.
journey and learn you know and um i think that that would always i think if i'm when when i have
the luxury to think about it which should be all the time but i've like everyone fall into the trap
of getting stuck up in my brain and analyzing things and getting too wrapped up in all that
side of it the truth is that service and it's a great word it really does depict the action very
well is the place i hope everyone arrives or most people arrive when ai takes away all the
bullshit from our lives which it might it might do the opposite as well but the menial jobs can be
replaced by you being in service to other people and like you say service requires a connection
and with a human being and which we're sorely lacking as the internet is one of the sort of
secondary effects of the internet is this is this splintering of groups of people who and we still
think it's fine it's brought me together with pretty much all my friends now but i have to
maintain that i have to make sure i meet them in real life it's not good enough to just you know
have those connections on the internet but but i don't know i don't know what do you think what
happens to your life when you um when ai is washing your clothes you've got a personal robot
that does all that shit that you or that gets in the way of the good stuff
i mean
got some microplastics
i'm actually going to get one out the fridge keep talking i'm listening yeah
so i think that when we don't have to do the kinds of jobs that we do today
we are first of first of all gonna have other types of jobs we're still gonna be
we're gonna we're gonna redesign the rat race i'm sure of it for for some time in a bad way
same as the rat race yes yes um because it it's going to require more than just i the ability to
be productive um in a on a scale that we've never been before we've seen that time and time again
where we with the industrial revolution we replaced our muscles and now we're replacing our cognition
but that has only ever led to us demanding more so i think that we we are
gonna lose a lot of jobs and create a lot of new ones and we're just gonna expect more
and that's gonna lead to a new kind of rat race i'm not sure um we can sort of see the
shape of it, but we can't see the details of it yet. But let's say that we can entertain the
idea that we will find ourselves in a world where we are in a post-scarcity economy,
and a post-labor economy, where we don't have to do jobs to make a living.
and what our lives will look like then
can be challenging for people who have been working their entire lives now.
They don't know what they would do all the time
because they have been indoctrinated into that world.
They're damaged by the rat race.
They have essentially forgotten what it means to be human.
If we look back a few thousand generations,
Let's go back, say, 30,000 years or so.
What our days looked like then, we tended to our injuries and our peers.
We tended a fire.
We gathered food.
We traded with other tribes.
We sat around the fire and shared stories.
We connected with nature, with the stars, with cosmos, with self, with other, with God.
We made much fewer decisions.
And I think that is a much, much richer life than what we have now.
It sounds like it contains less, so therefore it should be a lesser life.
It is not.
this is what your life looks like now.
You wake up feeling drowsy, you have your caffeine,
you go about your day and make a gazillion decisions.
And for every decision that you make,
you are clogging your pathways in your mind with glutamate,
an excitatory neurotransmitter.
and then throughout the day adenosine which is a is another neurotransmitter that
builds sleep pressure builds up through through the day and then you have a lot of impressions
and things like this that are that you're going to have to process and then you go to bed
and then you start to that washes away the adenosine the sleep pressure molecule and the
glutamate, but you never really get to a place where your mind is clean.
So then you go about the next day with some debt, sleep debt and neurochemical debt.
So you compensate for that by drinking more caffeine.
And caffeine is one of the coolest molecules evolutionarily that has ever come into existence.
It is a molecule that awakens you but then prevents you from sleeping.
But it creates the solution to the problem that it creates.
And it's highly addictive.
So it has gone from this place in the Middle East and then colonized entire planet because it has hijacked our species.
So we now live a life where we are constantly in a neurochemical imbalance that is hurting us.
And on top of that, we are consuming more and more content because we are lacking in dopaminergic resiliency.
So we are now not as dopaminergic resilient as we used to be.
And what that means is that when you're not dopamine resilient, what that means is that you are much more inclined and at risk of binge eating and falling into doom scrolling and things like this.
And you don't get enough reward from a conversation or exercise.
So you get less reward than you would normally in a healthy dopaminergic system.
And then when you get a spike, or rather you get a spike from certain things like eating
chocolate instead of just having a normal response to it, and then you're more likely
to fall into a binge So we are neurochemically imbalanced and that the life that we lead today And it hurting us It not fulfilling us And like I said on top of that we also consuming
so much content. I remember back in the day when podcasts weren't as popular as they are today.
One of the first ones that I really enjoyed was Radiolab. And it was like a science podcast.
and I would listen to it at 1x speed
and I would listen to it twice and I would take notes.
And then I would talk to my friends about it.
I had perfect retention.
Now I listen to a lot of podcasts
at the very minimum 1.5 speed,
often two times.
And I listen to 100 podcasts
and I listen to several a day.
I have zero retention.
That must be weird.
I still sit down quietly and listen to one.
You're an exception to him.
And that's why,
but that's what this is.
This is,
this is a one X podcast.
And it's super enjoyable.
It's super enjoyable.
I've had my,
I've had my mind blown listening to two people sit at a table,
talk who live on the other side of the world at a different time in history.
You know,
there's,
I don't see the point of,
it's not enjoyable to listening,
listen to them at full speed,
but but it's missing the whole point of a podcast yeah like you can realize that sit at this table
if you get it right it works with headphones yes yes sitting at home it's a joke i always say it
in the intros to my pod you know sit down find a quiet spot relax enjoy the next couple of hours
because it's like that's the point it's enjoyable talking do you know what it's even more enjoyable
listening yes really you know engaging with the conversation be part of it that's very difficult
to do in the fiat system well i don't know there's a lot of opportunities you know you're going to
listen to a podcast when you're doing other things that's the beauty exactly but there's so much
so and that's the point what what kind of life are we looking forward to uh what can we look
forward to in a in a world where we don't have our fiat jobs anymore and we don't have the types
of responsibilities that we don't have what are we going to talk about we'll have we'll have a lot
to talk about we'll remember what it means to be human beings we'll sit around the fire no no this
is gonna it's gonna be a wonderful time you you're you're absolutely right though that um i i've been
a keen observer of fire fires for a very long time and i've always sat around fires i've taught it to
my children we all sit around fires in the winter inside in the and in the summer outdoors we cook
over open fires um the the lot the the the tradition i feel like i was put on this earth
to do is the storytelling tradition for a lot of my life i've done it through visual storytelling
right but i never felt as comfortable as i do now just talking about stuff and it's it's primordial
the talking is we've got no fire but but but it's this is the same thing this is what we do we
We've talked about our day.
We're talking about much more bigger ideas, potentially.
Yes, we live through our stories.
And we live through other people's stories.
And human beings are storytellers.
We are a species of engineers, explorers, and storytellers.
That's what we are.
And I think we're going back to that.
And I think it's going to be liberating.
I think that we are gonna rediscover what it means to be human to connect with one another and realize that life is
Perfect just as it is. We don't need to fill it with a lot of stuff
We don't need to make a gazillion decisions a day
It's perfectly fine to just be and where we can learn that our primary architecture is to just be
Not to do we are human beings not human doings and where we can rest comfortably in our
in our being
I think that is where we can
flourish truly
we can be in a place
where we connect with self
other nature, cosmos
and just have
endless conversations
or just sit in silence and just be
and that is a wonderful
experience
what about K3 societies though
we'll never get to there
we're all sitting around the fire chatting
how are we going to master the the energy of the solar system that's that's part of the jobs that
we'll have uh that's that's part of going there uh we're always going to have our struggles our
technological struggles our philosophical struggles and so you think we can this is
something i've always found fascinating about the bitcoin community is you get all these people
heavily into bitcoin tech freedom tech this kind of stuff but everyone dreams of having a homestead
and it's this funny little balance between the two.
Is that what you're talking about?
This is the solar punk vision.
Is that right?
I've never heard that.
Yeah, the solar punk vision is when we are rediscovering
what it means to be human.
And that for somebody means running around naked
to do an LSD all day.
For others, it might mean sitting around fire telling stories.
For somebody else, it'll mean being an explorer
right now we are
peering into the oceans of the cosmos
and as Carl Sagan said
the waters are looking quite friendly
we're going to be standing on
others stellar bodies
being explorers
there's a lot of work
to do, a lot of meaningful
work to do
and then there's a lot of being to be done
alright, final question
you're going to love this one
why?
Why do we need to go out into space?
Why do we need to do all this stuff?
Because we are honoring the human experience.
As human beings, we are engineers, we are explorers, and we are storytellers.
And as a consequence of that, we will go to other, we will look beyond the hill.
We will row across the pond.
We will build ships and airplanes and spacecraft and we will explore.
And then we will tell our stories.
We will tell stories about our days, stories about our adventures, stories about our ideas.
And your primary purpose, your primary archetype is just to be.
All of the other stuff is something that we do because we can and because we want to,
but we don't have to.
The only thing you have to do as a human being is to be.
And you can always find your personal why,
and that is up to you because there is no meaning inherent to the cosmos.
You create it.
So we have, as Brian Cox says, a tremendous responsibility as a species.
Because if our species goes extinct, we might eliminate meaning from an entire galaxy by virtue of going extinct.
So we have a tremendous responsibility on a cosmological scale preserving meaning.
because you and I create meaning.
It doesn't exist.
You and I create it.
It doesn't exist inherently in the cosmos.
We create it.
So you decide what your why is.
The only thing we can do
is to honor the human experience.
And if you want to live a radically aligned life,
my suggestion is that you learn to live in body
and learn body's way of communicating with you.
And you are either a storyteller, an explorer,
or something that is aligned with what it means to be human.
We don't have to invent all these crazy kinds of jobs
just to have something to do.
we don't need more content just to numb ourselves there's a life to be lived
and a human experience to be had so because
okay i think we better knock it on the head mate it's not that's three and a half hours i'm like
my brain is frazzled i feel like i've done a little bit of um a tiniest bit of buffo
but it's in a good way i enjoyed it yeah me too i loved it i enjoyed this thank you for a great
conversation
um and um yeah and good luck i still feel like i i don't know the answer but i'm not sure i knew
the question because really at the end of the day what can you do but one foot in front of the other
end of your life you know it doesn't matter you have to make peace with that reality doesn't exist
time doesn't exist the meaning doesn't exist and death is an illusion life is an illusion
you have to make peace with these if you if you like you can intellectualize these things and then
they don't really mean a lot but when you truly see it it takes on a different meaning and then
it can be quite difficult to make peace with but if you choose to have us do a spiritual journey in
life you have to make peace with these kinds of things yeah i could easily make peace with doing
nothing right now i need some time off all right only thanks mate and enjoy your talk tomorrow and
your panel and all that kind of stuff and it's been great talking to you thank you thank you
Thank you.