When trust between two people goes down, the energy level goes up, which means I have to work
harder and do more things to sustain what could be there if the trust was higher. At the heart of
who I am and what I do in anything, it's heavily influenced and shaped by what I saw and what I
experienced in those moments. But if you come and talk to me about something that lacks complexity
or intellectual rigor.
I'm just like, I can't get away from the person fast enough.
And the whole time I'm there, I'm like smiling and like nodding my head
because I don't want to be rude.
But deep down inside, I'm thinking this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Yeah.
Okay.
So is it happening right now?
No, this is amazing.
Of course, what are you going to say?
No, I enjoy these types of questions
because these questions have deep compression.
These are the types of questions I never get asked.
These are the types of questions I love.
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Let's do this.
Welcome to All in Bitcoin, Reston.
I'm excited to talk to you about Bitcoin,
everything you've built and what next. Let's start with my 21 takes on you and take it from there.
Okay. Where did you grow up and what kind of kid were you?
Oh, so I grew up in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area.
Football, Steelers football was really big in the Pittsburgh area.
Peter McCormick's football?
No, this is American football. Yeah, not soccer. What kind of kid was I?
well I guess if if my parents were here and they would describe me how would they describe me I was
I was always kind of cheerful I would say I was always kind of very positive that was a very happy
kid I would say academically math came very easy for me language was extremely difficult for me
Yeah. English, I struggled in school a lot.
But you're an avid reader.
I'm an avid reader. And that was the other thing. In high school, I didn't really read that much.
I didn't like it.
And what changed?
My frustration was in school, I had to read stuff that I had no interest in.
Same here.
Yeah. And I was just very frustrated. It's like, I don't want to read this book on Shakespeare or this. I just found it super frustrating. My love for knowledge and learning really happened after college, like almost immediately after college for some reason.
You know what I think it was? I think it was I was really interested in investing mostly because it was something that I could apply the math to like after I graduated. And I immediately was like, well, who's the best in the world at investing? And I quickly saw like Warren Buffett. And then Warren Buffett was really big on reading and like expanding your knowledge. And I was like, OK, well, if that guy's doing that, that's what I'm going to do. And I just started doing the same thing.
So that's where the reading came after college was mostly because of that. But when I was in high school, I was frustrated with respect to anything language related. And to this day, I am horrific at foreign languages. For whatever reason, in my mind, it just does not sync.
so like when I'm around people that speak three or five languages or whatever it just
does not compute like it just does not make sense to me how somebody could even speak a second
language let alone a third or fourth language just doesn't make sense to me so as a kid what
was the one thing you were obsessed with that nobody else got I don't know that I was really
obsessed with anything I would say that I didn't really have a lot of hardship as a kid you know
you see some kids that are shaped very early on because maybe they had parents that were
super hard on them or they were living with a mother or a father. Like I didn't really have
that. I had, I had great parents that raised me. I lived in a really stable area. It wasn't like I
was, uh, like my family was super rich either, but it was just a very normal American, like
upbringing that didn't have like any volatility in my environment. Like my environment was very
stable. I think because of that, I really wasn't polarized into being obsessed with any particular
thing. I was just kind of like, I had my friends. I was in Boy Scouts. I loved playing baseball.
I'm curious, what were the topics of conversation at the dinner table at home?
Nothing really that stands out as that exciting.
Politics? Religion?
We went to a Presbyterian church every Sunday. Politics were not really a big topic in my house. My mother owned her own dance studio. She had like 200 students. So she was an entrepreneur with her dance studio.
and then my father had made investments into apartment buildings through the years so they
were both very entrepreneurial but not in a high risk kind of way so like I think a lot of people
today they would hear an entrepreneur that goes out and raises a bunch of money and they do like
these kind of like very high risk type things they were like small because it was a small town it's
not a big like outside of Pittsburgh I think this it's a town called Saxonburg Pennsylvania
really small town, really small town, like 300 people. They worked very hard. Neither of them
went to college. I think I learned the hard work from both of them because they were always kind of
grinding in their own kind of way. So that kind of came instilled in me and my sister is, you know,
you got to work hard to make money and it's not going to just be given to you and that kind of
mindset. At what point did you notice that the world runs on systems and that some of them are
broken? I think when I went to combat, I went to West Point, I got a degree. I then go to flight
school, which was two years. And then I go into, I went and flew in South Korea. None of it was,
none of the world was looking like it was broke to me even through all of that and then um when I
went to combat with the 101st Airborne to Afghanistan and I came back and based on the
stuff that I saw when I was there I was just like how old were you at the time I was in my 20s but
when I came back I was just like why the hell was I there for a year doing what I was doing
and that's when the whole like i think everything like my worldview that was very american dream
very just just stable i think that's the best way to describe like my whole upbringing through
college graduation from college and then i go to combat like everything was just very stable and
predictable and just kind of the american dream ish you know it wasn't like i was it wasn't luxury
but it was like good steady life. And when I came back from that, I was just like,
like, what the hell are we even doing over there? What was I doing over there? Why was I doing that
over there? And the whole thing was just really got me thinking hard. And I still didn't think
that, that the whole world was kind of had like, like in Bitcoin, we say like the fiat disaster,
like all the incentives in the fiat system are broken and they're pointing in the wrong direction
and making people have short-term interest. None of that stuff was any part of my vocabulary or
even thinking at the time. Through all of that, I was a hardcore Warren Buffett fan and somebody
that was reading a ton. And then the 2008 crisis also kind of played out during that kind of
timeframe too. And I had some investments in the market and like they got obliterated in the 2008
crisis. And I come back from the war and like all this kind of stuff. And I was like, what is
happened? Like, it was just this moment in time where I was just questioning like almost everything
and questioning the world around me. Cause I was, you know, I was studying finance,
self-taught finance. I had like, I think I had one economics class at West Point.
What did you study?
I studied aerospace engineering. So when I graduated, I was studying investing,
like self-taught investing and accounting and like all of that. I was just super interested
in all of it. So the 2008 crisis thing happened and I was like, okay, well,
evidently everything I thought I knew about financial markets wasn't true because all these
all these companies that I owned went down. So like, how does that compute?
And I looked at what the central banks were doing and printing all this money and buying bonds. And
I was like, hold on, like, that's not a free and open market. Like that's manipulated. Like,
how's that going to end? Well, you saw it that clearly at that time. Very clearly like 2000,
2008 happened to like 2010. And I was just looking at what central banks were doing in the market.
And I didn't have a podcast or any, I wasn't like a podcast or anything.
I'm still in the army.
And were you already reading the Austrians?
No, no, no.
I was much more just trying to understand how to value public equity to buy it on the stock market, thinking that I'm doing what Warren Buffett's doing.
Right.
But when I saw like how the central banks responded to that crisis, I was like, this is all just fake.
Like this is, this is not like, there's no way this is, this is a naturally occurring
system, but the whole system was like corrupted.
I was like, that's, this can't be solved this way.
As an engineer, you're trying to build something that makes life better, right?
So to do that, you have to first assess your environment.
You say, okay, I'm going to build something in this environment because you have to understand
that very deeply before you build something to know that it'll be able to withstand whatever.
And so I was just looking at the environment. I'm saying, hold on, this isn't like naturally
occurring This isn like what we taught in school that this is a free and open market This is a manipulated market And so that really caused me to go deep down the rabbit hole of trying to learn everything I could about financial markets
What's something you picked up in the military that never left you?
There's a lot of things that I picked up.
List them.
you know i a lot of it came from my time at west point it was because i was at a very influential
age when i showed i mean i was 18 years old when i showed up at west point the first thing that i
learned there um was shut your mouth and do what you're told and you've got to learn how to follow
before you could ever learn how to lead. That's a very humbling experience for somebody that's never
been forced to go through something like that. So for me, I show up and I mean, the whole first year
is just, just shut up. Like, don't open your mouth. If somebody's talking to you, like,
you better get the job done. There's never an excuse ever. Like literally, like if somebody
came up to me and said, Preston, why did you not complete task XYZ by 10 o'clock? And the answer
is always no excuse, sir. Even if there was a good excuse, the answer was no excuse.
And so what does that teach you? It teaches you to take self-responsibility.
And I think this was a massive, massive asset for me personally, because anytime something goes
wrong in my life, I'm very rarely looking at saying, well, that person over there caused it,
or this thing out in my environment made me mess up. Instead, you get wired and conditioned because
it's psychological conditioning. But in a way, it was very beneficial for me to always say,
all right, I failed. And when I fail at something, my immediate reaction is, what did I do wrong?
what did I do wrong 10 minutes ago, one year ago, five years ago that led to this moment of failure?
And by personally always auditing myself first, I think you're able to deal with the reality of
how you got to where you're at, like way clearer. And then you can take future actions that start
with you and how you're acting in your environment to make sure you never do it again.
so that would be the first thing i would tell you is just ultimate self-responsibility
it's a great one for everything no matter what and this is why i think for bitcoin like
syncs with me immediately because it's like oh you lost your keys well whose fault's that
it's your fault you know people people will go on their you know their bank account today and
like i lost my password it's the bank's fault the bank needs to figure out how i can log back
in and it's like no actually you sucked at securing your password or whatever like you got to start
with yourself first always and in bitcoin that's like the number one rule is like if you mess up a
transaction like it's your fault it's nobody else's fault but yours what did the military teach you
about power in people oh for all intents and purposes the military is like a dictatorship
You get humbled when you live in a dictatorship.
So it taught me humility.
It taught me that there's always somebody that's higher in the pecking order.
And you have to properly identify who that is and make sure that you don't end up on the wrong side of things.
and I think for people that have never operated in an environment like that
they are sometimes naive in thinking there aren't outside influence or outside actors
in their environment that can actually shape their world pretty heavily if they
get on the wrong side of things I would maybe argue that it that it sensitized me too far to
the one side. And it's, I think I've learned that, but like when I was in the, in that operating
environment, you start to like maybe pay too much attention to what everybody else is doing and the
sensitivities of like how they can wreck your world if you kind of get on the wrong side of things.
And I think very few people in the military would ever describe it that way,
but that's how I ended up seeing it after observing it and having,
being able to step away from it and looking back at it.
Can you still be honest with yourself or have your own voice when you are so cautious about what people might think or say?
What the challenge becomes is as you would move up in the ranks, what you find is because you have so much more responsibility in the military, you know, you do 10 years, you do 20 years.
By your 20, 25 year mark in the military, you might be leading 40,000 people.
And some of those people that are of the lowest ranks have an extremely difficult time being able to speak truth to power because of the potential ramifications of that environment.
If a leader at that really high level that's operated in that specific type of environment
for many years, sometimes their ego can just get so inflated because they're so used to
people that are very sensitive and don't want to be on the wrong side of things that you
create this ego dynamic that is very powerful and really strong in the person that's achieved
these really higher ranks.
And I'm not saying that that's the case for all leaders in the military.
It's not.
But would I say it's more prevalent?
Yeah, probably a little bit more prevalent than what you would see in the private sector.
Maybe, maybe not.
I don't know.
And so is it difficult?
Yeah, I think it is difficult.
But it doesn't mean it can't be done in a way that you stay humble.
Even now, with the amount of followers you've got, are you cautious with what you say?
Yeah, I think maybe my time in the military has made me a little bit more sensitive to making sure that I'm not saying something too controversial, maybe. Because I mean, there's some people in the space that they don't care who they offend or anything. And I would say if I have to audit myself or like be really introspective in that, I would say that, yeah, I think I probably am a little bit more on the I'm sensitive to as to what how what I say, how I say it so that I don't really kind of.
bifurcate or upset too many people. And that can be a real downfall because we really need to be
just focused on one thing, which is the truth, and make sure that that's what we're talking about.
It's only human, I think.
Yeah, I think it is. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.
If you could go back to any moment in your life, not to change it, but to relive it,
Which one would it be?
You know, when I was first dating my wife, right?
Like, that was a pretty special moment.
And it's one of those things that, like, you can only have those feelings and those...
Even after years of marriage, like, it's just different.
Like, we look at each other way more like friends.
And you're raising kids.
And, like, that spark, you know, that love spark that you have very early on.
is, I mean, that's really hard to like re-experience again, right? I guess I'd go back
and maybe do that all over again because it was really fun. It was fun.
What did your 25-year-old self-belief that you right now reject?
Well, in general, I was just really naive at 25 compared to what I am now. And I think it was
just mostly my worldview. I bought into my patriotic duty to the country and all that.
And I'm not saying that I don't feel like the United States, the country I'm from,
has enormous benefits and good. I just think that I was naive to the idea that maybe some of the
antics as it relates to things like the IMF and the World Bank and just the defense industrial
complex and how corrupted a lot of this is, I had no idea how any of that worked at 25.
And I totally reject a lot of that. Very simply, I didn't realize how corrupted the US dollar
was and like what it was really kind of doing to the rest of the world because of that dollar
dominance and the currency arbitrage that existed between the U.S. and all these. And you know what,
even though, and I'll say that in one breath, and I'll also say that the natural laws of nature
are going to provide, has already provided the ramifications of that to America. And what I mean
by that is the benefit of the dollar supremacy that we had, we've already paid the cost and the
cost is all the work and all the jobs and all of the ability to actually produce things locally and
domestically was exported out of the country. And now the U S has a major problem because of that
benefit that they've already received. So as I talk about that, I'm not pointing my finger and
saying, I hate the word wrong and right, because I think that nature has a way of providing the
ramification for the, it's almost like the advantage and the disadvantage are literally
tethered together like a rope. And that has already kind of metastasized in a way that I'm
not saying it was right or wrong. I'm just saying the cost has already been realized,
whether people realize it or not. And I was totally naive to all of this. I just had no
idea of any of it. What's a piece of advice you got early on that you ignored but later realized
was dead on? The thing that was really impressed upon me at West Point was just your integrity
and how important it is. I'm not implying that I wasn't acting with integrity when I was younger,
but I think when I was younger, I just didn't really... I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it.
I've got to be a good person. And at West Point, it's don't lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those
that do. I mean, it is crammed down your throat at the academy and I heard it so much. And for me,
I was like, yeah, I know that stuff's important, but good Lord, can we stop saying it so much?
Like, geez, it felt very preachy. And I just didn't, I don't think I understood the importance
of it at that age. When did it click? Probably in my thirties, mid thirties, I would say I started
like, because when I started really thinking about it, I was thinking to myself, okay, so like, why?
Like, that's a question I've asked myself a lot.
It's like, why?
Then why again?
Then why three more times after that?
When you are socially interacting with somebody and you don't do what you say, like if I tell
you I'm going to do something and then I don't, I am reducing the trust, the social trust
that I have with somebody else.
And what I actually doing is I creating more volatility and variance in my own life because now that person may or may not trust me the next time I say something or do something again And there a book by Stephen Covey not the son of the Stephen Covey the five
elements of success. But the book is called The Speed of Trust. His son's book is called The Speed
of Trust. And in the book, he talks about when trust goes down, cost goes up. And as a Bitcoiner,
we can all appreciate the idea that cost is actually energy.
Okay.
So if we stick to this rule that like when trust between two people goes down,
the energy level goes up,
which means I have to work harder and do more things to sustain what could be
there.
If the trust was higher,
you're more efficient when you're trustworthy and it requires less energy and
you can be more effective.
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It might sound like I'm bargaining with why you should be an honest person, right? But I'm also trying to just look at it from a, how can you operate in your environment most effectively?
And I would say that I think when you really do lean into this idea of don't lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those that do, and you live that kind of life, you're going to probably have a more enjoyable life because it's a little easier for you.
But it took me a long time to really appreciate something that I think everybody just intuitively knows, but whether you actually act on it is a whole different thing.
but I think when people start to act on it,
they're going to find that their life just gets a little bit easier and a
little bit more fun and a more and more enjoyable.
I think that's a great tip.
What's your relationship to ambition?
Oh, that's an interesting one.
And has it changed over time?
Yeah, I think so. I think it has.
I think a lot of people will just immediately like equate it to their work
or like what they're doing professionally.
I guess for me, I aspire to be just a good steward of raising my kids and doing good on the people that I love that are in my life, trying to be a good example, trying to be a giving person.
I always try to give more than I take, whether that's through knowledge, monetary, whatever.
I believe that the world around me is actually just a mirror for me to observe my own actions
and myself. And so as I'm having these interactions, if I'm always taking from my environment,
what I'm actually going to see is kind of a much darker picture than if I'm emitting energy and
energy into the system. What was your ambition when you were younger?
Yeah. When I was younger, I had like this total false sense of ambition is like, oh, yeah, well,
if I can make some money, then I can, you know, do anything I want and I'm going to have fun and I
can, you know, I mean, the classic, the classic blunder of anybody that's young, right? Like you
just get wiser through the years, mostly through pain and being humbled. And yeah, so like I had
ambitions. I never had ambitions to, uh, be recognized. Like I never had ambitions to be,
you know, like have people know who I was. That was never an ambition for me. Um,
I was much more, uh, wanting to have control. I think that was, I think that might be what it,
And maybe that's because of the military piece that I wanted to have control.
And I thought early on, well, if I can be a really good investor and I can make some money, then I can be on the controls and I won't have to answer to anybody.
I can do whatever I want.
I was ambitious for having the levers or the controls.
Yeah.
What personal values do you refuse to compromise on, even if they cost you personally?
I don't need to make an extra buck to, and in Bitcoin, an extra sat at the expense of somebody else's detriment. Like anything that I engage in, I want it to be a win-win. If I'm winning, the person who I'm engaging with also needs the win.
And I think that's the one thing that you see all these crypto token scam, clown coin this,
and then for all intents and purposes, they were all just giant rug pulls that somebody was
getting value extraction out of somebody else's loss. It was a lopsided. It was not a win-win
situation. And so for me, that's always been extremely undesirable. And somebody could say,
oh, well, you could make $100 million doing this thing. I was like, yeah, right, go screw yourself.
I have no desire for any of that unless it's a win-win.
What's the hardest truth you had to accept about yourself?
I have a really hard time telling people no. And what it leads to, the effect of that is I then
overextend myself. I get involved in too many things. And I think I try to please too many
people. It does drain me. And then the effects of being drained and not, because then it wears on
you and then you can't be the person that you want to be around the ones that you love most.
And so I think that that side of me, and I think some of that actually comes from my military
service too, because in the military, you just like never tell your boss, no. If the boss,
whoever I'm working for says, Preston, can you get to the top of that mountain in 10 minutes?
And the answer is, yes, sir. And you might not have any clue how the heck you're going to do that.
But in the military, you're wired to always figure it out. And if for whatever reason,
you can't figure it out, then you go back to your body and say, sir, I've done these 10 different
courses of action. The fastest I can get there is 12 minutes. Does that work? And if not, I'll go
back to the drawing board and try to find another 10 courses of action so I can get to the 10 minutes.
And so in that, you can see how you're always trying to find a way to get something done,
regardless of how hard it is. It doesn't matter how hard it is. You could come up with the craziest
thing ever and hand it to me and I'd say, I can do it. Or I'm going to give it my best try to get
that done and I'm going to come back and tell you how I'm going to do it. But with that comes this
wiring of you're always saying yes and that you can always figure out a way to get something done.
And so that has spilled into just like who I am and it's extreme. I know it's extreme
and it's hard to turn that off.
What's something about you
that even your close friends misunderstand?
I think most people misunderstand
how disinterested I am in most conversations.
Uh-huh.
I have things that I am interested in
and most of them are usually pretty technical
and pretty boring to most people.
Like when people come up to me
and they talk about like sports team XYZ
and like what they did,
I am literally like, dear God, like shoot me.
For me, it's a super brain dead conversation.
Like I love complexity.
I love trying to understand complex things.
Like quantum computing is so complex and I'm like a pig in mud.
Like I just want to try to wrap my head around how it works.
And no matter how deep or how hard I try to understand it, it just seems to always be
so elusive and difficult.
until like I can't look away.
Like if somebody wants to talk about that,
I could literally,
I'd become the most extroverted person you've ever met.
But if you come and talk to me about something
that lacks complexity or intellectual rigor,
I'm just like,
I can't get away from the person fast enough.
And the whole time I'm there,
I'm like smiling and like nodding my head
because I don't want to be rude.
But deep down inside,
I'm thinking this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
and I'm very bad at expressing that.
Like I think most people would think that,
oh, wow, he really enjoyed that conversation.
But what I was really thinking was this is so stupid.
Yeah.
Okay.
So is it happening right now?
No, this is amazing.
Of course, glad you're going to say.
No, I enjoy these types of questions
because these questions have deep compression.
And for me, I love going really deep into the compression of why somebody is the way that they are.
I love studying psychology.
I love cognitive discussions of how the brain works.
And these are the types of questions I never get asked.
These are the types of questions I love to talk about.
Yes.
Thank you.
What's your filter for when to speak up and when to stay silent?
when I feel like somebody is uh being treated unjustly sets me off I have a very hard time
filtering myself and and it doesn't matter if I know the person or not like if I'm walking down
the street like when I'm in the presence of somebody that is clearly doing something wrong
and unjust to somebody else and I and I know with a very high probability that they know they're
doing it, you will have a very hard time keeping my mouth shut. Drives my wife crazy, but I will
speak up. I will put the person in their place immediately. Can you give us an example? If you're
in a line to get coffee. Wow. Then you have plenty of examples. It happens all the time.
You're in a line to get coffee and somebody clearly makes it seem like they didn't know
that the line was going this way
and they clearly just cut you.
Like they, and you can tell they did.
And I only would speak up
if I had a very high probability in my mind
that they looked at the person,
they're like, well, screw them.
I'm more important than them.
I will be relentless.
Like, I just can't take it.
How do you switch between introverted and extroverted?
For me, it's just like
whether I actually have an interest in the topic.
Okay.
It could be somebody I don't even know, but if they're talking about something that I find intellectually stimulating, I will be super engaged with that person.
But if I feel like the conversation is not intellectual or that there's learning or complexity to it, I'll just be nodding my head and not saying anything.
I am introverted.
And for me it really difficult I can see the injustice in the world but for me it really difficult to speak up When I in the presence of somebody that is parasitic I have no problems letting them know that I think they parasitic
And I think that goes to just the core essence of what I believe in, which is helping other people, always finding the win-win.
And so whenever I get around a person that is clearly breaking that rule of life and they're just being selfish, I think that's what it is.
I can't stand selfish people.
Cannot stand them.
And it comes out in full display when I see it happening very overtly.
I have no problem telling them straight to their face.
in a very descriptive way. But I want to say this too. I want to say this too.
I also have an appreciation for not pulling certain people into my sphere of my gravitational
pull because I understand that they can pull me into their parasitic nature. So am I going to
super engage with somebody that I think is just a degenerate parasitic person?
I might fire a shot to let them know that I think they're a parasite, but it's not going
to be much more than that because I quickly want to disengage and have nothing to do.
They cannot be far enough away from me.
Yeah.
You've built your brand on asking great questions.
What's a question that's haunted you?
So when you say the word haunt, fear immediately comes to mind, right?
And I like to think that I'm not too fearful of too many things.
Fear is the opposite of hope.
Fear is a very dark thing.
And I think my time in combat, I mean, I saw some pretty scary stuff.
I saw some pretty dark stuff.
And my core takeaway from when I came back alive from that was I'm not going to be scared
of anything.
I'm not going to be scared of anything because we're all here for a reason. And we're here to
to inspire, to give hope, to create value for others and not just ourselves. Right. And so
going to this haunt, like what haunts me or the question, like I just, all I, all I hear in that
is fear. And I like to say, I would look fear like straight in the eyes and give it the middle finger.
What I'm trying to discover is truth. And so the questions that I'm asking are all different
vectors to try to unlock or express the truth out of something that seems to be somewhat difficult
to understand what the truth is. So like you look at the global economy, like why am I studying this
super complex machine that, you know, I think everybody would argue is impossible to properly
define. And the reason why I'm asking the questions from all these different vectors is so that the
truth or like some semblance of the truth can kind of pop out of that with respect to some mental
model that helps us define our environment. And I think that's also where it comes from is
If I can properly define my environment, I can now most effectively operate inside of my environment, which maybe goes back to this idea of control.
Right?
When I prepare these questions, they are very personal to me.
And for me, I think the question is, is Bitcoin going to make it?
I look at it as we are participants in the idea of Bitcoin, which is a sound money alternative to this blob of a parasitic system.
I think the way I would maybe reframe that question is, am I doing enough, going back to this idea of taking self-responsibility, am I doing enough to make sure that Bitcoin is successful for humanity?
And a lot of my love for Bitcoin comes from the fiat system incentivizes violence.
Because at the core, you have countries that have incentives with their local currencies.
And when you're in this global race of fiat currency debasement, one of the easiest ways
to print a bunch of money and the populace to get behind it is through patriotism, war,
and violence.
And so as a person who literally, you know, experienced that on the front lines, getting
shot at as I'm flying missions, there is nothing, in my humble opinion, there's nothing more
important in my lifetime than ensuring the success of a money that doesn't create this
friction between the governments in the countries around the world and that everybody's operating
off of the same unit of settlement. So what am I doing? What is Preston Pysh doing to ensure the
success of that? Because we are working together collaboratively as a human race to usher that in
or to not usher that in. What's a topic you're dying to explore but haven't yet?
I've explored most of the topics that I have an interest in on the show, especially now that I'm
covering tech more recently on the show. But I would argue that my understanding of AI and just
cognition in general is extremely weak and something that I could spend,
I'm sure, more than a lifetime studying and still wouldn't be able to fully grasp.
I find that really fascinating right now. I find the humanoid robotic stuff, as an example,
like a question I have asked myself and I think any human has asked themselves quite a bit is like,
okay, so like, what's the real deal here? Like, why are we here? Like, what's this all about?
And, um, I find myself as I'm studying AI and humanoid robotics and like partitioning
intelligence inside of a, you know, a humanoid robot to actually maybe somewhat answer like
life's like greatest question, which is like, why the hell are we here? Studying those types of
things for me is a frontier that I would love to cover more. I'm also really interested in just
like longevity and biology in general. I like studying that. And it just all goes to this idea
of like, they're super complex and really difficult to, to understand the truth of like the matter of
like, what is all this? So that's why I think I, I love going into some of those areas, maybe a
little bit more in the future. Yeah. What are you more drawn to building something new or fixing
what's broken? I look at it more from what will create the most value to the most people possible.
And if it's something that just needs to be fixed that already exists, then do that. But if it's
something that needs to be built from the ground up because it's never existed before, then let's
do that. But I'm looking more at the end state of what is going to have a larger impact to the most
participants to bring value to them. And do I need to fix something that's already there? Or do I
need to build something completely new? And then that's how I would make the decision. But it would
be more focused on the end state than- It's the mind of an engineer.
Yeah.
How do you explain the idea of sovereignty to someone who has never questioned the system?
I suspect when you get around somebody who's never questioned the system, it's probably more correlated to the pain that they've experienced in their life.
So people that grew up in a country with just severe oppression and the government's taking from them, they inherently know exactly what sovereignty is.
They don't even have to know the word.
They know what that is.
For a person who grew up, I mean, based on the conversation we had earlier in the show,
my upbringing does not really prepare you for really truly understanding what sovereignty
is all about because you've lived a pretty stable, good life.
So for me, I would really argue sovereignty is much more of an academic idea than something
that I was able to experience firsthand.
And I feel very fortunate
that I've been around the right people
and read the right authors and things like that
to somewhat grasp the importance of it.
What I would tell people that are maybe listening to this
that have lived a pretty good life.
How would you explain it to them?
I would tell them sovereignty is when you have control
of your autonomy to go out there. And if you want to go wherever in the world,
you don't have to be relying on anybody else to grant you that right. You can just do it.
You can take full control yourself to do whatever you want. And that's the sovereignty
that everybody thinks they might have. If you don't move right or left.
But sometimes they find out maybe they don't actually have that sovereignty when they would try to make that decision.
And unfortunately, a lot of the times when people try to make that decision in a dire setup, that's when they uncover that they actually never did have sovereignty.
Yeah.
What keeps you grounded even when the noise is loud?
Oh, this is easy.
Okay.
My family.
Your family.
They have no problems putting me in my place.
so what's something about you that's completely misunderstood
i don't think a lot of people understand how polarizing combat was for me
um they don't understand how that shaped me morally and ethically
in that i will not compromise my values for for anything because of that experience
because it was so like disgusting.
I mean, it was pretty much the most horrific
like human experience, pitiful human,
just, it was just disgusting, right?
And seeing that for literally two years of my life,
it shaped me pretty heavily.
And I don't talk about it
and I don't really ever get into the details in interviews.
but um at the heart of like who i am and like what i do in anything it's heavily influenced
and shaped by what i saw and what i experienced in those moments that's where i left it with
preston part two dropping on march 18th goes somewhere i didn't expect and he reveals something
i didn't see coming follow subscribe and hit the bell you want to hear this one
Outro