we are recording contra welcome to the podcast yeah thanks for having me jake no it's my pleasure
and how i'm going to start today is a little different to normal but i um i dug it up last
night and as i said before i'm always keen on organic conversation but there was a a note that
you posted that i found and it's just such an interesting point of view on what nostr actually
represents and why it's important. And I dug it up here. Where is it? Here we go. So you posted this,
when is it? November. So maybe six weeks ago. I refuse to stop being a thought criminal.
The thought criminal is the person who shows up daily to share unfiltered thoughts,
encourage others to reclaim their own minds, and create spaces where clarity is possible.
It's someone who understands that in an age of managed anxiety and algorithmic negativity,
genuine encouragement is dangerous because it reminds people they're still capable of sovereignty over their own thinking.
The thought criminal doesn't reject society.
They reject the specific machinery designed to capture minds while calling it connection,
and suppress dissent while calling it safety
and eliminate independent thought while calling it progress.
Here in the purple verse, speaking plainly, thinking clearly,
and encouraging others to do the same is a small act of defiance
against the walt reality we see every day.
The purple pill helps the orange pill go down.
Boom.
Maybe we end the podcast there.
But Contra, tell me, where did the inspiration for that post come from?
um you know a lot of and i've mentioned this before on several of my posts people ask where
i pull content from it it uh it literally just some of these things cross my mind as i deal with
them uh each and every day so i mean it could be a clip of you know i see on australia it could be
something i'm dealing with in life a podcast i'm listening to and uh there's uh i don't remember
exactly uh i might have read it also but i think it was a podcast um from uh actually a reform
pastor who deals with this thought criminal and embracing the idea of being a thought criminal.
And it just got me thinking, like, thoughts are dangerous, right? A lot of what people are
dealing with today, speaking truth into a society that's constantly manipulated,
those are dangerous. And so just trying to put that into perspective on, you know,
what Nostra is at its heart, at its foundation, just got me thinking, like,
this is the free space that like i think people want maybe i mean for us who are on it it's
definitely a reality and it's it's you see this freedom daily as we post on these things so
um there's a lot of depth to that post obviously and i took some time to write that out well
um but essentially i think it gets down to some of the incentive uh structures that um these modern
social media, I should say legacy platforms, kind of where they disseminate information.
And a lot of them are optimizing for, you know, engagement through outrage and anxiety.
And I guess I just like to question that narrative with just basic questions and getting people
to think clearly rather than just accepting the norm of whatever is being brought out
in front of their faces, I guess.
So I think that's kind of where I was going with it.
I mean, there is a machinery that's involved in our culture today, I think.
And this machinery, I don't think it's conspiratorial by nature.
I think it's a reality.
I think it's purposeful.
And it is emergent from the broken systems that we live in today.
And so, you know, especially for us Purpleverse people, as I said,
Bitcoin and Nostra kind of fixes both of these layers, speaking truth into the information aspect of it, as well as the monetary aspects of it.
So I think that's kind of where I was going with it and just speaking freely as a free person, a sovereign person, shall, ought to.
It's so cool, isn't it? The process of almost the documentation of your thought processes.
and it totally resonates with me
the idea that you just get these things in a moment and you just post them.
I think in some ways that's what's
valuable because as the consumer of said
content, I know that that's coming from a place of
your heart in a way. You're like, I actually think this right now.
It's not like some predefined schedule that's trying to hype up an algorithm
them to create as many eyeballs as possible. It's like there's, I saw recently, there's only three
or 4,000 daily active users on Nostra. There's no one here, essentially, versus 1.5 billion daily
users on Instagram. It's crazy. Crazy. Yeah. But it's different. It's absolutely different.
The whole construction of it. And let's say you caught my attention. And that's just one of many
posts that I've come across since I, um, you know, found your account on Noster where you
really just like synthesize something so important. You go, Oh, I love that. I've got to talk to this
guy at some point. Um, let's sit on this idea of the thought police. Yeah. What is that? And why
does that exist? Yeah, I think, uh, the thought police is essentially again, alluding back to
this machinery of this culture we live in. And when there's a threat to a societal norm,
somebody's freedom, somebody able to speak freely or to act freely, the police will come after you.
And whether that be an X algorithm, an Instagram algorithm, I mean, you name every platform out
there, they're going to police that. And because it doesn't fit into their worldview, their
structure. It doesn't buy clicks. It doesn't make them money. And I think that's one of the
beauties of Nostra is I don't see people on there to make money. That's a huge aspect. That's huge
motivations for people on all these other platforms, which is why you don't see the amount of people
probably on here. People are looking for that algorithm to make them bigger, to make them money.
and you know what, if I get one zap, one sat on, you know, one sentence I say because I'm just
thinking of something, I'll take that all day over 50,000 likes, say on X or said protocol or
platform, sorry. So I think it speaks to going back to kind of what you alluded to earlier,
that freedom, that sovereignty that we have is like, look, I don't need somebody to tell me
how to think. I don't need you to tell me what to see in front of me on my thread.
I'm curating this. And the Thought Police is essentially these CEOs and these organizations
that are worth billions and trillions of dollars that really are using its users. They are the
product. And I don't think people see that. And they've kind of curated a society to believe
these things. And I think that's why Noster is so beautiful. I think people forgot what it looks
like to be free and you have all these people essentially hurting uh the sheep if you will and
people don't see it so yeah thought policing is exactly that they're they want you to think a
certain way and behave a certain way and essentially bow the knee at the end of the day
it's fascinating isn't it because like what even is freedom great question like let's let's let's
hang on that so um yeah was freedom a subject that you were always interested in and what does
it mean to you yeah that's that's a good question uh it's it's even more interesting for me just so
not to dig too much into my history into my background but you know i come from a more of
a military background as much or as that yeah as much as little as you want contra there's no need
to yeah yeah it's a military background okay well yeah military background um and i joined because
I just I wasn't fitting in with the education system after I graduated from high school here.
I did college for a few years and it was just like I feel like I'm being fed crap and I needed to grow up.
And I was like, well, hey, maybe I was married at the time as well.
So I was married super young. And my wife's like, why don't you try the military?
And I was like, military is for nerds like that's not for me.
I grew up a jock, super competitive. And I sat down one day with a dude by the name of, his name's Alex.
I don't talk to him anymore, but I still remember it because it's just, it was a vivid memory.
But he got me sucked into this military mindset and this competition and what the U.S. government,
the U.S. military does for its people. And I didn't think a lot about it in my,
I was in my late teens at the time and early 20s going into it.
And so I essentially allowed myself to be captured by the government with no freedoms.
I was essentially owned and stamped by a government who told me where to go, when to go, what to eat and when to eat.
And in some senses, it was good for me as a man not growing up with a father.
So structure was good for me. All men need that structure.
And I didn't have that. So that was good.
But it wasn't until I got out and I transitioned out where I started questioning a lot of things.
I did a lot of things, the brainwashing really that really happens in the military.
And so that freedom aspect when I got out was like, okay, I'm starting to question all these systems.
I was part of this system.
What's the purpose of this system?
And, you know, America, its political figures wants you to believe that freedom is free because the people that protect you and your in your said country.
And, you know, I started questioning deployments. I started questioning certain wars we were part of in the Middle East, wars I was a part of and just questioning the narrative and not understanding that there is there is more things at stake than what I knew.
And so freedom, I would say, really began for me understanding it maybe a decade ago to know that we're raised in a system essentially that's captured us.
And until I started really questioning narratives and reading books that nobody wants you to read, essentially, it really started opening up my eyes.
And so I'm not anti-military. I still train with the military often. I do contracting work.
But I always feed guys just questions to get them thinking because nobody helped me to think that way.
And so I think freedom is just the free will to act and do as you will without anybody impeding on your ability to do something.
And that goes from thinking to acting.
It goes to using social media to your financial means.
And we have all been captured into this system.
and I don't think a lot of people know it.
A Noster is definitely awake to it,
which is why it's so rewarding to be on there
because you're around more like-minded people,
which is helpful.
So that's my basic, I guess, nutshell
without getting too many rabbit trails
of what freedom is ultimately.
It's a really fascinating story.
In some ways, I wish this was an offline conversation
so I could ask some more detail,
But shout out to Average Gary, who came on the podcast a couple of episodes ago and spoke
through a similar experience of joining the military.
And there's now a community called Bitcoin Veterans that he's part of.
I'm sure you know those guys.
Yes, I'm on it.
I've actually, I've met a few ex-military guys in the Bitcoin space.
I'm from UK originally, but now based in Australia.
And I met an Aussie Bitcoiner who was ex-Australian Navy.
and almost every single one of them has the same trend of story which is i was doing something
that for a certain period of time felt right and slowly but surely it got chipped away at
and suddenly start doing things you're like hang on a second that doesn't make sense and when you
ask the question why you get reminded that you have no answer you are just a piece in the machinery
and that itself is an extremely disempowering fact
that people who are in many ways ideologically driven,
this idea of freedom drives a lot of Western military concepts.
But do you know what I mean?
They don't actually gel.
They don't.
Yeah.
Without sharing specifics, Contra,
Could you share, was there a specific moment where you go, oh my God, I can't do this any longer?
You know, I think I've listened to enough podcasts and I've read enough books about most people going down a lot of rabbit holes.
And I can't specifically say there was this key moment or this key genesis.
There was a genesis.
I don't think it was one moment.
I think it was a culmination of just a lot of certain things that came into my life at very specific times, which I believe are providential.
And they just got me going down a course where nobody led me It just kind of one thing led to the next And then it just branched out from there
And I mean, everything changes once you go down that rabbit hole.
You don't think the same.
You start questioning things you've done in the past.
And that's essentially, I think, what, you know, that the eye-opening moment, if you will, where you become awake.
I think that's when things start clicking.
you start putting pieces together when you start becoming awake. So I can't specifically say there
was one specific thing. It was just, there was a person here that mentioned something,
you know, maybe weeks, months, years later, somebody else mentioned something else. And I
started just, you know, in my quiet moments or my downtime, started putting pieces together and
reading books and listening to people that just kind of opened up my worldview.
Awesome. And it takes time. It takes work. Even in this conversation we're having right now,
I mean, ultimately what I love about these is it's like, who are you and what brought you to today?
And everyone's completely unique, has these extraordinarily rich and intense and romantic stories that bring you to today.
Let's shift a slightly then to talk more about what that sense of freedom is.
So the act of free will.
how do you exercise that today versus perhaps in the past where you didn't have that
yeah good question um i mean for me it's it starts in the home um every single day you know
my main responsibility is making sure uh i'm present for my wife giving her everything she
needs uh to structure the house when i'm outside of it and uh having the financial means to do that
gives her the ability to fulfill her role as the wife, which then leads into my children.
So it starts really at home for me.
And then giving my kids the things, the tools, the books, the education that I didn't receive,
just always questioning narratives that you're being told.
So getting them prepared when I wasn't prepared to essentially face a culture that is really
going to be hard pressed against them and to have answers for them to push their narratives
or their worldviews on, you know, the way that I raised them to believe and to stand up for it.
And so as I do that in my house, you know, I go out into a world and I would love for Bitcoin to
be the standard around the world. I know we're in a fight and it's going to take time. I hope
to see it in our lifetime like everybody does. But I think once you, you know, that cliche saying,
you fix the money, you fix the world, that's a reality. And I don't think it sets in for enough
people to understand because we're run by a financial system that essentially governs
everything we do from governmental leaders to corporations all the way down into households.
It starts with there, but the individual responsibility has to start with yourself
first and foremost, to inform yourself, to educate yourself, and then to equip your family,
equip the people that are around your sphere of influence and begin to question their narratives.
And I did a podcast with Source and a couple other guys maybe a couple months ago. And
you want to talk about somebody who can orange pill somebody, that's your guy. He's mastered it.
And I think we can use a lot of his, not only the resources he uses, but kind of just the, I guess the lingo.
He's gotten really good at trying to help people to think in ways, like I was speaking about, that aren't normal, that really fight against the times of our society.
And so not only financially with Bitcoin, but we can do that with everything.
We can do that with Nostra.
This is the free space of thinking.
And if we can get good at purple pilling people, you know, I deal with a lot of dudes and I try to tell them all the time to get on it.
And they're like, well, what's the main thing about it?
And I'm like, freedom.
And they're like, well, what's so free about it?
And I'm like, it's not run by anybody, period.
It's yours.
You design it.
You create it.
You friend who you want to friend.
You're not given recommendations like this is all yours.
And on top of it, it's not, it can't be censored.
And you get to earn Bitcoin on top of it.
And then you can zap people for content you like.
So these concepts of just the freedom of what kind of what you're asking is,
people are not awake enough to this concept of what freedom actually looks like.
And so it takes time.
And, you know, podcasts are popular just like this one.
But I think ultimately at the ground level, it starts with the people and your sphere of influence
and the people you talk to daily and just getting them to think.
I don't think we do that enough.
oh what an amazing reply and as you said that like it starts in the home i had this really
strong feeling of emotion like kind of right through me i haven't felt that actually um on
a podcast before and largely that's because of my recent experience as a dad of three young kids and
actually getting the keys to a house that we own and just a lot of stuff's happened for us that's
really important from a kind of stability perspective um and and it's also it's that
re-engineering of focus around this is my job you know as the as the kind of protector provider role
for a woman to then flourish in the feminine below that with the children below beside is a better
word um but some some cool coaching i was doing recently and i love talking about capital and how
you can create, maintain, grow over time. And part of that is humanistic. So that is your relationships,
that is your wife, that is your children. And in that sense, a nice image that I came across
recently is this idea, you only go to like a, I don't think I've ever even been to a party with
this, but a movie will have like a champagne tower, right? And it flows off the first level
and flows off the second level, then the third, then the fourth, maybe you could think of like a
big chocolate fondue or whatever that's great yeah the first cup that you're filling up needs
to be you yeah ultimately it has to be you because if you're not fit strong ready then nothing else
works so providing you're doing that as step one step two is on your wife because frankly your kids
will move out of home at some point it's you and her forever and therefore once you've figured
yourself out it's then about figuring out her situation and then below that comes your kids
and then below that comes everything else.
And if you're filling the cup of someone or something
that's below those first two or three tiers, why?
You have to have a really, really good reason
to not be trying to solidify your stored capital
in the first three tiers.
And so that resonates a lot, Contra.
Have you always been like that?
No.
So like I said, I come from a broken home.
um my mom's been married three times now and uh so i've had essentially my biological father left
when i was super young so i didn't have him in my life ever i had a stepdad and then now uh he's
since passed uh and then now my mom's remarried to another guy and uh so i never had that father
figure and so the marine corps kind of became that for me in a lot of ways uh just the discipline
and structure so i didn't have that i did grow up with uh with eight uncles on one side of my on my
mom's family. So I did have some male figures in my life. They were more of the mindset of
work hard, play hard. And so you had this concept of, you know, working your ass off
all day, every day. And then when you have some free time, go party it up and live your life.
And I tried to go down that road many times, Jake, and it never ended well. It always ended
with more problems, especially being married as young as I was. I tried to ruin my marriage
multiple times. And thank God my wife continues to have some grace for me and stayed with me. But
I didn't have that. And it wasn't until probably around like 2014, 2015, again, going back and
reading and listening to some more masculine dudes. And a lot of guys start with the Joe Rogans and
some of these podcast guys. And some of those concepts are helpful. They really are. But
So ultimately, biblically, especially for me, understanding the patriarchy and what I'm called to be as a man,
I started just really trying to understand, you know, what happened the generation before me with my family.
And my whole mom's side of the family is, I think, all but one has been divorced.
So it's 10 kids and almost all have been divorced.
And I just always got – I began to question as I got older, kind of that awakening moment, like I stated earlier,
where I was just like, this whole, you know, work hard, play hard thing,
like this isn't working.
Like, and so where can I find answers that's going to help me, right?
And you talk with your friends and you try to, you know,
glean a little bit from their experiences if they had fathers and stuff.
And so, again, I don't think it was one moment,
but over a period of time, it began to snowball
and understand that like, no, like my wife, first and foremost,
she needs me to make sure I'm being responsible with what I'm essentially over, what I'm in charge
of. And she really helped to equip me and push me and drive me to work hard, to go after the goals
and things that, you know, I was going after. And having that foundation at home is key,
a healthy household. I'm not really good at work if I'm not good at home. And the same goes both
ways. If I'm not performing well at work, at least my wife can pick me up at the end of the day.
So it started with taking care of myself first, understanding myself, understanding my worldview,
and then loving my wife like I hadn't seen anybody else in my upbringing do, which is just to,
you know, love my wife, provide for her, give her. She has the keys to the castle, the house,
and my job is to help her to fill that household. So when I come home, it's, you know, it's clean,
It's prepared. It's she has the food that she needs to prepare for the family.
And then my kids are grown up with with both parents in the house.
And so it took time. I haven't always been good at it.
I'm still learning. But I think now with a lot of systems that we put in place in our own household and kind of having these.
I wouldn't say like their family meetings, but we check in on each other a lot.
And, you know, when we wrong each other, we confess these things to each other early and often and just say, hey, I failed you.
I never had many men in my life ever apologize for taking responsibility for things that they had wronged other people with.
Men are terrible at it.
But I have no problem apologizing now, you know, if I've wronged somebody.
And it's really simple.
It's just like they're human.
Like, so treat them human.
Right.
And so I raise my voice to be manly, to stand up, to be physical, you know, work out.
You need to be able to prepare yourself for this world.
And at the end of the day, we need men.
The world's not going to run real well without men, masculine men.
And I know that term gets thrown out and kind of convoluted in a lot of ways.
But I think the ultimate, you know, title, if you will, masculine men is love your wife, give her the things that she needs.
and then make sure you're there to help raise your family and your kids.
And then just like you said, that waterfall effect, it bleeds out from there.
And I wish I had more kids when I was younger because if you want to change a generation,
you want to change a culture, we'll then have more kids.
Because then I can essentially raise them and teach them with my worldview,
which I believe I think a lot of us are in a lot of the same worldviews.
It's like, hey, just let us live.
and let us create the tools we need so that we can thrive as a community.
And we have, you know, Noster is a small borough, small community,
but there's people all over the world that I've talked to through Noster
that are doing the same things that we're doing.
And so if we start here, we raise it into the next,
or we bleed it into the next generation, then I think we can continue to grow.
So I do have hope in it, but to answer your question,
this whole thing has been a process for me, Jake.
No, and same here.
one of the hardest things is admitting that you've made a mistake.
It's one of those obvious tropes that gets rolled out on lots of wellness podcasts,
except failure, or equally in the startup space where I worked for a long time.
It's like you want to fail fast or make failure your friend.
Great, but it's actually really hard.
Yeah, it is, yeah.
Contra, what I'd love to do is then spin back to this idea of freedom
and acting with free will because it strikes me that it's on a spectrum and a lot of that spectrum
is actually driven by choice so had you stayed in the military your ability to exercise free will
was limited in comparison to where you're at today and not that it's the same decision but
you could go and post on instagram right now if you wanted or you can post on nostor why
obviously will drive the decision as to which but they're both a a form of free will given one is
a centralized platform someone's digital real estate you're renting that space until you can't
the other a protocol that you can build on top of and the user is the center they're very very
different but you're talking to 4 000 people versus 1.5 billion yeah yeah you get it couldn't
be you get one viral post you get 10 likes on oscar right you get a viral post on these other platforms 50 you know whatever 20 Yeah quite different It crazy So how do you you know we spoke about
like focusing on yourself and the home, but this idea of free will, like I pay more taxes than my
great grandfather, for sure, because of the way that the tax system has encroached into the
financial world um it's it's it's backed up by guns you know i'm currently in australia basically
no one has a gun the the covid lockdowns are the most extraordinary experience here given the lack
of ability to to react to a government it was it was extraordinary we went to a number of freedom
rallies like anti-lockdown protests as they got redubbed and were deemed extremely irresponsible
for breaking the chief health officer's rules.
Just so ludicrous.
Crazy.
And it's like both my wife and my mother-in-law
ended up in central Melbourne in handcuffs
or partially handcuffs from a police that were being used
to protect the decision-making of a obviously fascist agreement
between a medical empire and a government.
That's what it is, right?
And then you call it medical apartheid because people who got the jab were allowed to do stuff and people that didn't weren't.
You get, I mean, you wouldn't be invited back to lunch to most places.
But like, what are we talking about here if we can't talk about it?
And hence why recording and speaking via NOS is so interesting because, you know, as a capital allocator, I could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and hours of my time pumping into a YouTube channel over five years.
to just be rug pulled right it's like a horrendous counterparty risk that most people with a sunk
cost in that platform aren't willing to admit fortunately for me i'm at the start i don't have
to necessarily think about those things right now and i don't need to make money from this so i can
go in this direction that's what's beautiful about it yep but like what is free will and how do we
you know how do we build a more free space for us even in the confines of the playing field that
we're given. Yeah. You really want to push against the structure I see, Jake, and you're
right to do so. And I don't think America is very far behind Australia or the UK or a lot of these
other countries, honestly. I really don't. We talk about a two-party system here in America.
I don't believe that. It's definitely a unit party. It's different ideologies that have the
same outcome, which leads you to want to ask the question, well, what's the motive?
And I think ultimately you can get down to a motive of obviously power and money.
And if you have both of those, then you can control people, right?
I'm sure you guys experienced that where you're at and even where you're from.
And history doesn't go away.
You know, the saying is it will repeat itself.
and I believe it will in America
as we're right at that fourth turning
that everyone talks about, right?
I think you've even mentioned something
about fourth turning before.
Yeah, I've looked at that, yeah.
Yeah, and so I think this idea of free will
is why Nostra is so important
and let me tell you why, right?
And even with the mesh networks
and all kinds of other technological networks
that these developers are building,
which I think are going to be more useful
than we really acknowledge at this point.
They're cool technology when they first come out.
They're a toy.
People play with them.
But I think at some point,
we're going to be reliant upon these technologies
to be able to communicate with one another
to help one another.
And because they will herd people,
as you just stated, like in Melbourne,
when people come out and speak their voices against these tyrannical ideas and tyrannical everything, really,
then I think we're in trouble, especially in a place where you're at where there are no guns.
The American citizens, at least the people I deal with the most in my world,
are mostly within the confines of what I believe about protecting themselves,
not only from people, bad guys, but from the government ultimately.
I think they understand that that's why the Second Amendment exists.
And I think COVID woke us up to that big time.
And I had a conversation with Source about this even also,
is that the left and the right, it will never be a battle because the left doesn't want guns.
They want more of your style of government.
And the right, I would say, they're the ones who have the guns.
They're the ones living in more rural areas, and they like exercising their Second Amendment.
Some of them understand their freedoms, and some of them don't.
ultimately I like shooting I'm good at shooting but I've come to a realization that you know I'm
not I'm going to be dealing with the government more than I am with you know a bad guy that wants
to try to break into my house that's just the reality at some point I don't know when that will
be I don't know when you know who will be in charge of our government at that time but I think
ultimately circling back to your question on this free will, it really comes down to
coming alongside like-minded people, families that are going down the same path and are willing to
link arms despite not having everything in common, but core basic life principles and understanding
freedom. And again, I think you can define freedom and many people have different probably
definitions of it, but the ability to move freely without interruption, right? I mean,
that's one aspect of physical freedom. What other types of freedoms are there, right? I mean,
monetary freedom, social freedom, whether it be online or whatever it is,
we need more structures in place to be able to communicate with one another and create
businesses, create essentially our own cities. I mean, our own cities, our own places where we can
exist without government interference. And I think that's ultimately what it comes down to,
is it's going to take groups of people that are going down the same path that will fight for the
things that we believe. And that's going to be a hard fight for small groups of people when
we live in these types of governments because they're supposed to be working for us and they
don't. So I think it's, we're at an uphill battle, but I wouldn't pay too much attention to it. I did
for a long period of time. Again, going back to what, what can I influence right now? And that's
my family, which then bleeds out from there. And then coming alongside people on Nostra and,
you know, not trying to start wars. I like to post some controversy every once in a while,
I'll just disturb people's brains up a little bit to get them to think.
And it's okay if you disagree with me.
You don't have to agree.
But I'll leave room for interpretation.
And I don't think people sometimes, even on Noster, it's funny.
I'll post something, and I'm willing and able and ready to engage back with people.
And people will post thoughtful comebacks or thoughtful replies.
But usually the discourse doesn't last too long.
And I always ask myself why.
And it's usually because of time preference.
I mean, people don't want to give themselves too much to it or they run out of ideas.
Or you can clearly see when AI is being used and you're essentially being, I'm talking to a bot rather than a person and a free thinker.
Yeah.
So that's kind of frustrating.
But understanding that's the world we live in.
And so having this discourse with other people like you and me are doing right now, I think is how freedom will continue to exist ultimately.
it's like it's like blending together a series of experiences that don't make sense
hang on sorry i was i was told that i lived in a liberal democracy and in the constitution it
says you have the freedom to move this is australia specifically and the first thing that
happened excuse me is the there's like there's a bunch of states uh that make up australia and
they closed the state borders you couldn't travel between the two of them without getting a certain
test so well hang on it says in the head terms of the country that i've just become a citizen of
more recently actually um that you can move anywhere you want so why can't i move anywhere
i want it's like well some spurious health department somewhere has said that it's too
dangerous for you to move anywhere and the point of that is it really speaks to this idea of
you're operating within a system ruled by rulers.
And as and when that system from a, I think,
and this is an interesting one, it's like this whole concept of they,
which can be helpful, but also unhelpful.
It's a self-protective system,
much like any organic organism in a way,
like the state wants to get bigger.
It wants to defend itself.
It wants to continue.
and it uses people and ideologies to do so and even to have that statement you've got to have
done some work to figure out well what do you mean what is statism is that even a word and
yeah i think what's fun though is thinking through like practical steps like don't
don't listen to the fucking news you know i went to a protest for example where they told everyone
that hundreds of people were there and someone beat up a police horse that was the news and i was
there and there were thousands of people from every color every age all saying this doesn't
make sense so they they'd capped the attendance by 10x wow wow hang on how many times in my life
have i been lied to literally like blatant lie that i've physically seen a difference to
yeah um but perhaps contra do you agree with me with this statement so like like if freedom's a
spectrum and you want to live as close to the end of the spectrum that is freedom itself,
choosing to have your money in Bitcoin is an absolutely critical step on the way there.
So do you think that you live a life full of free will? How am I saying this correctly? Is your
ability to act with free will now better as a result of adopting Bitcoin? And what has that
experience being like on that process yeah uh i would say
not yet i would say that it gives me now
an out of a system that requires me to still be in it although i i don't think that
we as Bitcoiners can truly exist apart from the system that we currently live in, the fiat system.
And I think that goes back to kind of what I stated earlier,
as far as having collective minds come together in where we live to create systems
where we can freely spend our Bitcoin in a circular economy.
And so until, and I think there are certain places around the U.S., and especially obviously in other places in the world that have Bitcoin more of a standard, they are going to be far better off than we will because they've already started it.
Now, we've started it too. I think we're still wrestling with the tension of both sides of it, and we'll get there.
And I think we have good people that are in good positions to help us get there as well.
They're leading the charge.
But for me personally, I think it's given me kind of like, how would I want to say it?
It's like a backup, right?
If a system fails, there's enough things on the internet where I can use Bitcoin to shop for a lot of necessities, right?
Especially with Jack incorporating Bitcoin into Square, that's huge because I would say there's not a ton of people that use Square.
There are a lot of people who use Square, so excuse me for saying that.
But there's enough businesses out there that use Square where we could still utilize that.
Now, if, say, I don't know how it would play out ultimately, but would the system, kind of what you ran into as far as moving, what kind of walls would the government put up for, say, a Square merchant if they tried to outlaw something like Bitcoin, which obviously they can't.
But if they were to say, hey, you can't, if I'm transacting in Bitcoin, you can no longer convert that over to fiat like Square does now or vice versa.
right so i think we need to be ready for things like that i'm sure you know i want to say jack is
is trying to do the right things but uh he's he's in a different playing field than most of us are
but i would say it gives us a road that leads away from where the rest of society is for the rest of
where our government makes us stay trapped in.
So I think the combination of both Bitcoin and Nostra together they give us something to start with and we need to keep building if that makes sense
Absolutely agree.
And I was struck by this idea as you were speaking,
which I'm sure you've come across before,
which is the idea of building on the shoulders of giants.
And in particular, it's quite a cool concept when you look at
when and how Bitcoin was created.
and it's really like a 50-year process of computer science compounding and compounding
and compounding until eventually there's a breakthrough that we discover digital scarcity
and again people don't understand the profound nature of that statement I just made.
But I wonder with this kind of societal structure question and a lot of what Jeff Booth will talk
about resonates a lot in terms of like you can't fix a system from within the system you have to
create something new. I agree with that. But as I'm sitting here now, I'm thinking, well, actually,
like, you know, the real estate market, it doesn't need to completely change.
Like the idea of private property is a concept that could remain. It's just that the way that
we transact for it could be different, because you're using a different base layer of money.
Or maybe the Australian dollar suddenly pegged to Bitcoin rather than the central bank bond.
so it's not like we need to completely tear down
what's already being built
it's about incorporating something in
with a superior feature set than before
because it was interesting
you immediately went to the operational issues
of using Bitcoin as a Bitcoin maxi every day
to fulfill daily requirements
from a freedom of will perspective
for me moving into Bitcoin was more around
like as an investor, most or a traditionally managed portfolio of assets would have 100%
counterparty risk. And that is not something that people understand. It's like you've got a wealth
advisor looking after a bunch of things that essentially you have to ask permission to get
your stuff. And maybe the stock market will be closed, or maybe the banks are closed, or maybe
your wealth advisors on holiday, or you name it, right? Or actually, they decide you're a felon of
some form because you posted something on a on a on a website and now they've gone and completely
frozen all your assets or you happen to be a nationality that's at war with someone and all
your assets get frozen because of new sanctions like who knows right but by moving your wealth
into bitcoin your counterparty risk is so much better in self-custody that my freedom of will
has improved as a result so i think this idea of freedom is something that you can actually cherry
pick certain bits and pieces that improve your ability to have freedom of will like another would
be an employment contract and if you have built yourself a position of bitcoin which i've seen
multiple people do now over the last five years that i've been meeting up with at bitcoin meetups
where they were accountants or electricians and they've just been stacking bitcoin diligently
for five years they're now taking caravan trips around australia or they're having a sabbatical
or they're starting their own business,
they've built themselves a position of freedom
that previously wasn't there.
So I guess what I'm getting at is
there are practical things that we can do every day
that you can choose to live a more free life.
Because sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming, can't it?
It's like, how am I even going to...
Oh, fuck.
Yeah, exactly.
I think you're exactly right.
We give ourselves an opportunity
and I think that's what we want.
It starts with an opportunity, right?
And Bitcoin gave us that opportunity, an idea, and that idea is going to have consequences.
And I think that's why governments haven't adopted it, because there will be consequences and people are going to lose power and money ultimately.
Right. And you become more free and more sovereign because of it.
And that's a threat to somebody's livelihood or or a system and its livelihood.
and heaven forbid, I don't know how many empires
we have to see fall, but ultimately it all leads to the same place.
Yeah, it's that process of
spring, summer, autumn, winter, and round we go again.
And it builds on itself.
Contra, okay, so we've got give or take 5-10 minutes left. This is a big question that we would
never be able to answer in 5 minutes, but we referenced the Bible earlier.
so I'm intrigued what
you learn from the Bible and how it helps you
every day
that's yeah that could be
a whole episode
one day I'll do much
much longer conversations and I'll
organize in person and stuff but
yeah just a shorter
version of that
so I mean ultimately
I grew up in
the Roman Catholic Church
until I was 18 years old.
I was forced to go by my mom.
And I went through all of the steps
that you could possibly go through
or that you're required to go through.
And I didn't understand any of it.
I didn't understand.
Like I had this concept of God.
I had, you know, how deep it was, not very.
But I did have this concept.
And it wasn't until I got married.
I was married at 20.
I wouldn't say until maybe 10 years after I was married.
My wife kind of grew up more in the Protestant Christian church,
and we never really had faith-driven conversations.
We went to church a few times when I was in the military with some friends and stuff,
but it was never just a big aspect of our life.
So without getting all the way into the story,
essentially there was a tipping point on this one,
So there wasn't many on others, but this one was it where my marriage was kind of on the rocks.
I was working a ton. I was always gone, obviously in the military.
I was doing lots of training and gone and doing things that was definitely immoral and unethical and was hurting my wife and my marriage.
And ultimately, she was like, I'm going back to church. And I was like, have fun.
Looks like I get football on Sundays. Right. All to myself.
And, uh, but then I started seeing changes in her. Right. And, uh, it just started getting me going back to the, kind of the other stories where it just started, these questions started kind of poking my, my soul a little bit. And I was like, well, I started picking up books that she just had laying around. And, uh, I posted this actually on, on Noster, uh, about a book called Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.
and that was more or less one of the first books that I've read probably within 48 hours.
I couldn't put it down.
It just gave me a sense of like this makes sense to me.
Like the way that I've experienced life, the way I've experienced the world,
how it operates in its fallen nature with the corruption and the evil and the good.
Like, yeah, we live in a spiritual world and ultimately I just dug in.
and I'm still learning.
Obviously, I've been on this faith journey for, let's see, 24 to 11 years now.
I've grown tremendously in my knowledge.
I read more dead people than I read living people.
Obviously, nobody's living in the Bible right now,
but a lot of dead theologians that kind of just sparked historically politics,
economics, obviously theology, but it's all driven and centered around theology.
So that's how essentially I came to it.
And then just seeing myself ultimately, right?
I'm going to, to give you the gospel message, right?
Like I was a sinner.
I was depraved and I was in, like, I was in need of help.
And I've done, I had essentially done everything that I thought I could do to make myself better.
And I just really couldn't.
And so, you know, I learned why Christ had to come and save sinners because we couldn't fulfill what God required of us.
And he did that on behalf of the people that he loves.
and ultimately I follow him.
I put my trust in him
and my life is only since that day
and continues to be more fruitful because of it.
And so I just challenge people to dig in and ask questions.
Like there's so many, I understand,
like Noster's reach is global, obviously.
And I'll get lots of pushback
from different people all the time,
but I'm willing to engage in those conversations.
And it's more or less just to help people
to see there's truth.
and this truth that I came across,
and I'm not trying to be pluralistic,
this is the truth that I believe in
and I think I can answer
or go back and forth with people
to come to a conclusion
on this is reality of life
and the Christian faith has lasted all these years
and I live by it and help my wife
and teach my boys in the same faith.
So that's essentially kind of it.
Awesome.
Thank you for sharing.
I immediately just popped on my phone as you were explaining that and I've just bought the
kindle version of that book so I'll have a look at it yeah somehow and I've talked about this in
the past from why would you create a podcast perspective and I talk about the idea of leaving
digital breadcrumbs and people find those breadcrumbs and they eventually catch up and they
get to you and I've done that many times with other people and I know that happens with the
content I've created over the years because I get emails and messages from people from all sorts of
different parts of the world but as I grow older I get more spiritual there's no doubt about that
as a trajectory and I've had some already fascinating conversations on this podcast about
like consciousness what God might mean to someone and I love what you mentioned there about like a
book that you just had lying around yeah like that was the breadcrumb the chances what are the
chances but there's the breadcrumb and you go boom i'll take that and and that is then how you seed
an idea and that's what's so cool about all of this because it's totally unique right no one else
has the same life experience and i think one of the one of the pulls to that that book jake is
is uh it was coming from an atheist who had converted to christianity so i had lots of
questions. Just like we go down all these rabbit holes that we've kind of already talked about a
little bit, this was a rabbit hole for me as well. And as I've gotten older, I picked that thing up.
And like I said, I couldn't put it down, but it was answering all the questions that I had.
Not super deep, but deep enough for me to at least grasp the concepts of what was being said
and being defended from scriptures. And I tell you, when I was done with the book, that was
probably the first time in my life where I was like, I know this information now. It's kind of
like when you get to that point in Bitcoin, you're like, now I got to do something. Now I got to buy
Bitcoin. Like I understand it now. Now I need to buy it. It was, it was that moment kind of where
I was like, okay, I think I believe this. Like I feel it in my soul. I believe this. Now I need to
do something with it. And I remember coming to my wife and just started like, well, what do I do now?
Like, I think I believe, you know, this Jesus that came into this world to save sinners
from themselves and from God.
And she was like, just put your faith in it.
Keep reading the Bible and live out what it says
and the way that Jesus lived.
And I was just like, that's it?
Like, I feel like I need to do something, right?
And I feel like I need to enact certain things in my life.
And it really, obviously it's a process.
It's still a process, but I've learned so much.
Just like you said, there's breadcrumbs everywhere.
These dead theologians, a lot of them from Europe,
from the early church.
they've given me more enlightenment than anybody of our time has.
And it's helped me to just, again, structure my family first,
how to organize it, structure it, and then live it out.
And it's been nothing but a blessing and obviously very super fruitful for us.
And so I just implore everybody to at least pick it up and read it
and at least have a conversation and ask questions at the end of the day.
Well, and I think if there's anything that's true from the last five years,
if you haven't asked yourself the question,
why do I know what I know?
Right.
Then you're not asking a key question.
No, you're right.
Because the information that has been shared
and conditioned into us from an extraordinarily young age
through the school systems,
you have to start asking that.
Because even like, you know, for me growing up in England,
we were taught the kings and queens of England.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I can't remember them all now.
But that is a long list of people that won.
And so the truth is, there's someone on the other side of that.
And you can get into Taoism and yin-yang and all this kind of thing.
There's a winner and a loser.
That doesn't mean that the loser's story was wrong.
They just lost that battle.
The war continues, right?
Absolutely.
Oh, Contra, well, mate, thank you so much for sharing your time today.
and it's always amazing to learn from people like yourself.
So as much as I would love to carry this on
for another two, three hours, we'll call it there.
Is there anything you'd like to leave anyone with
just to close things up?
No, I appreciate your time, Jake.
I appreciate this and hopefully we can do it again
and talk about more Nostra, more Bitcoin or life in general.
But no, I just encourage everyone to continue
to remember that we have more in common
than everybody's telling us.
And I think ultimately we all have this feeling
of what's going on around us
and change needs to be implemented.
And at the end of the day, look in the mirror,
we're the change.
Awesome. Great vibe to finish with.
Well, thank you, Contra.
Thanks, Jake. Appreciate it.
Pleasure.