Hey, okay, so Lucas and I are here again for, we're going to do the second chapter of software,
or software rather, a novel theory on power projection and the national strategic significance
of Bitcoin. That's Jason Lowry's thesis. We have it in PDF, and we have the first chapter,
last conversation, we're doing the second chapter here. The second chapter is purely methodological,
it's an account of the methodology that Lowry uses for his thesis. On Twitter, Lowry said,
hey, you might want to skip that chapter. It's purely formal, purely something he had to do for the thesis requirement he had to talk about the methodology he used.
But I think Lucas and I agree that it's really interesting in and of itself.
Because what's really interesting about Lowry's thesis is that it comes from a perspective military theory that we usually don't see.
With Bitcoin, we often see monetary, financial, economic theory used as kind of a jumping off point for hypotheses or claims about Bitcoin.
And Lowry comes from a completely different perspective.
And so in this methodology chapter, I think we get kind of a meta perspective of how we could take new angles on any subject matter, but more specifically on Bitcoin.
And on that first point, like, I think that's inherently interesting, too. Like, one of the things that's interesting about Bitcoin is it is a jumping off point into other things, like people who become interested in Bitcoin, often Bitcoin is hope and hope is kind of it fosters curiosity, right? Because you begin to look at the world again with with new eyes, and you want to learn about things that the monetary system is no longer this opaque cabal that does things without our knowing or whatever, right?
It becomes we see that this open, transparent protocol makes other aspects of our lives more open and transparent, too.
And I think it does foster curiosity.
And so this chapter, it's methodological.
Maybe it's dry in that sense.
But I think it's indicative of what Bitcoin brings to us as far as a reengagement with things that we can learn about and from whatever angle.
And so this is one methodology we could use.
And I'll just lay out the kind of the general summary of that methodology.
And then Lucas and I will talk about it here.
So it's grounded theory methodology, which begins with data instead of theory.
So usually, you know, you could start with a general theory.
And from that general theory, you could deduce a hypothesis and then you could test that hypothesis.
For example, you could say, you know, you'd have a theory that Bitcoin is a monetary technology.
and you could deduce hypotheses relating to that about Bitcoin being money.
But that's kind of been problematic because then you're already starting from a particular theoretical perspective.
So grounded theory allows you to work the other way around.
You begin with the data and then you derive or get to a theory from that.
So you begin with data, you then organize or code that data into different categories using concepts.
And it's kind of a process of increasing abstraction as you create these categories that organize the concepts that you derive from the data.
And as you analyze data according to these concepts and then abstract them into categories, it's also an iterative process where you, once you have concepts, you then go back and get more data and analyze that data.
once you have categories maybe you refine your concepts and then also go back and get more data
and it's kind of iterative until you get to the point where you've sufficiently abstracted your
categories kind of that broadest organizing principle of your analyzing of the data into
what are called core categories and from those core categories you generate explanatory you make
them sufficiently explanatory such that a theory emerges from that that's a point called theoretical
saturation within the grounded theory methodology. It's the point at which you really
kind of general finding new data and analyzing it doesn't generate any new conceptual insight
that would then lead to a new category, you've kind of done enough analyzing of data to get the
concepts and categories needed to inductively arrive at a general theory. So how that began
And here is Lowry had a kind of a general idea.
He began with a vague question in this kind of that's going to guide you're analyzing the data.
You have to begin with something.
And the vague question was kind of something like, what are the national security, strategic security implications of Bitcoin?
And then from that, he analyzed the data, generated concepts.
From those concepts, again, he created general categories to organize those concepts.
from the general categories, iteratively went back, looked at the data, came up with more concepts,
refined the categories from those categories. There was a process of abstraction to create
kind of core categories that organized all of it. From the core category that he alighted upon
through this methodology, this grounded theory methodology then, was power projection emerged
as this central category. And under the central category, there was power projection in Wild
nature, power projection in human society, and power projection in cyberspace.
And then underneath power projection in cyberspace is kind of the theory he generates, which
is that Bitcoin is a form of physical power projection into digital space.
So that's kind of a broad overview of this methodological section and how he kind of
tips his hand that this is the theory that is generated from all of this engagement with
the data, analyzing it, coming up with concepts, organizing those concepts into categories,
arriving at core categories, finding that core category of power projection, and then
the subcategories under it of power projection in nature, human society, cyberspace.
And then again, the theory that is inductively arrived at, or that I guess the theory itself
is inductively arrived at from looking at all this data.
And that theory, again, is something like Bitcoin is a form of physical power projection into digital space.
So that's a summary.
Is that kind of what you got from this, Lucas?
Yeah, absolutely.
A couple of things that really, I think, stood out to me that clarified, A, the value of this approach just in general, but B, the specific value of this approach for Bitcoin.
Like you mentioned, there's so many jumping off places.
And to quote Larry Lippard, the fix the money, fix the world.
Once you understand Bitcoin, you start to see it everywhere and you start to see how it impacts everything.
And you go, oh, well, we won't have to fight forever wars because we won't be able to raise infinite money out of nowhere.
So there's a benefit.
And then you go, oh, well, companies can actually focus on innovation instead of chasing growth because they won't have to overcome a 12% cost of capital because the money is being inflated away.
And you think, oh, things are going to cost less because there's going to be fewer intermediaries and people in between taking transaction fees.
And so specifically for Bitcoin, this interpretive grounded theory approach is absolutely wonderful.
And the interpretive part where you get to bring your own bias, which is something that has always been no-node and poo-pooed when doing research, is actually brilliant.
because you think about what value do you have to bring a new perspective,
a fresh perspective to something.
I think about like you go, well, here's this thing,
and we need to determine the usefulness of it.
And let's say this thing is a smooth, rounded stick that's slightly tapered
and has a bit of a bulb on one end.
and one guy goes, oh, that's a baseball bat.
I hit home runs with that.
And another guy goes, oh, that's a murder weapon.
I kill people with that.
And another guy goes, well, that's firewood
and I keep my family warm with it.
And you bring a different perspective
based on the experience that you've had.
And when I was in college,
I was involved in a little bit of research,
some economic stuff and some agronomy.
and it this like reading a methodology section should be boring it typically would be boring but
to me it just hit me like a light bulb because i realized like just how short-sighted limited and
truly potentially dangerous um the hypothesis approach can be and like give you an example
let's take OxyContin and let's study and let's ask the question, does it reduce pain?
Yeah, it does. It does. That's great. It does that. And now we're done with the research and
we've failed to look at the overall body of data, which also shows that it ruins lives. It gets
people addicted. It creates havoc throughout a society. Think about Ozempic. Does Ozempic
and weak OV. Does that help you lose weight? Absolutely. It helps you lose weight. That's
great. We've answered that question, but what we haven't considered is there's long-term effects.
It's going to cause muscle wasting and you're going to be probably dependent upon this and,
you know, it may change your brain chemistry as well. You know, all the, all these different things.
So to be able to come at a research question with this qualitative approach and to use the benefit
of your life experience as, as bias in order to give you kind of a, and to, to use that introspection
that you have and go, Oh, that makes sense to me. Um, one of the things that I thought when I was
reading this was he talks about like some of the drawbacks of this approach. And one of the
drawbacks is that it can kind of be like overwhelming and it can kind of be, um, almost,
you know there's just so much data and you don't it can be frightening is the way that he put it
in that you may not know what you're going to find yeah and and you have to go through that
iterative process of putting things into categories and what that made me think of
in my interpretive approach is you know so I've been involved back on the family farm helping out
and trying to kind of clean things and order things up.
And I realized by doing that that the most effective method in order to clean a farm shop
is not to pick this up and put it away.
It's to literally take everything out, put it into piles, and then start refining those piles.
And first you go, okay, this is air equipment.
And then this is, here's stuff that you beat stuff with.
these are hammered and then here's stuff that are wrenches and then you that's interesting
that's like a material literal example of the methodology like literally the data is the piece
the object and then the concepts are you kind of understand the you subjectively describe the tool
the item to yourself and then you group those according to that and through process of abstraction you come to categories about where you going to store things and stuff yeah well and that the other part is that it not only do you continue to refine it where you like okay these are wrenches
And then you go, you know, these are open-ended wrenches.
These are closed-ended wrenches.
And here's your metrics.
And here's your standards.
And here's your big ones.
And you're a little – you got all that.
But then you also – you go, well, where does it make most sense for me to have these?
Like is it on the east wall?
Is it on the back wall?
you know this air equipment like why would i ever keep my impact wrenches on the opposite side of
the shop as the air compressor that doesn't make sense because i'm gonna have to walk across the
shop and so the answer reveals itself by ordering the data yeah and and there's so much value in
that right right um to be able to look at this like the way that he did which is to which is to
come at it with just, here's my bias. You know, I'm a, I'm a guy that's interested in power
projection and, um, securing resources because I'm a soldier. Um, and this is my charge. So
if I come at it from that perspective and I start ordering this data, what happens? And
right. Yeah. It turns out that he comes up with a, you know, this novel theory.
And the thing is like, we don't, to kind of get the, like, I don't know that the jest
to alter the theory and use it in our lives to get like the motivational force behind this.
You don't need to sit down and do a formal thesis to apply a methodology like this.
I mean, as you've described, you can even in ordering the I mean, we kind of implicitly
do it because it's a natural way of operating in the world.
If you're intelligent, you take the data, you don't pre commit to some theoretical framework
about it, that all of the tools or items are going to find in this garage or garbage, you're
going to say, I'm going to look at each of the things and then kind of, as I look at
them. I'm going to make subjective assessments about them, put them in the piles, and then refine
my piles. So it's like something we do naturally. And it's good to see it stated formally as a
methodology. So we remind ourselves that in this type of qualitative endeavor, you do derive a
theory that has some sort of value, even if it's not purely objective. There's a quote in here from
a textbook dealing with grounded theory methodology. And it kind of gets back to first
principles, I'll just read it because I think it's good, that noting that when you're dealing
with qualitative data, you're only ever going to have that type of subjectivity involved,
as opposed to quantitative data. And so this is from Corbin and Strauss,
data collection analysis have traditionally called for objectivity. Today, it is acknowledged that
objectivity, as it is traditionally defined in research, can't be applied to qualitative research.
The reason is that qualitative researchers interface with participants and the data.
They bring with them their perspectives, training, knowledge, assumptions, and biases, which in turn influence how they interact with participants and interpret data.
Instead of objectivity, qualitative researchers aim for sensitivity or the ability to carefully listen and respect both participants and the data they provide.
And so I think this is, I mean, you mentioned this, like, we're each going to come to any new phenomena, take Bitcoin with our own biases and perspectives. And what's liberating about considering from grounded theory methodology, or kind of the principles behind it is that you don't, that's, there's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to say, okay, abandon all of those now hit the textbooks on Austrian economic theory, so I can learn what Bitcoin is, you can encounter it naively with your own naked eyes, bring to the table your own prejudices.
assumptions, biases, and try to understand it. In that endeavor, it's obviously going to be
helpful to look at what people have said about it, look at other perspectives, but it remains
to the case that I do think that it's liberating and we shouldn't be ashamed to come at Bitcoin and
try to understand it from the perspectives that we bring to it and that that's going to lead to
Bitcoin and art, Bitcoin and football, Bitcoin and this, Bitcoin and that, and that that's going to
be really cool to see that explosion of people understanding this thing from whatever bias,
prejudice perspective they bring to the table. Yeah. And it gets stronger the more you approach
it with different researchers. So you take the hypothesis approach and what you do is you come
up with a result that is according to the scientific method, not false. You know, the
scientific method, you can either prove things to be false or not false. They're, they're never not,
They're never true, but they can just be not proven false yet.
And if you have more and more researchers that attempt to replicate that, the best that they can ever do is agree that it is not false.
But if you take this approach and you have more and more people come at it with their own personal biases,
and they are approaching it with different facets and they are coming to, you know,
they're ordering the data and they're looking at it from their perspective
and they're coming to their conclusion because it's the data ordering itself that gives the conclusion.
Then what you end up with is a result that instead of the best you can do is say that it's not false,
you can say it's more true.
It's true from this perspective.
You know, it's true from the soldier's perspective. It's true from the financier's perspective. It's true from the libertarian perspective. It's true from the individual autonomy perspective. It's true from all of these different perspectives. And the more we bring bias to it and the more varied those biases are, the more true the result that we end up with instead of just reaffirming that something is not false.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we are constrained in doing that. We bring our biases perspectives to the table, but we are constrained by logic and we're constrained by, I mean, other people are going to have to be able to understand and accept our subjective evaluation as carrying some truth for them if they're going to also accept the theory that we deduce from the thing.
I mean, if you say Bitcoin is a lizard and you have no logical reason to back that up, obviously it's silly. But the investigative, open-eyed attitude you bring to it is what matters. And we will get new perspectives and hopefully assess some of those as, like you say, more true than others.
And Lowry notes that in the lessons learned at the end of it, he notes that one of the things that this approach requires is there's a specific character in the investigator that is required to undertake grounded methodology research in relation to some subject matter.
It takes a humanistic bent, kind of creativity and imagination, but with a strong sense of logic, detail oriented, got to be able to see the variation in the data to be able to kind of derive the concepts and then group things in categories.
and a willingness to take risks and kind of live with the ambiguity you're always going to have when you do any sort of qualitative investigative endeavor.
That especially is kind of drawing from lots of data and you're tasked again with creating the theoretical framework instead of relying on it like a crutch.
I think a really interesting part about that is he notes it takes a humanistic bent.
And, you know, people can maybe sometimes be put off from something like Bitcoin because they think, oh, man, now I got to learn computer code to understand this.
Or, oh, man, this is finance.
I'm not a numbers person.
But to note that, you know, those are important skills that a person could have to tell us something interesting about what Bitcoin is.
But that doesn't exhaust the field of people who have something to say to us about Bitcoin.
humanistic people, artists, philosophers, sociologists, military theorists, everybody who
comes from a camp that is more based in the humanities than programming or financial theory,
banking or whatever. Those people also have something valuable to tell us. And I like that
thought that it engages more people with interacting with Bitcoin in an intellectual way or could
engage more people to engage with Bitcoin in an intellectual way rather than just number go up or
something like that. Yeah. And I'm going to say something that goes along the lines of that
stoner dorm room approach that we were talking about is such kind of the fun part of this, but
it makes me think of beauty. It makes me think of Jordan Peterson's definition of what beauty is.
And beauty is that which we all agree is beautiful.
You know, there's a reason why this piece hangs in the Louvre and this piece does not.
There's a reason why these types of characteristics are commonly viewed as beautiful amongst the population.
And it's because everyone bringing their own personal bias to it is still drawn to it in a certain way.
and Bitcoin is something that it truly does represent something beautiful.
If you look at the code, it is beautiful in that it's incredibly simple
and it addresses the problem and it does it in a manner that is so innovative
and it draws this beautiful line between the physical and the digital world
and it marries them together in a way that could never be done.
And then the way that it was conceived, you know,
the Immaculate Conception was beautiful,
where it was released into the world and it's decentralized and it's open for all.
And what we see it do to people that adopt it,
you see the people on Bitcoin Beach that were giving haircuts
and taking payment in Bitcoin that are now millionaires.
How it changes people's lives is beautiful.
how it has united people.
We talk about this.
There is no more.
We've been stuck in this hellhole of diversity, inclusion, and equity.
I like how I think it's Elon that calls it that, D-I-E, die instead of D-E-I.
But we've been stuck in this just toilet bowl of these words that mean absolutely nothing
and truly represent racism and discrimination.
But when you look across the landscape of people involved in Bitcoin, there is absolutely no more diverse, inclusive or equitable group of people in the entire world than people that have seen Bitcoin for the beauty that it is and chosen to adopt it in their own lives.
I mean, we don't even I don't think need to prejudge DEI as you're right.
I just throw that in there because I want to say that like this would be interesting.
Like you can judge DEI by saying, okay, use that as a framework, as a vague intuition, go and look at the data of Bitcoin, see what concepts from DEI you can apply to the data you're analyzing relating to Bitcoin, the nature of this thing, and then what categories emerge from that.
and if it's a core category.
And then let people who are so inclined see if they come at a new insight relating to when you look at a decentralized race protocol that is equally available to somebody in Nigeria and across Venezuela in the United States anybody can get a banking account
Or even without prejudging it as financial in nature, what does it mean that there's a proof-of-work protocol behind which everybody can shield their information?
You know, what does somebody who comes in with the perspective of a committed DEI person, what will change about their ideology? Or maybe even, I mean, being open-minded myself, will they bring something to Bitcoin? I don't know. It would be interesting.
I would even, skeptical of some DEI things, I would say it would be interesting for a person who's committed in that way to bring their value to the table and honestly try to do data analysis, coding, conceptual refinement, category creation, and see if they can say something interesting about Bitcoin or about the values that they brought in to assess Bitcoin.
Yeah. I mean, what what other thing unites drug dealers and senators and artists and engineers and criminals and criminals? But hey, I'm being redundant. Yeah, 100 percent.
But yeah, I mean, what other thing unites people like that?
I mean, it's like soccer.
It's like the global sport, except it's the global liberator.
And also perhaps the global protector.
One of the things that I've been thinking about since we had our last conversation was,
you know and he obviously mentions this but just trying to put this into my own framework was
I brought up how I'm viewing this in terms of Bitcoin is the first live money that we've ever
had everything else is simply dead money that is potential energy waiting to be released and
the way that it is released can be by purchasing a weapon that is turned into kinetic energy the
The way that it's released can be by bribing someone in order to do something that you want,
by paying someone to protect or harm in your name.
But the thought that I had was just that dead money kills.
Like the only way for dead money to inflict power is to do something that is destructive to society.
It can be a bomb in order to try to claim more resources.
It can be a bribe in order to try and get a back around on something.
But what the crypto, what the cyberspace battle of power projection does is it uses live energy.
And there's no innocent bystanders.
There's no casualties.
casualties. It's merely a back and forth, a push and pull where the superiority transfers to whoever
can display the most power in a competition that is not just harmless to the participants,
but instead of being destructive, it is accretive because the more power that they are able to
project, the better that they are able to serve their society and the people around.
Yeah, yeah. So, no, that definitely goes to the heart of, can you hear me?
Yeah, I was just going to say, I want to make shirts that say dead money kills.
I mean, because it's been running through my mind, it's just dead money kills.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, and live money gives life.
Dead money is after your brains. I mean, it's a zombie.
But yeah, I mean, so that's obviously, you know, that's a good kind of,
that is very consistent with Lowry's thesis.
And so it comes at it from a theoretical framework that he is kind of establishing here, power projection and the physical power that Bitcoin represents in cyberspace.
I'm curious, Lucas, you as a person, if you could strip away your preconceived theoretical knowledge of Bitcoin and arrive at it now, naive, as a child, innocent, but still bringing all of your world, all of your life experience to the table, the jobs you've had, the rural background you've lived, bringing all those things to the table.
Can you put yourself in those shoes and come at Bitcoin again and describe what it is without recourse to military theory, banking theory, like monetary economic theory?
What is it to a person who is you?
Yeah, that's a what a great question.
And how like how do you even come at that and try to leave those things behind?
Because I know, you know, like Saylor Saylor always says, you know, Bitcoin is on a need to know basis.
Like you you'll know when you need to know.
and I think for me
for me it was
that realization that oh this is something that works
like I think about this all the time and I write about this too
I was a financial advisor
who bought Barnes & Noble
instead of Amazon and I looked it up last night
the $2,500 that I put into Barnes & Noble
that went to like nothing would be worth like
$25 million now
if I had put it into Amazon.
And I went to go buy Google when it IPO'd,
but I wasn't able to make the purchase
because the only person that I could find to sell it to me
was a guy that was going to charge me $300
out of the $800 that I had for a commission.
And I didn't trust E-Trade because it had just come out.
And so I had this experience of,
even though I was educated,
and I was credentialed in that area that I kept getting the things wrong.
And the only thing that got me there was when I bought some Bitcoin,
I got lucky and I happened to buy it like right when it was in a bull run.
And it went way up like in a week and I freaked out.
I didn't know what it was.
I still didn't understand it.
And so I sold it just to make sure I could get my money out.
And of course, it never went back to that level.
I was never able to buy back in. Um, but I mean, can, can I even come out? And I don't think so.
And the, and the reason I, the reason I don't think so is just because how many people have
you tried to orange pill and how, like, what's your hit rate? You know, like mine's probably,
mine's probably 3% maybe if that, you know, and, uh, and of that 3%, I wouldn't say that I've
actually orange-pilled anybody. I was just able to trade on my reputation and their trust in me
and get them to take this step for themselves. And they just see, oh, number go up. And it takes,
I don't, I mean, I don't, and I could still, you know, you could break it down into all the
different categories. Like here's how it serves the four purposes of money and here's the 10
characteristics and you could, you could do that, but why would you like, how would you ever have
that curiosity unless you had a need to know? And that, that, you know, that need to know for most
people is when they're in the situation like Saylor describes, which is, it was life or death
for that company. And they needed to know like, what, what can we do in order to save this company?
It wasn't something that they were doing as like, hey, how do we just get better a little bit?
It was like, hey, we're going to die.
You know, and we're looking at that right now.
Like that's, you know, we're watching the, I think the debt just went over 36 trillion.
And it's, who knows?
I don't understand why, but maybe 36 trillion seems to be kind of the magic number.
Nobody cared when it was 27 or 22 or 33, but all of a sudden 36.
And we've got a, you know, we've got the Bitcoin Act bill and we've got an entire cabinet and president that are pro crypto.
And yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, shit just got real.
So maybe maybe we should look into what the significance of the number 36 is.
But there's a Kabbalistic significance we can esoterically derive as like if time is a topology and not linear,
then from the future a message is being sent backwards in time through
Kabbalistic significance of numbers.
I'm reading Zeno systems right now.
It's definitely a trip.
But I would still don't feel bad like that.
You bought Barnes and Noble instead of Amazon.
I bought booze and books instead of either of those things.
And I don't know that my investment has paid off except for,
except for kind of subjectively as something that I invested in.
And here's how, how, how, how prescient is this?
36 is the atomic number of Krypton.
There you go.
Again, these things, these things don't, there is significant numbers.
It's all preordained.
Yeah.
It's the future speaking to us.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
I don't think I could, I genuinely don't think that I could come at Bitcoin from any way other
than I did.
But what about you?
Is there, is there a way that you, I mean, you and you and I, like, this is a great example.
you and I came at Bitcoin from completely different reasons.
I came at it from probably greed, I would say,
because I kept seeing a buddy of mine who I knew was very wealthy put stuff up.
And I finally talked to him and he gave me kind of the end.
But I think you kind of came at it from the academic humanitarian side.
Right. I was a philosophy major, so I never had wealthy friends.
Correct.
I never had to worry about wealth.
That was not something that like greed would have been entirely hypothetical for me that, oh, that's something you have if you have money.
I didn't have the predicate to greed.
But no, like what.
Greed is what you have when you don't have money.
Some idea of money you don't have.
Like in philosophy, it's like you don't you don't get this.
You don't get a skill that's going to make you wealthy, but you get the skill that makes you not care that you're not wealthy.
Right.
Yeah.
What is that?
Indignation.
it's a negative description of all the philosophy but perhaps it's true but no so i was i was doing
lawyering at the time of the human rights orientation and so alex gladstein like so again
we're talking about different theoretical frameworks that one might have and like the
common ones financial banking uh you know economic theory and then with lowry military theory human
rights could be considered also another you know orientation someone could have to bitcoin the
another theoretical framework from which a person could deduce hypotheses about what does Bitcoin,
does it actually in X society lead to less oppression from an authoritarian government?
And so Alex Gladstein's book, Check Your Financial Privilege, that really opened my eyes. And that
was a theoretical framework that, I mean, it's not philosophical, it is very economic in orientation,
But it is very value based and ethical and oriented towards kind of claims about ethics within political morality of oppressive societies cannot sustain an open monetary protocol because of the way they operate and more so like check your financial privilege if you don see why that
significant for someone in other countries because you've never lived in a country where you haven't
had access to banking like and so you know if you say ah you know just get like apple pay or venmo
or whatever it's like well these things aren't even available in in certain countries right so
But so in any case, asking myself that question I asked you, coming at this from the frameworks that were given to me, my own experience, the perspective I have naively not considering Bitcoin as a monetary technology.
It first arrived to me as a human rights technology.
And I still see it as that.
Like, that's what I see it as.
And that is what, even beyond any investment thesis, that's what sustains my conviction.
That's why Bitcoin is hope.
And again, hope is what gives me curiosity. And it's this reinforcing feedback loop. And now I want to learn about banking and financial theory and all these other things, because I want to understand why this thing works and the ways in which it's going to ramify. So yeah, I mean, that's just given my philosophy, philosophy background and the kind of human rights oriented lawyering I did. And then Gladstein's book really struck me and was a good theoretical framework for me.
yeah and i should say you know at the time that i was doing that i was i was living this comfortable
life as a banker and i had a little money and i was just like oh how you know how can i how can i
find something that will help me retire earlier because i don't want to do this like i just
genuinely wasn't enjoying but concurrently at you know at the same time i was sitting there and i
was reviewing financial statements coming in from operations during 2021 after um agriculture had had
just the most insane year ever. They had the greatest, they had the best yields. They had the
best prices. They got the biggest payments from the government that were just, um, we, I called
it the Trump bump, uh, on the coat on the heels of COVID. Um, and so, you know, they had all this
money coming in, but I had so many operations that their entire net worth grew by 40%, but they
couldn't pay their bills and they needed more credit. And then I had operations that were coming
in that had literally never borrowed money, like people that literally did not have a credit score
because they had never borrowed money before. And we had to figure out how to finance somebody
without a credit score. Um, and they were coming in asking for money. And I was like,
none of this makes sense. Everything, everything should be working. Everybody's getting more money.
All of your ground, just like the, the, the real estate values went up 30% in a year or 50%
In some cases we had irrigated ground that was going for 6,000 was then selling for 8,900,
$9,200 per acre.
And you're looking around and you're like, wait, I thought that was good.
And, but if that's good, then why is everybody broke?
And why, why is this not working?
And why are we expanding lines of credit from a million to a million five?
and so having that perspective where I was researching that and that took me down the
you know the creature from Jekyll Island rabbit hole and learning about you know the Fed and
learning about that kind of money if not for that just the simple number go up thing on my
on my app was on on Coinbase was not going to get me there and the way that I know that by the way
is because there's a whole lot of guys right now in the Wall Street Bets section of Reddit
that are learning a terrible lesson about greed right now
because they're in there going, oh, this MSTR thing, it's way overvalued.
We're just going to short the living hell out of it,
and they are getting their faces ripped off right now, and nobody understands why.
And it's because, yeah, they're coming at it from greed, but there's not something else.
I mean, there will be when they go broke.
And then it'll be a need to know basis because they'll want to know what killed them and what killed them was Bitcoin.
They will transmute it into the facile knowledge of mimetic contagion.
They will assume that master is in Bitcoin or another meme.
They understand memes.
They will on the lowest common denominator interpret the phenomena.
Hopefully they will have the curiosity to extend beyond that.
But we'll see.
The ADIQ memes are really getting it done these days.
It's like they're effective, they're simple, and they are spreading like wildfire.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah.
So anyways, I think for both of us, I think maybe it's probably accurate to summarize that, you know,
we got to Bitcoin the way that God or whatever it was was supposed to get us to Bitcoin.
You know, we found it because it was there for us.
Um, and there was nothing that I could do differently.
And there was, yeah, I mean, you're a curious person.
I mean, I am curious in some ways, and I think that it's nice that Bitcoin rewards virtue
in that way.
It, you know, you come to it when you need, when the time that is adequate, correct for
you, preordained, Kabbalistically, but you also come to you because you're engaged with
the world.
It comes to you because you're curious about things.
it comes to you because you're concerned about preserving your value that you've accrued in your
life you're concerned about your family and so it's nice when things reward virtue and virtuous
behaviors virtuous characteristics and so there's one lesson or the one thing i also this is kind of
a meta point from this but i wanted to i don't know end with this or at least say it that um
lowry notes that when you engage when you engage in grounded theory methodology it takes a high
risk tolerance for a theorizer. So you're going, you have the data, you don't have a theory to
guide you, you have to find that theoretical framework. And so you go out in the wild into
the wild of the data itself, that's not the data that's faceless without concept. I mean,
there's a Kantian point in there, like, without the concept, you know, it has no name yet,
it is nothing. And so you have to give it meaning, you have to subjectively kind of describe this
data, come up with concepts that do that, then organize those concepts into categories,
et cetera.
And so you have to have this high risk tolerance.
And it's also, at the end of the day, you are making something.
What you're making is a theoretical framework.
It's not a rocket.
It's not going to save humanity, but you're making something.
And I think we're entering the epoch of the makers, of people who, whatever you make,
be it you know an emotion if you're an artist maybe it's an idea if you're a thinker maybe
it's a theory if you're an investigator but this is the epic of makers and i like that the grounded
theory methodology is about making something something that's that's non-material a theory
but you make something and like lowry made something of value this power projection thesis
And I hope one thing that this dry methodological section could do maybe is empower people to be elons of theorizing and come up with new theoretical frameworks and make something.
yeah i think about um when you think about kind of the scariness of walking into that data
without knowing it makes me think of of songwriting and when i when i write i typically
i i tend to want to write about some of the more like darker subjects um and i've always held the
belief that there is more in darkness than there is in light you know if you're if you're faced
with darkness, there could be anything in there. Um, and your imagination will put anything in
there, but if you shine light on something, it just simply is what it is. Um, and so you think
about like, Oh, you know, I could sit down and I could write a song that, uh, is about, is about,
uh, beer drinking and driving trucks and chasing girls. And all I have to do is, you know, start
rhyming stuff with boots and boots and jean shorts and tank tops or whatever. But this other idea
where you're like, you know, I feel something that I don't like and it's unsettling and I'm not really,
I'm not really prepared to, to manage it emotionally, but I'm going to try to write it down and see what makes sense.
And that's, it can be scary because it takes you into something that when you're done, you, you may not,
you may not really like about yourself or you may not, you may not want it to represent what it actually does.
It may reveal a truth that you weren't willing at the time to consider.
But just like the data ordering itself, you know, just like cleaning out the shop and the tools getting put into order, they do reveal themselves for what they are.
And, you know, going back to it, it's not coming up with something that's not false.
It's coming up with something that becomes more and more true the more you look at it.
So that, yeah, I'm just having done a little, I mean, just, and I mean, just the tiniest bit of research, like it was truly just so eye opening to consider this idea of what does it mean for research to take those blinders off and actually try to look at the forest instead of the trees.
No, look at the trees in order to.
Yeah, look at the trees.
Yeah, that's actually true.
Yeah, look at the trees so that you can see the forest, I suppose.
Or understand that it's not a forest, it's a other thing.
It's everything.
Yeah.
No, that's a good way to put it.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I love the route that it's taken us down.
And especially just, you know, again, reading a methodology section should be the most boring thing about a paper.
But this, you know, it couldn't have worked any other way.
Yeah.
And so it really did provide this deep breath of coming at it from different facets to support what became a theory that didn't start as one.
Right. And that's what we have here is a novel theory about Bitcoin and its strategic relevance.
And that novelty is not possible without this methodology.
So, yeah, it was worth reading definitely this chapter.
100%. I'm glad we did.
I appreciate Jason Lowry stepping into the comments and trying to give us a pass on it.
Thanks, teacher.
Yeah, but super glad.
Yeah, definitely.
Very revealing.
Nope, it was great.
All right, that's all I got.
All right, so then next time we'll check out Chapter 3.
Yes.
Chapter 3 gets us into kind of the meat and potatoes.
The meat of things, right on.
Yeah, really, which is, let me scroll down here.
so I don't get it wrong,
just in case there's people that are following along
that are interested in how this works.
With bated breath, wondering what the name of Chapter 3 is.
Yeah, exactly.
People that tell us to look at a table of contents.
There are people that are too lazy to Google the PDF,
so I want to say that.
There's no way if I was listening to a random podcast, I would.
Yeah, Chapter 3, Power Projection Tactics in Nature,
which I think is going to be fascinating.
It is fascinating.
It's got a David Attenborough feel.
We've already read it, both of us.
We know it's fascinating.
It'll be good.
Yeah, it'll be great.
So, yeah, appreciate it.
Great conversation, and we'll do it again.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Later.