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This is Bitcoin Study Sessions.
Well, so we're here today for another Bitcoin study sessions. We have a special guest, Brom from Bitcoin for Millennials at Brom K at Twitter has dropped in for this study session.
What we're going to do today is we finished Software, a novel theory on power projection and the national strategic significance of Bitcoin. That's Jason Lowry's thesis.
Lucas and I discussed it in depth chapter by chapter
Bram is familiar, Bram is familiar with the thesis as well
has been engaging with it on Twitter and watched a lot of the videos
read a bit of the thesis
so I'm really happy too that we're going to have this chance to discuss it
kind of in a holistic way
instead of kind of breaking it down into its minutiae
we're going to give definitely just like three dudes discussing the thesis overall
and I'm really excited for this
I'm really excited to have Bram too
So if you haven't checked out his videos, Lucas noted this.
There's just a lot of joy when Brom is interviewing somebody and there's a conviviality there that I'm really happy that he's here today with us because that's kind of what we want to do is, with Bitcoin Study Sessions, is really dig into kind of the great books and great thoughts of Bitcoin and do it in a great books fashion of just going into deep conversations.
So I'm going to give Brahm a chance to introduce himself in a second, but we're going to do
that organically because the methodology of this book actually kind of presents itself
to you as a way to introduce yourself in the context of the thesis.
So what I'll do is kind of give a very, very quick kind of helicopter overview of the thesis.
Just if you're listening kind of naively for the first time, you have no idea what it's
about.
And then I'll kind of pitch that question to Brahm to allow him to introduce himself in
that context that I mentioned kind of more organically.
So the general thesis of softwar is that the nature of warfare historically is as physical power projection to settle disputes over property.
However, humans dislike violence, and so we have tried to reduce the need for using physical power to settle disputes by use of something that we can call abstract power, which is rank-based, invisible power that a belief system delegates to people when they subscribe to it.
A priest, for example, in a religion can say who's good and bad, who has access to the afterlife because they comply with that belief system. Politicians and judges in a nation state with rule of law determines who gets access to what property based on their compliance with the rule of law as written.
But those abstract power-based hierarchy have led to oppressive god kings, they've led to nation states that have nepotistically allocated resources to friends and family. And in the past, real physical power has been necessary to break up and discipline those abstract power hierarchies.
We've had revolution in the United States to create the United States, and that's happened around the world. We've had invasions where abstract power-based hierarchies were destroyed.
So the thesis of this thesis is kind of something like the proof-of-work aspect of Bitcoin is a new form of cyber warfare, a way to project real physical power into cyberspace instead of relying on abstract encoded restraints.
In that way, it's revolutionary in that it is a form of novel warfare called that Lowry calls soft war, a way to use real physical power to dissolve real disputes, but with no human in the loop who can be injured.
So today, I hope we're going to get into maybe the forms of abstract power-based hierarchies, the nature of software administrators as god kings, the future of human out-of-the-loop warfare, and Bitcoin as a world computer, because that's something that I struggle with, and that's part of this thesis.
So the methodology that I think allows one to insert themselves into this discussion and hopefully will allow Brahm to tell how he came to Bitcoin, too.
The methodology of Jason's thesis, he gives a section describing how did I come up with this idea?
So he used something called grounded theory methodology, which is where you begin with the data, not with a theory.
You come in without prejudice, naively, with your own perspective as a person and whatever education you have, but without an overarching theory of what the thing is, of what Bitcoin is in this instance.
And then you begin to organize that data to form concepts that help describe it and then to abstract those concepts into categories that describe those concepts.
And from the categories, you come at this overarching theory of what the thing is.
So you move from specific data to general theory.
it's a way to generate a novel theoretical framework and not to test a specific hypothesis.
But again, the key point is you don't begin with the preconceived theory. You don't begin with the
idea that Bitcoin is money. Bitcoin is something you look at from the perspective of economics or
finances. Instead, Lowry came to it with his military theory perspective and kind of a general
vague idea, a curiosity that Bitcoin had something more to say to us than simply some
novel use case or a different use case than simply what we'd considered as previously,
which is as money. So Brahm, I'm curious, what perspectives do you think, like if you were
coming at Bitcoin from a grounded theory perspective and kind of jettisoning, like the
way we've looked at it as a coin, as financial, as economic in nature, like, and just bringing
all of yourself to the table and trying to reorganize and rethink about Bitcoin,
what perspectives would you bring when you brought your whole self to it?
And how would you think about Bitcoin?
Yeah, thanks so much for this introduction.
And I'm super happy to be here.
I love how you approach this.
Just you explaining this again reminded me of what captured me when I dove into this thesis.
And I think it's really nice to have a conversation like this
because we can go a bit deeper into what I think is a difficult future conceptualization, right?
Like I think Bitcoin is that in general.
That's why I think it's hard to grasp.
But this is like an application of Bitcoin and what it could mean, right?
So I think this even goes a bit further.
So I love to have the opportunity with you guys to discuss this freely, I think.
You know, while you were talking, the first thing I thought of, which was a big realization point for me,
is when you just said, you know, there are a lot of, like, abstract rules also around power with nations,
nations but also you know consumers and banks or consumers and companies you know or legislators or
whatever right like a lot of the agreements that we have are on paper they are just words on paper
you know i am the custodian of your money as a bank and i will do blah blah blah you know whatever
and you say okay and then you you know put your signature below it and then you know you've
outsource the certain responsibility over a certain thing and then you're like well okay now
i can sleep and now i can sleep you know and i don't have to worry about this thing but the
the reality shows us that you actually have to worry about you know all the contractual
agreements you have as specifically with banks for example right but like one of the
big realizations i had was um when i actually listened to a joe rogan episode and i don't know
who the guest was, but they talked about war and stuff like that.
And they had a quote by, I think it was Madeleine Albright,
from an interview that she did where she was asked,
like, was the death of, like, 500,000 children in, like, the first Gulf War,
was that something that, was that justified or something like that?
And then her response was something like, yeah, according to our calculations,
you know that that was justified something like that well that's a horrible thing to say obviously
but but rogan and the guest were talking about this like what a psychopath like how could you
sleep at night so like they were judging and judging and judging but then at one point they
say like well you know that it's really easy to judge from a distance right so they might be right
in in saying that you know what what she said is gross obviously but the point was that from
from a distance, it's always easy to say, like, if I would be in that position of power,
I would never do that, right? Like, my morals are better than this person, etc. Like, it's really
easy to complain like that, plus kind of like say, right, talk, say that you would be a more moral
person and you would never do that, right? And then they started talking about, but that is not
really a fair thing because you are not in that seat right you are not in that position so you're
trying to like um make yourself uh like in some sort of higher value than than than you are and
that is talk right just like everything that we write down and sign and just talk like it's just
talk and what i love is that the the two big realizations that came from that was like everyone
one is corruptible. Like if you are in that position, if you are in a position in a system
where you could use your position to have, to, to create an advantage for your personal individual
life, you would probably do it. You know, like if you have children and you have small children,
it's all me, me, me, it's all survival. Right. So the self, like I would rather for you guys to die
than for me to die. Right. Like just the whole self-preservation idea. So once you realize that
everyone in essence is corruptible i'm doing air quotes corruptible because if they have an
opportunity within a certain system to corrupt that system in order for their self-preservation
in whatever way you would probably do it you know we can still discuss um around that but
just in general for me the realization to realize that okay once the opportunity arises we are
probably all corruptible that is not a nice realization but i think from that um you know
also doing my studies around bitcoin etc i realized okay if we just accept that that is what it is
then we can also accept that all these verbal agreements or abstracted you know written
agreements like i will do no harm because i said so are are all nonsense they are all talk and no
walk and I think what Bitcoin introduces with the proof of work is that you have to walk your talk
basically you cannot you cannot bullshit a system in which you operate because there is a way to
enforce your holdings intentions promises whatever and I think so if this doesn't make
sense no no this is yeah this is the base level realization i think that um lowry comes from is
that physical power the projection of physical power underlies life itself he starts with this
evolutionary story about the animals and right right and so and then he ties that to bitcoin
like you're doing like we have the yeah you have to exercise and project physical power to obtain
any sort of resource and to better yourself and bitcoin is a way to do that to constrain as you
mentioned the types of deviated and corrupt abstract power that we see in our day-to-day
life.
You mentioned corporations that write these contracts that we think are completely transparent.
So I mean, I think you're absolutely on base.
Maybe to add to that, so you could, because as you said in the beginning, we don't really
want to introduce Bitcoin, right?
So I think it's more about, okay, so, you know, you and I have a written agreement and
we both signed something, right?
but you don't follow the agreements that we made.
And then you could say, well, then we can go to court.
I can say Grant and I had this agreement.
Grant didn't do it.
And then you say, well, but Bram wasn't clear.
Whatever, we have some sort of dispute,
but you also mentioned judges, et cetera.
So you go from a certain level of abstraction
to another level of abstraction to another level, right?
And then if my money runs out, you still win
or something like that, right?
So it is, I don't want to say an illusion,
but in some way you feel protected by,
I'm doing air quotes again,
agreements that we all agree to
and that we can all use, right?
And in summary, in a very short summary,
that is the justice system, for example.
Go ahead.
No, but like what do you do
when a tool emerges
that can bypass all these abstractions, basically.
And my opinion right now
is that you cannot ignore the fact that that exists.
And so because that exists,
for example, related to this is, for example,
gold versus Bitcoin.
You can say gold has XYZ properties
that Bitcoin has too,
but you cannot ignore that Bitcoin
And Bitcoin's application of these properties is far more superior.
I can move a billion in Bitcoin for $3 instead of spending $50 million on transporting it physically if it was gold.
So you cannot ignore, one, that Bitcoin exists, but you can also not ignore that the properties are superior.
You can still have some dissonance that you don't want to accept it, but it's there.
It exists.
And because it exists, and in Bitcoin you can walk your talk.
I call it walk your talk, right?
You can say like, oh, I have XYZ Bitcoin.
But if I ask you, show me, and you don't show me, then I know you don't have it.
Because I know the option exists that you can show me, right?
So there's some sort of forced transparency with kind of like some sort of like social layer around it where if I can force you to be transparent and you decide not to, I can decide to not deal with you anymore, basically.
And that is a big contradiction to like the abstracted layered, you know, system that we generally participate in.
Yeah.
I want to jump in. I want to go back to what you were talking about very first, which is basically the explanation of all the inconvenient truths that we have to accept in order to have a rational discussion about this topic.
And we have to accept war and we have to accept corruptibility.
We have to accept immorality and we have to accept that there are belief structures that exist only because we say they exist.
That's the only thing that supports it.
Because we don't want to confront ourselves with these things that you just mentioned.
We are abstracting them away so we don't have to touch them and talk about them.
And well, they're they're inconvenient, mainly because I think of the labels that they have, like war is not a word that people like to talk about.
They don't like to talk about everyone being corruptible because that means that they themselves are corruptible.
They don't like to talk about their societies being morally infallible or more morally fallible because, you know, you don't you don't want to believe that.
And so they are, you know, they're inconvenient truths.
When I was reading Lowry's thesis, I mentally replaced a lot of words that he used with different words in my mind.
And so like every time I saw war, I just replaced it with competition.
And if you can do that, then that's it.
It makes it a little easier to swallow.
Every time I see corruptibility, I replace it with cleverness.
And so like you you get placed at the top of the hierarchy and you're standing next to the money printer.
It's a clever thing to do to print the money for yourself.
Like, you know, and and if we if we can somehow bring ourselves to assign some goodness to the people that are doing those things, like not only not only are you corruptible because you're doing that thing, but also you're doing it for a good reason.
We don't want to admit that, but you're doing it for the benefit of yourself and the people you love.
And, you know, this is another inconvenient truth.
Like, we all love people, but there's some people we love more than others.
And we have a preference that we are going to put into place whenever we are allocating our resources and our time and our attention and our intentions.
where if we are put in that position, just like anybody else, we are going to lovingly and cleverly
use that position in order to provide security and safety for that circle of people that we
love a little more than the rest of humanity. And so I, I like, I like trying to, I'm, I don't know,
I'm a tenderhearted guy, I guess, you know, but I like trying to reframe it in that way,
because then you don't have to necessarily put a negative connotation.
I, yeah, I, I came to this, I came to this from studying, um, habits and daily rituals
and, and things like that.
And one of the books that was real foundational for me was James Clear's atomic habits.
And in that book, he says, you don't rise to the level of your goals.
you fall to the level of your systems. And I had that quote in my mind when I started looking at
Bitcoin in the monetary system for my job. And I realized that, yeah, it's like we're trying to
have like a good system, but we just can't. Like we're trying to do well, but the system itself
is fallible and the system itself therefore innately corrupts the people that are in it.
And the problem that we always have, which is this is what politics is. Everybody goes,
this would work if only the people I agreed with were in power. If only we got those bad people out
and put my good people in, this would be perfectly fine. And you're like, no, like, it's a dumpster
fire. It doesn't matter what trash you throw in it, it's still going to burn, you know, so we have
all these inconvenient truths that we, we do have to accept. And so I completely agree with what
you're saying about having to, um, having to walk yourself through those acceptances.
And, uh, yeah, I just kind of, I, I sort of proffer the, I guess the, the creative, the
artist's tenderfoot, tenderhearted way of looking at those things from a different perspective.
Maybe does that kind of align with where you're at?
Yeah.
Sorry, Grant, but so much to unpack.
Like I, this is why I love Bitcoin.
This is like talking now already to you guys makes me feel not alone in these thoughts, right?
I absolutely love what you just said, Lucas, because that's what I wanted to say.
Like, I also don't think it's malicious.
It's not evil or something, right?
It's just you get served a perverse incentive without you maybe even realizing it,
and you capitalize on it for your personal perseverance, basically, right?
And a lot of these people think they are doing the right thing.
They don't understand that they're hijacked exactly, as you said, by the system in which they operate.
They don't, like, literally the box, right?
Like, interesting.
I'm really into, like, all this consciousness stuff.
And I don't know if you know this book, but you should study this, by the way.
Stalking the Wild Pendulum.
But when people say, like, think outside the box,
you know these images where it's like a circle, like a square in a circle, right?
And a circle is basically the spiritual realm and a square is the physical realm, right?
And so thinking outside the box literally means think outside the system that you're operating in.
Think outside of the paradigm that you're operating in.
So I love what you said about they are being served perverse incentive within the system that they operate in, and they don't have the ability or they don't want to or whatever.
They are not incentivized also if they profit from the system that they operate in to go outside and look at it and be like, this system doesn't really – this is a flawed system basically.
Right.
So I think yes again once you accept that these let call it a social interaction or just like the interaction between people just exists like that what we just mentioned that is okay
I think that's a good thing to realize.
But the system that we operate in is made by the same people,
people like just us.
We make the system in which we operate.
And if that system is flawed, then there cannot really be,
well let's call it a free market of competition when you said competition lucas right like the
the the field on which we're playing is flawed basically right and it's corruptible for some
people that that play that that game and i think for me that is where bitcoin comes in you know the
the the trustlessness the apoliticalness the a religious umness like all these things it is just
a system that when you adopt it, you basically move from a zero-sum game,
the current paradigm that we operate in, where people that win do that at the expense of others,
to a mutually beneficial game, or as Jeff Booth says it, he says, cooperative competitiveness,
which I like to
which basically
and I just visualize it as like a football field
or a soccer field, whatever
but it's just a different field
that's why it's a paradigm shift
it's just a totally different system
in which
and it's a new paradigm
in which we will have
we have to grasp
the fact that
we've been rent seeking
in this old system
and we've been profiting of other people
in this old system.
Like in the current system,
I live in a country that pillaged the world, okay?
And I live in freedom because they did that.
That's random that I'm here, you know,
but not many people realize that.
Like I can be poor in this country
and be richer than most people in Bangladesh
or something like that, right?
Like that's just crazy.
It's crazy.
I'm lucky, but that's a crazy thought
because the people in Bangladesh,
sorry for everyone from Bangladesh,
That's just a random example.
Like, why am I better than these people?
You know, why do I have that privilege to just randomly be born here, right?
So I think we have to come to the realization, and that's why it's also really hard, and people don't want it,
that if you move to this other system where everyone is equal, right, it's basically ring-fenced with Bitcoin, absolute scarcity, etc.
Yeah, you have to provide real value in order to get a reward.
And I think that's what many people, especially in the West, don't want because they have no clue what that looks like.
But I think this same principle applies to, you know, eventually the software thesis that we're talking about.
No, you are. It's incredible to see you and Lucas talk about it this way because I think you're wholly inhabiting Lowry's thesis here.
Like the way that you describe Bitcoin is apolitical trustless.
you would say even exogenous to a belief system in that it doesn't depend on whether you say you're
a communist or a capitalist it operates the same way i mean that's lowry's thesis is that bitcoin
is a form of warfare and that's what warfare is warfare is the thing that is outside of our
beliefs about it it doesn't care what you say about it as physical power warfare operates the
same on somebody who has abstract beliefs that say it's bad and the person has abstract beliefs
that say it's good. Warfare is the common denominator. And so I think you're absolutely
right. And to just a circle back and tie that to what you were saying, Lucas, that these the
negative connotations that we ascribe to things like war, and then by extension, maybe something
like Bitcoin, if it is a novel form of warfare, that's just as the result of an abstract power
based hierarchy, that is defined good and bad in a certain way. We always we did our very beliefs
about what is good and bad, what words are charged with negative valence, what words have a positive
aura from the belief systems that we kind of unreflectively inhabit. Like that's the
metacognitive point that Lowry makes throughout the thesis that we also need to step back beyond
our beliefs and see that the things that we say about physical power and war are really, you know,
as a result of an abstract power-based hierarchy that wants to prevent us from exercising those
things, wants to keep us weak and self-domesticate us.
Lowry suggests calling war primordial economics for the same reasons that you guys mentioned.
It just shows the continuous line between a membrane over a hydrothermal sea vent fighting
for resources to animals fighting for the carcass, like wolves fighting for the carcass
of a deer to us fighting for resources nowadays.
So there's that continuous amoral evolutionary line that connects warfare in the past with bodies on the ground to this novel form of warfare, soft war, that is hopefully going to enable us to keep using an amoral, trustless, apolitical, egalitarian, neutral, permissionless protocol that is a type of war, but that does not leave bodies on the ground.
yeah i i want to jump in there's something brahm said that i wanted to uh wanted to poke on which
was the idea that there's people in these fortunate countries that are benefiting from
the previous history of the plundering of their ancestors and they are kind of um
you know like you you look around the world and you're like yes i acknowledge that i have so much
more than the people in Bangladesh or Indonesia or wherever. But that's about as far as people
usually want to go when they're thinking about that, because they don't want to think about how
they got there. And they don't really want to think about maybe switching sides with them. And
they don't want to think about anything that's immoral about it. However, when I look around,
so I've been traveling quite a bit for the last couple of years. And it's very easy to see the
deterioration of society in all aspects in every place. And I've been in Morocco, Columbia,
Washington, Texas, Arizona, Missouri, Kansas, everywhere that I've been, it's very clear
that societies are coming down and they're really struggling. Even the prosperous societies,
Austin, Texas, Seattle, Washington, you know, it's the first time I ever got to see a guy doing meth
on a sidewalk at Tuesday, Tuesday morning at 11 o'clock out front of the T-Mobile headquarters.
You know, that's, you're seeing that things are falling, even though you have these preordained
benefits. And I think about it, when you listen to like Michael Saylor talk about this and Jack
Mahlers, I think does a good job as well in really distilling everything in life into terms of energy,
Like everything is energy. Food is just energy that we extract into our bodies. Gasoline is just energy that we use in order to transport ourselves. Houses are just potential energy that we use to protect ourselves from the kinetic energy of the weather.
And when I think about how the dollar, which is the strongest currency in the world right now, has fallen, I believe, 99% from its original strength.
and I compare that to the idea that electricity costs about eight cents a kilowatt hour.
If I were to make that 99% cheaper, or actually it's more like 9,900% cheaper is the math that
it works out to be, what could I do for all society? And I also think about how it raises up,
Like in this situation, it's not as though the Americans are going to go up this much and the Bangladeshis are going to go up this much.
And we're going to maintain this this disparate disparate difference between us.
It's going to raise ships up all to the same level.
And we're seeing that with Gladstein's work in putting Bitcoin miners and providing power to places that have previously never had power and using stranded energy and exporting that energy in the form of Bitcoin in order to bring wealth and catapult societies that are literally going from dirt floor huts to 1,000 megabits per unit.
second, I believe that's the right, internet and, you know, power. And, you know, they have heat and
they have air conditioning. They have all this, you know, free energy. So I think what we're doing
is really releasing a lot of energy with Bitcoin and thus injecting it into the world in a way that
almost globally immunizes us against this sort of immoral, corruptible type of system that we've
been talking about, where we just, like you said, there's the box. And try as you might,
you just can't change that box. You're just not going to win. The house always wins. It's like
playing Monopoly. It's like going to gamble. There's somebody in charge. And you have to just
get out of that and realize that it's not the somebody that's in charge that the problem is
the whole structure of the system. And so opting out, taking the orange pill, whatever you want to
call it, stepping outside of that system to acknowledge that there are some things that
could really benefit the entire world. Were they just it? And also, the beautiful thing about
Bitcoin is you don't have to adopt it. It's going to adopt itself. Like it's just mowing through the
entire world and you can either get on the train or you can chase after it once it's past you and
hope to ever catch up to it so yeah yeah yeah it's unignorable right like it exists and it's not going
away and then you know all the fud and now black rock is going to make more blah blah like all that
stuff is it's nonsense it's nonsense because the original version the og is is is is already
everywhere, right?
You can fork off tomorrow and make
grand coin. Nobody cares.
It's already there.
So it's imposing something
on the world.
I think that's what we are
talking about, right? And it's imposing
that there is a mutually beneficial
game that you
can participate in.
Or again, you know,
Booth says,
cooperative competitiveness.
So if everyone
is working in adding value wherever they are from,
they get the opportunity because a new system is introduced.
I mean, I think, you know, I hope another country joins soon.
But, for example, what El Salvador is able to do, you know,
of course, to a degree, sorry, Najeeb,
but, like, it's an insignificant country, you know,
in the rest of the world.
But when you really look at it, like,
He's building a paradise from the ground up from a country, you know, to be fair, that was at rock bottom.
But apparently you need that to take the opportunity to rebuild.
That's why it's so hard for especially the West, you know, I'm in Europe to acknowledge the fact that Bitcoin exists like this.
Total cognitive dissonance, right?
Maybe we have to go all the way like the El Salvador way before we realize what this is, right?
That would be a pity, by the way.
But my point is more that you cannot ignore it.
And you see that the people that participate in it, in this mutually beneficial game,
everything anyone does for Bitcoin or with Bitcoin helps all the other people that have adopted Bitcoin.
and um i i think that already is just a profound thought in a sense that it it it's not going away
like it's here it it is the mirror to this existing system right and once once you see that
yeah you cannot ignore it and that's why for me at least the conversation about bitcoin adoption
or understanding it, it becomes spiritual really quick.
Because in order for you to go through this cognitive dissonance,
to come to grips with an unfortunate truth,
you have to challenge your own ego.
And so you have to go through that arc of resistance,
going through it, realizing that, I don't know,
You don't know shit or you participate in a system where you realize that you are a subject and not an actor and all these things.
So that is, for me, the spiritual part of Bitcoin.
That is a hard thing to do.
But once you're there, I'll finish this thought, but I had a tweet yesterday that did fairly well.
And I got this from an Alan Watts video that I watched.
He has this video about money.
Very interesting.
from the 70s and he's just spot on crazy like like it could have been released today but once you
understand that like productivity growth is always happening like we the whole goal of people is to be
more productive right the whole goal like if we are inherently lazy everything should become
quicker cheaper you know easier everything like our whole goal is to be more effective and be
more productive. So over time, again, you know, this is what Jeff Booth talks about, about deflation,
but it's a natural phenomenon. If we create more abundant resources, then the price of these
resources will go down. Technology gets cheaper, gets democratized, right? Like, so more access.
So sorry again for Bangladesh, but like people in Bangladesh now also have iPhones, right? Which
maybe started in the West and then moved, right?
So everyone has a smartphone, let's call it like that.
So, but if you do this, so you have, again, this human behavior that is just existing.
But if this exists in a system where you constantly have to create more money, like more units
of money to pay for this ever increasing productivity, all the gains from the productivity are offset
by the debasement of all the monetary units, right?
Lynn Alden has an amazing video about this for her book Broken Money, where she shows like it's
two forces, right? It's a deflationary force fighting an inflationary force. And my explanation
is always, well, think about this. The bread was 25 cents in the 60s and now it's $5, right? Like
which side is winning, do you think? Like we are very far away. Like the bread should be free and
Nobody should be hungry, basically, 50 years after 1960.
So you have these two forces battle, which eventually makes prices rise, right?
Price inflation because the money supply is being inflated.
But it lowers the quality of all the offered goods because the reward is so bad that you disincentivize people to actually deliver value.
That's what we see now, right?
Everything is ugly.
All the architecture is ugly.
Everyone orders stupid plastic stuff from China, whatever.
You see it happening.
And everything is degrading in quality and values also.
So abundant money, a lot of money, leads to scarce quality output.
Why would I deliver real value if I'm not rewarded?
If I'm rewarded with something that can be infinitely created, right?
That would be a stupid trade.
So that's why everything is fast and cheap and all these things.
Well, I think that your focus, I mean, you mentioned the spiritual angle, and I do think that there's a thread in Lowry's thesis that is directly on point. And I think that the type of theorizing you're doing about a sort of spiritual decline that is attended upon the use of fiat, that's a very real thing.
In Lowry's thesis, he talks about the evolution, so to speak, of abstract power-based hierarchies as the development of free religion. Essentially, we have the hunter-gatherers who have kind of pantheistic, the spirit is eminent in the world.
that transitions to agrarian people who then put a god in the sky who is judgmental over them.
And then we've kind of entered a new fiat paradigm with all these different forces, you know,
that tend to a sort of spiritual and aesthetic decline in architecture and the use of disposable
plastic products. So it is interesting, even as a part of the software thesis, I would be interested
to see further theorizing about what it means when the proof of work aspect of the Bitcoin protocol
is taken seriously as a new form of realness in the virtual realm, a way to project physical power
into cyberspace, to pinch ourselves, so to speak, to wake us from this hallucination of
accelerating reproduction of fiat, all the trends that you mentioned, these accelerating
forms of decline based around disposability.
And how Bitcoin can occasion new forms of consciousness and both as a physical constraint
inhibit those things, but also as a spiritual catalyst, maybe enable us to reflect upon
what is the nature of our consciousness in relation to the material conditions that we
inhabit.
And maybe to reformulate it as a question, one of the things that Lowry does, of course, is Bitcoin is not just money, right? We call it a coin, but that's just an arbitrary semantic designation that was given to it as a form of object-oriented software design.
Bitcoin is not a coin. So what is it then? One of the new problems we have are these software, like large transnational forms of software operated by the god kings of software, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, people who have these amazing, incredible powers over our digital resources because they control Facebook, X, Google, Spotify, etc.
So I guess the question in the context of this thesis is, how does Bitcoin discipline, break down these forms of software-based abstract power hierarchies that are maybe leading us into forms of decline?
Is there a way that Bitcoin, not as money, but through its proof of work protocol, can take down the god kings of the software-based abstract power hierarchies that we can maybe feel a form of oppression in the form of digital alienation or spiritual decline?
If that makes sense is the question.
Fantastic question.
Yes.
I would stick with Bitcoin as a protocol.
Right?
So Bitcoin is a protocol with a set of values and principles that emanate from it because it exists, right?
They are not in the code.
They are not in the promise of this thing or the value proposition or whatever.
Like they emanate from it.
One is, I think, one that we already touched upon, right?
Like it's walk and talk.
so
once you
so let's imagine
Bitcoin is the base layer of value
that's where I wanted to go with what I just said
but I think this is a great
you interrupted me greatly because
this adds to it right so
you cannot measure
this increasing productivity with
you know
with an inflationary
money
you cannot do that it offsets all these
gains so you can only measure it
with something
wait I'll add my tweet again
I'll finish the thought and I'll connect it
to your question because
yeah I absolutely love
this wait I have to scroll one second
yeah
so
if
this deflation this
innovation
and invention
in technology etc if that is a
natural occurrence and an
assured occurrence right something that
people will do regardless. It can only be rewarded and measured in a hard money, something with a
hard cap supply, something that does not change. Because the thing you're measuring is changing.
So you have the measuring stick should be a thing that does not change, that stays the same.
Which is what Bitcoin is. You know, this protocol is a set of rules that anyone can adopt that we
just mentioned.
And I think there's only one promise.
It's not in the white paper, but the whole goal of Bitcoin is to stay the same,
to create predictability towards the future for anyone that uses it.
Right.
So this mutually beneficial game or system, money system, however you want to call it,
just stays the same And how does it do that well you have this incentive for miners node runners etc right we checking is this protocol still the same is the ledger
still the ledger yes yes yes okay we we continue right that's the whole goal the whole goal is that
the entire ledger, this 500 or 700 gigabytes of just text, which is also another wild thing,
I think, of Bitcoin. Anyway, that is the truth of this system. Everyone in this system is
incentivized to plug into this system and verify this truth every 10 minutes. Only then you are a
real participant in this system, I think.
Because then you can actually verify for yourself.
You don't have to trust, right?
Trust, don't trust, verify.
You can actually verify this chain of information,
which is the base layer of truth of this entire system.
So that is the goal.
The goal is to keep up with the integrity of the system.
What is the integrity of the system?
It stays the same.
this truth is still valid
and we do that every 10 minutes
so every 10 minutes there's basically an audit of the truth
of this system
if we use this system
as a base layer to build stuff upon
everyone has to adhere
to these principles and values that emanate
from this base layer
which are this forced transparency that we also mentioned
and you can play
any ideological game
on top of Bitcoin
you mentioned communism, capitalism
whatever in general
I'd say the world is at war
constantly with ideas
we are in a free
market of ideas
if you just believe
ideas are a metaphysical thing
they are accessible by anyone
there's an unlimited amount
of ideas floating around constantly
and sometimes you pick one up, right?
But ideas are free.
Once you do something with it,
you start projecting that thought onto the world, right?
You're trying to manifest it into the physical realm,
you know, whatever the idea is.
So we live in this free market or battle of ideas already.
So you can try to impose whatever you want to impose
on this base layer of Bitcoin,
but Bitcoin doesn't care
because it is just a set of rules
with a goal to keep these rules as is, right?
With hard cap supply every 10 minutes,
just all the rules that are in the protocol.
And so that protocol doesn't care.
So you have to start figuring out,
okay, how do I act?
How do I operate in a system
that is built on this base layer
in order to benefit, I'm doing air quotes, like benefit from it, right?
But you can only benefit from it if you adhere to the rules.
And that's very interesting.
You know, we just mentioned trustlessness.
Like, I don't have to trust you guys because I know that you guys are also forced to follow the rules
to benefit from using Bitcoin.
So I don't even have to check that with you.
I know that's inherent to the entire system.
And I think what comes from that, like, yeah, philosophically or spiritually is like, okay, what am I really here to do or to bring or to say or how to act, whatever?
Like, what am I here to do?
I love that you mentioned, you know, the hunter-gatherers and the agriculture people.
I feel that the hunter-gatherers, or at least the way earlier people, were way more in tune with what the hell is going on here.
The entire existence of us in this world, or this world just in general, what is this?
And I feel that by adopting a certain system that forces us to play this mutually beneficial game with each other,
acting as humans are acting right we want to progress etc all the things that we just talked
about i think that eventually creates new time and space for us to actually explore you know what
the hell is going on here so for me that's kind of like how how i look at it i hope that's an
answer to no that's yeah that's exactly as an incorruptible base layer of rules it's different
than an abstract power-based protocol
where we've talked about the corruptibility of the rules
through corruptible humans,
but as that trustless base layer
from which new virtues and values emanate
because we have to determine
how we're going to live in response to a new reality,
to gravity reinstated, a new realness,
even in the cyber realm.
So I think that's 100% on point.
And that helps too.
It's a part of Lowry's thesis
that I kind of grapple with
turnaround in my mind what he means by he uses the idea of the strangler vine that envelops a tree
and then replaces that tree with the vine it's a computer science metaphor for a new system devours
a legacy system and slowly migrates services over to it and i struggle to think what that would mean
when bitcoin is the strangler vine replacing legacy systems here but i like your your explanation
there about the incorruptibility, the fact that it stays the same as being core to what it will
impart on us humans. What do you think about it, Lucas? One of the things that Brom brought up
that you and I have discussed before is the wrongness of using a changing measuring stick.
So that's what inflation is, is that you're handing out, instead of dollars, think about
that you're handing out measuring sticks and it's a ruler and we're handing out this is a foot and
this is a foot and this is a foot but as you continue to hand them out they continue to shrink
and you need more and more of those feet you know it still says that it's 12 inches but the one from
100 years ago was this big and it said that it was 12 inches and so you continue to hand these out
but there's something else that um jeff booth brought up in in your discussion with him brahm
that I've thought about for a long time and really was able to see not only in my experience as a lender
and working in finance and investments, but also I feel like really well elucidated by Michael Saylor,
which is that not only are we handing out measuring sticks that are getting shorter,
but Booth talks about this, is that we're measuring the wrong thing.
We're measuring growth.
Why do we want to measure growth when technology makes things less?
Like it requires less power.
It requires less man hours.
We don't want growth to be the metric.
We want quality to be the metric, right?
Because you can't compare these things equally.
If we go back to 1920 and we take a look at the basket of goods that people had and you go, okay, well, they had a pair of pants and they had a pair of shoes and they had a steak and they had a house and blah, blah, blah.
Okay, yes, that's true.
We have that stuff today.
However, those shoes were handmade.
They were made out of leather.
They were made out of very high-quality materials.
Those pants were fitted by a tailor because every pair of pants was custom made to the person.
The food that they were eating, if you compare it to today, would be at the top shelf of the expense level because it was completely organic, all locally sourced, all effectively humanely raised, right?
Because you just had these chickens running around and you had the cow outside and it had a name and you walked out there and you talked to it because you had time because you were engaging in that spiritual realm that you and I and Grant and I had an off-camera discussion about this yesterday.
an experience that we've both kind of had reconnecting with nature and relating it to
writings and experiences from people before us. I just got done reading the autobiography of Red
Cloud, who's a famous Native American Indian chief of the United States. And the way that he talked
about the things that they were doing, it's like, yeah, when I go for a walk in the woods and, or
there's no woods in Kansas. There's a, there's a pretty girl behind every tree and we have like
three trees, but occasionally you can find a place to hide. Um, but when you go for a walk and you
disconnect yourself, you do find yourself feeling spiritual in a way that almost feels unnatural
because we have so disengaged ourselves from that, um, from that world. So, yeah, I think that
you you're really hammering into this i i love talking about the spiritual side of what bitcoin
does because it's not just um it's not something that you have to seek you naturally come to these
places on your own and every and you know that because you look at the commonalities between
the bitcoin community and there there is the toxic max maximalist there is that person that
does exist, that's all number go up and win moon and win Lambeau and, you know, you're
going to die poor and all that.
But then something that Grant turned me on was the work of Alex Fetzky, which is moving
beyond that and realizing that what you're talking about when you're talking about basically
virtues emanating from Bitcoin, they're not encoded into it, yet somehow they arise simply
by participating with it and acknowledging that proof of work is that these virtues arise.
And virtues are verbs and virtues are actions.
And these are the actions that we all seem to take.
We all seem to become a little more healthier.
We all seem to become a little more engaged with our families and our communities.
We all seem to appreciate art a little more.
And these things that were so valued by previous civilizations, if you look back into the glory ages of civilizations, when we're building these beautiful stone structures and the Sistine Chapel is being painted and Mozart and Beethoven are making symphonies and there's beautiful art everywhere.
And why was that? It turns out that that coincides with the time where we had the hardest money that's ever been known previous to Bitcoin. And so, yeah, I think that you're really just hammering onto these, tapping onto these little things that are so prescient about what happens as Bitcoin, the strangler vine, comes over and takes over the old system,
which is that these things emanate from it and they do replace it by being, as the quote that you sent or the tweet that you sent earlier,
just a technologically superior form that it's not because it's cheaper, it's not because it's going to go up, it's just because it's better.
And then all of the other things come about from it being better.
So I'll quit rattling on about that.
But I had something that I wanted to ask you because I know that you've worked in tech for a long time, but now you're actually working in the Bitcoin space, correct?
Yeah.
And so we're talking about, you know, this is a marketplace of ideas.
It's a marketplace of opportunities.
When I think about what Bitcoin is going to do, I think of Bitcoin as the car being invented.
And then I think of all of these other cryptocurrencies as everybody else trying to invent a different car instead of just trying to make this car better.
Like the first car didn't have a sunroof and it didn't have cup holders and it didn't have airbags.
Like you have to iterate upon it in order to make it better and more useful for people.
And I think the real failure and the real ego and arrogance of developers today is that we see so many of them trying to reinvent the wheel, trying to reinvent the car, instead of accepting it for what it is and building upon it to make it better.
So you're working in that marketplace of ideas of Bitcoin. And I was curious to know, what are some of the ideas that you see in Bitcoin that are exciting to you that you think are going to have a impact on the world beyond simply?
I can change value in between people without having to trust them.
Like that's the base layer.
We can do that.
That's great.
But what are some of the other ideas and emanations of ingenuity and innovation that you see coming out of the Bitcoin space?
Yeah, I love that you love the spiritual side too.
I think that is what has drawn me in even further, I think, because I love the genuine positive future outlook that Bitcoin has given me.
Like my podcast is called Bitcoin for Millennials.
Like I want to educate like our generation, right?
I think we would be the best to adopt it.
But I spend a lot of time like on Reddit.
I mean, like the money Reddit or the millennials Reddit.
people have a lot of fucking anxiety.
They have no money.
They have no savings.
They have no positive outlook for the future.
And every time I read about that,
I'm like, I don't have any of these things.
Which, again, you know,
I know I'm privileged to a degree
that I've had the time and space
to figure out this thing,
although it's taken me 10 years already.
but
when I realized that I don't have these things
I realized, oh, I'm actually in a really good place
and I think
the nihilism
and all these things
it's very prevalent
which I think is just a pity
because
I just mentioned all the consciousness stuff
and also what you said
I think
people that came way before
For us, we're way more in tune with nature and the universe and spirit and all these things.
And I know we can go there, but I also know that we're very, very, very far away from that.
I don't think we'll see any crazy spiritual renaissance in our lifetime globally, but maybe.
maybe um but i think what comes from that is what you what you mentioned about you know all these
developers doing all these other things yeah i think that's a real pity it's like uh and you
mentioned the wheel and i think the wheel is a good example again it's hard you know on one side
we talk about bitcoin and now you when you're listening to this you have to think about okay
conceptualize the invention or the discovery of the wheel okay a wheel is a wheel is a wheel
right so even even when the when nasa is trying to create wheels with mesh and no air for their
mars rover whatever still conceptually a wheel okay that's how you have to look at bitcoin so i
also think it's a pity that people are like oh well i'm gonna make something faster because i can
you know like it's just it's it's a waste it's a waste of your time if all these people
you know project their energy towards bitcoin we would be going super super quick
but I feel this is also a symptom
of the entire system that we're in
like it is staring you in the face
you know about Bitcoin
you didn't do enough work
you have some skills and you're gonna
put it to work on some
SPX something whatever
fucking meme coin
I don't know
there's always something better
there's always this other thing
like for me that's all symptoms
of what we're talking about
and what we're trying to fix here.
I think the problems are staring people in the face.
As we mentioned before,
the cognitive dissonance of not going towards
where the resistance is is huge.
It makes also a lot of sense, right?
So I'm not bashing on people,
but it's literally in front of your face.
And the alternative system, the mirror,
is also just there.
right the fact that people after 15 years are still like oh ponzi scheme blah blah you know
also you know fucking system a symptom of this system like it's this is how far off we are i
hope i illustrate it in a nice way also for people listening but like i feel like this is how far off
we are from where we could be right because where we can be is what you mentioned luke's like we can
be totally in tune with nature with each other wherever we are right imagine that all the people
in the world despite all their little power projections etc that we also talked about
like we're working towards a goal together not in a communist collective way right but like
um i don't know summary summary would be like uh excitement towards the future or something like
that right if everyone has excitement towards the future i think we could go super far um yeah again
especially if you look at like all the um like uh you know what people talk about in the past and
maybe to end that thought uh and connected also to bitcoin but i have like um i have friends that
go on like these crazy trips in the amazon and they do ayahuasca and whatever and they hang
you know with in villages for like a week with all the shamans etc and they once told me like
Like, when we walk through the jungle with these people,
they talk to the trees.
And I'm like, yeah, I want, I cannot, like, visualize it
because I cannot do it, but I want to believe that that is possible.
Right?
Like, if you think that, you know, consciousness isn't everything
and et cetera, right?
Like, it's just, it sounds crazy now that I say this, right?
But imagine if that's real.
Right?
Imagine you could actually go there and be so in tune with the nature
that it guides you on a path through a crazy dense jungle.
I think it's real.
It's how my friends share it, and I trust them.
Their experience, they are sharing with me.
But anyway, so my point is more like that for me is like a personal example
where I think like, wow, if we can all be that in tune with nature,
with who we really are as we are also part of nature, right?
Like, what would that be like?
Like, I don't know, it makes me smile.
Like, I think that's just a really interesting,
positive, you know, concept to think about.
To connect that to your question about going into Bitcoin,
like, that took me some time.
And I'm super grateful that I'm able to do that now
because I think this is,
Bitcoin is the most fascinating subject
that I can dedicate my time to, I think.
it's also when i heard bob burnett say something like this in a podcast is when i realized i should
do something i should contribute to this thing i'm going to think about this for the rest
of my life so that's where uh kind of the idea for or the motivation for for my podcast came about
and then um yeah i thought like i i did some consulting and i drove to another city here like
two three hours a day and you know listening to bitcoin podcasts along the way and i was like
damn, I only want to do Bitcoin.
So that's kind of when I started, you know,
throwing out some lines
and just see if there were any opportunities.
And eventually I ended up with OnRamp
that I'm really happy with.
And I think there's not,
I don't think there's specific ideas
that I can really point to,
but just the idea of participating
in this, you know,
proliferation of the concept of Bitcoin, I think, is very rewarding. And maybe practically to connect
with that, it's like, I really see Bitcoin as a mirror to this current fiat money system, right?
Like, it exists. And as long as it exists, it will act as a mirror, like you cannot ignore it, right?
So once you can show comparisons with the fiat money system and the Bitcoin system and showing
that the Bitcoin system is superior in whatever the application is that you're trying to show.
I think that is what helps with continuous adoption.
And I think one great example is, and there's a few people working on this,
like if you deposit, so getting a mortgage for Bitcoin, for example,
like if you deposit, so there's already people doing this privately,
but if you deposit like 250k in Bitcoin, you can just borrow 250k in fiat money.
And with the Bitcoin as collateral if you buy a home with it you know the home is also collateral So it lowers the risk for the lender which also results in lower interest payments for example right So if
you could borrow that for like a 1% interest, because you have the most liquid asset in the
world as collateral, plus a part of the house, yeah, then you totally undermine the traditional
Fiat money mortgages, for example.
I love this idea because I really think you can undercut just traditional mortgage products
because, yeah, you have superior collateral.
And if you think about the fact that mortgages and, in general, broader loans
are like 90% of revenue and income for big trade-fi corporations like banks,
Like if you undermine their main business model, I think that that could be a very interesting thing to to watch.
Yeah.
Sorry, I used to work in that industry.
I worked in that industry.
So I was an ag lender and I financed farms and ranches.
And that's what brought me to Bitcoin was seeing a disparity and a discrepancy in the financials of my customers that came in where they were getting richer on paper, but they were poor in real life.
And I couldn't understand it.
They were worth 40% more than they were the year before due to the inflation of their real assets like real estate.
However, they had to borrow money in order to purchase inputs because they weren't able to cash flow this.
And so I'm really interested in that perspective.
Leon Wancom, I think, is probably the best at explaining this.
I've heard him on Preston Pysh a couple of times, and I've also just kind of followed him and listened to what he said.
when you're using a superior form of collateral in order to borrow a inferior form of money
to buy a less superior form of collateral, then you put yourself in a great position.
Grant actually talked to me about this because he's interested in trying to bring this to banks
in Western Kansas as well. How can you just start the conversation?
It's really fascinating because from a mechanistic perspective, what happens is, let's say you put $250,000 of Bitcoin down and you borrow against it.
you're going to see the value of that Bitcoin grow relative to the value of that real estate,
especially as real estate is demonetized, where the monetary incentive of owning real estate goes
away because there's a superior form of collateral. What we see now is we see people
hyper-financializing different aspects of the world because they're all just always seeking
something that will outpace inflation. And for a couple of years, it'll be real estate,
and then it'll be equities, and then it'll be gold, and then it'll be art, and then it'll be
wine, and there'll be racehorses, and there'll be collectibles like race cars and baseball cards
and things like that. So the problem with that is it's really no different than the fiat system
where you've got 160 currencies that are constantly trading against each other. And
this one's going to be worth less because we think this one's going to be worth more. And
it's all just laying bets. It's all just built upon these abstract beliefs that, you know,
the saying about real estate is that, you know, if you buy dirt, you can't get hurt. Like that's
what, uh, you know, owning real estate, they don't make any more of it. Right. Um, but,
but the truth is they do, you know, they, you can build up, you can build down, you can build out,
you can, um, create islands, uh, out of nothing if there's a monetary incentive to do so. And
there has been that monetary incentive and seeing that Bitcoin is demonetizing real estate. And I,
and this is, I think one of the real imperative forms of personal assessment that you have to
take when you look at Bitcoin and how it affects the world is to look at Bitcoin and how it affects
your life. And personally, for me, I am in a position where I could buy a house,
but there is zero chance that I will buy a house now.
Like I will eventually, but in today's prices,
I look at it and I'm like, this is absurd.
This is ridiculous.
This market is so overpriced.
There's no, you know, it's just continuously monetizing itself.
And so if I know that I'm not engaging in that sort of activity,
then I also realize that I can extrapolate that to the rest of the world.
And I can say, well, if I'm removing myself from that market and so is this guy and so is this guy, then we're starting to really see some effects.
And we're definitely seeing that, especially in commercial real estate right now where the value is just not there.
Because the value in commercial real estate, it turns out, had nothing to do with the location.
It had everything to do with the people inside those buildings.
And now that those people aren't inside those buildings, those buildings aren't worth anything close to what they were before.
And so it was a wrong application of thought, really, where, you know, in real estate, it's always location, location, location.
It's not location anymore, not location anymore, because the best location in the world to make money, it turns out to be a stranded waterfall in the middle of nowhere.
Or it turns out to be a volcano somewhere that you can strap a generator on and make some power and turn into Bitcoin.
Like, that's location.
Everybody always thought location was, oh, you need to be next to the Yankees and you need to be close to the opera and you need to be close to the ocean.
It's like, no, that's entirely untrue.
But it was a thesis that we based a lot of decisions upon.
So, yeah, I appreciate you doing it.
Like, I really appreciate the demonetizing real estate and the using Bitcoin as a pristine form of collateral in order to borrow against.
Because having come from that industry, I can't remember what it's called, but there's a bias or effect or something.
It's named after one of the scientists that worked on the nuclear bomb with Richard Feynman.
It's when you read the newspaper and you see something that's in your industry and you're like, oh, that's bullshit.
And then you read everything else and you're like, oh, that must be right.
Like, no, like recognize.
But the only reason you know that's bullshit is because you don't know the rest of the stuff, you know.
And so, yeah, you have to look very deeply upon all of these things in order to really bring it around.
So, I don't know.
What do you think, Grant?
We've talked a little bit about this.
We've talked a little bit about the real estate thing before and throwing that in there as another application of Bitcoin.
What are some of the ideas that you see in Bitcoin that are really exciting?
So that's a really good question. Because especially in the context of Lowry's thesis, I mean, it urges us to think like, what are the applications and uses of Bitcoin that are beyond our denominator, are calling it money or calling it coin.
And so as that pristine form of collateral, as a new form of capital, as a sailor says, a form of cyber real estate, or as Lowry says, as a form of bit power, a way to project physical power into cyberspace and tie it down to reality, open, as he says, a bidirectional portal to make cyberspace more real and to take what is good about cyberspace and import it into all.
our world, the ability to have an electric form of currency that we use being one of them.
So I mean, to go back to something Brom said, I think that what's most exciting for me is
Brom mentioned, you know, going into those Reddit forums and seeing the anxiety of our
generation, but other generations too, and then sensing an ambient nihilism kind of percolating
from people who have lost hope.
And so Bitcoin, not just as like, you get this,
it's going to solve your monetary woes,
your anxiety is going to be gone.
But Bitcoin as another grounding in reality,
we're increasingly becoming unmoored from a sense of the real.
I think with cell phones, social media, cyberspace,
We enter virtual. A huge aspect of our lives is virtual, is fake, is a hallucination, a dream.
And so within Lowry's thesis, if there is some truth, and I think there is, that the proof of work aspect of the Bitcoin protocol allows us to infiltrate the virtual with real world premises and the emanations of virtue and new values that Brom was talking about, too.
going into cyberspace, the idea of Bitcoin as hope, as a new thing, a new form of realness,
it's somewhat of a vague premise. We're still all of us fleshing out what this means. But I don't
think just because it's vague and just because we call it spiritual, that doesn't mean that there's
not nothing there, to give a double negative. So I think that for me just is what it's about.
It's all of those, the use cases all come together to address what is for our generation and others, the nihilism that we can't put our finger on, the anxiety that seems to orbit around us and be a cause of so many woes.
So that's a vague response, but I do think that there's something there. And I do think that Bitcoin as a form of realness, the proof of work protocol, injecting energy consumption into the virtual realm and pulling it down to us is going to open that pi-directional portal to use kind of the interesting language that Saylor uses.
So just to endorse what Brahman, you have been saying, I guess, I agree with all that. And I think that Bitcoin is going to represent a lot of things that we're still getting our hands around.
I was going to say, why don't we throw it?
Brahm, I know that you've got to get out of here fairly soon.
So if you want to kind of take us in your direction of really where you see this going
and maybe some of the thoughts that you have in terms of the bright spots.
You're a very hopeful person.
You're a very optimistic person.
And you've really adopted the ethos of what I think the virtues emanating from Bitcoin are going to do to a lot of people.
So we'll kind of give you the runway on the way out here and sort of let you have free reign in this discussion about software and power projection, how that changes society and where you see things going.
So feel free to land the plane, man.
Very broad.
I think what I wanted to say was I think we should do this another time
because so many new thoughts pop up.
But, yes, I think we have to round up.
So if you enjoyed it, then let's do another time because there are so many ideas.
Also, Lucas, on what you just said, like when you talk about like the demonetization of real estate,
I think about this mirror, Bitcoin acting as a mirror again.
You cannot ignore that this is a better way to store value, to save.
So people are using real estate or they're tricked into becoming a property owner, etc.
I follow a guy on Twitter, Wealth Squad, Chris or something.
He's like selling his real estate for Bitcoin.
I have a friend here who sold a few hundred homes for Bitcoin.
But this Chris guy says, I don't want to be a predator.
Like I am doing something immoral, which I find a huge realization, right?
Because he obviously got wealthy from it and now he's changing to this other thing.
But the interesting part that I was thinking about to tie it back to the software thesis is it's also like a power projection of Bitcoin.
Like the hurdle rate of Bitcoin is also a sort of power projection.
It's like a negative power projection.
It's like if I sell my Bitcoin for something that is inferior in holding or storing energy towards a future space and time, then, yeah, why would I ever do that?
And the other way around, if I can trade in an inferior asset for a superior asset, then I should definitely do that, right?
and so I think
yeah once you understand
that like why you do what
you do
I was at an event a few months
ago and I talked to a guy who sold his
company for like I don't know 100 million
or something everyone knows that he has a lot of money
and I know him from like
10 years ago or something
and we met actually again at this
event he's like oh you're into
Bitcoin this and that and I was like yeah
I know you sold the company
etc right like are you into Bitcoin
No, no.
And then I said, but well, what do you do for your wealth preservation?
He's like, I'm into real estate.
And then I asked him, but okay, let me ask you maybe a stupid question, but like, why
are you into real estate?
And he was quiet for like four minutes.
And he's like, I don't know, because everyone is doing it.
I was like, okay, I find that an interesting answer, right?
And then we continued.
We talked for like an hour about Bitcoin and all these things.
And I wanted to zoom in on that because I said to him, but you did something very consciously.
You build a company, you know, like everything that's connected to building a company, big enough, valuable enough for other people to reward you for, you know, the energy and time that you spent and the value that you created.
And now you are doing something to preserve that wealth in an unconscious way.
that's not very smart.
And he's like, no, that's not very smart.
And I don't know why I'm going in this direction,
but what I love is that when you see,
they don't even have to be into Bitcoin, right?
It's more about this realization,
I'm doing something that I don't understand,
which is not a nice realization,
makes you feel stupid,
but it is kind of like the stepping stone to,
I think there's somewhat of a red pill you have to take
before you can orange pill yourself.
Like you have to come to the realization
that you are not participating in a system,
you're a subject in a system, right?
I don't know what you exactly said, Grant,
but I had to think of like,
why is nobody,
why is not everyone like all into Bitcoin, right?
because they are captured in this current system.
They are doing things.
They are in the rat race.
They are on the hamster wheel.
And they have no clue why.
They are just doing what they think they should be doing.
And I'm not any different.
Like, I was into Bitcoin when I was 30.
I worked at a bank.
And then I had a colleague tell me,
like, do you know that the money in the bank is not yours?
And I was like, what?
Sorry, what do you mean?
And then we had lunch for an hour.
he explained to me fractional reserve banking, all these things.
And I walked away from that conversation feeling utterly stupid.
Like just thinking about myself being at the forefront with Bitcoin
and into tech and banking and whatever.
And I was like, I have no clue what this is about.
What am I participating in, basically?
And I think it might sound simple or I'm like overcomplicating it,
but it's quite an innocent realization, but it's pretty deep.
It was really deep for me to realize like, okay, what am I actually doing?
And I just hope, and maybe that's a nice ender,
like I hope that I and also you guys with what you do,
we can just create like as many touch points as possible
where people can like get on that one stepping stone
where they're like, okay, but why am I doing what I am doing?
If I don't understand it, why do I agree with it?
Like, what is the alternative?
What are all those things that I don't know?
Yeah, I just hope we can get there.
And on the other hand, I hope we can set the example
by having just free form conversations like this
to show that, yeah, it takes some time to get there, right?
And it's not easy.
But once you get there, as I mentioned before,
like for me, it's been really, really rewarding and freeing.
And yeah, I think that just adopting Bitcoin
really improved my life in way more ways than just financial.
And I think we could emphasize that more.
fantastic um i think uh now would be a good place for us to uh agree that uh this is a this is a
great conversation i'd love to continue it um grant i'm going to speak for you um and say that
that you would be interested in that as well so we'll look forward to doing that again um and on
the way out um typically i always tell everybody you know i'm lucas maddy i'm at lucas maddy on x
That's Grant. He's at the whole frame on X.
And Braum, I want to give you the chance to let everybody know where they can find the work that you do, how they can get in contact with you, and just to engage with the 45 people that are going to watch this on our channel.
Let's cross-post on my channel, hopefully.
Yeah, then it'll be here.
Yeah, no, no. Thanks again, guys. I really, really enjoyed this.
I think this is, to go back to something Grant said,
or what you said, Lucas, about what you apparently see in me,
and I like to hear that because it helps me to just continue.
A conversation like this gives me so much joy.
Again, it shows me that I'm not alone in these thoughts,
that there's a resonance with these thoughts,
And I think personally that really motivates me to just try, you know, doing what I'm doing in my own capacity for Bitcoin.
So I want to thank you for this conversation.
And yeah, where people can find me is on Twitter.
It's the easiest.
I still say Twitter, but it's Bram K, B-R-A-M-K.
And yeah, people can find my podcast, Bitcoin for Millennials, on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, anywhere they listen to podcasts.
So, yeah.
That's fantastic. Having this conversation as well, really, it does give me some excitement, not just because Grant and I usually just talk with each other and it's nice to have somebody new, even though he's the, I mean, this is the best conversationalist that I've ever been around.
Um, but, but also because like you said, it, it does give you not just a, not just a companion
in the journey, but there is a very real unmooring from reality that occurs when you step outside
the box, when you take the red pill and the orange pill and you move away from that system.
And it, it does have the effect of being, um, incredibly, um, lifting when you're going
with it. But if you're not feeling good about it, then it can be very demoralizing. It can be very
sad. And you see that resonating in a lot of areas with people that just have a lot of anger
towards the system, a lot of anxiety towards the system, a lot of angst that they push out.
And so as we continue to connect with more and more people and the people that will listen to
this, that's really, I think, more of the benefit that we'll ever find than people adopting Bitcoin,
which is people knowing that they're not alone in the journey that they have and working together,
finding someone on a frequency that they can resonate with. So I think that this has been
a fantastic discussion. Grant, thank you so much for leading this and sort of laying the groundwork
for us to do. And I would like to, I'll throw it back to Grant and let you kind of take us out if
you've got anything to say. And if not, then we're going to hit it. We're going to hit it. We're
going to quit it. Nothing of substance. Just thanks, Lucas and Braum. I really enjoyed the
conversation. It increased my understanding of software to hear you guys taking these concepts,
working them around, applying your own perspectives to them. So thanks for that. I really appreciate
it. Thanks. All right. Thank you for listening. If you like, please subscribe. Every little bit
gets me one tiny step closer to my ultimate goal of living in a cave. You never have to
buy windows or shingles and there's no lawn to mow. Look it up. Dream big, kids.