Yeah, so we just got done talking to Jeff Booth, literally just got done, hit end on the session,
and both turned and smiled to each other and said effectively the same thing.
What a genuine human.
Yeah, and understanding, too.
It's always intimidating when you talk with somebody.
You know, Bitcoin lore can and slay your heroes, but also your heroes are very intimidating,
and people who are just so intelligent.
and then when you talk to somebody also it's just so kind it's just so great to talk to people like
that because we're not podcast hosts we're not podcast hosts we're just people having conversations
two dudes sitting in chairs that your mom recovered yes you re-impulsed these things it makes a weird
noise when i go like this in the background they're trying to have conversations i nod my head
and like there's this like racket but no it's it's so great to be in a space right where you
We talk to people and they're just kind and genuine people and also super intelligent.
And we were talking about just the way that Jeff answers a question you can ask.
And there is a superficial response that could easily be given that would kind of address the direct question you gave.
But Jeff doesn't do that.
He starts from like first principles reasoning, the species of first principle reasoning that he has, which is you're currently in the matrix.
What would you think if you were in the matrix?
What would you be led to think?
Here's what you would be led to think.
That's the way you're thinking now.
So you're thinking within the matrix.
Now, what would you think if you were then outside of it?
How would you build?
And so he kind of builds you up rhetorically, like it's rhetorical questions.
But the answers, they follow from his, again, first principle assessment.
This is the type of way you would be thinking if the system was the way it was or something like that.
Yeah, it's on the surface of it.
If you're just listening for hot takes and you're just listening for something like flashy, you're not going to get that.
But what you are going to get is, hey, Jeff, how do you make a club sandwich?
And his answer is going to be, well, let me tell you about a farm.
Yeah.
Let me tell you about a plow.
And yeah.
And the thing is, that's the right way to answer that question.
Yes.
Because it's all involved.
And then it's like, okay, now let me question the assumptions at every single level.
Because our thoughts would be, if you just said you put the sandwich and the bread together, our presuppositions would be, and I bought those at a store or something like that.
But like you think beyond the sandwich, beyond the store, where do things come from?
The first principles generation of our ideas.
And he uses this phrase control system to describe like the society we're in.
I kind of reductively tried to call it like fiat monetary system or something like that at some point in the conversation to get a handle on what he's thinking.
But he doesn't just like fall back on labels.
He has this idea of us being controlled by just the system we are in, whatever it is.
You're the fish swimming in water.
Yeah, it's the water.
You're the fish swimming in water.
And what do you know about water?
Because it's always been there.
Yeah.
You don't see it, right?
It's your medium that you swim in.
It's transparent to you.
And what he's trying to tell us is that Bitcoin is not a different pond.
It's not a different ocean.
it's not water it's something that we haven't experienced it's not a control system and so
we come from this at like everybody wants to reason by analogy because it's easier and it
allows us to kind of visualize that's why we were talking in the earlier episode that we recorded
we were talking about is a web address really an address because like an address is a place
Physical. Yeah, spatial.
And digital has no space, but we're taking these terms that are spatial and we're applying them to digital, which has no spatial.
Yeah. I think Lowry talks about that as reification.
Like we talk about the computing cloud.
It makes it benevolent, benign.
Oh, let's put our information in the cloud.
No, you're giving your information to other people.
Yeah. You're just putting it on a billion different servers.
Yeah, yeah. And so address, I just wonder if there's some, it translates easily from the physical to the digital. And we understand it's how you direct yourself to somebody else.
It's more like an incantation. It's a spell, almost. Like that's what you're doing when you're typing. You're just saying the right combination of numbers and letters to conjure up whatever it is that you're trying to conjure.
Yeah.
It's witchcraft.
Yeah.
It is a cult in its operation for sure for someone like me who looked at an old box cathode ray TV and is like, this is from the future.
This is good.
Yeah.
This is Terminator 4.
We should have stopped here.
We should have.
I was contemplating getting a new television and everybody's recommending smart TVs.
I was like, I want an inert black square that plays the movie that I plug into it externally from a DVD player.
I don't want something that talks to me and is friendly and jovial and has a bunch of junk in it.
So, yeah.
But he throws that into it, too.
Like, he, you know, he's not naive.
In fact, probably less naive than most.
Yeah.
Yet he is perhaps the most optimistic person that we've talked to.
He didn't say it on this podcast, but I've seen him say it on other podcasts that, you know, he loves every second of his life.
He loves everything that he's doing.
He even loved his seconds on our podcast.
And that is saying something about your ability to motivate good conditions of existence through your thoughts.
And like, but like comparing it to people that, you know, use plant medicine, you know, psychedelics and stuff to go touch that state of oneness.
But then they come back into this world and they lose that ability.
and uh you know he's like by by removing yourself from the control system and that's that's the
functional part that we need to explore um in just how to do that but basically like there are no
rules i make the rules um in that by removing yourself you're able to to just live in that
state of oneness yeah at all times and the way you know someone can trivialize it as like new age
to talk about generating consciousness and determining your response.
But it's absolutely not.
And I specifically like zeroing in on his response to the question about Marx.
It's just an inversion.
I mean, Marx, the material conditions of existence, generate our consciousness.
And then Jeff is the exact opposite.
And it's a philosophical position.
It's not new age.
It is well thought out that, no, our thinking generates our material reality.
And so begin with your thoughts and then begin to meddle in the world.
And that's the way when he talks about Bitcoiners.
You can be a person who has Bitcoin and uses it within the control system.
You are completely different than somebody who is a Bitcoiner or whatever outside of the control system You looking for the right moment to trade it for fiat you looking for ways you can leverage it to get other things or whatever it not just no this is what freedom is is participating in a free market and that is its own value
yeah so where do you like where do you start to remove yourself from that system i think
like you start by if you want to determine your wealth you look at it in terms of how much bitcoin
do I have, not how much dollars do I have in Bitcoin. And I'm not checking the Bitcoin price.
I'm not looking at how they model it within that control system. And then also to just really lean
into what he talks about as being superordinate to all, which is love and belonging. And he does
the great job of inverting that as well, which is talking about, well, if love and belonging is the
truth that is above the other truths or is at the bottom of all the truths from which all the other
truths spring, then what would the system opposite of that look like, which would be like hate and
exclusion? And when you put it into that terms, I think it's really, he did such a great job of
talking about, what was it, like the Patriot Act is the opposite of patriotism. It always is the
The Inflation Reduction Act was just inflation explosion.
Stable coins are guaranteed lost coins.
And so what's the Genius Act?
What's the illusion of a genius?
Yeah.
Oh, God, that's going to be true.
That's going to be true.
I don't even know what all the Genius Act does.
Maybe it does some good things.
There is some dumb stuff in it.
I think there is some dumb stuff in it.
That is true.
Yeah.
There's one thing.
I don't know if I disagree.
so the talk and i mean you started off there i didn't hear the podcast where he talked about
belonging and love being superordinate so i kind of came in to that conversation in media res and
then heard um booth start talking about it and i tried to fit it into his talk like the price of
tomorrow right his book it's it's a view he has of human nature i think like he i asked him
Is this an evolutionary view? And he does think that this is a condition we find about ourselves, that we need love and belonging due to an evolutionary history that led us to need these things to make us cooperative or something like that.
I just tend to have a much more cynical exposition of human nature and understanding.
You think we're bastard-coated bastards dipped in bastard chocolate.
Which is why Bitcoin is fantastic, right? It's the solution of the problem of trust. We can't trust other apex predators. We can't.
We need ways to mediate and coordinate cooperation without trust.
It's not that I think that this person just wants love and belonging.
I think that they want a position higher than me on a dominance hierarchy.
And so, you know, they may also want love and belonging.
We have lots of, Samson mentioned this, like inconsistent drives within us that some serve different evolutionary purposes.
I just also think, there's no doubt that we all want love and we all want belonging.
But we also all want – not all, but enough of us want a high position on the dominance hierarchy.
We also want like sexual access to the right partners.
We also want a huge reserve of resources so we can survive whatever winter, you know?
Yeah, but don't we want that because that's our interpretation of what love and belonging is?
um like i you know like i grew up poor and i want to be a billionaire because i feel like that's where
um i'm safe yeah i i grew up unloved and therefore i want to sleep with a thousand women because that
makes me feel wanted um you know like that that's just i think that that is downstream
of love and belonging and i want to call out that perhaps that framework that you're talking about
is within that control structure of a zero-sum game.
That to stand on the peak, to be at the top of the dominance hierarchy,
is to believe in the zero-sum that you do have to take,
that you do have to conquer, that you do have to be a predator.
Yeah. The natural condition of history, or the natural,
the condition of nature is scarcity.
It is zero-sum. We evolved in that condition.
Jason Lowry talks about this, you know, Samson talks, anybody who considers evolution talks about, you know.
Nature also has symbiotic relationships, right?
They have symbiotic organisms that like nature works.
As a defense strategy.
Yeah.
Against other predators.
But it's offensive. Like, it works in harmony. You know, the bee, the flower, the little fish swimming in and out of the whale's teeth, munching on the little niblets and the ones that are on the body, clearing away the parasites and stuff. Like, nature is...
So, which of those are humans? Are we the wolf or are we the fish that swims and nibbles at the tooth? I think we're the wolf. I think that's what humans have always been as apex predators. We devour. We don't nibble at the teeth of other creatures.
But I think we're both.
I think we're, I think we are, there are some examples of people that are that, and then there are others that are latching on.
Like you, you had the question to Jeff about, you know, what if you have muscular dystrophy or.
And to give context to that question.
Yeah.
It's asked in good faith because I do a summer camp in the past.
I've done it many times with people who have muscular dystrophy.
And so I'm friends with lots of people on Facebook who are either themselves extremely disabled or work with the extremely disabled.
And to people like that, not universally, but they tend to be generally less libertarian because they're like the state really needs to be involved to care for certain people because it's not going to be done otherwise.
And they can't care for themselves through no fault of their own.
And so I ask that question like in good faith because I want to know the answer to that too.
Like, I'm a generally free market person, but it strains the free market when we think about human vulnerability, that we're animals.
We are born into a condition of vulnerability as children and which are dependent on adults.
And we inevitably, our body decays into another stage of dependency as we become elderly and depend on care.
Humans, we depend on care when we cannot reciprocally care for others.
Yeah, but that presumes that the state is the only one that will provide because it is acknowledging the control structure that says that it's a zero sum game and that people will not, you know, just give to that.
And I almost jumped in because I was about to say, like, I feel like there's an obvious answer to this because your question was around, like, you know, if we live in this post-economic society, this post-economic world where everything is abundant and people are able to express the particular fractal or mosaic of their own genius to the best of their ability.
I love Jeff's description of that, by the way.
I mean, maybe not off the cuff.
He's probably said it before, but that's a very beautiful description.
And I do believe on a heartfelt level that that true outside of whatever market that somebody everybody does have a particular genius to add I sorry Well but I mean your question was like well what you know what is it what there for those people What there for those people that need that care And to me
it's just very obvious is that, well, there's a world of abundance, then they're not going to
need that care to come from another individual, that they're going to have everything that they
need, probably have the advancements in medicine and things like that to cure it as well. But even
And if like, let's just assume that that doesn't happen.
And it's not the case right now.
So like, how do we operate right now?
Yeah.
So, but just like say, okay, well, what if you could just replace the human caretaker
with the robot caretaker for one twentieth of the cost?
Again, in a near-term future, that might be possible.
What's that?
In a near-term future, that might be possible.
It cannot happen right now.
Yeah, but like, it's like, we're talking like very near-term future.
We'll see.
Like very, like, like.
People need to survive until we get to.
I'm trying to just roll out like a couple hundred thousand humanoid robots that are capable of effectively.
If you go to a disabled person right now who can't care for themselves and say, we're going to take away all of the state provision care that you receive because we're going to get robots in five years.
Nobody's arguing that. Nobody's arguing that. What I'm saying is that it will be the case that with abundance, whenever it occurs, that those individuals will have everything that they need.
And they will be able to express themselves way more fully at less cost.
Why maybe?
I'll only say, this is maybe not what you were thinking, but the ability to express oneself depends on having developed with human interaction the ability to express oneself.
And so a robot can never fully help a person develop into a human.
But if it can get you where you need to, if it can take you to the, you know, if it can get you out of the house every single day with the same sort of mobility that a human has to be able to meet up with all these other people that were previously homebound that could only go somewhere if they had a person that was willing to take them there, then you're going to explode their opportunity.
And in fact, it now makes me think that perhaps one of the greatest untapped resources will be that community that has previously been sort of locked up.
Like Stephen Hawking was in a wheelchair.
What if his wheelchair had fucking rockets on it?
And he could just go, hey, you know what?
I'm going to New York City today.
An exoskeleton where he moves around.
Yes, whatever thing.
But no, I agree with all of that.
But we can't live in a near-term future that is not the present.
We have to live in the present.
And so as long as we agree that right now, however predatory the state is, we require maybe state provisioned care or like we need to ensure that charitable giving is going to –
It's not state provisioned care.
The state provisions nothing.
All of the provisions of the state come stolen from the people.
So they require stolen care.
So there's no –
Call it whatever you will.
We need to steal right now from people so that we can care for our most vulnerable.
Yes.
That's the case, right?
Maybe.
Yeah.
It seems to be the case.
It's a bad situation, but we live in a very bad world.
We live in a fallen world.
We live in a great world.
We live in a world that's getting better.
And we live in a world we can keep on making better.
But we don't live in a perfect world, and so we can't have perfect solutions.
So we live in the best world that's ever existed.
Okay, Candide.
It's like—
Like, is it not better?
Yeah.
Is it not better than in 1900?
Is it not better than 1700 and 1000?
It's getting better.
Is it not better than 1985?
Neither here nor there, but it's getting better.
So we live in the best world that's ever existed in this world?
Oh, I see what you're saying.
We live in a very good world.
You could say we live in the best world as long as you don't say that to obscure or occult the very severe deficiencies we need to be fighting to remedy.
But that's just – that's the whole check your privilege thing.
It's like I can't enjoy this thing unless I also –
You can enjoy it.
Keep on fighting.
Like I can't say that this is the best world without also saying that, oh, they're still suffering.
I can say that it's the best world.
Yeah, as long as you also acknowledge this other thing.
Yeah, why? Why do I need to acknowledge that?
You don't need to verbally acknowledge it, but in this conversation, some people will say this is the best world, and so I'm taking my chips and going back to my mansion.
Some.
Yeah.
But I mean, those are also the people that currently are having all their chips stolen from them in order to fund a incredibly inefficient state process that, you know, say you probably take $100 from people and $1 of it actually ends up helping out.
Yeah, listen, I think it's all fucked up, too. I just don't know what the right answer is, because I'm reading another book, too, Dependent Rational Animals. I'm reading with this from our mutual friend Rick by Alistair McIntyre. And his whole thesis in this book is he is a moral philosopher who did, he's passed away, did serious work in the realm of moral philosophy, ethics, like what is the right action in a given set of circumstances.
And the point in this book is we've developed our ethical theories typically as if we're all kind of perfectly free moral agents, like autonomous people that can choose this way or that way.
We don't typically build into our moral theories a recognition that we all pass through stages of vulnerability and dependence in which we cannot give to other people what we need to get in return.
There's going to be a non-reciprocal exchange.
We rely on others.
And so I just like keep on challenging myself with that because I am a very free market person. I do dislike the government. I agree, like with our conversation with Sal Pineda, all of the personal pain that inflation causes, too. It's not just, you know, not just thievery. It's something more like structural violence. It is something that hurts people.
But I struggle to think, you know, how do we also acknowledge our own individual vulnerabilities and periods of vulnerability and also people who will be profoundly stuck in that stage their entire life?
But there's like, OK, so everybody has their own optimist that alleviates nearly all of that vulnerability to the point that what you need other humans for is simply human connection.
You don't need them to take you to the bathroom.
And when we get to that point, that'll be fantastic.
But we don't live there yet.
We do.
It's just not evenly distributed.
And that's what.
That is the case.
Like the case is.
That's no sucker to the person who doesn't have it.
Like don't worry, bro.
We got the technology, but you don't get it yet.
Maybe 10 years, it'll be equally distributed.
But good luck.
We agree on this.
No, we don't.
We do.
No, we don't.
Because, again, you're focusing on the negative.
Right.
And you're focusing on the positive.
And they're both true.
It's just like we need to find a way to integrate them.
Yeah.
But the truth is what you believe in.
Not all.
It is.
I can't.
If I am disabled and need care, I can't think my way into being cared for.
I need somebody to give you something.
Yeah.
But if you're disabled and need care, then you have a better outlook than any other person
who has ever existed that was disabled and needed care.
Yeah.
You still need care, though.
Right, but I still need food.
Everybody has needs.
You can go out.
Everybody has needs.
I need shoes, right?
You have the ability to go out.
The guy with no legs doesn't need shoes.
Like does he have to acknowledge that I need shoes No because you have the ability to go out and in a free market or even in a non market to do some work get some money and go buy the shoes This person doesn have a skill like you do
where you can go out and work to get the money
and then go buy the shoes or whatever.
The world is trended like away from any sort of manual labor
into white collar labor.
Like there's nothing that, you know,
unless you are like there's the exclusion here
of like mentally disabled, but physically disabled,
They're a physically disabled person now is more equal to an able-bodied person than at any point in history.
And they're only gaining.
They're getting better.
They're only gaining.
I'm talking about people like meet a person with serious muscular dystrophy.
Some of them can't talk.
Some of them have ventilators breathing for them.
Some of them, they can't type either.
They can barely operate a power wheelchair.
They can't move their limbs.
Yeah, but now they have Neuralink and they can stick a thing in their brain.
They can communicate telepathically.
They can drive a car and they can read a book.
and they can write.
If they had developed with a sense of autonomy from birth,
the thing with disabled people,
and this happens to everybody,
but it tends to happen to disabled people more often,
unfortunately, is their wings are clipped psychologically
from a very young age
because they're not told you can do anything.
They rely on their parents' care for everything.
Some of them age 35,
they're still living in their parents' house.
And so you meet some, not all disabled people,
but many you'll meet them
And they have almost a childlike aspect because they there was no point when they could just be thrown out and get out of the house and get a job.
They were always, you know, it's a very sad thing.
It is the case.
People are psychologically crippled, too, oftentimes due to a disability through no fault of their own.
It's just a more extreme example of what Jeff was talking about, was the control system that we live in, where we have been psychologically.
For sure.
That we don't know what true freedom feels like because we constantly are looking for someone to turn towards rules and make it fair and do this and do that for us.
It's a continuum and a gradient of crippling for sure.
It is.
Absolutely.
And we're just saying that, like, yeah, I mean, you're just picking a spot on it.
I'm picking one.
And we're also on it and we're hard.
But there's lower than that too.
There is, definitely.
Yeah.
And there's even worse.
You're absolutely true.
But there's also better.
There's also better for sure.
You know?
Yeah.
But to the extent that you are of the view that because everybody's possessed of equal dignity, everybody needs to be allowed to live some sort of life, a dignified life, then we're going to have to provide something for some people more than for others.
Yeah, but dignity is a personal thing. Like, if you look at someone and you say, because you can't go outside, because you can't put your shoes on, because you can't shower yourself, you don't have dignity, that is you making a judgment on them that is a result of your own fear of not being able to have those freedoms.
That there are plenty of people that live a disabled life that do not feel disabled.
Yeah, yeah.
And so that's not like you're putting your own fear upon them in calling them or in saying that they don't have the ability to have dignity.
No, I didn't say they didn't have the ability.
I said we all have dignity regardless of whatever level of capacities we have.
It's like the Christian notion of having a soul essentially is what I was getting at.
I mean like it's – there's nothing that's undignified about having a wheelchair.
There's nothing that's undignified about having somebody have to help you use the bathroom.
No. And so as long as they have somebody to help them use the bathroom and instead are not living in squalor and filth because nobody's caring for them, then that's an undignified state.
When they need if you need help using the restroom and nobody's there to help you, nobody's to have to live like that.
But that's your judgment.
I'm definitely a judgment. I'm comfortable making.
Yeah, there's one of, was it Epictetus? I can't remember.
You're going to push stoicism on the disabled for sure.
One of the great philosophers that was like, you know, he just chose to live in squalor, live in that.
And, you know, that was his choice.
Diogenes, maybe?
He was definitely dignified in his own mind.
You can certainly be dignified and live in something that somebody else defines as squalor.
You can be.
It's imparting your own judgment on it.
Yeah.
there are more and less dignified ways to live there are not they're all individual
um they all depend on they're all contextual for sure um but i i just think that we need to make
sure that everybody has the resources if they are unable to acquire them themselves through severe
vulnerability dependency of that is unchosen that they have the ability to access a minimally
dignified life.
Yeah, but thinking the state
is going to provide that.
I'm open to other avenues.
Well, I mean, what I'm saying
is like the state has
like a proven track record
of not doing that
despite taking huge amounts
of funds for it.
It has a proven track record
of holding those people hostage
to say,
if you don't give me
a bunch of money,
these people are going to die.
I mean, that's the sick part, right?
The state will say,
give me all your taxes
because we needed to support
this vulnerable population.
Also, I'm going to go
invade this country over here.
Don't knock a bunch of shit over.
So that's – it is true. Like I think the state is abhorrent in that way. I just struggle to see in our present circumstances any configuration of enlightened consciousness that can remedy what is a material deficiency.
Is there anything the state does well?
There is something that – again, democracy is – like they say, democracy is not the best system, but it's the least worst.
Maybe the state is a stage we passed through where it was not – it's not the best thing, but it's like the least bad we could do.
I don't know. It's in any case where we find
ourselves historically. It seems to be.
I would agree with that. I would say that
that is the case, that it's just the
yeah, it's
I mean, that's kind of like the argument
of it's like whoever
whoever enslaved the other people
was the worst humans in the world.
Everybody was trying to enslave everybody else.
They were just the ones that were better at it.
And so you're just getting mad at somebody for being
competent where
you're
it is. It's again, it's a continuation
of the what booth was talking about was just the victimhood thing is just get away from the
victimhood get away from the you know that i'm in this situation because of yeah you know i'm in
this situation because i choose so yeah i think we settled it i think i do i do think we agree
we're just pushing and pulling because we both dislike the state a lot and we don't want to
we're both savvy to like the way the world is but we also want to find a better future
and it's tough.
I think they do good with flags.
Some states make nice flags.
I'm trying to say something nice about the state.
Patriotism.
Yeah, I don't think that has anything to do with the state, actually.
I don't know.
Great propaganda.
They've made some really good movies.
Really good movies.
They did.
Questionable songs.
Yeah.
I mean, you'll never be just Tom Cruise
and like a F-16 or something
just screaming above an American flag
and an eagle flies nearby
and then you turn over
and there's a bust of George Washington.
You're just like
thrumming with patriotism
and just like,
I've won.
Oh, let freedom ring.
All right.
Yeah.