really honored to have with us. What I would kind of refer to as one of the more kind,
optimistic thinkers in the Bitcoin universe and the intentional way that he has chosen to navigate
the chaotic world that we're living in as the fiat system unravels and we exit a world of
rules for a world of freedom. This is Jeff Booth, and he wrote the book The Price of Tomorrow,
which we reviewed recently on the podcast here. And Jeff, we're honored to have,
really honored to have you with us. And the question that I wanted to begin with was,
you talked about love and belonging being superordinate to basically everything. And
the experience of life being in-depth tied to that and how we are entering this time of chaos
that is not due to Bitcoin upsetting the system. It's simply due to people experiencing freedom
for the first time in 5,000 years of civilization. First freedom in markets where we have Bitcoin as
the first free market that's ever existed, but freedom in other aspects of life as well.
And that the chaos ensues really from people wanting to have that tie to the system. They
want to be told what to do. They want those rules. And I think you elucidate it so beautifully. So I
guess I just kind of want to throw it to you and ask you, can you kind of walk us through
how you came to this understanding and what you what you feel like the
inserting of freedom into a unfree world um does to humanity and consciousness as as we try to
navigate this this wide open space that we've never seen before just that just
the next question will be three words just go into that multi-complex there so each of these
frameworks i would say it would be different frameworks um and they're each each one of those
frameworks is almost big enough to comprise an entire show an entire life being serious they
because because these these things that we're hearing or some of these things will depending
where you are in your journey will hit differently they they may might be true but it's your
understanding of of them um that uh myth is it really shapes it so so i like to i i like to
find the bottom of what i'm talking about so what's what's true for sure and then pose that as
if that's true what else is uh what else could we say what do you expect to see
um and and so you just gave a number of them right in the same and when you asked the question
and oh let's start with the first one um the uh the love and love and belonging um so
as far as i can tell um that's one of those things that that i kind of came up with that said
I believe love and belonging is
superordinate to everything else
that we act
in
a way to try to get love and belonging
and most times
because of that
we don't see the things we do
to actually push it away
and so if I use
examples to be
able to see that I'd be a few examples
to say if that's true in other people
then it must be true in me too
um and so i try to find things that are that are that are first true and then and then they would
if if it's in all people and it would have to be true in me to be able to help me
soften an edge and some are finding a lot deeper so one of the examples i often give in love and
belonging is kind of that victim analogy and somebody um somebody trying whether they had
pain as a child, whether they encoded pain as a child, whatever happened, that somehow
by being a victim, everybody raced to them and showed them exactly what they wanted.
And then because that was hard, because they always acted that way, those same people move
away and it's too hard to be around that person.
And so that typical thing is then they would double down and create more drama to get everybody
to come back. And so you can see when I talk about that, you can see it in probably somebody
you know, maybe you, if somebody's listening to this, but it's really hard to face, right,
that it's me creating the world instead of somebody else creating the world to me.
So in each of these things, by the way, if you use that exact same victim analogy and you say
the person who wants to be a billionaire so much
that they lose their family.
Because they're constantly working to try to make that.
It's all-consuming.
And they're telling themselves the whole time I'm doing it for my family.
And then as the family pushes away, it feels like loss.
And they move to what gives them the love and belonging.
more people to tell them how great they are.
And so you see this, and I just gave a couple examples,
but what got me interested in it,
and what wanted me going deeper in it,
is watching these examples of different people
all over my life of different,
I call it the sign that they had on their forehead
that was pushing everything away that they wanted,
that they were unaware of it.
You can see people doing Bitcoin.
You can see they're so concerned with Bitcoin and how tight they are, Bitcoin, that they want to push away everyone else in their life, right?
Which they can't understand.
Why are these people not around me anymore, right?
They think it's everyone else.
And sometimes that comes from needing to show up more intelligence and so on.
Or it's needing to.
So it's everywhere.
And it just is.
And a different way of looking at it is we look at our own photo first.
We look at our own photo and a group picture first.
We're so consumed how we show up, who we are in our own movie.
Right. That it kind of shows that, that, and then I, then the irony of what I just said, the irony is we're so consumed with our own movie, but then most of the world, most of the time we're talking about other people. Why, why did they do what they were doing? Completely unaware of the actions that we, that we do to push people away.
so if it looks like that everywhere
and love and belonging
if love and belonging were superordinate to everything else
I would expect it to look like that everywhere
and then I would also have to face that
anywhere in my life that I wasn't getting what I wanted
would have to be me too
and that's how I found different things
to be able to unlock
to be able to take me to a different level.
And so some of those things are hard to find
because you want to believe all the good things
that people tell you about yourself.
And as soon as something's negative,
that can't be me.
Everyone else says the great things about me.
So that other thing has to be someone else.
Yeah.
To go down, like, even, like, maybe below that bottom,
that movie that we're generating for ourself
or that consciousness that wants to put us at the center of a movie,
do you think that that's an evolved human capacity that we have evolved
to help us get along as a social species?
Or maybe and is it fueled by an attention economy
with the new forms of social media we have?
I think it's evolved.
I think that in part, we're social creatures.
We get more done, even if you just said what the free market is.
It's a divisional language to get more done based on trust and based on belonging to a group and group bias.
And so as we evolved, I suspect that there's a part of that that gave a bias for people who cooperated.
or people who, and so our cooperation
gave a bias to some fitness function and survival
that allowed that to happen,
and we didn't see that it happened.
Yeah, and so there's this idea of evolutionary mismatch.
We were reading a book by Dr. David Sampson
called Our Tribal Future,
and the idea of evolutionary mismatch is
you evolve a trait in a certain environment
but then the environment changes and you still have that evolved trait and you're applying it
in a new realm so his example is like turtles a type of sea turtle evolved to go out to the sea
when they hatch out of their egg according to the moonlight of the sunlight glinting on the sea
but now there's beach houses that have bright lights and so the turtles go inland and die
do you think that there's if this is an evolved capacity is there some toxic dynamic in the
current environment that is leading it to have a negative effect whereas as you know it evolved to
help us maybe cooperate but is the current environment a mismatch from the environment
in which we develop that capacity or trade and that's a huge question the simple answer is yes
but it but it would have to be the simple answer tied to something totally different right that
tied to when I say the natural state of the free market is deflation.
And that means inside that system, we should, if we were cooperating,
it means all prices have to fall forever inside that system.
But we've never lived in that system.
We've lived in a zero-sum game.
So that's different, but very connected to what you just said.
So if we've always lived in a zero-sum game where we are easily manipulated, and if the science of consciousness and the science of how to understand how people think and make decisions,
where equally you can now really understand and coordinate and control those people
from that science, from that centralized thing,
then from that centralized entity, you would expect everything to constantly do that
and prey upon your weaknesses.
But you wouldn't see them because you would be making decisions within that water,
which is a fish know what water is and so all of your thoughts would be inside of there
and if remember i said the sign on the foregad if this is how then then you would be so easy
co-opted by that system and you would think it was somebody else you would it would fit set up a
perfect environment to program you in service of a system that was controlling you.
And all of your work inside of that system would be furthering the programming.
And this system, I don't know, is this just the fiat money system?
Is it crony capitalism?
Or is this a more intentionally constructed system?
by marketers who want to sell us something?
Or what is the system, I guess, broadly speaking?
So that's why I start with the natural state of the free market is deflation, right?
Yeah.
Because what you just did and nodded your head, you know something's true.
But what does that say?
So you have to say it hundreds of times to yourself because it's not just knowing it.
it's it's it's internalizing it and then and then acting within it right because if you know
something but all of your energy is in the other system spending in the other system
then you know the system that we've never lived in that is true for sure right you would you would
expect all of the other things all of your time in the other system to be capturing you more
and so so people nod their head like it uh you've heard me say this on every podcast every speech
and people do what exactly what you're doing nod your head and then they ask what price in u.s
dollars and then they ask and then they yell at the existing system and they what what about those
people what about those bankers those the the rothschilds or all of this it has to look like
that. Whether it's evil in disguise or not, it doesn't matter. It just is. But your actions within
that system further. So the question isn't what would it look like? Who would they look like? You
are they. The power that comes to that system is from you. And until we make the decision,
each of us make the decision to stop to to see it for what it is instead of make it about
those those because every fight within that system strengthens it
yeah yeah it's it's so radically simple like it's so crazy simple
but but it's why that this is why it's so hard because because because we've we've grown up our
parents grew up, their grandparents grew up, over and over and over.
We've never seen what it would be like to live in a global free market.
We don't have pattern recognition for it.
And remember, and that's why it's connected to that love and belonging.
We want to matter in that other system.
If we can get a little bit more money and matter more to the other.
Because there's so much expert bias.
recency but there's so many biases in our decisions that we're inside the system trying
to matter more within it within a zero-sum game and you can't matter more in a zero-sum game
right or from that system you could you would look really popular to the people you had more money
from that were trying to escape poverty right or if you're tucker carlson or somebody else
you're yelling at that system and telling people the reason why it looks like this you
keep hundreds of credibility right because all of those people were looking for an out
you would still be in the system trapping all of your time and energy give yeah giving
fighting the system gives it the energy that it needs to persist kind of in your own mind and
your own mind is forming the reality that you're living in. You talked about in the book,
you talked about the visualization of folding the piece of paper 50 times in order for us to
help understand the power of exponentials in that if I take a piece of paper and I fold it 50 times,
it reaches nearly to the sun. And so the flip side of that, in the conversation with Daniela.io
that I listened to, you gave the example, you know, we talked about how you're not only the sum
of what you've experienced, but also there were two parents and there were four grandparents and
there were eight great-grandparents and so on. And so it's a deflationary collapse of experiences
throughout generations into you that carries, I guess, both, we focus, I think, more on the trauma,
but it also carries the victories and the optimism of those previous generations all
exponentially collapsed into one person. And so to get back to the second half of my chapter long
question that I opened this with was the freedom to, we are now experiencing freedom for the first
time. And we're experiencing freedom in capital markets through Bitcoin. But there comes behind
that because of the deflationary abundance of technology routed through AI and Bitcoin and
robotics and the sum of all the technology. That freedom expands not just from our capital
experience, but also from our lived experience. And Grant had a great quote from Marx, I think,
do you have that? He wanted to, because we're curious about where do we go with this freedom?
And, you know, what does this post-economy or post-zero-sum game world look like?
Yeah. Unless you want to react to that.
I didn't answer that before you go to the question.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.
So what I recently described, where we are moving to,
versus what I described in Love and Belonging,
most people still measuring that from the existing system,
they are not free.
They don't have freedom.
They might have more freedom because today they have more money
than the next person.
But they are in a system that is going to be a totalitarian
control system. And they are most, if they're giving their energy to that system, they are not
free. And until we're all free, nobody's really free. Because we've always lived in this control
system, and it's quite likely that most people are going to get co-opted by it. Most Bitcoiners
are going to sell back to a piece of paper. And it's going to centralize, that's going to
centralized further. What I'm talking about is, and in some countries, we don't see this because
we've never seen it. We believed we were free in the U.S. or Canada, but that control system was a
zero-sum game that had to come from the losses from somewhere else. And then there had to be
three-letter agencies that would go in and put in the dictator to ensure that those people never
rose up out of freedom because that's what funded us we were at the top they were at the bottom
i sat down with uh um the uh um the writer john perkins who wrote confessions of an economic hit
man i sat with him for uh for three hours over dinner a couple about a month ago and he said
that literally he went in,
bags of money in one hand,
for the dictator and all their family and friends and cronies,
done in the other.
Choose.
That's what the world's looked like.
It's always looked like that,
because it had to look like that from the zero-sum game.
When we're talking about freedom right now,
and people think they have freedom of speech and everything else,
because they've had it.
It came from somebody else losing theirs.
If we don't operate in Bitcoin,
if you don't operate in Bitcoin and develop privacy tech on top
and spend your money in Bitcoin and advocate for that
and building on top of it, you will be captured.
And it only matters how many people do that.
we we have never been free and it's consolidating faster than people realize because the exponential
trend that i talked about has to mean exponential manipulation exponential centralization exponential
control at the same rate and so right now you see people talking about privacy coins
and going into all this nonsense
and talking about this nonsense
because they don't know there is a protocol
that they can be free of.
So the vast majority of Bitcoiners
are going to get captured.
And so freedom so far in this discussion
is defined as freedom to transact
and freedom of certain political rights
like expression, maybe democratic involvement.
Is it, I guess, is your definition of freedom here
the free market which you know has not existed
or what does freedom look like in its pure form
right now if there are pockets of it
or what will it look like if it is instantiated in the future?
So this is actually why I think I'm really glad, and keep pushing here, by the way,
and let's keep on pushing, because sometimes you'll say a word that is your idea of freedom like democracy.
Yeah.
Right.
How could your version of democracy work that you believe you live in
if most of your money is stolen from an unnatural tax that you don't have a vote in
because you don't have a vote in inflation right and remember inflation isn't from zero it's from
the productivity rate of the world which would be way negative so most of the economic decisions
which drive your life you don't have a vote in most of the economic decisions that create
to the three agencies They create all the power that creates the centralization of media technology farming agriculture medical
All of that bullshit is stolen from you,
concentrated in the monopolies,
that then you regurgitate into it
and then say democracy.
We've never lived in a true democracy.
we don't have a and with the word we've never lived in true capitalism if the natural state
of the free market has always been deflation and we've never seen it so and i don't mind and i don't
mean to be argumentative but i want to really pinpoint why these words you can't understand
them because they have a meaning that meaning for each of us is describing a different meaning that
doesn't exist.
Yes.
It's complete make-believe.
It's a zero-sum game
that had to steal from somebody else.
And if we made believe
and we put our head in the sand
that it was stealing from somebody else,
we could just keep on rolling in that game.
But it's never been the free market.
So now we're the free market.
So what is the free market?
What is the free market?
That's probably a better way into this.
yes the free market is the only way you could get paid more than than others is by creating more
value for them only possible way and and so and then when you do you create margin
that other people see your margin and they want to compete on your bar they want to take your margin
and compete more of it and give more value to others so every single thing you do in the free
market has to benefit all of society. And if you do something really special for all of society,
you get paid more for a while until people do something more special than you.
In that world, there couldn't be a monopoly. It's impossible. In that world, as you added
more minds to try to compete to serve others, you have faster abundance.
Not, there's never going to be a problem.
Just all problems create more opportunity to solve problems for society.
I guess my question, though, then, is if freedom in the free market is defined as that ability
to contribute and then to be rewarded in relation to the value that other people find in your
contribution but brass tacks what everybody cares about is belonging and love won't some people get
less belonging and love in the free market system if they don't have something to contribute that
others find of value so that's why so so now okay now let's say you don't have a job right
first I'm just going to qualify something. I believe every single human being has genius in
them. And that genius doesn't have to be my genius. The mosaic of who we are all connected
is the genius in each of us, that fractal showing up. But what if you didn't have a job and everyone
else's work was making things more abundant for you and you didn't need a job and you were just
getting wealthier when i say wealthier i mean you could have one dollar and that one dollar would
increase in value forever for forever and when i say one dollar in this case it wouldn't in a dollar
but let's say 100 satoshis it would increase in value forever then the genius that you were
would find something even if you were making one satoshi right but you wouldn't need to make more
and more because your currency was being devalued your time would be increasing forever your value
to society would be increasing forever whether or not you contributed you would be you'd be
benefiting from the global competition trying to provide value for you as would every other person
on the planet.
Yeah.
So I think what I'm interpreting you saying
is that love and belonging
superordinate to all
and that with freedom,
each individual will experience
an opportunity to discover
the mosaic of genius
that exists within them
and drive them into
to express that genius in a way that contributes to the love and belonging of the world.
Or serves society in whatever way they say.
Because now to argue the opposite, argue the system we're in,
wouldn't the system we're in have to try to divide you from that love and belonging,
to use that to be able to say that it's somebody else's fault,
to be able to continue to control you?
Wouldn't that system have to do that more and more and more
as it had tried to agree?
Because you weren't making decisions on a free market.
You were making decisions on a manipulated market
and those in control of the decisions would...
Most people would be caught in it,
not even know that they're feeding, contributing to it.
And so it would have to be tied into our consciousness
because it's just based on a system
which is ultimately based on theft.
Yeah.
And so those would have to,
they'd have to be so diametrically opposed.
And you'd face a choice at some point,
the cognitive dissonance of trying to mesh
two different systems that couldn't be compatible together.
The cognitive dissonance that you would face
in trying to, even what's happening,
and by the way and i love these conversations i love what you're doing because because this would
be really hard for every single person to win because most of your decisions are made from the
other the other system they'd have to be to catch yourself and realize and say it could like of
course it looks like that from where i'm making most of the decisions now my choice is do i move
my time and energy to the new system and how much of my time and energy.
Yeah, you talked in an interview about checking yourself, using your framework to check yourself
and realizing that there was a point where you were in the Bitcoin world, but still spending
most of your energy in the fiat world. And you made the active decision to move that.
And it sounds like you are very well versed in the corruption model, in the taking, the hating, the exclusion, and very aware of that.
And so what did it look like functionally for you to move yourself out of that fiat system?
Was it just the mindset of I'm not a victim or what?
Yeah.
What does that look like to you when you moved all in on Bitcoin?
Yeah.
And I'm going to caveat this.
I try even today to spend as much possible energy in Bitcoin as I can and spend in Bitcoin as much as I can.
I still today, I bought a boat recently.
Boat wouldn't take Bitcoin.
The boat owner wouldn't take Bitcoin.
So I bought in fear.
But I'm constantly thinking how to move more time and energy.
And I get sometimes, it doesn't matter to me what somebody else's perception of me is.
And I understand and empathize with their perception because their perception is coming from their own reality.
So I get sometimes, oh, easy for you to make that choice because you've always had money.
And so let's investigate that specific example.
Well, you know, in my book, in 2017, I round-tripped my own company, went from $500 million value, and I walked away with zero.
Not only zero, I had sold our family house into that, and I couldn't pay rent at the end of the month.
And so we were literally zero.
And I came away from that experience realizing I had everything I could ever want at zero.
I had still had my family, still had all my relationships, had my integrity.
I had everything I could ever want at zero.
And so it was easy to start again.
But we started again late, late 2017,
and then started and built back and did very well.
So when I made a decision in 2021 to stop all of the boards,
stop everything else I was on and move into Bitcoin and create ego death. That decision
looked like this with my wife. Still remembering your billing back, your sugar, it said, we're not
going to make anything for the next year, at least. But I'm going to try to create ego death.
And assuming it works and we'll make money later on, but I have to move my time
into the system.
And so we're going to just put a box
and we're going to live on
many savings that we've had.
Might go to zero again.
But I have to do this.
So, and I'm not looking for simply
I made the right decision for me.
And I don't want to also say,
Janion, they need to make the decision
because I made the decision.
Each person needs to make the decision
in their own time what it looks like.
I couldn't live with the cognitive dissonance of knowing that I wasn't in unity with who I was.
And I had, so that was more pain than any money I could make.
so there's going to be a certain subset of the population that regardless of whatever whatever
particular genius they have as like an aspect of their dignity or some universal aspect of them as
humans they're going to be able to contribute far less for example a person with like muscular
dystrophy duchenne muscular dystrophy they're born in a state where they're always going to be
in a power wheelchair. They're always going to require immense amounts of technology that others
provide to them to maintain their bodily function, to enable them to do things, going to need personal
care from other humans to bathe them, toilet them, things like that. And so for the critic of the
free market system, they're going to say that that type of person is not going to get the love and
belonging that they need. A person like Jeff Booth, who is able to create companies, can, but a person
who is not able to, and in fact, is very profoundly disabled, is going to require maintenance from
others, whether in the form of pure charity or in the form of the state providing something.
And so I guess where, how is that person on the free market, if love and belonging is the ideal
or superordinate state that justifies the system, how does it justify their position within that
system? So keep in mind, I didn't say love and belonging justifies the system. I said the free
market in the natural state of the free market is deflation right okay that's true how we show up
i've always showed up as love and belonging and so so what so if the natural state of the free
market is deflation and the opposite system is a credit-based system by which money is lent into
existence with an interest rate it means you built in um an interest rate that must expand forever
on money that didn't exist.
So you're built in essentially theft
to the protocol layer of humanity.
So instead of asking how this would work
if you had a system of honesty
where you had to provide more value to society,
wouldn't you want to first explore
what it would look like in a system
where you created independence from everywhere,
created victims everywhere
from a system that had to control you. So even the question itself is so crazy. And I'm sorry,
but it's because it perceives that you've lived in a system that is honest. And what would that
dishonest system have you believe about those other people or yourself that you couldn't have
agency you couldn't provide because the state had to look after you, right? And how could you
be convinced from that? It's a dishonest system. It comes into existence completely dishonest.
And so I know who I am, right? And if I've created more wealth or more of this,
then I am far more likely to give back.
And instead of give back because I had a tax incentive to give back,
to bury my head in the sand, that I'm at the top of a system of theft.
Yeah.
I want to change direction real quick.
And you have said that Bitcoin eats all the other currencies.
And I believe that as well.
But there are a lot of people with very large platforms, even people like Michael Saylor, who have talked about the dollar being able to exist kind of side by side with Bitcoin.
the rise of stable coins in the last few years becoming more and more prominent, which I,
like when I think of stable coins, I just think of them as a shorter term way to steal money as
a, it's like a momentary bond that, that takes away your opportunity instead of a time sensitive
one. But can you, I guess, can you just sort of solidify that argument, which I do believe is true,
but I want to hear it from you, that Bitcoin takes over all the currencies and kind of address
stable coins as well. And if they have a role to play in that, or if they are just a blip in time,
where there is an extractive economy that's taking advantage.
Yeah, so Patriot Act is the opposite of the Patriot.
The Inflation Reduction Act is the opposite of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Stablecoin is opposite of a stablecoin.
Stability comes from guaranteed losses against Bitcoin.
It should be called a guaranteed loss coin.
Yeah, but branding will suck a whole bunch of people in.
this will happen um all of these things at the highest level of the natural savings free market
is the deflation if if we now have an ability to to live in that energy completely and move our
time into it but in the in previous 5 000 years we've never lived in that then you would expect
people to get captured over and over and over again.
And because it had to mean we were always captured.
And you'd have to believe that just this system kind of imposing,
Bitcoin imposing discipline would have to have all of these short-term actors,
scams, nonsense.
It would have to look like that.
There's no possible way that it just magically, oh, we're going to just give up.
Because why would it look like that?
Because we've always been the other system.
And I would virtually say most Bitcoiners are still in the other system.
Yeah.
Right.
And so it would have to look like this and not, it might look like this.
Yeah.
Right.
And then, and then every single person would choose through their proof of work.
Which system that they wanted to participate in.
And then a lot of those people, that's why I don't trust Verify, slay your heroes, people should say about me too, have you moved?
Or which is like, have you been tapped on the shoulder and now you're telling a different story to society?
One that captures, and so then that bar should be really high.
I'm not saying attack everybody because you don't need to.
You just watch. Just watch their actions. But you'd expect this to be a really chaotic transition, because the chaos was us. Chaos was us understanding something different, that we'd imposing something different, that we had to make a choice. And not just one choice, more and more and more choices, right, to be able to do this.
And each time we made that choice for the owner system, we'd be abandoning the dishonest and more people would be joining us.
And then there'd be a lot of, over here in the system that we've always lived in, there'd be this pull to, you got really rich, go back.
And then, how do I aggregate more of this, more in fiat dollars?
There'd be this pull.
so now now for my you've probably heard me say this hundreds of times about protocol or winner
take all and technologies or winner take most so the way people are looking at bitcoin right now
is they're looking at the first layer of a protocol i'd say even bitcoiners that aren't
using lightning or liquid or spark or they're looking at first layer of the protocol not as a
as a medium of exchange, they're looking at it as a store of value.
And that store of value in 16 years is still decentralized, secure energy.
Backing it is growing exponentially.
And so it's never 10 minutes, new block, 10 minutes, new block.
It's imposing a change in the world.
What would it look like over here?
over here it would look like well a bunch of those bitcoiners got rich early on but this protocol
can it can't scale right so one of those bitcoiners was fatale and so and he tried to
change the protocol and and the consensus mechanism saw through it they saw through if you changed it
it would it would centralize so we're not going to change it so what would he say to a world of
people that were wanting to get rich from this world he would say i have a new scaling technology
that bitcoin's old tech that i'm going to scale and it would just be a centralized blockchain that
would be garbage right and because why would you need a blockchain if you were going to centralize
you just use a database yeah but because most people wouldn't see that most people wouldn't
see how protocol scale and layers you this this chaotic world and the entire monetary system was
being broken where even without bitcoin it was hitting the end of end of a system that was
going to need to be reset or go to war and reset it right even without bitcoin people would be
stuck in chaos like crazy, and they would be looking to try to get out of it, and they
would be totally susceptible to scams from that other system.
It would look like that.
And also, they'd never seen the protocol before.
They saw the internet, but they thought the internet started in 89 instead of 1969.
They didn't watch how protocols emerge.
So other things you can garner from if that was the case.
You can say there would be a whole bunch of ideas,
there'd be a whole bunch of things that Bitcoin didn't do right now,
but would on different layers,
that a bunch of those people would want right now.
And they would try to change the first protocol layer.
They would try to make changes.
You would also expect three-letter word agencies and everything else to infiltrate that to try to make changes.
And the consensus mechanism and the people involved would constantly push back as new layers were built on top, providing more functionality that no one could see coming because they were trying to do something different.
And so that's what's happening right now.
that's why lightning, liquid
or Xper, all of that
is kind of a language
interoperable language
now you're moving value
people to people
on top of a protocol
that's decentralized and secure
part of the protocol that's decentralized and secure
yes, it provides a little bit more
through lightning nodes
it provides a little bit more
of centralization on the second layer
or any of the
to let Spark or Liquid or anything else.
But if those are sufficiently decentralized
in a whole bunch of different applications,
and you have decentralized security on the bottom layer,
you have a payment medium of exchange on the second
that can scale along, along wider.
And what about privacy?
We need privacy.
And so that's what Fediment is.
That's what the cashew is as well.
but my personal choice, now I'm an investor, so caveat, I'm an investor in Fedi.
The Fediment protocol is something that had to be there
before such time that this entire system was compromised,
the centralized system was compromised.
So now you have, and some of the things that we even designed in there,
it goes open source January 4th,
But even before that we had a poison pill that if anything happened to Fetty it was immediately open source because you had to move it for a certain And so the thinking through that in order to essentially build nodes at the next level
when I say nodes, I mean us, that couldn't be compromised in order to provide privacy
tech to the entire world, they could use this as a medium of exchange.
it had to be there before the rest of the world centralized.
Thank you so much for that response.
It's so much fun to watch you reason from the bottom back up
and the way that you reason this would have to be the case if
and then you're able to arrive back to explain the system as it is,
the labels that we use, and also the technologies that people propose,
the reasons they propose them.
So it's just I can see why.
And, you know, you're on so many podcasts, but watching you reason in public each time is just so valuable.
So thank you for doing that.
Appreciate that.
I've had to do it myself.
Because when you're making, even when you're making investments, not just investments of money, but when you're making investments of your time, what would you, what does this, what's required here?
And why are so many people are going to be confused by the existing system thinking that it's a token?
Right.
because they're going to be rich on it.
What would that look like too?
And how would it end back in tears in the other system?
You had to do this.
In the FEDA example, for three years,
I've been on a weekly strategy call
because that strategic effort
to develop something that's so robust for humanity
and has so many potential people
wanting to try to kill it
or had to
had to exist
and so you had to be
really thoughtful
in the way that
that was designed
and this is such a
beautiful example
of your philosophy
and action
because you're
investing in a protocol
that's going to go
open source
so there's no
IPO
there's no
big cash out
there's no
big sale
and so
you're
You've been talking about how we have these words and we use these words as though we know what they mean, freedom and democracy, but we've never actually experienced them.
And what I'm hearing is that perhaps we've never experienced the meaning of investment because what you're doing by investing in a protocol, it makes me think of like the chickens, the rotisserie chickens at Costco.
It's the loss leader that they know that they're not going to make money on that, but it bolsters the value of their underlying product.
And so would it be the case then that you look at investments now effectively as I'm not making money off the investment, but what I am doing is I am bolstering the system, the Bitcoin system, which therefore raises me up and raises everyone else in that system up?
So a little different because we are looking to make money.
If I was investing my own money to have a different calculus,
if I'm raising money from LPs and they know that the Bitcoin IRR is 45%,
that's 45% against the existing system.
So it's probably a lot higher than that, right?
And they knew that they have a 45% IRR.
then I would never take money from somebody unless I thought I had a chance to beat that IR.
And so what would beating that IR look like?
If you were making, and by the way, the same is true for every single person in the planet right now.
The IR of Bitcoin is 45%.
45%. So if you made just a little number of sats per month and everything else is losing money, then you have an extraordinary IR. It's more than 45%. Because you're a denominating Bitcoin and you're adding sats all the time.
And so that free market is going to get, and I also believe unless you're, it can't just be all open source, because if it was all open source, where does the money come to fund open source?
Yeah.
It comes from people who've made money by extracting from the other system.
Yeah.
And so if it looked like that, you could expect that that thing might get broken in time.
It has to be the free market.
value. Now, this is the difference. People who create tons of value, you could actually have
long-term value if they continue to create value. You could actually make a ton of money
if they continue to create value, but they don't have any moat. They don't have a moat that's
caused by the existing fee system or regulation or anything else. So that means if they,
let's use Fetty for example let's say Fetty created so much value as an example that was
really early but let's say they they were charging people hundred dollars a year but you've got
perfect privacy in your communication so now you had a real bank you could start your own real bank
your your communication your money cannot be seen by is it by anybody and you could have
millions of banks all over the world you could have 20 yourself you could charge other people
for the service of actually having your bank confetti
unless they made $100 a year from you
and you made more from everybody else.
Well, then you would expect if that worked,
you'd expect to have somebody else
using their exact same technology
to do it for $80 a year.
You'd expect somebody else to do it for $60, $50, $40, $30
until prices fall to marginal cost of production.
So unless they're creating more and more value,
tons of value for you
that you don't want to go somewhere else,
then somebody else will be there.
That's how I look at this.
And so I have no problem investing in free market,
and I have no problem investing in somebody
who's going to create more value forever for their users,
because that's what it looks like.
And that's the key, is that you have to continue creating value.
You can't just do it once, because if you do it once,
it'll be undercut by somebody using the same tech.
Yeah, or if you do it in a way, and I think a lot of people are making this mistake because they're using fiat games to do this.
A lot of Bitcoiners are like, we're going to make so much money here by essentially creating an extractive model here.
It could never look like that on top of Bitcoin.
Yeah, and so this is a question we were kind of leading to earlier because it's the end point of your book.
And it's something that really fascinates me and I find just beautiful.
this end state like we kind of once we get to the point where deflation escapes inflation and we just
lean back into it i'll read a quote from your book that i really love the fear of a future without
those jobs and self-worth that they bring stops us from imagining a better world in which they
might not even be required and you say consider this alternative allowing abundance without the
jobs might actually open an entirely new enlightenment era where we have time to enjoy
the benefits that technology brings.
And I'm just, I'm really curious about how you view that state of being, I guess, and
how we're living at that point where we do allow deflationary, the deflation of technology
to occur.
We allow abundance.
It's not restrained by inflation.
What does society look like?
So it's funny, this whole conversation, that's what the world looks like to me right now.
Yeah.
I've heard you talk about this, yeah.
And that energy, because I know it's coming.
And so when I say we create reality, I very much mean we create reality.
But we can't see we create reality because of our ego in the way and this love and belonging and everything else.
So we think it's somebody else doing it to us.
And so by living in Bitcoin, by spending my time in Bitcoin,
and all the beauty and all of the people that are in it and doing it,
I've still spent time with people who aren't in it yet, moving them along.
But I know that they're going to move there too, right?
But by spending my time in doing this, I'm not just, I'm a participant.
from a node bending reality
into the direction that I want it to.
And so if a whole bunch of people
didn't understand that
and they were fighting me,
why would I fight them?
Yeah.
Because my ability to create value
in the free market
comes from a whole bunch of people
not understanding that.
My ability to bend reality
into a world where
where our consciousness rises yeah because of because of our time as technology does the job of
us we benefit from the technology doing the job of us instead of that getting concentrated into
somebody else there's nobody to blame it's just us and so the and and and you can make the decision
And you could live in that total energy yourself right now.
And the more you do, the faster life gets better.
It's just so beautiful to hear you talk about this.
You had mentioned speaking at a consciousness conference with, you know, seers and Zen masters in the audience.
And you said that there was a, like an aura, a green light kind of surrounding you.
And I may have misheard, but...
It was actually, it was a light that wasn't plugged in, right?
Okay.
And so my wife was watching it, but it turned green and it was pulsing behind me.
I didn't know it was a light.
Yeah.
But it wasn't, it was, and so, yeah, it was interesting to see that.
And all of those people, everyone in that conference is now Bitcoin.
now they're early in their journey but you could just because they could connect to something that
was always there that before they had to go live in a cave and be in meditation or or psychedelics
all the time and then when they came back to experience the real world it didn't look like that
yeah yeah i uh and it may just be a trick of the light but earlier when you're talking i was
you know I'm looking at you here on the computer and there was this green um around around your
head and it just uh brought me back to that um which gives the impression to me of course that
you know you you do have a wonderful take on things and you have a this beautiful approach
and I wanted to ask you um it's been it's been a while since you wrote The Price of Tomorrow
are there things now looking back that you would have put in that you left out or the things you
put in that you would have taken out and then where are we at in the folding of the paper it's
been a 70 80 years since the transistor was invented and so you know what is the you know
where where are we at in the folding of the paper and what would you change about the price of
tomorrow if anything yeah so there's a couple things that i would have so from a functional
thing i would have explored more in energy i would have explored more nuclear um specific
specifically in energy so that was one i i i shook it in fact again this is i'm going to use
if this look like this if this look like this you would expect that that if the if the thing that
that gave this system was a petrodollar was required,
then you'd expect technology to get a button in energy
to be gaslit.
And so, and then in the end,
I'm actually glad I left it where I left it on Bitcoin,
but my journey, and although I was a Bitcoiner,
kind of especially in 2019 as I was writing,
and I bought the first time in 2017,
but I wasn't really Bitcoin.
I think my journey to Bitcoin really just started then
and it's deepened more.
But if I tried to put all of the second half
into that book about where Bitcoin takes us,
it just would have been too much for people.
People needed to see the problem first
and then what a solution would look like
and then wait, I'm the solution.
And that's why I've been so maybe vulnerable
in showing my own path and understanding,
realizing that if I didn't know this
and I went down the sand of all of these
and I spent a whole lot of hours,
tens of thousands of hours on post-systems
trying to understand the first principles,
not just that, but who we are,
how we make decisions.
There's thousands of hours just there.
And if I didn't know this
and I was caught with my own hypocrisy,
then it would be likely
that lots of other people
would get caught along the way too.
I definitely feel like I'm caught.
And it's fun to see
and really educational to see
you talk about how this consciousness
can be generated right now.
It's very difficult for me to do that.
And I want to work towards it because I think you're absolutely correct. And Lucas alluded to this. I wanted to read you a quote from Marx to see if the generation of consciousness. So Marx is a materialist. Consciousness is generated by material conditions. You seem to be, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that we have the ability, the autonomy to generate consciousness right now and use that to bring conditions into existence.
So I'll read you this quote, and if you can just react to it, I guess.
I'd really love that.
So Marx writes,
For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being,
each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity,
which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.
He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic,
and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.
While in communist society where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity,
but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes. Society regulates the general production
and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning,
fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind,
without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic. So Marx is speaking of a
universal abundance and the consciousness he thinks it's going to generate. I guess,
What do you think about that?
So he comes to it from materialism, like you said.
And by the way, this is the same thing in the consciousness seminar
that they saw in my work.
All and everything, all of materialism exists in our mind first.
There is nothing.
When you think of planets in the far out distance
and being able to see those with telescopes today
or the math being able to measure those.
Where did the math or the telescopes come from?
It came from your mind.
The mental model you have for how you believe for society,
it's all in your mind.
Everything is mind.
That doesn't come from materialism.
It comes from mind.
It's above materialism.
It exists and then materialism comes into play.
And so if materialism comes in, what Marx did is essentially, I'm going to put a central bank in control of something to be able to unlock this thing that steals from everybody that's a control system, that is just a different form of a control system, in believing that we can stop the free market and our flow of ideas and actually somehow gain abundance.
But the abundance comes from our ideas.
So if you put this in place and then you're in that new system, measuring from that new system, then you wouldn't see the abundance because you'd be caught in the existing control system.
And your ideas wouldn't have to compete in the free market.
So what would happen to society is it would degrade it.
It would be caught in its own trap.
And so that's what you see in communism.
That's what you see.
The perceived what we know is always in this box.
And on the edges are the brilliance and the genius, also the crazies.
But sometimes their genius is so genius that it infects us in a different way
and we see something different that we could never have seen.
His progress.
It all comes from the mind.
I find that very persuasive.
The ideas unlock material conditions, like you say.
That's a great response.
I really appreciate that.
Thank you.
No problem.
So I use it as an example.
So in printing press, you can see these kind of enlightenment and such
before it gets captured again.
You can see it in different examples.
but printing press took more people that could contribute.
They could both read, see what the world's thought looked like,
and then use that to contribute their own thought to it.
So it was a two-way condition.
So effectively, you added more minds to the global collective.
There were only a certain amount of minds.
Everyone else was slaves or caste system.
you added more minds one of those minds michael faraday would um work uh work he was a came from
a poor family went to work for one of the book binders because he wanted to consume the world's
information as it was at that time well as he did he became one of the foremost scientists of the
world at that time meinstein references him in his work because he's he saw something that he
couldn't even measure electromagnetism that was all around him all the time he just had a feeling
20 years later james clark maxima will put this put the math around that that idea and that still
runs all our satellites and communications and everything else today so so what if the book what
if printing press came 100 years later 500 years later and michael faraday came 500 years later
and where would we be living?
Because the same energy was all around us all the time.
What if it came 500 years earlier?
What if that was the case?
And most people can't even measure who don't know who Michael Faraday is,
even though he's responsible for just tons of things in their life,
and not just responsible there,
but responsible for much of the other science that came after him,
those ideas.
They were always ideas first.
And I'm just using one certain person here.
Yes.
Are you?
But it's all of us.
Every one of us.
Every one of the things you've ever read or to all of your time to get to this podcast right now.
All of my time to get to this podcast now that could go touch thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands of people, and then could have other ideas that contribute to our lives.
That was such a great part of your book that I had not appreciated the printing press.
So you describe intelligence at its heart being about error correction.
And so then the printing press allows us to publish our errors and to see other people's ideas and discover errors and to increase intelligence like that.
And so that was, you know, we talk about how the printing press spread ideas.
But it was your book really put that piece together for me, how it spreads intelligence through correcting errors.
It enables science in that way where we can build up the experiment.
So it's just a great part of your book, tying the printing press to the inevitable, not the inevitable, but the later development of artificial intelligence to as a form of error correction.
And if that was the case right now, shouldn't that lead to massive abundance for 8 billion people on the planet? Because all of our time would go into correcting errors rather than from a control system that would add to us living in this other system.
Wouldn't that have to drive prices down our abundance up?
And we would be in that new system.
And wouldn't every single new invention protocol that allowed that to happen
sit on top of all of the beauty and all of the pain and everything else
that has always transitioned society?
It would have to be from us.
We weren't.
Yeah.
So this podcast is it too, man.
It's one of those error correction mechanisms.
And you're doing so many podcasts like this and slaying these different misconceptions we have.
And the way that you reason, it's just, it's all really great.
It's fun to participate in error correction and hopefully add that little grain, yeah, to universal intelligence.
Things getting better.
So I want to, and thank you as well, because so you're just review of the book.
And I just thought, wow, these guys are cool.
Right.
And you did a really good review of the book and then asked to meet and do this because
you're doing it too.
Right.
That's the point.
This is what it looks like as we all come to a greater understanding and we are part
of the greater understanding.
Yeah.
It's what it looks like.
and if it
matters to other people and they start to
see it, then
your podcast will get more views And if you continue doing that you get more views Why Because it impacts other people positively And you be contributing
And you already are contributing.
The first global free market that's ever existed.
Yeah.
And more and more people will move their time along the way.
So, yeah, it's just, we are,
and it's so wild.
That's actually why I just believe people,
people thank me.
Yeah.
I'm wildly thankful to them because it is that thing that's creating us.
Yeah.
Consciousness precedes material conditions and we're all making it right now.
So I've got a big one then.
So consciousness precedes the material conditions.
Is there anything that precedes consciousness?
Which is my sly way of asking, do you believe in God?
Is there, or are we it?
Because you did end that last thing by saying we are it.
So two different versions of that.
So each religion has a belief system inside that religion that it's this religion.
This is square.
And by the way, I'm okay with somebody believing that completely.
It doesn't bother me for that belief,
because actually the thing that's common in all those religions
is actually at a higher level.
It seems like it's the same thing,
that it was always in us.
And what would it look like?
And again, now I'm going to get attacked by a bunch of people,
but it's okay.
I believe in consciousness.
I believe that that's actually,
and if somebody wants to view that as a god or this god
or versus this god, and they believe,
and that takes them to the same place,
And that's okay.
Actually, whatever they want to believe by it, that's okay by them.
I would just ask, does it serve you?
Or is it serving you?
And how I think about this is if 2,000 years ago,
or what it would look like when many of the great religions emerged,
and the chaos and the control system that emerged,
if somebody was speaking in a real higher consciousness,
how those people would feel in truth, in complete truth,
that it wasn't that control system, it was you and what you could do.
What would it look like to the observer at the time?
To the observer, it would look like this person gave me this.
and then that then that would cascade through society and it would create another version of
a control system from various religions and there's months and years and everything else
from the observer perspective versus versus the conscious story enlightened perspective
so so when i when i watch religions when i watch what how they've emerged you know how
when they emerged, what that looked like,
what time looked like,
I would expect it to look like that.
Not that it's wrong, not that it's right,
but my own belief,
whether it's right or wrong or anything else,
is I believe it was always in all of us.
And just in us, or is consciousness,
you discuss artificial intelligence
in a way that your book 2019 right is when the parts of the just like that's a level of prediction
on the development of ai you were spot on there whatever you would change about the book you would
not change a thing about your discussion of artificial intelligence do you think like
is artificial intelligence going to be the vector of a generation of a new type of consciousness
whether in like inference generation now through an llm or through the next model of how intelligence
is generated on a machine substrate,
is that going to lead to what we have
or something similar, I guess,
if you have thoughts on that.
I think we're, so in consciousness,
we are both a fractal and,
or in, let's say, religion,
you're both a part of it,
and the religion or unconsciousness,
you're either a part of it.
So it exists within you.
And that means every test,
all of these tests to consciousness
exist when it does too
all of the things
if you said fitness function for the species
or the consciousness to evolve
it would have to exist
out of all of these tests
the more and more tests
the faster evolving consciousness
so we're both one and the same I think
and what would we do?
we would create another thing to test faster
a thing that would know that and and and not different than us
right no different than us and we would be within consciousness as we can't see our spot in it
yeah right but uh but connected to us
yeah so maybe and we would and we would create that and so a version
um it might not look anything like we experience consciousness right right but a but a version
probably exists in in ai in time so maybe we shouldn't fear emergent consciousness in ai
so much as we should celebrate that it will be a validation of our own consciousness um
And most of the fear that people have in that isn't the AI, it's the other system.
Using the AI.
So if you actually just saw it as a tool that constantly made you better, had to make your life better.
And that's where it exists from Bitcoin.
Then there's nothing to fear of it.
The price of AI goes to zero.
Yeah.
And it gets better and better and it serves you better and better forever.
Yeah.
Why it's such a complicated topic is most people are talking about AI from that perspective.
They're talking about AI from the control system.
And we're so locked in the control system and it's trying to drive fear into us.
And it feeds on fear and coercion and control.
And the majority of the world is stuck into that system.
So it's all that you see in AI.
all the news media
everything you see
and that is
yeah
system
yeah it's all about
AI taking
because that's what we know
from our system
Terminator
all of the movies
all
but all of those
different things
and they feed on those fears
that make it worse
and so you want to
you want to stop that
and what you're doing
by trying to
is actually making it
happen faster
like you're
you're fighting
inside that control system
when somebody just
move over their time
to Bitcoin
and celebrate it
Mm-hmm. What's the, in the landscape that you look at with the, you know, looking at your portfolio with EgoDeath and then your experience with interfacing with people within the intelligence community?
obviously you're a huge figure within the Bitcoin space that we again will say it again we're just
so honored absolutely that you took the time to be with us here what's the most interesting thing
in the world to you right now like where where are you looking at and seeing
seeing things that are are really piquing your interest or kind of popping up at you know the
the tall poppy
that is sort of garnering
your attention right now.
It's this.
It's why I do the,
it's why I'm spending time
in ego death.
It's why I'm spending time
when you said intelligence community,
you have a whole bunch of people
that are going to,
what do you mean you're talking
to the intelligence community?
My bad.
Probably,
we should probably clarify that.
Where I send Bitcoin,
who I am at Bitcoin,
you can imagine
a whole bunch of people
come to me.
I don't know who those people are,
and sometimes they come from whether they're black hat, white hat,
but I would say when I say there is no they,
then it's so easy to just label somebody and put them in a box.
But I have talked to very senior military officials,
generals, emeralds, that can also move to their time,
And now we're 100% decorators.
I've talked to many different people
that are also moving their time.
Because if I moved my time,
I once wasn't,
and then I now am,
then this thing would have to transcend
all of our beliefs
about this little bucket
of this little bucket
that we created
through living in that system.
And it would have to transcend it all
and it would have to,
and these people would either
be run over by Bitcoin
or see themselves in it.
It's not negotiating.
And I know it's not negotiating
and I'm not negotiating.
I'm helping it to accelerate
with my time and energy.
But just because of that,
you can imagine a lot of people come to me
because they don't know protocols.
They don't know what's happening.
They have no idea
how fast this is going to.
And I won't know
and I can't know
I was just
with Bichelli for dinner
but again
that was the second time
and people ask
some people that aren't Bitcoin
he's a dictator or a Taker
IMF money or whatever
all the beliefs and everything else
it leads to
I only helped him put on that conference
because he said
I will give you a stage
to get my people into self-custody and spending in Bitcoin.
Because if they do that, if they know it's self-custody and spending in Bitcoin,
then there's no way that I or anyone else can stop this from happening.
He was a Bitcoiner before he was a president.
Now, I can't tell you for sure does he use that and go back and change his mind one day.
But I can tell you for sure that that's why I went to El Salvador.
That's why I spoke there, because if somebody gave that proof of work and can allow me to tell other people that they have agency, then I'm going to take that.
And so you see all sorts of characters, as you would expect to see through this, and every single person's proof of work over time is going to manifest out and do they stay the course.
yeah and those motives are perfectly legible to other bitcoiners that they recognize bitcoin
is money for enemies and not to say that bucalia or anybody's a friend or an enemy but
if you see the of the path to advance the adoption of bitcoin and you walk down that path that's what
bitcoiners do they work with different people and it's not a smear or anything on someone i feel it's
just like an extension of who a bitcoiner is they see that the it's like a meta ideology that's
more powerful than whatever silly political debates people are caught in. Because if you
get more people going towards adoption, the protocol strengthens and we need to get all
people adopting, not just one side, not just one ideology. So yeah, I think that's excellent.
Yeah. And I just want to mention some people that are really vocal and some of the energy,
you know, if two different thoughts here, I actually love it because sometimes somebody
that's so opinionated on one side signals to me something that i need to look at more deeply
yeah right so i'm just saying that's not me right i want to watch it all i want to say the consensus
mechanism is perfect for that because you see the whole thing you see all of it and then i get to
make my own decision of how much energy and what that what that looks like but the uh but that but
that's actually what's changed.
We get to see the entire discourse.
Yeah.
Are there any signs that you are looking for
in the coming years that will indicate to you
that the paper has folded once more?
So that the paper is folding, right?
So when you said what fold we're on,
well, they fold 37 or 38.
But it's happening at such a, no faster velocity, but at that exponential trend.
Yeah.
That it feels like to our human brains, how fast things are, that are happening.
It's so hard to even comprehend.
And by the way, it can capture your fear too.
Because, and it can capture most people caught within a system that they've always known,
trying to solve the thing they care about from that system.
Let's use an example.
So if you were worried about, if you're in your bubble, you thought most humans are bad and we have to protect against those bad humans through a war machine or terrorists.
Most people are terrorists, right?
And what you would do is you would drive your control system with AI and you would drive more and more and more, more manipulation, more experimental weapons, everything else into this.
you'd have killer bee drones that could fly in and kill somebody right that uh that have no idea
that that would they would uh that would happen and you'd create this technology and everything
else and the same thing that you were scared of was the thing you created by creating a whole
bunch of it uh adversaries that were had to topple your control system because of what you did
and you'd have no idea it was you.
You would be participating.
And so we live in a system that is accelerating on one side like crazy.
You have China and the U.S. both trying to move to more control
to beat each other.
The U.S. can't win a control fight with China.
It could only win a freedom fight with China.
where the whole world wins.
But right now you see the opposite.
You see the entire venuous manipulation of a control system
and we're going to use Tether or we're going to use stablecoins
and to be able to reset this,
we're going to invest in all of this AI tech,
Palantir, all this nonsense to essentially a surveillance state.
I spent some time living in Colombia and Morocco, and I just recently got back from Balaji's network school in Malaysia.
and being outside of the United States gives you a much more clear take on this where you see
people in countries that are not China that are not the United States and they look at the global
situation and they are cheering very hard for the United States to for lack of a better term get
their shit figured out because if they don't then they know that it will be china and you said this
so like that's such a perfect way to say this is that the u.s can't win a control fight with china
they can only win a freedom a freedom fight but but but just about all participants of the united
states don't know that they're in uh they're they're they're in a control fight so when i
mention all those people and i when i mentioned most the podcasters most of the elon mass all
like just anybody in that they're fighting a control fight
they're all they're all inside a control fight believing they live in a freedom fight
what would you so what would you do is instilled in that control because he's uh when he talks
but the network state and all these coins and everything else,
he's still fully in it, where the protocol is eradicating that.
So there's much higher odds, if that continues,
that a country like El Salvador paves the way for what that looks like.
And then other countries from a bottom-up movement
pave that way before one of the bigger countries sees it.
is a much higher likelihood,
just like all innovation has bottom up.
So the freedom fight is won just by individuals opt-in.
Nation states also opt-in one by one from the bottom up.
And that's how the freedom fight is conducted,
just welcoming into the fold other countries
that want to get on board with a freedom infrastructure like Bitcoin.
But even before that, it starts with individuals and it starts with individuals.
So think in the worst state governments and such, there's always a black market that is the free market rate.
That's what's happening right now.
So there is a black market now with more and more privacy with FedE and that most people don't even know that exists yet.
And they can take that and it's going to explode.
because because and and as that explodes because you can't control this and what ends up happening
is the cost to attack when when these are so buttoned down the cost to attack explodes
and so what what you can do for a while is you can run the cost of attack and you can jail
jail freedom advocates and everything else but as more and more pop up and every single person can
now is is able to launch their own can't jail them all and so is so and and that on a system
is then then somebody says wait i'm going to accept it
because then they take advantage in the accepting it rather than fighting it
so but it is driven by people not government yeah this is a this is what jason lowry helped
us understand was that with bitcoin violence you no one can take your bitcoin it has to be given
and it can be given under duress but because of that technology violence and coercion does not
scale and therefore collaboration supersedes competition as the way to get to the top
so so so what we're saying right now and you could say what do you go to f is and what we're
we just invented um not just us but the other bitcoin company capitals too we just invented a
new model that is right for the time that we're we're building in that drives honestly and as a
result and why these are having lots of success lots of success inside the portfolio company is
growing too is we're so early in that model what that like what would it look like you would build
what wasn't there for people that didn't know they needed it yeah by the time it was needed
yeah instead of building the faster horse you're building the car yeah you're instead of building
within that existing system and all of the nonsense that's inside that existing system
you're building a new one yeah you've talked um you've talked about how you you still try to read
like 50 books a year or so. Obviously, we like books. Are there any that you feel were really
paramount to your understanding, to your journey, to your mindset, to the way that you approach the
world with such, you know, such kindness and optimism? And truly, the message of this entire
conversation I feel has been like empowerment, um, that, that you hold the key that you are able to,
um, to change your world that no one else can. It has to be you. Is, are there any books that you
would point people to or point us to that you felt really helped you out along the way?
Oh, how would I do this? Cause every time I get asked this, it's like, yeah,
block there's a different there's a different answer yeah exactly so why don't i send you a
couple uh just after this that'll be in line with some of the talking uh here oh we'd love that yeah
we'd love that thank you so much and maybe just what are you reading right now
well um what am i reading right now so again same thing on
i'm reading two bitcoin books that are new ones that have been sent to me but uh um
buy then build not not particularly it's just okay yeah yeah um
uh how people read my big toe
it's a five part
five part book
I read Signature in the Cell just before that
which is actually both different sides
of the religious side
Signature in the Cell would be
it's religion
I think that would be consciousness
oh cool
I typically do that
if I think one thing, I'll read everything on the other and vice versa.
That's great.
Yeah, that's excellent.
You've got a lot of monger in you.
Invert.
Yeah.
It's fantastic.
We, unless you have anything else.
I just become so conscious that you've given so generously with your time,
of your time, that there's a million things we could ask,
but I just, I want to let you get back to your family
and get back to contributing more.
Thank you so much for bringing a smile to our face, giving us this time and just giving us your wisdom.
Yes.
Obviously, sharing with us, being vulnerable and honest as we had this conversation.
Yeah, you guys, and I honestly say that this has been my pleasure.
I think you guys, by poking on some of these things at a deeper level, will help your audience, help others go to see it in themselves and to move forward or deepen the conversation where it needs to go.
So thank you.
Yeah, thank you.