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If I could hope for but one thing for you, so you'd be curious in all that you do.

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Cause love like a flower just wants to grow.

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Oh, and knowledge like your heart just wants to be known.

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If you like, please subscribe. This is Bitcoin Study Sessions.

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Hey, welcome back. So Lucas and I today, we're going to finish off our discussion of Lynn Alden's broken money, why our financial system is failing us and how we can make it better.

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this caps i don't know six weeks or something of conversations on this and it does tie everything

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together this final portion um my book has the tatters of that shows that reading it has

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discolorations i don't know why it's a pink discoloration some sort of nameless fluid which

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will remain nameless um but it's showing the wear and tear so we're going to move on from it after

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this but i'm happy that we get to talk about it and summarize the whole work and its significance

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So part six, the final capstone portion, is financial technology and human rights.

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There's going to be three chapters that comprise that.

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I'll summarize that.

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But before, so as we usually do, we're going to give a quick summary of the state of things

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up till now, the book till now, put everything in context, and then Lucas and I are going

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to discuss it in more granular detail.

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So a quick summary of the book up until chapter six, a very short arc of this book, just to

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give what we're going to talk about context.

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You can listen to any of our past conversations, of course, for more detail on this.

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But a quick arc of the book is the nature of money is not as any particular thing that we have used as money.

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It's not shells or gold or banknotes or even credit.

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But the nature of money is as the ledger itself, that thing that we used, whatever it is, to record stored up value and to note the transactions of that value that occur between us.

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banks develop because the thing that we were using to kind of record the state of the ledger

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gold was kind of the culminating instance of this that ended up being very slow and difficult to use

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in an increasingly kind of international economy difficult to move it around difficult to authenticate

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for day-to-day transactions so people preferred to have banks maintain a ledger for them this

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distances the ledger from the underlying substance used to record the ledger.

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We then have an even bigger problem for gold.

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The age of telecommunications occurs.

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This is the final nail in the coffin, essentially, for gold as a monetary standard, because now

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transactions could be done at near the speed of light.

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The exchanges of information that we do to note that we're going to exchange something

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of value.

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But the actual exchange of value, the settlement of that transaction when it was gold, occurred at a very, very slow pace.

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So their transaction and settlement, there became a speed gap between those in the telecommunications age.

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People initially began to deal in abstractions still based in gold, like a claim for gold, a piece of paper that said, I'm worth X amount of gold and redeemable in gold.

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And then banks circulated these and recorded these on their ledger.

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But with time and the speed of telecommunications, gold eventually drops out of the picture entirely and we enter into the fiat era.

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Our money is backed by nothing and is based only on notations on a flexible ledger ultimately controlled by a central bank.

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The flexible fiat ledger has many problems.

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The book discusses them in detail.

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For example, it leads to constant inflation of the currency as governments secretly tax people by printing more money and thereby draining value from savings without kind of angering people by explicitly taxing them.

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This also, the fiat monetary system, leads to increasing speculation as people continually seek to leverage that empty credit in order to exchange it for scarce real-world assets like real estate.

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in this story all these problems develop the entropy of the fiat ledger is described in detail

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by alden but technology doesn't stop we have this kind of interregnum period of the fiat monetary

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system but now we have new intervening technology if speed gives us the fiat system that we now have

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what is our what our new technology is going to give us specifically the internet and encryption

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When you combine these, do we get some sort of new monetary order, some sort of new ledger?

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So Alden describes two primary contenders for Internet native money.

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One is Bitcoin, a decentralized ledger hard capped at 21 million Bitcoin and secured by real world energy.

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And the other one is our CBDC, central bank digital currencies, which are centralized ledgers, which kind of continue the fiat abstraction and financialization of everything, but add the ability for additional control and surveillance by the government.

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That brings us up to the last part of this book, which, again, is financial technology and human rights.

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We're going to see the importance of those things and why Bitcoin emerges between, you know, between CBDCs and Bitcoin, why Bitcoin is the one that is going to help us preserve human rights.

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So there's three chapters here.

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The first one talks about privacy.

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um in the past privacy was ensured because it was physically hard and costly to surveil people

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you had to follow them around and stuff like that and in the past physical bearer assets were used

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as money like gold which you know that was the entirety it was trend it was the value was in

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the object and you gave that and you completed the transaction and settlement at the same time

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gold shells these types of things they're private when you give somebody that they don't know you

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don't have to tell somebody else why you gave a third party gold. Cash is also private in the same

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way. You can pass someone $50 without the government knowing about it. But now people

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mainly hold money in banks, which people are encouraged to do so by inflation. If you don't

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have your money in a bank, if you just have cash under the mattress, it's continually losing its

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value. In addition, governments encourage this transfer of money into bank accounts. France

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banned cash transactions over a thousand euros. Germany required background check for gold

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purchases over 2000 euros. So governments are encouraging people to put money in bank accounts

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because bank accounts allow for government surveillance. In the past, we've talked about

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the Bank Secrecy Act. Transactions over $10,000 have to be reported to the government. There's

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various ways in which bank accounts just centralize our money. And of course, the banking system

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ultimately is under the surveillance of the government via the central bank of whatever

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nation maintains that central bank. But now technology, in addition, technology is enabling

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mass violation of privacy over time, the way in addition to bank accounts, other technology has

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developed. So we can't expect laws to protect our privacy, because it is the government that leads

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to the encroachment. And Alden kind of gives a timeline of justifications that the government

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has used to encroach on privacy via new technologies. In the 70s and 80s, we have the

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war on drugs. A new technology comes out, pagers, and there's a moral panic because drug dealers

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are using pagers. And so the government institute credit checks for people that want to buy pagers.

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In the 2000s, there's the war on terror. And of course, there are many different,

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We have the Patriot Act, many different infringements. Alden discusses Edward Snowden's leaked information from the NSA in 2013, revealing that the government had the ability to tap or obtain email, video and voice chat photos, social networking details, that there were secret courts and unclear protections for American citizens in this process.

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And programs like this still exist, still a relic of the war on terror.

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Also, she notes, there's client-side surveillance, things that were intended for military surveillance, military usage, but ended up being turned on civilians.

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Things like Pegasus, a mobile phone spyware app created by an Israeli cyber intelligence firm that can covertly spy on a target cell phone, including utilizing the microphone and camera.

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Purportedly, this has developed to monitor terrorists.

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Now it's frequently deployed against activists, human rights advocates, pro-democracy advocates, and authoritarian countries.

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In the 2020s, then, we now have, as an excuse for the government to encroach on privacy, kind of wars against trafficking and suspicions of foreign alignment.

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Ah, this person is a Russian asset, something like that.

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In the 2020s also, and earlier, China has turned surveillance into an export.

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Domestically, we've talked about they require QR codes in certain places to move around the country.

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They have facial recognition that allows for monitoring of civilians.

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They have a social credit system and automatic bank freezes, things like kind of a minute control and surveillance made possible by technology.

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And China is now exporting this, Alden says, internationally. They're the world's largest exporter of surveillance tech. She notes that, and this is very interesting, this is actually part of their Belt and Road initiative.

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We talked about that in past chapters, the Belt and Road Initiative being China's attempt to kind of duplicate neocolonialist monetary practices like the kind of Western bloc uses through the IMF and World Bank predatory strings attached lending to developing countries to get them hooked and to extract value.

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China does that through the Belt and Road Initiative. And one of the things, one aspect of that is they subsidize and encourage the spread of surveillance tech to other countries.

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So in this way, the government is not something you can trust. Historically, it's encroached on privacy with various pretexts. Alden also notes you can't trust corporations, of course.

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we have this idea of surveillance capitalism. In the 2000, 2010s, we enter what you could say is

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the age of surveillance capitalism. This is a term that was popularized by Shoshana Zuboff

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of the Harvard Business School. Under surveillance capitalism, services seem to be free that we're

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getting online, but that's actually because our user data is being harvested and monetized by,

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Of course, Facebook, Twitter, we're all aware of this, to create targeted ads.

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There's extensive monitoring, even by our physical devices, a Siri, Alexa, and then now everybody has a ring camera on their door.

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You know, everybody's taping everybody.

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Massive amounts of data being collected about ourselves, by ourselves, through corporations.

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There's been countless data breaches of both corporations and government.

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All then goes historically through many of them.

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You know, it's the extent of data breaches is always something that it's very jaw dropping to read about from both whole scale government breaches in Brazil to credit bureaus leaking everybody's information.

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It's pretty massive, the amount of data that has wound its way to the dark web, all of our data.

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And so overall, we see developing a surveillance and control mindset, the idea that privacy must be given up so that nothing bad will happen to us.

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The solution, in Alden's estimation, we need to release new unstoppable tech, which is kind of the theme underlying your whole book, that tech is unstoppable and that changes the material conditions, which then changes history.

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And then new laws will follow privacy technology.

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Don't lead with laws, lead with tech.

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Which brings us to chapter 29, asymmetric defense. These are the defenses that are arising to defend our privacy. So there are both centralizing and decentralizing tech, centralizing all the stuff we've talked about, the surveillance tech, government control of the financial system, monitoring bank accounts.

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There's also decentralizing tech. Historically, the printing press allows mass printing of the Bible, mass reproduction of pamphlets so people could talk about the Bible, give their own interpretations, and kind of almost wrest the word of God from the hands of those who would use it to control others and talk about what they think that the authoritative natural law indicated.

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another decentralizing tech is encryption enabling private communications which enables private

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communications between individuals because you know encrypting them prevents them from being

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openly exposed on the internet encryption is hailed as a liberatory liberatory technology by

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the cypherpunks this is a movement um you could say that begins in 1993 with the publication of

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a cypherpunks manifesto by Eric Hughes, who is a mathematician and cryptographer.

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So the cypherpunks were about actively building and preserving systems using encryption tech.

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And Alden talks about the manifesto in detail. I'll read a couple of the quotes she has from

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the manifesto because it's really beautiful that it summarizes also what they're getting at.

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We, the cypherpunks, are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending privacy

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with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with

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electronic money. They also write in the manifesto, cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has

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to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to

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write it. We publish our codes that our fellow cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our

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code is free for all to use worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software

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we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut

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down. History has vindicated this. One example is Phil Zimmerman creating PGP, Pretty Good Privacy,

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in 1991, making it open source. And so Lucas is going to summarize the description of that legal

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saga and what that signifies. Yeah. So Phil Zimmerman codes this piece of software that allows

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for encryption that can't be broken so far as we know.

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He puts it out and he finds himself facing the United States military.

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They are, well, the United States attempted to classify his code under the Export Control Act,

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which is the law that we apply to make it illegal for me to build a nuclear bomb in my basement and then sell it to someone in Canada or Turkey or wherever,

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or for me to build an attack helicopter and send it to somebody.

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It's meant to protect the advantage that the United States has on the military battlefield.

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And so Zimmerman gets brought up.

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They try to classify it as a munition.

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So they're trying to classified code letters and numbers as a munition, as a object of warfare.

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Takes us back to Jason Lowry's thesis, Softwar, where he definitively, I think, has done an incredible job of acquitting himself of having the opinion that Bitcoin is a form of munition.

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And in fact, it's the most powerful.

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Zimmerman, in facing this legal battle, decides to prove his point, how absurd this is, that code is being classified.

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And so he publishes it under an MIT open source license.

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So he basically writes a book on PGP and gives out the source code.

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Um, it becomes popular at the time for people to in the know to wear t-shirts that have like the code on the, on the t-shirt. And then it says like, this t-shirt is a weapon. This code is a weapon.

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um and uh anyway so what happens then is that though they don't necessarily give a reason

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possibly because and i think we'll get into this later because i want to hear the rest of your

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summary possibly because the government would have had to reveal some things in order to make

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their case that they didn't want to reveal um or possibly because they just saw that it was uh

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a pretty worthless approach and they were attacking free speech um they decide to drop

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the case. So that case never, never was resolved. So there is a, not necessarily a precedent for

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code in terms of being upheld as free speech, but a precedent in the more native sense of

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this was tried and it didn't work. They literally didn't even go through with the court case. So

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that kind of a little bit of background on that. Yeah. And then after that, cryptography goes on to

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play a very large role in making e-commerce secure. So we have that initial saga and then

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cryptography is now part of the internet. Governments are now seeking to regulate

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cryptocurrencies in the same way that maybe they initially sought to regulate something like PGP.

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It's justification often being that we need to do this for anti-money laundering purposes,

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that crypto is used by Russian oligarchs, by terrorists, by drug traffickers in order to

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longer their ill-gotten gains. But Alden poses, you know, we can argue that with the empirical

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nature of that claim. But I think Alden tackles this in a very interesting way. She poses three

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questions to regulators. And I think that the three questions are first to acknowledge the

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trade-off, second to examine the motivations, and third to be realistic. So first, acknowledge the

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trade-off? What should be given up to ensure that the small fraction of the population that engages

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in this illicit activity cannot do so? So first, acknowledge if you're going to be doing a trade-off,

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any anti-money laundering thing, you're going to be doing some sort of trade-off of other values

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like privacy. Second, examine the motivations. How honest are governments regarding their motivation

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for these trade-offs? And she gives the example of Argentina, the currency rapidly debasing,

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And so people beginning to flee to a different ledger, ledger of crypto government.

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The government then adopts provisions against this to prevent this capital flight, but cites anti money laundering as the reason, whereas Alden thinks that that's not the real reason.

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And then third. So acknowledge the tradeoff, examine the motivations.

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And third, be realistic, be realistic. Can the government even enforce it?

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She mentions Napster, centralized, you can shut that down.

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BitTorrent, decentralized, much more difficult to shut something like that down.

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Bitcoin, closer to BitTorrent.

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So can the government actually enforce any purported regulation of cryptocurrency?

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They need to first ask themselves, is this actually something we can regulate?

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So legislation, she notes, that seeks to ban, for example, open source wallet anonymizing techniques is simply seeking to ban some iteration of some form of mathematics, which is very similar to the Phil Zimmerman situation.

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This brings us to the last chapter of the book, a world of openness or a world of control.

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The stage is set for us to enter one of those two worlds.

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Bitcoin's potential is to support an open world.

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The past chapters have mentioned how human rights advocates, activists have been funded by Bitcoin when authoritarian governments debanked them.

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And now Alden gives an example that's more perhaps morally complex, more close to home for people in Western democratic countries, the Canadian trucker protests in response to COVID mobility restrictions.

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The protesters needed money.

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You always need money to fund a protest.

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you're away from work. They were debanked though. Their GoFundMes were shut down.

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It turned out that Bitcoin was one of the only ways they were able to be funded.

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So without going into whether you agree or disagree with that cause, you should at least,

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Alden thinks, be pro-ensuring the freedom of speech and due process, which is what Bitcoin

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enables. To quote Alden, custodial financial services allow governments to freeze accounts

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first and then sort out who was guilty or innocent later. Self-custodial financial services force

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governments to actually charge people with the crime before they can use pressure to freeze their

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accounts. So the government can't just shut down debate by freezing bank accounts. If Bitcoin is in

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the picture, they're actually going to have to allege that the people are doing something against

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the laws, find the laws and charge them, which in an emergent situation can be difficult. So what

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does it mean to support an open world in this way? And this, I think the Canadian trucker example

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really opens us up to this question, because some people, you know, would say, well, I didn't,

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you know, I thought it was good to restrict mobility a bit to prevent the spread of infectious

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disease. And we need to have that ability as a government. So Alden poses the question about

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maybe the implicit or native politics of Bitcoin. What exactly is the political nature of the

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network. Is it only for cypherpunks and libertarians? Alden thinks not. She thinks that

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what it is is anti-authoritarian and anti-authoritarianism is not just on the left or right.

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And she gives a good example of the, after the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting

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selective bailout of the people who caused the crisis, we had both the emergence of the Tea Party

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on the right and the Occupy Wall Street on the left, they're both emerging to protest the same

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point, the use of the flexible ledger to bail out those closest to power who are already rich and

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powerful. So to quote Alden, today, Bitcoin as a network collects members from both types of groups

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and partially organizes them in an emergent way by giving them something to use and build on

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so that they don't have to rely only on protesting. It offers them a way to potentially

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opt out of the existing financial system that they view as being heavily corrupted and to build a

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parallel peer-to-peer financial system instead. And Alden develops the point, you might say,

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the leftist take on Bitcoin. She doesn't do that for the right. And we can see maybe because,

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you know, there's already kind of a dominant libertarian picture of what Bitcoin could and

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does represent. She develops the leftist take on what Bitcoin could represent. And she says,

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a way to curtail corporate overreach and crony capitalism in that Bitcoin provides a check on

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really all forms of consolidated power. It's designed to take back the public ledger from

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where it is currently controlled, you might say from a leftist point of view, by corporations in

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the form of the revolving door between them and the government. And so Bitcoin is going to in that

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way hopefully combat crony capitalism. She also notes that the left kind of generally tends to

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oppose war and they did oppose the Iraq war, which was financed through opaque taxation,

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which is made possible by the fiat ledger. So it's not just white crypto bros or shadowy coders,

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she said, and she does give a list of human rights advocates who are currently working on

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Bitcoin in different capacities. And it's a great list to read through if you want to get,

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If you want to learn about interesting new projects and perhaps people to follow on Twitter and to maybe broaden your view of Bitcoin if you do come at it with a default libertarian view.

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In any case, people of all political orientations are beginning to feel that the system as it is, the fiat ledger and the current monetary system is not working for them.

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And Bitcoin is a technological reaction that will have freedom expanding consequences whether you right or left Alden ends with the overarching question then that has defined her book who controls the ledger That the nature of money for her ledger as a ledger And so who controls that ledger is a recurring question for her

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In early history, nature controls the ledger because commodity monies like shells and then gold have a natural scarcity and natural physical characteristics like their portability due to their physical nature.

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And so in that way, nature, roughly speaking, maintains the ledger.

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Technology, though, ends this control.

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There's new shell-making technologies that people can use to debase that currency, and then there is the technology of speed that allows for an abstraction overlay on gold.

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And so technology breaks the use of commodity money in its past form, which leads us to banking in the central banking area, which leads us to the fiat system in which governments gain control of a flexible ledger and can devalue savings and channel value toward their purposes in an opaque way.

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And so now we're at the digital era and we have new technology, again, the internet and encryption. And so who controls the ledger? There's two possible futures here. Neither one is set in stone. We're all going to have to collectively fight for what we believe is right.

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Either bottom-up decentralized control ledger through something like Bitcoin or top-down – so bottom-up decentralized ledger like something like Bitcoin or top-down centralized – a top-down centralized ledger through CBDC, central bank digital currencies, controlled by governments and their central banks.

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so in this um in alden's estimation bitcoin is not about eliminating the state but about putting

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it on a level playing field and making it operate more transparently bitcoin represents the closing

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of the gap between transaction and settlement which was initiated by that age of telecommunications

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which effectively ended the gold standard but now with bitcoin we can move away from fiat as a

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temporary solution to the speed gap and also move away from the abstractions and the financialization

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that were enabled by the fiat era. Bitcoin then, in Alden's estimation, to end this summary,

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could herald an age of simplicity, transparency, and robustness. So that is a summary of Lynn

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Alden's broken money. We've finished it out there. There's a lot of really interesting points in this

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chapter. And in fact, we kind of, Lucas and I talked about it last time we got into some of

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these points, because they were already beckoning towards these kind of ideological questions.

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Just to start with a question, what do you think about Alden really focusing on

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what I call the leftist take on Bitcoin and emphasizing, and you know, and saying it's not

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about eliminating the state. I think some Bitcoiners are of more markedly anarchists

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or crypto anarchists, anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, call them what you will,

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where the kind of elimination of the state is the end goal. But for Alden, it's not about that.

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It's about, you know, making it more open and transparent, putting on an empty plan,

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an open playing field, ending corporate and crony capitalism, the things that corrupt the state.

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So what do you think about that leftist take on Bitcoin? What I call a leftist take on Bitcoin, I guess.

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Yeah, I think because you have to call it a leftist take on Bitcoin, I believe that drops some clues.

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And I think the biggest clue is that because we have to call it a leftist take on Bitcoin,

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it's somewhat of an overt reminder that the actual leftist take has been abandoned by the left.

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And that the principles that liberal left-leaning ideologies were built upon no longer seem to be the ones that they are espousing in recent years.

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And, you know, these were people who believed in free speech above all else, that they should not be told what they can do in terms of their bodies, what they can do in terms of their affiliations.

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You know, the right to protest, the right to really be a combative element to the state that is coercive in the means that it provides the constant tension that you need.

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Like you need to have tension in order to make sure that one side doesn't go too far.

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You need to have something pushing back because the nature of the state is control.

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And I think we need to separate state and government because you can have government without having a state.

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You look at even down to the family level, you know, a mother and a father certainly govern their kids in a way that they call parenting.

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If you look at Native American tribes, they have a gut like a governing council, but they're not a state.

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And so what's the difference?

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I think the difference is that the state is the control mechanism that enables government to get out of control.

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Without the control, and specifically the control over the money, then you can't really abuse people.

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And so we're talking about, let's go two paths. And one path would be the open source, decentralized money that is Bitcoin. The other path would be the easily censored, heavily surveilled, government-controlled, state-controlled form of CBDC.

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and I want to go back to that that state cbdc the we talked about this as an early earlier podcast

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there's an old country song um called uh I think it's called 16 tons and it's about a coal miner

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who is bemoaning his existence in that he has to work all day and have nothing to show for it

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because he works for a coal mine and the coal mine issues the money that he uses.

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and in everything that he buys, he has to buy from the coal town,

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which adjusts its prices in order to extract his money back out of him.

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And so it just creates a cycle.

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I load 16 tons and what do I get?

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Another day older and deeper in debt.

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St. Peter, don't you call me because I can't go.

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I owe my soul to the company store.

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And I think that that provides this perfect microcosm of what we are sure to see and what we're already seeing in places that have instituted a central bank digital currency.

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you see that the issuer of the money has total and complete control over the citizens

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and they have no choice but to remain in the system because

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the money that they have earned in exchange for their energy what they have given their life for

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is taken from them so that they have no control over it and they cannot use it

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in order to escape, in order to better their life, in order to do anything.

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So I think it's the perfect example to demonstrate, you know,

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a central bank digital currency is that's just the coal company issuing company script

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that they then devalue whenever they want to.

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And if it turns out that they hit a tough spot and everybody dulls their pickaxes,

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and to the point that they all have to go buy new pickaxes.

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In the company store, there's the new pickaxe,

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but it's five times the price that it was before.

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And so, yeah, it steals away the opportunity to do anything.

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I guess that's where I go first when I think about that,

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is a 1960s country song about a coal mine.

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Yeah, well, I think because that summons up the values

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that we associate with the left,

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which I think is what Alden is talking about here.

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So the values that we typically associate with the left, looking out for the common man, especially with respect to big corporations, very powerful financial interests.

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And that is, you know, maybe the spirit of Occupy Wall Street as well. And that iteration of the left, maybe the Noam Chomsky left, is something that it's much easier to sympathize with than, as you began, as you noted, like the modern left, postmodern left, you might say, is different than that, in that it's an infatuation with power and state control as such.

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and perceiving not that the leftist values are important and the means to arrive at those are kind of to be decided,

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but instead looking at the means and saying government control, the means to arrive at the things is the thing that is important.

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You know, if you're going to support the working man, it necessarily means a more powerful government to do so.

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So that seems to be a sort of default leftist take from today instead of saying, no, what's important is the small coal miner worker.

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Maybe some sort of government intervention is what helps them.

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Maybe a union strike against the corporation, maybe a protest, maybe something else.

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But it just seems like there is – when I was reading this, it just seems like there are people – the modern status calls themselves leftists, but they're not a leftist.

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And maybe Bitcoin can be one of the small ways in which we reassert that actual ideological leftism on the spectrum is about freedom and liberty and not about any specific means to achieve that, such as using state control to do it.

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And that maybe Bitcoin can be that thing that the leftist can seize on, can see that the underlying values are more important than the specific historical vessel that we've used for the past, you know, since Roosevelt or whatever, which might be kind of a leftist idea of using strong government power to intervene and help out.

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which is actually a very authoritarian model as we listened to that Curtis Yarvin interview.

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And, you know, he kind of motivates a sympathy between kind of contemporary leftism and his particular view,

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which is very right wing and endorsing a monarchy by saying, you know, Roosevelt was almost a monarchist,

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you could say, in the way that he operated. And I think that modern leftism can be very statist.

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And just to tie this back again, maybe Bitcoin can represent a liberation of leftism from statism and a reassertion that's what is important is that coal miner who can now save in Bitcoin, who is not going to be kind of opaquely taxed by inflation to fund a war, that they're then going to send the coal miners' kids to die on foreign soil to support some cause that's actually dictated by crony capitalist interests.

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through corporations that are trying to sell defense technology or something like that.

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So, yeah, I think you're totally on with that analogy and hearkening back to, you know,

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what's really sympathetic about the left and what real and true empathy means.

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Yeah.

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Yeah. So I think it's really important right now that we pay very close attention to what things are and not what we call them.

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because there's this very strong anchoring bias to be held captive by whatever it is that we grew up with.

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So we want to call a cell phone a phone.

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We want to call an iPhone a phone because it derived from a cell phone.

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But it's not. It's a supercomputer.

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Right. We want to call Bitcoin money, but we're stuck with the idea that the dollar is money.

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we're we're moving into an era where these new things are being developed that are replacing

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the old things and we're struggling to we're struggling to understand the new thing the new

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technology because we're so anchored in what the old technology has meant to us and i think that

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also applies to definitions of a political party. You can call them the left, but I think this is

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actually probably why it's been more popular to refer to that type of ideology as woke, because

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it's not left. It's not liberal politics. If you look at what they stand for, you know,

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stand for segregation of people based on, not necessarily segregation, but discrimination.

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Discrimination based on race, discrimination based on sexual preference, discrimination based on

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gender, identity, all of these things, they stand for that. They stand for controlling speech

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online. Um, and, and even so far as to boldly and overtly say that it's not just things that we

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don't like that we don't want to see. And it's not just things that are untrue that we don't

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want to see. It's also things that are true that are inconvenient and we don't want to see that

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either. And so there, if you look at it from that perspective, then it's very easy to see that this

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is not a liberal left type of politic. This is something new. That is also something very old,

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which is, as you correctly point out, it's just an authoritarian, statist regime mindset. And

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And, you know, if you can't beat them, join them.

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I think, you know, I feel and I know a lot of very good left liberal thinkers.

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And I feel for them because their movement has been hijacked and they were infiltrated.

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infiltrated and much like the strangler vine from jason lowry's thesis is that they were somewhat

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taken over and choked out and now they're trying to get back out and um be that be that tension on

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the system that's needed so um yeah i it's a it's a it's it's really good that she takes this

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approach because less than an appeal to the left, I feel like it's a subtle reminder of

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what are the left's core beliefs. And if you're reading this and you believe that you are a left

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leaning person, do these core beliefs resonate with you? Because if they don't, then you have

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been captured by something. And, and it's a good time for reflection and thought, in order to think

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about really where, where your beliefs lie, and why you have those motivations you do.

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Yeah, I mean, something like Bitcoin, it's an FAFO type thing, fuck around and find out. It's like a

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natural law. If you have an ideology, and that ideology is not true in some sense to the human

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condition, then it's not going to interact well with something that has truth as its

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primary criterion.

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I think that maybe one of the entropies of the fiat monetary system is kind of a definitional

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entropy in that fiat relies itself on abstraction, and it enters us into an age of abstraction.

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We're no longer trading a real thing that is gold.

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We're going to trade claims for gold.

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And then the gold drops out entirely. And like all of value is now an abstraction that you can print. And if you can print value, it's like, you know, then power really is the primary condition of reality.

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Once you can print value, the postmodern idea that power underlies everything and not truth becomes palpable.

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And so people begin to think that that is maybe the philosophy we should all follow.

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Power does seem to be what matters because those in power print value for themselves and their friends.

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And I think you're right that this awoke ideology, call it what you will, some form of a left-oriented statism that has actually forgotten leftism's core values has arisen. And I think we maybe attribute that to the entropy of the fiat ledger. It's abuse, it's corruption. Yeah.

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Yeah, I think you also need to really come to grips with what printing value means, because this is the thing that is a direct exchange. It is a direct equivalent for a person's life, you know, for their productive capacity.

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Um, this is the thing that we exchange for our application of focus and effort in life.

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And so printing money is stealing life.

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And, um, the more, the more life is stolen, there finally comes a breaking point.

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I think we're a revolution of sorts.

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Bitcoin, when people call Bitcoin a revolution, I kind of get what that means, is that it very much is a silent revolution.

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But yeah, steal enough life, bleed someone enough, then they will find some way to fight back.

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um yeah i i was pretty touched by the just the the deafness with which alden approaches this last

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this last bit i'm very very calculated very thoughtful calculated not a good word because

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people think that's a negative connotation but but calculated in the sense that um you know i

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she acknowledges I think that the anarchist libertarian

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esque bent is is very well represented already in Bitcoin and does a good job in trying to

375
00:45:59,487 --> 00:46:08,887
bridge the gap I and I think what we saw in this election was that money is not a political issue

376
00:46:08,887 --> 00:46:12,867
because one side tried to make it a political issue

377
00:46:12,867 --> 00:46:18,607
and got destroyed by doing that.

378
00:46:19,227 --> 00:46:21,687
You have one side that says,

379
00:46:21,867 --> 00:46:23,787
we need to stop spending all this money.

380
00:46:23,967 --> 00:46:25,827
We need to be more reasonable.

381
00:46:26,187 --> 00:46:29,927
And another side that just continues to spend that money.

382
00:46:30,547 --> 00:46:32,187
And where the people voted, I think,

383
00:46:32,287 --> 00:46:38,127
really reveals that it was in 1996 or whatever,

384
00:46:38,127 --> 00:46:44,307
James Carville got famous because he, he told Bill Clinton when they were trying to figure out

385
00:46:44,307 --> 00:46:49,907
strategy, I don't know, 95 or maybe earlier than that, what was the strategy to win the election?

386
00:46:50,567 --> 00:46:57,127
And Carville goes, it's the economy, stupid. That's it. You know, like, yeah, people care about,

387
00:46:57,127 --> 00:47:03,047
um, having the right to do this and the right to do that, but they, they really care about

388
00:47:03,047 --> 00:47:11,047
being able to get up, put in a good day's work, have a fair wage paid to them that they are then

389
00:47:11,047 --> 00:47:17,367
able to spend before it devalues in a society that's not trying to extract from them all the

390
00:47:17,367 --> 00:47:27,727
time. And you mentioned that, you know, we have entered this age of surveillance capitalism where

391
00:47:27,727 --> 00:47:36,407
the value is just being continually extracted by these free services and free products.

392
00:47:37,547 --> 00:47:44,587
And Elon Musk, I was reading another book about him, like one of the earlier ones.

393
00:47:44,987 --> 00:47:51,727
And there was a quote in there from like, he was like 20, I think he was like 27 or something at

394
00:47:51,727 --> 00:47:57,707
the time when they're interviewing him. And she asked, why is it so important for him to

395
00:47:57,707 --> 00:48:05,427
do these things because at the time it just seemed utterly ludicrous like utterly absurd he

396
00:48:05,427 --> 00:48:12,607
he gets a payout from his first business and instead of sitting on his laurels and waiting

397
00:48:12,607 --> 00:48:17,167
for something to come he knows exactly what he's going to do next and then he gets the payout from

398
00:48:17,167 --> 00:48:25,107
that business so he sells zip2 makes paper gets gets in with x.com and paypal sells that

399
00:48:25,107 --> 00:48:27,167
and then funds everything.

400
00:48:27,167 --> 00:48:29,367
Like he knew exactly what he was going to do.

401
00:48:29,367 --> 00:48:35,467
And he claims to have had this, he claims to have, um, you know, had this vision for

402
00:48:35,467 --> 00:48:37,327
his life since he was like 14.

403
00:48:38,567 --> 00:48:40,387
And there's a quote in that book.

404
00:48:40,647 --> 00:48:44,167
So she's asking him, you know, why, why are you doing this?

405
00:48:44,327 --> 00:48:45,907
What is so important about this?

406
00:48:46,667 --> 00:48:49,467
And he says, you know, nobody else is doing it.

407
00:48:49,467 --> 00:49:03,687
Like, I would go make, you know, arcade games and video games, but I'm not really seeing how that benefits the world and nobody else is innovating.

408
00:49:04,787 --> 00:49:12,967
And he said that, you know, like the greatest minds of the greatest minds of the generation have been lost trying to get people to click on stuff online.

409
00:49:12,967 --> 00:49:26,927
All the greatest physicists that would have been turned into financiers, lawyers, and social media entrepreneurs.

410
00:49:26,927 --> 00:49:29,667
and so we

411
00:49:29,667 --> 00:49:32,927
we've just seen this

412
00:49:32,927 --> 00:49:35,307
huge drop in innovation

413
00:49:35,307 --> 00:49:36,607
where

414
00:49:36,607 --> 00:49:38,927
you can't

415
00:49:38,927 --> 00:49:41,647
it's made it

416
00:49:41,647 --> 00:49:43,627
the money has made it so impossible

417
00:49:43,627 --> 00:49:44,687
to do anything

418
00:49:44,687 --> 00:49:47,867
long term because you can't

419
00:49:47,867 --> 00:49:49,927
save money long term that everything

420
00:49:49,927 --> 00:49:51,667
has become short term and

421
00:49:51,667 --> 00:49:52,407
extractive

422
00:49:52,407 --> 00:49:55,707
I think it really reveals

423
00:49:55,707 --> 00:50:04,087
the kind of the sad nature of what happens as a fiat money really starts to spiral and fail

424
00:50:04,087 --> 00:50:13,187
is that people people feel kind of hopeless at the end yeah yeah um and i mean i like to say about

425
00:50:13,187 --> 00:50:18,627
money not being a political question or issue because i mean just kind of someone hearing that

426
00:50:18,627 --> 00:50:23,507
would say that's ridiculous it's the most political question there is but alden when she's summarizing

427
00:50:23,507 --> 00:50:26,007
the Canadian trucker protest says, quote,

428
00:50:26,327 --> 00:50:36,914
my conclusion was that technologies that make it harder to freeze money are not avoiding legitimate laws but rather are about ensuring that government themselves follow their laws

429
00:50:37,454 --> 00:50:42,874
So again, like Bitcoin as an almost natural law constraint on government

430
00:50:42,874 --> 00:50:47,634
is something that is above government in the same way that gold's characteristics

431
00:50:47,634 --> 00:50:54,094
of being portable and durable, divisible, those are things that governments don't control.

432
00:50:54,094 --> 00:50:56,894
And so it's not political that gold has certain characteristics,

433
00:50:57,474 --> 00:50:59,974
It's also not political that Bitcoin has certain characteristics.

434
00:51:00,554 --> 00:51:01,554
You know, it's adoption and whatnot.

435
00:51:01,694 --> 00:51:03,174
It's going to be mediated through politics and whatnot.

436
00:51:03,174 --> 00:51:12,294
But at the end of the day, it does present a constraint upon government rather than something that governments will ever be able to constrain.

437
00:51:12,474 --> 00:51:13,854
That's the Philip Zimmerman story.

438
00:51:14,094 --> 00:51:18,134
You can't hold back mathematics in the long run, something like that.

439
00:51:18,274 --> 00:51:23,394
So Bitcoin is a new technology in the same way that telecommunications was.

440
00:51:23,394 --> 00:51:48,014
And it's going, you know, strap in and see what the consequences are to a certain extent. I mean, we need to still facilitate its adoption and make it, you know, help to bring it about. We can't just say it's going to defeat CBDCs without more, but it's got, you know, it's an easy and good thing to defend because it does have this almost natural law force behind it.

441
00:51:48,014 --> 00:51:52,874
it acts as a truth-based constraint rather than a power-based construct.

442
00:51:53,314 --> 00:51:57,334
And so it's long-term, I think that that's a good thing.

443
00:51:57,594 --> 00:51:57,654
Yeah.

444
00:51:57,854 --> 00:52:01,054
I like that you're bringing us back into the math thing because I wanted to,

445
00:52:01,174 --> 00:52:05,934
I wanted to have you lead us into a little discussion on Cody Wilson and

446
00:52:05,934 --> 00:52:09,654
ghost guns and kind of draw some comparisons.

447
00:52:09,654 --> 00:52:13,594
And there's something that I wanted to say about Mark Andreessen as well,

448
00:52:13,594 --> 00:52:15,574
kind of with relation to that.

449
00:52:15,574 --> 00:52:28,374
So, yeah, I mean, I wish kind of give us an idea. Link us from Zimmerman to Ghost Guns in a way, maybe. And then kind of give people a little background on that.

450
00:52:28,374 --> 00:52:53,894
Yeah, I mean, I wish we were talking about this right before the podcast. And, you know, that's when the connection crystallized for me, because we were talking about I wish I would have went back and kind of boned up a bit on the whole drama or whatever. But basically what happened. So if you're not aware, Cody Wilson was an advocate and entrepreneur for gun rights, essentially, the Second Amendment.

451
00:52:53,894 --> 00:53:01,334
And what he did was instead of just he was in law school, but he began to take a more active material role.

452
00:53:01,514 --> 00:53:03,074
He drops out and he starts.

453
00:53:04,914 --> 00:53:07,094
That's a great mind save from being a lawyer.

454
00:53:07,674 --> 00:53:08,474
Yeah, no, definitely.

455
00:53:08,754 --> 00:53:15,994
From a, you know, a imposer on others to a doer oneself or something like that.

456
00:53:16,054 --> 00:53:21,894
And he starts a company, long story short, to 3D print firearms.

457
00:53:21,894 --> 00:53:27,894
firearms. And so the question in this, the government comes down on them like a bag of

458
00:53:27,894 --> 00:53:34,154
bricks or whatever, that all these lawsuits from the ATF and the federal government, they don't,

459
00:53:34,434 --> 00:53:39,814
yeah, they don't want him. They don't want people to be able to buy a 3d printer, go on the internet,

460
00:53:40,054 --> 00:53:46,094
download a file and print all the pieces for a gun to assemble it in their own house. Even though

461
00:53:46,094 --> 00:53:50,334
people do have rights to assemble their own firearm, they didn't like the code. He made it

462
00:53:50,334 --> 00:53:56,494
so easy and breaks it down no no but but they didn't like that they can't track them yeah they

463
00:53:56,494 --> 00:54:00,514
didn't like that they don't have control over them because right now every firearm i have has

464
00:54:00,514 --> 00:54:06,234
to be registered in my name or else it's an illegal firearm there are right isn't that what

465
00:54:06,234 --> 00:54:11,514
they don't like about it um right they don't like to be able to serve they want to be able to surveil

466
00:54:11,514 --> 00:54:19,414
and control yes firearm distribution um and cody facilitated something that was against that

467
00:54:19,414 --> 00:54:29,554
So there's all these lawsuits against him, and it's similar to the Zimmerman thing in that – I mean, Cody's making the point that – a couple of points.

468
00:54:29,774 --> 00:54:36,254
First, once these gun files are on the internet, they're available to anyone, and anyone can get a 3D printer.

469
00:54:36,694 --> 00:54:40,494
Cody Wilson is facilitating this maybe, but it's already out there.

470
00:54:40,594 --> 00:54:41,914
Anybody can already do it.

471
00:54:41,954 --> 00:54:43,734
You can't stop this technology.

472
00:54:43,894 --> 00:54:44,794
Go ahead and try.

473
00:54:45,354 --> 00:54:48,234
But the second thing is sort of Zimmerman-type argument.

474
00:54:48,234 --> 00:55:02,954
The Second Amendment now gets filtered through the First Amendment. And what seemed to be a weapon is now information once it's on the Internet. And you can then begin to make constitutional arguments that are stronger or different in force than under the Second Amendment.

475
00:55:02,954 --> 00:55:08,294
it and those lawsuits as i understand it there's a really good documentary called death athletic

476
00:55:08,294 --> 00:55:16,034
by jessica solche it's an excellent documentary it walks through all of cody wilson's um legal

477
00:55:16,034 --> 00:55:21,114
kind of the legal drama that's going on these different lawsuits i i don't know there's been

478
00:55:21,114 --> 00:55:25,974
so many lawsuits against him i don't know what palpable gains he has made if there's precedent

479
00:55:25,974 --> 00:55:28,594
set regarding

480
00:55:28,594 --> 00:55:30,814
information

481
00:55:30,814 --> 00:55:33,054
and it's, you know, whether

482
00:55:33,054 --> 00:55:35,014
guns can be information and therefore

483
00:55:35,014 --> 00:55:36,554
protected by the First Amendment.

484
00:55:37,034 --> 00:55:37,774
That's unclear.

485
00:55:39,194 --> 00:55:40,834
But that's the connection there,

486
00:55:40,934 --> 00:55:42,974
is that that's a literal instance where

487
00:55:42,974 --> 00:55:45,134
an arm is now

488
00:55:45,134 --> 00:55:46,874
sublimated into information

489
00:55:46,874 --> 00:55:49,214
and possibly therefore subject to

490
00:55:49,214 --> 00:55:51,234
a different regulatory framework

491
00:55:51,234 --> 00:55:52,934
and also the way that

492
00:55:52,934 --> 00:55:55,074
information, once decentralized

493
00:55:55,074 --> 00:55:58,814
and put out into the ether is almost unstoppable.

494
00:55:59,834 --> 00:55:59,994
Yeah.

495
00:56:00,214 --> 00:56:03,694
So that's a really good example.

496
00:56:04,194 --> 00:56:12,414
Cody Wilson and the ghost guns is a really good example of an attempted application of

497
00:56:12,414 --> 00:56:19,394
arms control against free speech, free speech in the way of code.

498
00:56:19,394 --> 00:56:36,394
And one of the things that you talked about in the summary was the, you know, the question of what is what is reasonable in terms of like concessions made in order to be able to track transactions.

499
00:56:36,394 --> 00:56:42,434
transactions. You know, this is the debate that this is the debate that we need to have.

500
00:56:43,754 --> 00:56:52,934
But what I think is so very clear with an example like Cody Wilson and Ghost Guns or with PGP or

501
00:56:52,934 --> 00:57:03,954
with Bitcoin or with Tor is that it's not a debate. This is Jason Lowry's famous quote,

502
00:57:03,954 --> 00:57:11,014
technology does not negotiate. There is no debate. You can outlaw

503
00:57:11,014 --> 00:57:23,014
me being able to use a mixer, which anonymizes my Bitcoin so that you can't trace the transactions.

504
00:57:23,474 --> 00:57:30,974
You can outlaw that, but I can still use it. It's still there. It's still out on the internet.

505
00:57:30,974 --> 00:57:47,314
There's open source protocols for this. It's just code. And so what can you do instead? Well, you can encourage them to domicile in your jurisdiction so that you can then shut them down.

506
00:57:47,314 --> 00:57:52,754
um and i think i i kind of have like a little different view i guess on the

507
00:57:52,754 --> 00:58:03,914
um so trump wants to make the united states the world capital of crypto um and i am actually

508
00:58:03,914 --> 00:58:13,714
really leaning more towards a very libertarian view of i think i would like to see crypto

509
00:58:13,714 --> 00:58:21,674
developed in places that have no rule of law, as opposed to the strongest rule of law, because

510
00:58:21,674 --> 00:58:30,714
the good things always come up to the top. If something is not useful long term for

511
00:58:30,714 --> 00:58:37,454
parties involved for the people that are using it and the people that are providing it,

512
00:58:37,454 --> 00:58:39,194
then it just doesn't live.

513
00:58:40,974 --> 00:58:42,874
And so I like the sandbox.

514
00:58:42,874 --> 00:58:46,594
What is an area that has – a sandbox, that's not an area that has no rule of law.

515
00:58:46,754 --> 00:58:51,134
That's an area where there's a sandbox constructed within a rule of law system.

516
00:58:51,514 --> 00:58:52,654
You always need the rule of law.

517
00:58:52,754 --> 00:58:54,814
You need property rights protected with guns.

518
00:58:55,074 --> 00:58:57,874
I mean you need the rule of law in order to have any sort of system.

519
00:58:57,874 --> 00:59:04,194
What I'm saying is we have seen very clearly that it doesn't matter what the law says.

520
00:59:04,194 --> 00:59:09,834
you can't rule against free speech and digital code.

521
00:59:09,834 --> 00:59:18,354
Like it, it just, so, and this, um, like I'm not, I'm not saying what I'm saying is that it's not a debate.

522
00:59:18,354 --> 00:59:29,214
It's not a negotiation. Um, you can outlaw the code and then, or you can outlaw the app, but I can get a VPN and I can use the app.

523
00:59:29,214 --> 00:59:35,394
so you can get a you can get a vpn because you have a laptop and a house which is secured by

524
00:59:35,394 --> 00:59:40,514
um the rule of law system that you exist so that's like the threat that's like you can get a vpn

525
00:59:40,514 --> 00:59:45,954
because i allow you to have a house and i allow you to have a computer right i mean which is

526
00:59:45,954 --> 00:59:52,654
different than like if you're in north korea or eritrea or um some venezuela like those are very

527
00:59:52,654 --> 00:59:57,574
strong rule of law places i disagree the rule though that's where the rule they have very strong

528
00:59:57,574 --> 01:00:01,914
laws it's a definitional thing i think the rule of law has broken down there they don't have the

529
01:00:01,914 --> 01:00:06,334
rule of law they have the rule of exception they have what maybe they have a law on the book but

530
01:00:06,334 --> 01:00:10,454
it's always the exception that matters it's always the state the state coming into your house and

531
01:00:10,454 --> 01:00:15,794
saying oh this law says this but you can't cite it against us we don't believe it has law-like

532
01:00:15,794 --> 01:00:20,934
applicability and yeah that's no different than the u.s like i can't remember who it was somebody

533
01:00:20,934 --> 01:00:27,314
it's quite different somebody did somebody did an analysis of all of the regulations uh this is

534
01:00:27,314 --> 01:00:33,014
floating around i don't verify it but um it was from a was from a very well-respected researcher

535
01:00:33,014 --> 01:00:38,454
he says on average that the average american commits three felonies a day yeah there's a book

536
01:00:38,454 --> 01:00:44,034
that they don't know i believe right yeah yeah yeah i mean the the only thing that's different

537
01:00:44,034 --> 01:00:50,834
is that we don't yet have a whole lot of people having their doors kicked in by the government

538
01:00:50,834 --> 01:00:53,654
and coming into their house and taking their stuff.

539
01:00:54,374 --> 01:00:56,914
We're just on the lower end of the spectrum.

540
01:00:57,114 --> 01:00:59,974
I agree that we have much stronger rule of law.

541
01:00:59,974 --> 01:01:02,894
But we still have that occurrence all the time.

542
01:01:03,454 --> 01:01:03,934
Definitely.

543
01:01:04,114 --> 01:01:05,634
We have things like that that occur.

544
01:01:05,774 --> 01:01:08,354
But we do have much, much stronger rule of law.

545
01:01:08,854 --> 01:01:13,654
And I think probably the strongest rule of law, if not one of the strongest,

546
01:01:13,734 --> 01:01:16,834
if not the strongest rule of law systems on the globe.

547
01:01:16,994 --> 01:01:19,454
And that's why we're entrusted with the financial order as it is.

548
01:01:19,454 --> 01:01:24,234
I think – I mean that's why people buy into the US as an idea.

549
01:01:24,874 --> 01:01:26,534
And I think it goes beyond our laws too.

550
01:01:26,914 --> 01:01:31,214
There's like norms and institutions that underlie the rule of law that make it possible.

551
01:01:31,594 --> 01:01:34,614
We have people who believe strongly in the First Amendment.

552
01:01:34,754 --> 01:01:39,254
In other countries where there's no rule of law, you maybe have a default presumption that speech should not be free.

553
01:01:39,374 --> 01:01:44,514
These are – I mean cultural values and norms are – substantiate a rule of law system.

554
01:01:44,514 --> 01:01:57,894
I think that – I don't know. I think a capital of crypto on the presumption that it's going to be the rule of law system at least is a good idea and that I think the rule of law is important for a technological center to thrive.

555
01:01:58,674 --> 01:02:12,514
It's not binary. This is a sliding scale. The rule of law of the United States may be stronger than any other country in the world, but every country in the world has been trending more and more away from rule of law and more and more towards authoritarianism.

556
01:02:12,514 --> 01:02:19,234
authoritarianism. And so that you, it's, it's just rule of law is not a yes or no thing. It's a,

557
01:02:19,414 --> 01:02:26,514
it's a relevant sliding scale. And just because we are currently the cleanest dirty shirt,

558
01:02:26,514 --> 01:02:31,174
we're still a dirty shirt. And we're not. And the thing is we haven't been getting cleaner.

559
01:02:31,594 --> 01:02:34,554
We've been getting dirtier. The whole pile has been getting dirtier.

560
01:02:35,094 --> 01:02:38,694
I was thinking exception was saying that we should go to where there's no rule of law instead of

561
01:02:38,694 --> 01:02:43,594
where there's not it's not it's not we so that again that's another as the crypto it's not

562
01:02:43,594 --> 01:02:48,434
developers or whatever the people who are going to do this are going to go where they can be

563
01:02:48,434 --> 01:02:54,074
in peace yeah it doesn't matter like they'll right they'll find a way to get there they're

564
01:02:54,074 --> 01:02:57,554
they're going to right now they're going to portugal they're going to argentina they're

565
01:02:57,554 --> 01:03:05,794
going to the united arab emirants uh and they're going to uh like uh i don't know soviet bloc

566
01:03:05,794 --> 01:03:12,014
country, I think, but I can't remember. But I mean, there's no we, it's like we, we don't decide,

567
01:03:12,014 --> 01:03:19,914
we don't decide where this is done. The way that the law looks, and the way that the people are

568
01:03:19,914 --> 01:03:27,814
treated, that decides and no, definitely. Yeah. And, and, and if you, if you are somebody who is

569
01:03:27,814 --> 01:03:34,894
creating products, that when you put them out into the world, they change the world. And they

570
01:03:34,894 --> 01:03:42,774
change the world in a way that is undeniably better for all the people in the world.

571
01:03:44,134 --> 01:03:51,454
If you're trying to negotiate with that person, you have no foot to stand on because the thing

572
01:03:51,454 --> 01:03:54,254
that they put out into the world cannot be stopped by you.

573
01:03:54,974 --> 01:04:02,214
Like there is no, like what I'm saying is, I think it's laughable that governments think

574
01:04:02,214 --> 01:04:03,794
that they can negotiate with crypto.

575
01:04:06,334 --> 01:04:08,234
But you just said that crypto,

576
01:04:08,754 --> 01:04:11,554
like a sandbox is a negotiation with crypto.

577
01:04:11,654 --> 01:04:13,034
If a country establishes a sandbox

578
01:04:13,034 --> 01:04:14,454
as a regulatory framework,

579
01:04:14,674 --> 01:04:16,794
that's an attempt to lure crypto to your country.

580
01:04:16,894 --> 01:04:19,374
So governments can do rule of law things,

581
01:04:19,374 --> 01:04:21,954
which is to create an open atmosphere

582
01:04:21,954 --> 01:04:23,214
that protects property rights

583
01:04:23,214 --> 01:04:25,474
and doesn't regulate crypto

584
01:04:25,474 --> 01:04:26,334
and prevent what they can do.

585
01:04:26,434 --> 01:04:28,574
I mean, that is a thing that a country can do.

586
01:04:29,234 --> 01:04:30,214
The world is a sandbox.

587
01:04:30,214 --> 01:04:33,394
I mean, like the United States is a sandbox.

588
01:04:33,674 --> 01:04:37,034
It was designed to be 50 experiments or however many states.

589
01:04:38,074 --> 01:04:42,014
Everybody's going to have their own experiment and we're going to draw whatever works best from that.

590
01:04:42,134 --> 01:04:43,274
We'll apply it to the other ones.

591
01:04:43,374 --> 01:04:44,394
We'll adopt it as it works.

592
01:04:44,754 --> 01:04:47,174
The world itself is a sandbox.

593
01:04:47,734 --> 01:04:49,554
There are some that have this.

594
01:04:49,694 --> 01:04:50,694
There are some that have that.

595
01:04:51,314 --> 01:04:59,134
And if you're the guy who is going to create something that revolutionizes the world and you have the choice, guy or girl.

596
01:05:00,214 --> 01:05:11,134
And you have the choice to go to this country where in this little certain area of the country, we're going to say that we're going to lessen the amount of restrictions that we have on you.

597
01:05:11,134 --> 01:05:32,954
Um, but outside of that, um, these overt restrictions, oppressive restrictions are still going to apply. And in exchange for letting you, um, work, uh, without being thrown in prison in this little area, um, we'll take, uh, you know, a 30% cut.

598
01:05:32,954 --> 01:05:40,994
if that's the negotiation, then those people are going to go, well, actually, I can go to this place

599
01:05:40,994 --> 01:05:48,014
and they don't care. They're just happy that I'm here because I'm contributing to their economy

600
01:05:48,014 --> 01:05:58,234
by the amount of value that I'm creating. And so it, I don't know, it's a legitimate argument

601
01:05:58,234 --> 01:06:04,094
to be made right now because governments are currently so strong and have so much oppressive

602
01:06:04,094 --> 01:06:14,454
force at their, uh, at their availability that they do kind of have a way to turn off or, or

603
01:06:14,454 --> 01:06:22,394
like they do have a way to encourage, um, negotiation, but that power is weakening every

604
01:06:22,394 --> 01:06:27,794
single day. And the power of what they're trying to negotiate is getting stronger every single day.

605
01:06:27,794 --> 01:06:35,594
And it's just, I think it's a very short-term thought to go, oh, we're going to control this.

606
01:06:36,114 --> 01:06:37,754
We're going to have rules on this.

607
01:06:37,854 --> 01:06:50,994
Because very clearly there will be jurisdictions that say we're not going to have rules on this because it is no different than sending a text.

608
01:06:52,094 --> 01:06:52,614
Yeah.

609
01:06:52,734 --> 01:06:54,534
And we don't have rules on sending a text.

610
01:06:54,534 --> 01:07:06,074
So if a jurisdiction says we are not going to have rules on this, you don't trust that jurisdiction unless it already has a rule of law system where they're held to that promise where you can then litigate if they go back on that.

611
01:07:06,374 --> 01:07:09,174
It's those authoritarian countries that say, oh, come here.

612
01:07:09,234 --> 01:07:09,994
We're going to have a sandbox.

613
01:07:10,214 --> 01:07:11,034
We're not going to have rules.

614
01:07:11,214 --> 01:07:14,414
And then you go to like Dubai or somewhere like that.

615
01:07:14,434 --> 01:07:16,234
And then they can pull the rug whenever they want.

616
01:07:16,414 --> 01:07:19,034
You need a default like background set of norms.

617
01:07:19,134 --> 01:07:20,474
You need a strong constitution.

618
01:07:20,474 --> 01:07:30,514
You need a legal framework that protects the freedom of speech and equal human rights to a certain extent before you can rely on a promise that come here, there's not going to be laws.

619
01:07:30,614 --> 01:07:31,774
And that's what the United States offers.

620
01:07:31,954 --> 01:07:39,934
I mean, is a strong constitution backed up by the blood of revolutionaries and the revolutionary sentiment that lives in our breasts.

621
01:07:39,974 --> 01:07:46,994
And that's something that you can't just recreate in another country by saying we're not going to mess with your company.

622
01:07:46,994 --> 01:07:54,054
Oh, they're going to mess with your company when it suits them because they don't have a background set of rules and assumptions that prevents them from doing that.

623
01:07:54,134 --> 01:07:55,294
So that would be my point.

624
01:07:55,374 --> 01:07:56,694
I think you can't like this.

625
01:07:56,834 --> 01:07:59,774
Don't undersell the United States and its revolutionary fervor, I guess.

626
01:08:00,034 --> 01:08:01,394
What that means for the free.

627
01:08:01,914 --> 01:08:02,134
Yeah.

628
01:08:02,434 --> 01:08:07,834
This is the network state was like, you know, we'll just we'll put it, you know, we'll put the Constitution out there.

629
01:08:08,094 --> 01:08:10,454
Anybody can adopt it and then run it.

630
01:08:10,554 --> 01:08:10,994
Right now.

631
01:08:11,274 --> 01:08:13,294
It's like here's the source code for.

632
01:08:13,574 --> 01:08:13,694
Yeah.

633
01:08:13,894 --> 01:08:14,654
That doesn't work, though.

634
01:08:14,654 --> 01:08:18,494
Right now, there are countries that printed the United States Constitution and tried to run them.

635
01:08:18,614 --> 01:08:21,454
It didn't work because they didn't have the default norms.

636
01:08:21,454 --> 01:08:25,354
It doesn't work because you can't fix the thing.

637
01:08:25,454 --> 01:08:26,474
You have to build a new thing.

638
01:08:27,954 --> 01:08:34,974
Yeah, and you have to actually like – you have to derive the values for yourself that underlie a set of words that you call the Constitution.

639
01:08:35,174 --> 01:08:37,654
The Constitution is just like, oh, a nice sounding set of words.

640
01:08:37,734 --> 01:08:41,194
We can even make a better one, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights,

641
01:08:41,194 --> 01:08:45,854
It's this beautiful flowery language that protects you in every way, cradle to grave.

642
01:08:45,854 --> 01:08:58,534
But it means nothing if people aren't willing to die for it and haven't had ancestors that died for it and don't live in a country where they're willing to like, you know, go to the mat to protect something abstract like a freedom of speech.

643
01:08:58,534 --> 01:09:02,874
That's not a background human value we necessarily have by being human.

644
01:09:02,974 --> 01:09:08,034
It's something that grows in your breast because you're raised in a particular way in a particular country.

645
01:09:08,354 --> 01:09:10,074
So that's a good – yeah.

646
01:09:10,074 --> 01:09:27,894
Yeah. I mean, that's a great argument for patriotism. And I believe I do believe that, too. I do believe and agree that patriotism is you need to be proud and you need to be willing to sacrifice for the greater good.

647
01:09:29,194 --> 01:09:31,254
And it draws people together.

648
01:09:31,254 --> 01:09:44,234
And this does tie back to another part of this chapter that I thought was really interesting, where Alden talks about China exporting surveillance tech, essentially, through part of their Belt and Road initiative.

649
01:09:44,234 --> 01:09:54,794
One of the reasons she says that they're doing that is not just to control another country because they subsidize their purchase through some sort of predatory lending.

650
01:09:55,134 --> 01:10:03,154
That's one reason that they want to export surveillance tech and then subsidize its purchase by some country that wants to be able to surveil its citizens.

651
01:10:03,574 --> 01:10:12,614
But they also want to foster the underlying norms and values that it's okay to surveil your citizens.

652
01:10:12,614 --> 01:10:26,554
If China subsidizes surveillance tech in many different countries, then those countries begin to normalize that it's okay and right to surveil your systems. They go to the UN, they vote in that way.

653
01:10:26,554 --> 01:10:36,754
So by spreading surveillance tech, you begin to change values when people then accommodate themselves to the way that the world is.

654
01:10:36,754 --> 01:11:00,854
So the question is, then, can Bitcoin combat that and be an antivirus to that virus or viral in a different way and change norms and ideas relating to privacy, surveillance, and control in other countries serve as its own propaganda, in a sense, in the same way that China is trying to change world norms by spreading the violence of surveillance tech?

655
01:11:00,854 --> 01:11:06,394
yeah that's you're again we're back to

656
01:11:06,394 --> 01:11:15,674
so it's monetary colonialism it's not like actual we're going to land and we're going to take over

657
01:11:15,674 --> 01:11:22,914
and we're going to put our people there but it is still colonialism and colonialism is at its heart

658
01:11:22,914 --> 01:11:29,414
the exporting of the ideal or whatever your ideology is the underlying beliefs that you have

659
01:11:29,414 --> 01:11:49,414
And so, yeah, influencing, you know, reaching out and and trying to expand your area of influence in the world to expand the dominion over which you somewhat control entropy, I guess, might be might be a way to think about it.

660
01:11:49,414 --> 01:11:59,614
when i was in africa and when i was in uh when i was in morocco um i was i was blown away by how

661
01:11:59,614 --> 01:12:08,174
much surveillance technology i saw like and it was all huawei brand um yeah the cameras

662
01:12:08,174 --> 01:12:16,434
everywhere like i i've been in i've been in um bigger cities in the united states that i feel

663
01:12:16,434 --> 01:12:24,514
have a lot of security cameras not like this um and just very overt um and and you see

664
01:12:24,514 --> 01:12:35,014
you see how people self-censor there i mean it um there is i remember when i came back and i think

665
01:12:35,014 --> 01:12:41,094
you were one of the first people i talked to no well no it was but anyways i remember when i came

666
01:12:41,094 --> 01:12:45,814
back, I told people, um, cause I went from Morocco directly to Colombia.

667
01:12:46,334 --> 01:12:49,654
And those are two entirely different worlds.

668
01:12:49,674 --> 01:12:52,794
One is a police state and the other is a cartel state.

669
01:12:53,694 --> 01:12:57,854
And, um, in Morocco, nobody ever smiles.

670
01:12:58,074 --> 01:12:59,514
Nobody looks people in the eyes.

671
01:12:59,514 --> 01:13:00,574
They don't trust each other.

672
01:13:00,574 --> 01:13:03,534
There's a very, very, very low level of social trust.

673
01:13:04,214 --> 01:13:11,074
Um, and in Columbia, um, where it's leaning more towards anarchy.

674
01:13:11,094 --> 01:13:17,634
you know everything's done in everything's done in cash everything is done um kind of out in the

675
01:13:17,634 --> 01:13:27,214
open um private transactions are very private um the people there smile and they there's this

676
01:13:27,214 --> 01:13:36,714
really vibrant um motorcycle taxi system where uh for for like one peso or whatever i don't know

677
01:13:36,714 --> 01:13:55,494
I can't remember what it was. It was one coin. For one coin, you just get on the back, they hand you a helmet and away you go. And it's a very, I know this sounds weird, but it was a way safer environment. At least it felt safer. I don't know.

678
01:13:55,494 --> 01:14:04,594
um but yeah it exporting that type of that type of surveillance and trying to normalize it

679
01:14:04,594 --> 01:14:10,434
having experienced that like that was that's the only place i've ever been in morocco that's the

680
01:14:10,434 --> 01:14:13,554
only place i've ever been where i didn't feel comfortable i didn't feel safe i didn't really

681
01:14:13,554 --> 01:14:20,774
want to be there um because it felt like um you were always being watched and someone was always

682
01:14:20,774 --> 01:14:29,774
trying to catch you doing something. And this, this brings me so the summary talks about how we

683
01:14:29,774 --> 01:14:35,974
moved through the war on terror, or sorry, the war on drugs to the war on terror, and then to

684
01:14:35,974 --> 01:14:44,994
the war on trafficking. And I was thinking about that. And I think it's more, we declared a war on

685
01:14:44,994 --> 01:14:50,674
drugs because they were opening people's minds and there was rebellion.

686
01:14:52,994 --> 01:15:03,234
And then we took over the trade of drugs and use that to finance our own operations.

687
01:15:03,234 --> 01:15:17,234
and by doing so we enriched ideologies that then we decided we needed to put down

688
01:15:17,234 --> 01:15:24,314
because they were becoming a threat so the war on drugs creates the war on terror

689
01:15:24,314 --> 01:15:30,414
and then i would say after the war on terror we actually because we then had a war on terror

690
01:15:30,414 --> 01:15:42,454
where for 20 years you grew up, you either grew up terrified of the Russians or you grew up terrified of people in the Middle East.

691
01:15:43,554 --> 01:16:00,501
And that war on terror funded by the war on drugs creates a war on hate where now we have really created these people in our minds that we hate just because of the way they look

692
01:16:00,501 --> 01:16:12,821
Because we have been told that they're terrorists who were emboldened and enriched to even be here because of the war on drugs.

693
01:16:12,821 --> 01:16:20,601
And then that war on hate, I think the war on hate, what is hate?

694
01:16:20,701 --> 01:16:22,441
Hate is viewing people as less.

695
01:16:23,201 --> 01:16:26,221
And if you view people as less, you can treat them like commodities.

696
01:16:27,121 --> 01:16:29,581
And treating people like commodities is trafficking.

697
01:16:30,541 --> 01:16:37,021
And now we have a war on hate that has created a war on trafficking.

698
01:16:37,021 --> 01:16:42,101
And I wrote all those things down and then I crossed off war on.

699
01:16:42,101 --> 01:16:48,621
And I just put, here's the mechanisms for control that have been used by the state.

700
01:16:49,261 --> 01:16:52,641
Drugs, terror, hate, and trafficking.

701
01:16:53,741 --> 01:17:01,901
And the next logical is basically thought.

702
01:17:01,901 --> 01:17:11,381
And so that's really what I think you see in these countries that have gone in deep with the Belt and Road Initiative.

703
01:17:12,101 --> 01:17:21,301
is that the war on thought is very obviously being fought and lost by the people

704
01:17:21,301 --> 01:17:28,301
because of the manner in which they interact with each other and self-censor

705
01:17:28,301 --> 01:17:38,601
and continuously accept more and more punishment

706
01:17:38,601 --> 01:17:50,361
in terms of losing liberty in exchange just to not be crushed under the thumb of the state.

707
01:17:50,681 --> 01:17:53,241
So yeah, that's my little meander.

708
01:17:53,241 --> 01:17:54,741
I think that gets on.

709
01:17:55,161 --> 01:17:55,321
Yeah.

710
01:17:55,801 --> 01:17:57,821
So Alden had three questions for regulators.

711
01:17:58,281 --> 01:18:02,101
If you're thinking about regulating something, we already hit the last one.

712
01:18:02,101 --> 01:18:02,761
Be realistic.

713
01:18:02,981 --> 01:18:04,301
Can the government enforce it?

714
01:18:04,421 --> 01:18:05,561
We talked about that at length.

715
01:18:06,161 --> 01:18:07,481
And I think you just got to the second one.

716
01:18:07,481 --> 01:18:15,161
examine the motivations how honest are governments regarding their motivations for um you know

717
01:18:15,161 --> 01:18:20,461
actually regulating the thing that they say they're purportedly regulating like again the

718
01:18:20,461 --> 01:18:25,261
argentinian currency example we say we want to go after anti-money laundering but actually the

719
01:18:25,261 --> 01:18:31,861
motivation is to cut off capital flight from a burning fiat ledger and so right and i mean

720
01:18:31,861 --> 01:18:38,501
I bought a, I bought a tour bus one time. I bought a tour bus and I had to pay cash for it.

721
01:18:38,721 --> 01:18:44,061
I had to go to the bank three days in a row to draw out cash so that I wouldn't be reported

722
01:18:44,061 --> 01:18:51,761
under. And it's not, you know, I, I, I could have drawn it all out. I, I think maybe they

723
01:18:51,761 --> 01:18:56,721
would have given it to me, but I self-censored, like there was something in my mind that said,

724
01:18:56,721 --> 01:19:02,221
oh, if it's over $10,000, then I'm going to get reported and I'm going to have a file or whatever.

725
01:19:02,701 --> 01:19:08,321
And it made me change my action just because of those kinds of capital controls.

726
01:19:08,801 --> 01:19:11,081
No, and they are intended to change actions.

727
01:19:11,301 --> 01:19:12,441
Like that is for sure.

728
01:19:12,681 --> 01:19:18,061
Like the explicit ones mentioned in France and Germany where they're 1,000 to 2,000 euros,

729
01:19:18,261 --> 01:19:24,881
not a huge sum of money, but those are to prevent – I think it was in Germany to prevent capital flight to gold

730
01:19:24,881 --> 01:19:33,561
And then in France, just to prevent people from accumulating cash because, of course, they want money in bank accounts so they can surveil and control it.

731
01:19:34,001 --> 01:19:35,261
It's like a used motorcycle.

732
01:19:35,921 --> 01:19:38,541
Like you can't pay cash for a – or a nice bicycle.

733
01:19:38,721 --> 01:19:39,581
Yeah, right, right.

734
01:19:39,941 --> 01:19:42,401
You know, if the French ride a lot of bikes, that's like a nice bicycle.

735
01:19:42,541 --> 01:19:44,561
You can't go pay somebody cash for a bicycle.

736
01:19:45,141 --> 01:19:47,961
Now you begin to cut into the informal economy that way potentially.

737
01:19:47,961 --> 01:19:56,781
I mean, I wonder what the effect has been on like resale, you know, private resale, things like that, because now you have to have like a credit card machine so people can use credit.

738
01:19:57,101 --> 01:19:57,341
They would have gone up, right?

739
01:19:57,941 --> 01:20:01,521
They'd probably have to go – wouldn't they go up in price?

740
01:20:02,821 --> 01:20:03,481
Yeah, right.

741
01:20:03,541 --> 01:20:06,221
So if it begins to cut off that market, it begins to be – right.

742
01:20:06,281 --> 01:20:13,501
It drives up the price for the people that can stay in it to negotiate that way if it's really important to you to get it on the resale market.

743
01:20:13,501 --> 01:20:18,921
it um yeah now there's all sorts of secondhand consequences when the government begins to

744
01:20:18,921 --> 01:20:25,781
regulate and you you know their motivations and it ties back into you know us pontificating that

745
01:20:25,781 --> 01:20:33,301
maybe modern leftism as statism has different motivations than it proclaims or says that it

746
01:20:33,301 --> 01:20:40,461
has so do you remember the story wasn't there a story about um like a kid that they decided some

747
01:20:40,461 --> 01:20:47,281
I don't know what country, but they kicked in the door and they found that he had cash and they decided to hang him.

748
01:20:48,341 --> 01:20:49,321
Wow. Yeah.

749
01:20:49,881 --> 01:20:51,761
Fairly recently. I can't remember what.

750
01:20:52,301 --> 01:20:52,521
But yeah.

751
01:20:52,841 --> 01:21:05,201
Yeah. When I was practicing criminal law, Alden mentions here civil asset forfeiture, you know, in the United States, that's one way in which surveillance implicitly occurs.

752
01:21:05,201 --> 01:21:13,841
When I was practicing criminal law, there was an individual who was traveling from Missouri to Colorado with a large sum of cash in his car.

753
01:21:14,681 --> 01:21:16,001
He gets pulled over.

754
01:21:16,741 --> 01:21:20,921
And so Colorado at the time has weed that's legal.

755
01:21:21,141 --> 01:21:22,101
Missouri does not.

756
01:21:22,921 --> 01:21:34,081
Traveling with that large sum of cash in his car to Colorado was enough for the police to confiscate, to steal his money and take it in order to get that money back.

757
01:21:34,081 --> 01:21:37,141
So we told the police, no, this is for a vacation I'm taking to Colorado.

758
01:21:37,261 --> 01:21:38,101
We plan to spend it there.

759
01:21:38,161 --> 01:21:38,941
We're going to ski resorts.

760
01:21:38,941 --> 01:21:39,621
It's going to be expensive.

761
01:21:39,981 --> 01:21:40,901
They took the money.

762
01:21:41,081 --> 01:21:46,281
In order to get that back, it was a complex civil, federal civil lawsuit that had, it

763
01:21:46,281 --> 01:21:47,761
had to proceed through district court.

764
01:21:47,941 --> 01:21:52,381
And that's an expensive thing that, you know, most people wouldn't do because you're, you're

765
01:21:52,381 --> 01:21:55,941
essentially, you know, paying the money that you're going to get back to the attorney to

766
01:21:55,941 --> 01:21:57,301
do that thing for you.

767
01:21:57,861 --> 01:22:03,561
And so that in itself is a way to discourage people from having too much cash because there's

768
01:22:03,561 --> 01:22:09,761
the presumption that it's illicit or legal, the mere fact that you have cash. So we might not hang

769
01:22:09,761 --> 01:22:14,401
someone in the United States, but we begin to implicitly categorize them as a criminal and

770
01:22:14,401 --> 01:22:21,181
impose civil criminal consequences on them for having cash. I read a book about that. And it's

771
01:22:21,181 --> 01:22:29,621
the amount of abuse of the civil for civil asset forfeiture power is shocking, especially in Texas.

772
01:22:29,621 --> 01:22:42,281
um, there were stories about, um, they, they stop a family that has like four grand in cash.

773
01:22:43,341 --> 01:22:49,361
And I can't remember what the deal was. I don't, I don't think they had anything.

774
01:22:49,761 --> 01:22:54,401
It wasn't, it wasn't a big deal. Um, but anyway, so they, they say, well,

775
01:22:54,401 --> 01:22:59,081
we either take your money or you have to spend the night in jail, you know,

776
01:22:59,161 --> 01:23:01,581
that's fine. You can spend a night in jail. And they're like,

777
01:23:01,601 --> 01:23:04,421
what happens to our kids? They're like, Oh, we put your kids in the system.

778
01:23:05,561 --> 01:23:10,441
And, and so then, you know, they don't have any recourse.

779
01:23:10,561 --> 01:23:11,061
It is,

780
01:23:11,201 --> 01:23:15,521
it is a very calculated way to extract value from people by making it

781
01:23:15,521 --> 01:23:20,521
prohibitively costly for them to get it back. And right. Yeah.

782
01:23:20,521 --> 01:23:24,281
I'm really glad you brought that up because there are people listening to

783
01:23:24,281 --> 01:23:30,321
this that aren't aware of what the civil asset forfeiture power is and how it's being abused,

784
01:23:30,441 --> 01:23:37,801
I encourage you to look into it. Just Google civil asset forfeiture. And there's one example

785
01:23:37,801 --> 01:23:47,081
of like they get a warrant to go through some lock boxes at a safe deposit facility. And instead,

786
01:23:47,221 --> 01:23:52,501
they just go through all of them. And so they just take everything. And then if you want it,

787
01:23:52,501 --> 01:23:57,821
you have to come prove that it's yours and prove that you have it legitimately when they had a

788
01:23:57,821 --> 01:24:03,401
warrant for like one box or something like that so um yeah like there's there's a lot of abuses

789
01:24:03,401 --> 01:24:08,741
of power being and one does not have already in the united states yeah one one does not have to

790
01:24:08,741 --> 01:24:13,861
be to tie back to this left-right dichotomy one does not have to be libertarian to see right see

791
01:24:13,861 --> 01:24:19,681
this because in addition to this in ferguson there were these ferguson missouri right this is um a

792
01:24:19,681 --> 01:24:24,161
is a suburb of of st louis right or we're not a suburb it's a part of st louis that that's

793
01:24:24,861 --> 01:24:31,421
yeah i drove i drove yeah so it's a municipality there right and so there were race riots there

794
01:24:31,421 --> 01:24:35,081
um was somebody shot there's been so many of these racial things what was

795
01:24:35,081 --> 01:24:41,981
yeah yeah it's it started um it started with a police shooting um the riots yeah they after they

796
01:24:41,981 --> 01:24:46,541
did a like a post-mortem on it to figure out like why were there so many racial tensions here what's

797
01:24:46,541 --> 01:24:51,241
a problem with ferguson and there's a report you can read on this and they had like there was this

798
01:24:51,241 --> 01:24:58,541
really predatory municipal fining of people for small traffic infractions and they were doing that

799
01:24:58,541 --> 01:25:07,521
for like having like dirty windows or like uh bald tires or um like uh not being able to see your

800
01:25:07,521 --> 01:25:14,241
not being able to see your license plate and by the way this is so this is very real still there

801
01:25:14,241 --> 01:25:24,941
When I was there and I was driving Uber, I would pick up people and they would tell me this specific area, this one specific street, really.

802
01:25:25,541 --> 01:25:27,581
It's like, this is where they take you.

803
01:25:28,081 --> 01:25:29,561
This is where they pull you over.

804
01:25:29,981 --> 01:25:32,681
And they were just like, so they talked about it.

805
01:25:32,761 --> 01:25:37,161
So matter of factly, it's like, you're white, you're fine.

806
01:25:37,541 --> 01:25:38,481
You're going to be okay.

807
01:25:38,481 --> 01:25:46,761
but um anybody else they'll get you for stopping to uh like stopping too fast basically or like

808
01:25:46,761 --> 01:25:51,941
anything yeah sorry i cut you off but that i mean that's that's still a very real thing yeah

809
01:25:51,941 --> 01:25:59,161
just another three months ago no another way that um the government is harvesting people for cash

810
01:25:59,161 --> 01:26:06,021
opaquely taxing people through municipal fines instead of outright doing it and so yeah what a

811
01:26:06,021 --> 01:26:13,061
great system we have yeah it's uh yeah i think when you realize that you have the power to extract

812
01:26:13,061 --> 01:26:18,441
again this just is the same with the government realizing that oh if we can print some money we

813
01:26:18,441 --> 01:26:25,781
can print all the money um you know like you you just have to again throwing it back to to elon but

814
01:26:25,781 --> 01:26:30,601
i like to give him credit because he says these things that really stick in my mind but you have

815
01:26:30,601 --> 01:26:36,061
to think to the limit. You have to think, okay, if we're going to do this thing, how far can it be

816
01:26:36,061 --> 01:26:43,841
taken? Because how far it can be taken is how far it will be taken by somebody. Somebody will get

817
01:26:43,841 --> 01:26:48,041
there. Somebody will do it. They will plant a flag. They will move. They will shift the Overton

818
01:26:48,041 --> 01:26:54,621
window. We will continuously move closer and closer into this direction until a limit is reached.

819
01:26:55,081 --> 01:26:57,801
And what does that limit look like? And the limit-

820
01:26:57,801 --> 01:26:58,221
Yeah, what does it look like?

821
01:26:58,261 --> 01:26:58,421
Yeah.

822
01:26:58,521 --> 01:26:58,981
Oh, go ahead.

823
01:26:58,981 --> 01:27:07,421
Well, I was just going to say, the limit looks like that show Mr. Robot, which I don't think you've seen.

824
01:27:08,121 --> 01:27:08,861
I have not, no.

825
01:27:08,861 --> 01:27:14,481
The guy, I forget his name, but the dude who played Freddie Mercury in the Queen movie.

826
01:27:15,661 --> 01:27:17,781
Incredible, incredible series.

827
01:27:17,921 --> 01:27:34,581
I encourage everybody to watch, which is basically the rise of the central bank digital currency and the corporation and the state applying all of these overt extreme surveillance powers on the citizens.

828
01:27:34,581 --> 01:27:38,301
So, yeah, it's a very dark dystopian.

829
01:27:38,861 --> 01:27:47,041
but it also is a very, very real view in terms of what we're seeing across the world right now.

830
01:27:47,841 --> 01:27:51,841
Yeah. No, I was just interrupting to throw some shade to see if what it looked like for a person

831
01:27:51,841 --> 01:27:54,161
to think to the max was to promote Dogecoin.

832
01:27:55,081 --> 01:27:58,221
Not good, right? Like seriously, not good.

833
01:27:59,821 --> 01:28:00,621
So, yeah.

834
01:28:00,981 --> 01:28:01,281
Yeah.

835
01:28:01,501 --> 01:28:05,121
Even as a joke, even as a memetic kind of like,

836
01:28:05,341 --> 01:28:08,641
whatever is the funniest outcome will be the outcome that actually happens.

837
01:28:08,641 --> 01:28:13,661
I mean, that's trying to meme into reality, hilarity as a future.

838
01:28:13,821 --> 01:28:14,881
And I don't think that's a good idea.

839
01:28:15,461 --> 01:28:25,681
This is actually another quote from Musk when he was working on PayPal was, I mean, he defines money the exact same that Alden does.

840
01:28:25,821 --> 01:28:27,541
You know, money is just a ledger.

841
01:28:27,661 --> 01:28:28,881
It's just an entry in a database.

842
01:28:31,521 --> 01:28:35,401
And, yeah, promoting Dogecoin is wild.

843
01:28:35,401 --> 01:28:36,781
Have a talk with your boy there, man.

844
01:28:36,901 --> 01:28:37,741
Have a talk with your boy.

845
01:28:37,741 --> 01:28:45,021
he's wild i don't understand it now let's also let's also acknowledge that his company is the

846
01:28:45,021 --> 01:28:50,581
third largest owner tesla's got a stack yeah so yeah this again you know think about what what

847
01:28:50,581 --> 01:28:57,221
actually matters you know where is your skin in the game so yeah i i personally think that he knows

848
01:28:57,221 --> 01:29:04,861
exactly what it is and that in order to maintain relationships with a very litigious government

849
01:29:04,861 --> 01:29:07,641
that had been increasingly targeting him.

850
01:29:08,061 --> 01:29:10,681
I think that he really toned down

851
01:29:10,681 --> 01:29:15,741
any sort of slaughtering of golden cows

852
01:29:15,741 --> 01:29:18,481
or golden geese for quite a long time.

853
01:29:18,481 --> 01:29:21,061
Yeah, I think he runs public corporations

854
01:29:21,061 --> 01:29:22,641
that depend on public largesse.

855
01:29:22,841 --> 01:29:25,021
And so Bitcoin is vaguely threatening to him

856
01:29:25,021 --> 01:29:26,701
with what he needs to get accomplished.

857
01:29:26,981 --> 01:29:28,361
His only goal is to get to Mars

858
01:29:28,361 --> 01:29:32,781
and he's been working with the government as it is.

859
01:29:32,901 --> 01:29:34,301
And I think you stack Bitcoin

860
01:29:34,301 --> 01:29:35,721
because he's smart enough to do so.

861
01:29:35,861 --> 01:29:39,481
But I mean, I think he's like most CEOs probably are.

862
01:29:39,601 --> 01:29:41,121
He has a point that goes beyond

863
01:29:41,121 --> 01:29:44,421
what Bitcoin's liberatory potential is.

864
01:29:44,501 --> 01:29:46,281
And so he wants to get that done.

865
01:29:46,361 --> 01:29:48,461
And if Bitcoin vaguely threatens that in some way,

866
01:29:48,461 --> 01:29:50,541
then maybe it's not your biggest priority.

867
01:29:50,821 --> 01:29:53,761
Not saying he's against it, but I don't think-

868
01:29:53,761 --> 01:29:55,281
Maybe take another view of it,

869
01:29:55,381 --> 01:29:56,901
which is to say that I think,

870
01:29:57,401 --> 01:30:00,081
so he had the very personal experience, right?

871
01:30:00,081 --> 01:30:03,141
Of having one of his children be chemically castrated.

872
01:30:04,301 --> 01:30:13,461
under the like trans encouragement laws in, uh, in California and, um, has, has really struggled

873
01:30:13,461 --> 01:30:17,901
with that. Like he, you know, he lost, he sold all of his houses, he sold everything and just

874
01:30:17,901 --> 01:30:23,181
sleeps on people's couches now. Right. And I think he just identified that as a bigger problem.

875
01:30:23,181 --> 01:30:32,641
And I, I, I can't disagree like, because the, the fundamental, um, aim of that ideology was to,

876
01:30:32,641 --> 01:30:41,821
um, outlaw free speech. It was to, um, force people to, um, it was, it was to, to, to promote

877
01:30:41,821 --> 01:30:49,061
forced speech, um, and forced, uh, and, and take one step closer to legislating thought.

878
01:30:49,461 --> 01:30:58,401
So I, I think that if you have Bitcoin, but you don't have, um, you don't have the antidote to

879
01:30:58,401 --> 01:31:03,861
that, then I don't think you're better off. But I think that if you have the antidote to the woke

880
01:31:03,861 --> 01:31:10,021
mind virus, then I do believe that Bitcoin naturally, kind of like the way you were talking

881
01:31:10,021 --> 01:31:15,321
about with the values that arise, I think that Bitcoin naturally finds its place in that system.

882
01:31:15,561 --> 01:31:22,301
So maybe it's more of just a, I don't know. I think it is, to me, I think it's a close personal

883
01:31:22,301 --> 01:31:29,341
thing where it's like oh i had i have this trans yeah you know i have no insight into his mental

884
01:31:29,341 --> 01:31:34,581
state his i wouldn't psychologize him farther so i just think it's that's a good point he's an

885
01:31:34,581 --> 01:31:40,641
interesting person yeah so that's part six financial technology and human rights i mean that that

886
01:31:40,641 --> 01:31:45,121
concludes the book for us and like i said at the beginning man my book is it's seen some damage

887
01:31:45,121 --> 01:31:53,181
here and it's so much fun to like so thoroughly and rigorously get into a person's head to read

888
01:31:53,181 --> 01:31:58,281
their thoughts in this way to reconstruct it for yourself explain it to yourself take copious notes

889
01:31:58,281 --> 01:32:03,041
it's like a different reading experience and i just wonder what i mean is there something overall

890
01:32:03,041 --> 01:32:07,441
that you wanted to take away from broken money i mean obviously we've had hours of conversation

891
01:32:07,441 --> 01:32:12,461
on this but just given that we've concluded this book just any concluding thoughts on the book

892
01:32:12,461 --> 01:32:22,181
itself. The thing that I wanted to talk about that I think is just a very real example of

893
01:32:22,181 --> 01:32:29,621
technology matters more than ideology. Technology matters more than willpower.

894
01:32:30,181 --> 01:32:37,781
Technology changes things. The very first use of Bitcoin, she talks about it here in the final,

895
01:32:37,781 --> 01:32:52,801
The very first real use of Bitcoin was to help fund WikiLeaks after they were cut off by the United States for revealing abuses of the government.

896
01:32:55,421 --> 01:33:04,401
So I think that just that right there, that first use of Bitcoin, puts everything into an encapsulation for us.

897
01:33:04,401 --> 01:33:22,141
This is a technology that can't be stopped, that is viewed as a killer by the thing that it is trying to kill, which it's not trying to kill government, it's trying to kill abuse.

898
01:33:22,141 --> 01:33:30,101
and we're trying to move past and move forward to a system where we can no longer be unilaterally

899
01:33:30,101 --> 01:33:42,121
abused and have things taken from us that are ours, our lives, our energy, our contributions

900
01:33:42,121 --> 01:33:51,141
to society. They can't just be taken from us. And people rose up in the 60s because of this,

901
01:33:51,141 --> 01:33:59,001
but the technology wasn't there and i would say the motivation was probably way stronger than

902
01:33:59,001 --> 01:34:04,161
you know people had a lot more fight in them and and and certainly you know there were riots and

903
01:34:04,161 --> 01:34:08,861
there were massive gatherings and there were protests everywhere and people just actively

904
01:34:08,861 --> 01:34:17,781
dropping out you know the um tune in what is it tune in turn on and drop out that's kind of today's

905
01:34:17,781 --> 01:34:25,281
like silent quitting or you know people have just like removed themselves from the system

906
01:34:25,281 --> 01:34:33,221
because the system not only does it no longer serve them it never serves them it just finally

907
01:34:33,221 --> 01:34:39,621
revealed the extent to which it would take the abuse um and people have have uh

908
01:34:39,621 --> 01:34:48,681
people have done what people always do, which is find a way and rise up as one for the betterment

909
01:34:48,681 --> 01:34:58,821
of each other. You know, at the end of the day, we are all humans and we all feel a certain kinship.

910
01:34:59,361 --> 01:35:05,761
I think this is why it's very important for people to travel, not because of you want to go see the

911
01:35:05,761 --> 01:35:11,121
world. But what you want to do is you want to go to another part of the world and experience humanity

912
01:35:11,121 --> 01:35:22,621
and share the existence of life with someone else that you may currently think of in some sort of

913
01:35:22,621 --> 01:35:30,161
partitioned, separated, discriminated way in your mind. So yeah, I think that's the last thing I have

914
01:35:30,161 --> 01:35:39,801
to say, I am really glad that you chose this book because the second time through reading it,

915
01:35:39,801 --> 01:35:46,861
it really came to life. And having the discussions about it made me realize

916
01:35:46,861 --> 01:35:54,781
what you had said when you originally promoted the idea was that this was just the best top to

917
01:35:54,781 --> 01:36:06,961
bottom, back to front to back, um, not editorialized version of money and Bitcoin.

918
01:36:07,521 --> 01:36:11,821
And there's, it's not commentary on society.

919
01:36:11,821 --> 01:36:15,221
It's, this is what happens as a result of this.

920
01:36:15,221 --> 01:36:21,241
This is cause and effect being laid out to us in a very systematic way by a systems engineer.

921
01:36:22,021 --> 01:36:24,501
So I, I commend you for the book choice.

922
01:36:24,781 --> 01:36:28,821
I really took a lot out of it, like I said, especially the second time around.

923
01:36:28,821 --> 01:36:33,761
It got to be so much more of a deep read for me, and I enjoyed it.

924
01:36:34,521 --> 01:36:40,141
Now, one of the things I took away from it, and this maybe is a qualification on what you said.

925
01:36:41,181 --> 01:36:43,741
So this is a book about technology.

926
01:36:43,921 --> 01:36:50,841
It's a book about the way that technology has disrupted our financial system, our monetary systems in the past.

927
01:36:50,841 --> 01:36:53,761
and given that we have new technologies,

928
01:36:54,021 --> 01:36:55,981
how it could disrupt going forward in the future,

929
01:36:56,121 --> 01:36:58,321
especially given the flaws that our current system has.

930
01:36:58,321 --> 01:37:01,861
The one thing that I really,

931
01:37:02,801 --> 01:37:04,401
especially during a conversation today,

932
01:37:04,481 --> 01:37:09,841
was reflecting on is technology will inevitably change things,

933
01:37:09,981 --> 01:37:13,301
but the direction in which it will change things

934
01:37:13,301 --> 01:37:16,001
is not necessarily set.

935
01:37:16,581 --> 01:37:18,181
So we have a world of openness,

936
01:37:18,181 --> 01:37:27,581
or what a world of control posited as two potential futures cbdcs and bitcoin you know

937
01:37:27,581 --> 01:37:36,901
um one is the better money more sound money one has a lot of state interest behind it and the

938
01:37:36,901 --> 01:37:42,181
state being so intertwined with powerful elite financial classes also has a lot of support from

939
01:37:42,181 --> 01:37:50,381
them, CBDCs. So on a long enough time frame, maybe good prevails, but humans don't live necessarily

940
01:37:50,381 --> 01:37:57,681
on the longest time frame because we need to prevent ourselves from mutual destruction and

941
01:37:57,681 --> 01:38:05,621
nuclear war. Wars, of course, on Alden's thesis, made more likely under a fiat monetary system.

942
01:38:05,621 --> 01:38:13,681
um it accelerates us towards wars and finances those wars so you know maybe bitcoin you know

943
01:38:13,681 --> 01:38:19,261
slays cbdc's on a long enough time frame by itself but we don't necessarily have a long

944
01:38:19,261 --> 01:38:26,801
enough time frame we need to do it asap and so we need to do everything we can to um as trump's

945
01:38:26,801 --> 01:38:34,181
new executive order bans cbdc of technology but we also have um cbdc cbdc type technologies

946
01:38:34,181 --> 01:38:40,521
like XRP being advocated for at the highest levels. These are debates we need to have.

947
01:38:40,941 --> 01:38:46,741
And we need to ensure that the centralized outcome is not the winning outcome. And it does,

948
01:38:47,281 --> 01:38:50,661
you know, we have to fight it ourselves. It's not going to fight itself. You know,

949
01:38:50,721 --> 01:38:54,801
you can take your Bitcoin stack and go out into the mountains or whatever,

950
01:38:55,281 --> 01:38:59,441
and do that thing where you disappear. Or you can engage with these debates,

951
01:38:59,441 --> 01:39:07,121
read these books, talk to your friends and family, vote conscientiously and work within the systems we have to build the systems we want to have.

952
01:39:07,241 --> 01:39:16,001
And so that this is a very realist book. It's I don't think ideologically slanted, but it does present to you, all of us, a choice.

953
01:39:16,261 --> 01:39:25,121
You know, do you want are you willing to work to get the future that you want, even though you think that the technology is inevitable?

954
01:39:25,121 --> 01:39:28,521
And even though it may be in a long enough time frame, what are you going to do today?

955
01:39:28,721 --> 01:39:34,321
Here's all the information about why things suck and why they could unsuck themselves if we're willing to do something about it.

956
01:39:34,361 --> 01:39:35,821
So, yeah, I thought it was an awesome book.

957
01:39:35,821 --> 01:39:44,741
And I do agree with the sentiments you expressed that because I guess you relayed that they came from me is that I do think it's one of the best like top to bottom introductions to Bitcoin to a Bitcoin.

958
01:39:44,741 --> 01:39:55,561
And like if a person is intellectually capable of kind of reading through a 400, 500 page book and they're willing to do that, this is what you hand them, I think.

959
01:39:55,921 --> 01:40:14,281
If they're maybe vaguely of the left or moderate, this has a really good take that's not going to alienate them with a too aggressive Austrian economic scheme, a too aggressive freedom maximalist or anarchist schema for looking at things.

960
01:40:14,281 --> 01:40:19,461
it's really going to give them a sober recounting of what money is kind of historically,

961
01:40:19,621 --> 01:40:24,741
anthropologically, what our monetary system is and where it came from, why it has certain flaws,

962
01:40:25,141 --> 01:40:29,301
both as perceived from the left and the right. And again, from the left and the right,

963
01:40:29,461 --> 01:40:33,501
why we should settle on Bitcoin as a solution. So I'm really happy we read this for sure.

964
01:40:34,081 --> 01:40:40,861
Yep. Broken money. Go get it. It is fantastic. Yeah. Great deal. All right. Well, I guess we will

965
01:40:40,861 --> 01:40:45,781
get together again soon and talk about something new. Right on. Thanks, man. All right. Bye.

966
01:40:48,121 --> 01:40:52,701
Thank you for listening. If you like, please subscribe. Every little bit gets me one tiny

967
01:40:52,701 --> 01:40:57,861
step closer to my ultimate goal of living in a cave. You never have to buy windows or shingles

968
01:40:57,861 --> 01:41:01,801
and there's no lawn to mow. Look it up. Dream big, kids.