Brady Swenson, one of the founders of Swan Bitcoin, released a video.
Actually, Bitcoin Amsterdam released the video because he gave the talk on stage.
And it's under 18 minutes of some of the most condensed Bitcoin time philosophy that we've come across.
We've recently been exploring Bitcoin and the concept of time, having covered Der Gigi's Bitcoin is Time, and also talking about the latter part of Nick Land's book, Zeno Systems, which brings into play the discussion points that Bitcoin has with regard to time.
Brady takes this a step further. He's talking about civilization. He's talking about
the cadence of our lives. He's talking about the quality of our lives and the things that we can
build with time that we no longer seem to have. We seem to be rushing about everywhere. We seem to be
starting things that we don't finish. We seem to be
looking at the world with a shorter point of reference, a bit, a bit farsighted. I think
we can only see the things that are close to us and we can't see what's down the pipe. And part
of that has to do with this age of acceleration of technology that we're in, where change is
happening at a more rapid pace and that rapid pace is accelerating but also part of it happens
to do with the monetary structure that we live under the mechanical clock paired with fiat money
yeah and so we're going to discuss that here today brady's talk at bitcoin amsterdam and uh
We're going to see where it goes.
TikTok, next block, the cadence of civilization by Brady Swenson.
He gave this talk at the Kansas City Bitcoin Summit as well.
I heard it then and I was really struck by it.
You did a good job summarizing kind of its significance.
And for us, too, in the kind of the trajectory of our thinking on Bitcoin, like you mentioned, we read Durjiji's Bitcoin is Time,
where we saw how Bitcoin, it was necessary for Satoshi to give Bitcoin a notion of time
and able to allow money to take on a digital form.
In order for there to be a ledger, there has to be a notion of time
because you have to be able to say which transactions occur after other transactions
and you have to be able to preempt the double spend problem,
which in cyberspace, you can just copy and paste something.
How do you stop that from happening?
Satoshi brings a notion of time into digital space.
He makes Bitcoin as a time chain.
We saw how TikTok next block is this idea that in Der Gigi's essay, Bitcoin is a clock.
It's ticking.
Every block that's added is how it is keeping time by ordering transactions.
And so we looked at Der Gigi's Bitcoin as time.
And as you mentioned, we looked at Land's Zeno systems, and he talks about two things that are really relevant to Brady Swenson's talk.
He mentioned how capital, by its nature, has kind of a cybernetic dynamic where it is constantly accelerating, constantly seeking greater returns.
But there's also this thing that is Bitcoin, and Land talks about it.
He uses a zombie analogy, the thing that it can never die because for it to die, it would need to be laid eternally to rest.
But Bitcoin itself is eternal in the sense that it's self-sustaining outside of human control.
And so you can never fully lay it to rest because then some enterprising soul will stash it.
And then it'll have some value because somebody wants to stash it.
So another person will also want to stash a bit of it and then it's going to resurrect and have some price.
So we're looking, just considering time and Bitcoin, the nature of capital.
And here we get to TikTok next block, the cadence of civilization.
And it was TikTok next block.
Swinson starts this talk off noting that it's a meme or a phrase that he coined in a tweet when he's talking, celebrating the 600,000th block of Bitcoin time, saying TikTok next block, indicating that this thing is going to keep on running.
It's maybe not fail safe, but so far it has been.
And barring something unforeseen, it's going to keep on going.
Tick tock, next block, adding a new block.
And he starts off.
So this is going to tie that notion of timekeeping, the notion of keeping time to the nature of civilization.
That timekeeping defines a civilization, defines how people act in that civilization, defines culture and morality and economics.
And he starts off noting different forms of timekeeping throughout civilization that begins with watching the sky.
Like you look at the movement of the stars.
He notes that the Nile, they could tell when the Nile was going to flood because a certain star was in its end or something like that.
And so people begin to keep time by observing the world around it the way that it changes.
And so the very first notions of time he calls natural time were really just operating in the world, looking at the sky.
And then using that to craft our first calendars, right?
Yeah, it's more natural time is more observational.
Mechanical time is more of a dictate.
Yeah, machine time is what he's going to call it.
So we have natural time and machine time, the two notions of time we're going to get to.
Land's propensity to use a zombie analogy.
We should note, we looked up his favorite movies.
He digs that kind of thing.
But you could also say it's everlasting just in the sense of, you know, you could take a eternal life type of approach to say it as well.
Yeah.
That the land is trying to say that, you know, this zombie analogy that it's just, it can't be killed.
Yeah.
But then there's also the other side of can't be killed also means lives forever.
One of them might be a little more optimistic than the other or at least have a, I don't know, at least have a shinier surface to gaze upon.
And Land explicitly talks about using horror as a form of art to construct concepts, to explain abstract notions to ourselves, that abstraction is fully brought or most fully brought into art through conventions of horror.
And he talks about other types of, you know, the fly, the movie, the fly, the mutation in that movie is a way that form escapes itself. So we can talk about the thing that is being formed with a capital F, what that means, and then mix abstraction with images and come to a better understanding through horror.
And it goes along with human psychology, too, in that Tony Robbins, big fan of saying that change is something that you don't do until the pain of staying the same exceeds the pain of changing.
And so there is, Tim Ferriss talks about this with like a fear setting practice, which is like putting in your mind the consequences of your actions if you continue down that path in order to incite in yourself enough fear to change so that hopefully you don't have to go through that rock bottom.
Hopefully you don't have to go through that, you know, sleeping in a ditch or whatever to make that change.
So fear, fear and horror, which is, you know, it's using fear to generate this emotional response, very useful to affect positive change.
So, yeah, I don't begrudge land one bit for using that as a mechanism.
No, and it's helpful to explain. And bringing us back to where Brady starts here with a natural notion of time, it strikes me too, he doesn't talk about, but there's also the circadian rhythms of the body. We also, we look to nature to observe maybe a more objective sense of time, but we're also born with a sense of time, right?
I mean, maybe that's like pegged to nature, like the sun coming up keys our biological clock into that rhythm.
And so we know when to sleep and when to be wakeful and things like that.
But we do have this notion of natural time as Brady develops here as a sort of humane time, a sort of slow time, a time in which we can do things like build pyramids, projects that take, I imagine, either hundreds of years or aliens.
Yeah, I was going to say four aliens.
Four aliens, right.
Yeah.
I got to say that I heard this great comedian make a great joke about – he's Mexican, by the way, so he's allowed to say this.
Yeah.
He says that Mexicans are proof – no one ever doubts that Mexicans do work because we look at the pyramids of Giza and we're like, we have no idea how those were built.
We have no clue.
But it turns out that there's pyramids in Mexico.
They're even bigger.
And no one questions who built those.
So like, yeah, definitely Mexicans.
That is a funny joke.
Yeah.
Just want to throw that in there for our Mexican brethren.
Yeah.
Timekeeping mechanisms then develop in the form of like to keep natural time like sundials and obelisks to measure like lengthening shadows, things like that.
There's been a moment in Brady's accounting of natural time where things shift.
I really thought this was an interesting part of his talk.
We're talking about natural time.
He then talks about what the Babylonians did.
They, he says something like, brought time into the ledger.
They're the ones that gave us, through their Bay 60 system, which we kind of take for granted,
we get 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds as a way to account for the day.
But that whole notion of making time quantifiable,
that we're talking about this before we watch the talk and we're talking throughout it,
very annoyingly.
If we had been there,
it would have been not fun.
But as we were watching Brady's talk,
we were talking,
and like the first notion
of natural time tied
to the rising of the sun,
the falling of the sun,
the stars,
their movements throughout the year,
it's kind of this fluid time almost.
And it's a longer time.
There's no minute.
There's no second.
Fluid is the word for it.
Yeah.
It's not delineated
into chop, chop, chop, chop.
Yes.
And the Babylonians, though,
chop it for the first time.
Again, they give us
this idea of quantity.
And when quantity enters the picture, time changes.
It's a ledger.
We can account for it and do things.
We can make our day a sort of account book.
We know for this number of minutes or hours, I'll do this thing.
And that's when he talks about monastic life as a sort of regimentation of the day.
They have mechanical clocks and bells ring throughout the day.
And they're able, now we quantify time.
And so that changes spiritual life even a bit.
Maybe before you had solar religions that even worshipped the sun as a deity of God.
God is now more abstract, abstract, and other forms of monotheism.
Spiritualism is different.
And in monastic accounting, the day becomes maybe commodified in a sense and regimented and a thing where you can move the minutes around like dollars or cents, right?
I really liked your analogy of how with time we're able to turn monasteries into somewhat of like a factory of religion where, you know, here's your one bowl of gruel and your 14 Hail Marys and your 25.
You can literally clock in at the beginning of the day.
Yeah, it's like, you know, I just, I'm checking this stuff off as I go through the day, and now I've completed my shift of monking. I'll go monk somewhere else for a bit and rest my monkey.
uh-huh okay but monking is a lot more there is a certain form of spirituality that is enabled by
regimentation of time we also discussed this i went to a silent meditation retreat and time is
kept there was kept there throughout the day by bells gongs ringing and you knew meditation was
over when a gong would ring and if you didn't have that way an external referent to pull you
out pull you out of your meditative space it'll be very difficult to meditate because you wouldn't
have you couldn't say i'm going to sit down for an hour you would sit down meditate and then lose
any external reference you move into interior space it's tough to tell when you're meditating
if you've been there for 10 minutes or 10 hours in a sense because time is different when you're
inside yourself only dilates maybe or maybe it contracts at points.
But that's where, yeah, I brought this up.
That's where I kind of, I think I disagree because I feel like meditation certainly was
around prior.
And I'm sure that people sat cross-legged and closed their eyes and cleared their head.
And I would assume that they just stopped meditating when the job was done.
The job.
the job of meditating or the task or whenever they felt as though they were done.
And I think I understand what you're saying where because meditation is difficult,
that you have that clock and you have that knowing that I am going to sit here until that bell rings,
even though I want to get up, even though I'm not comfortable, even though this does not feel good right now.
And I can see how that would be incentivizing to do that.
But I question whether or not meditation was difficult prior to time.
I wonder if it was.
I bet it's always been difficult.
I don't know.
I mean, prior to the keeping, mechanical keeping of time?
Yeah, I mean, the reason meditation is difficult right now is because we live in this fiat world of the extraction and attention economy.
And I think that it, I was at the network school with a bunch of meditators and some that were, I mean, you know, multiple 11 day retreats per year.
And they were doing this every day.
Mikey would lead meditations every single morning and every single night.
And for him, because he lived that lifestyle, it was never a chore. It was not difficult. And so because he didn't have, like, I'm just saying that sans the distractions of the modern life, I don't think meditation would probably be difficult.
perhaps i it would definitely be less difficult but you have a meditation leader you have somebody
who's charged with keeping time in a sense keeping things in order because one of the most
meditation is about disregarding invasive thoughts redirecting your attention to your breath
to something to sensation of the body something like that one of the most invasive thoughts you
experience is do i need to attend to some other matter because some amount of time has passed
Right. And that's all I'm saying there.
Yeah. But before you have a concept of time and when time is fluid and it's not chopped up, then I think that you're just sitting there and you go, well, I ate and I'm in a safe place.
So that's it. Yeah.
Like, yeah, I don't think you're worried about answering emails or checking your checking Twitter.
Without things to urgently attend to, meditation is more fluid. Maybe to go back to our earliest metaphor, natural time has this fluidity to it because it's not chopped up into pieces by tasks you need to attend to.
So after talking about Babylonians making time quantifiable, Brady kind of moves on, talks about this idea of networked time.
And that's kind of into the modern era now where we have clocks, but every town maybe sets their clock to the noon of that town.
So a town 15 miles over has a slightly different noon, a town 30 miles slightly different.
But network time, then we get the telegraph. We're able to coordinate across vast distances because we can communicate at great speeds and say, no, we're going to go by the time at this observatory and it will communicate outward to others.
So this is, we read quite some time ago, Lynn Alden's Broken Money, and she marks a turning point with the, like kind of the invention of speed.
Speed is kind of not formally invented, but it's innovated when we get the telegraph and that collapses space in a very important way.
Maybe not necessarily so much innovated as realized to be an integral part of commerce because the telegraph separating the speed of commerce from the speed of settlement, which previously had always been harmoniously intertwined.
Yeah. And in Alden's accounting to time or speed was a centralizing force because when you have network time, then you get consolidated time zones. There's not a patchwork of different times. It becomes and then that network becomes global at a certain point.
swenson notes you have atomic clocks you have gps you have the ability to have one the world
becomes one clock or on one sort of time dictated by a mechanism we can all refer to that communicates
to us at the speed of light yeah and it's it's centralizing in a way yeah um and it's beneficial
to humanity and civilization because it enables organization.
I think about the patchwork of different times in different towns.
He notes that at one time there was like at least 144 different times.
I don't know if he was referring to us in the United States or across the world, but
that's a lot.
Yeah.
But it makes me think of like the period of wildcat banks where it was everybody had their own bank and there was a bank here and there was a bank here and there was a bank there and everybody was just doing their own thing and they were disconnected.
And wow, that – so there's good and there's bad to centralization.
The good is that you can do things fast.
The bad is that when it fails, everything fails.
Yeah.
Flip side, on the decentralized Wildcat Bank, the Wildcat Time side is that when one bank fails, not all the rest of them do.
In this town when whatever, Johnny forgets to ring the bell at noon or something like that and everybody's screwed up for the rest of the day, it's just that town and it's just that day.
Yeah.
And one interesting part of Alden account was that time that the telegraph and the centralization of time enables fiat
And it's almost a good story.
It was a story of technological progress before you'd have to carry your gold with you everywhere and commerce could only move at the speed of a horse or whatever.
And after that, and so like when we get the telegraph, gold centralizes in banks and they can communicate quickly amongst themselves.
What you mentioned, though, is you mentioned earlier just about civilization.
And here's a quote from Swinson that kind of moves us in, I think, the next part of his talk and really the overall point of his talk.
new clocks don't just tell time they fundamentally reorganize work coordination and the entire tempo
of civilization so we saw moving from natural time to babylonian quantification of time
to network and centralized time within that dynamic you have different civilizations that
arising and the tempo of life in those civilizations the cadence as swinston says is different for each
of those civilizations um you have natural rhythms then you have mechanical rhythms then you have
ever once you have mechanical rhythm it becomes kind of accelerating this um machines become
faster and communicate the speed of light and so the tempos of civilizations change too yeah you
think about having a, you know, you would have a conversation, you and I would live in different
towns and we would have a conversation whenever you visited my town. And I, you know, interestingly
enough though, you would really make an effort. If you came to my town, you would really make an
effort to come see me because that would be the only time that we could, it wouldn't be like,
oh, I'm in a hurry. You know, I got to get back. Right. And then after that, we got the letters and
Okay, so we could communicate a little faster, speed of a horse, you know, speed of somebody walking on foot to start with and then a horse and then a train.
And then the electric age, the digital age, you know, the speed of the telegraph, the speed of the email.
And I think if you read older books and you read the things that people wrote about each other, it's very clear that there seems to be an inverse relationship between the speed at which you're able to communicate and the depth at which the relationship ultimately can go.
But, you know, you just have deeper relationships because you because that everything goes back to scarcity.
That opportunity to communicate is so much more scarce.
Yeah. And when you wanted to communicate face to face, it was an approximate affair.
You couldn't say, I'll meet you at 335.
You would say, I'll meet you in late afternoon or something or some other way when the sun is at such and such point.
And so like coordination was approximate. And you could imagine, I would imagine, yeah, that would change the nature of the eventual face-to-face contact you would have too because it wouldn't be so regimented. You would arrive maybe 10, 15, half an hour early than the person and you wouldn't worry about that. You would arrive and be there and be like, oh, you know, I have to wait. This is just the way it is. It's approximate.
And you wouldn't know probably that you were 10, 15.
Exactly, yeah.
You would just be like, oh, they're not here yet.
Right.
Another thing when you mention like the proximate nature of it is just like you and I sitting here, we both have energy.
We both are giving off some sort of energy field.
We are both – this used to be woo-woo, but it's not anymore.
It's a very recognized science now that we operate at a certain frequency.
And when you're in proximity with another person, when you're face to face with that person, then you have a far different experience.
There is a sinking, I guess.
There is definitely.
Yeah, breathing.
We probably take on another's breathing.
somebody near you was hyped up and yeah i mean you're going to not only feel maybe the hormones
like the adrenaline or something like that smell that coming out in their sweat but also their
quickened breathing is probably going to quicken your breathing and you need to slow things down
sometimes to be able to communicate yeah and you don't know that when you're writing a letter and
you don't know that when you're maybe a little bit when you're on the phone but you don't really
know that when you're posting on your facebook or stuff but in that biological notion of sinking
time probably very important in the past if someone comes running up because there's a tiger
there you need to sync up very quick on your internal clocks to deal with the tiger so up to
this point to kind of recap where we have where we've gotten so far in the talk first there's
natural time the rhythm of the earth and the sky sundials and calendars um patient cyclical time
very humane in a sense because it's very human human scale um cyclical in the sense that it's
like tide to seasons and tides and the stars as they go around the earth,
tide to nature.
That's natural time.
And then machine time, we saw the advent of that
so far in the progression of this talk.
Machine time, the rhythm of industry and computation, too.
Chronometers, atomic clocks, the tempo is very precise.
The Babylonians chop it up, and now we've chopped it up even more
and measured it.
And we saw, too, that machine time accelerates with technology.
Natural time is pegged at nature, and it's human in that sense.
Machine time can escape the human.
I think about another thing that Lan said that I thought was incredibly fascinating.
There's more time at the bottom.
When you're a machine, if you can kind of compute more and more quickly, then you can slow time down because you can get more done in that same amount of time.
And there's more time at the bottom is just to say once you begin to do 40,000 computations a second or 60,000, 100,000, whatever that means, then you move more towards the bottom of like the very bottom of time, like Lan says, is like the time it takes a photon to move a Planck's length or something like that.
And you can imagine if you can approach thinking at that time, it's vastly accelerated for humans because we can't approach that even if machines can.
They can move towards the bottom and we can't.
We're stuck.
This is where we start to make consistently one of the most fatal errors of humans, which is to believe that if some is good, more is better.
Which is to say that if I can do this amount of work in two hours and you can do it in one hour and the work is equivalent, then you're better.
But that's not better.
Only better is better.
And so we stop looking at how to improve and innovate, and we only focus on the iteration, which is, I think, why that's, you know, I'm certainly not alone in saying this.
And I'm certainly it wasn't an original idea of mine, just an observation that I had from reading and listening to other people.
But the 20th century and in a lot of ways, most of the 21st as well, has been lacking in innovation and has been almost wholly defined by iteration.
You know, the car was invented 125 years ago or so, and we still got cars, four wheels and a steering wheel.
Yeah. Do we, though? We have a thing that is almost unrecognizable compared to the early car, I would say.
It's better, but it's not different. It's just innovated. Or, sorry, it's just iterated.
They're so vastly different.
But no, they're not different. They're the exact same thing. There's four wheels, there's an engine, there's doors, there's windows, there's radio.
You live a different life if you have a car.
You have a better radio, you have a more comfortable seat, you have a faster car, it's more safe. But nothing about it is teleportation.
It's teleportation.
But it's moving towards.
And nothing about it is – it's not a flying car.
But it's – flying cars are less impressive than autonomous cars.
I disagree.
To talk about Jonathan – like we talked – not Jonathan Kirkwoods.
It was Booth, right?
Like once you know fully autonomous cars, then the nature of life changes because you can let your car out as part of a taxi fleet when you're not using it.
It can drive around.
We only need one car for every five households.
Things like that.
A fully autonomous car is nothing more than a horse that's trained better than the rider.
It's just the horse that knows where to go.
You know, it's not the next step.
Maybe if we had horses like that, that would be a phenomenal innovation on horses, too.
I mean, we do have horses like that.
A horse that can, like—
Little pony rides that you go on.
Let it out at a stable at night.
It runs around, helps somebody else, comes back, powers your house.
when your personal solar grid in your house is down,
use its backup battery.
But in any case, natural time, machine time,
there's this third notion of time that Cody,
that Brady brings into this.
Bridging nature and machine, that's Bitcoin.
So that's, DurrGG kind of has this notion
of creating time in digital space.
And then Brady notes that you're bringing nature into the digital realm through proof of work. He calls it, it's a good metaphor, a sundial in cyberspace. The sundial is nature. That's powered by the sun, right?
cyberspace is obviously a machine technological innovation so a sundial in cyberspace bitcoin
weds nature and machine to bridge the two notions of time together in the form of tick tock next
block powered by computation which is work which is time and energy real world energy
making machine time something that doesn't constantly accelerate
but is pegged to the 10 minutes that is legible to humans.
Nothing to add.
Yeah.
Natural time keeps us human.
Machine time drives us forward.
Bitcoin time bridges the two.
So if clocks define our temporal landscape,
Again, the point of Brady's talk is to get us to think about what this means for the cadence of civilization. If the nature of the clock of a particular civilization defines the cadence of life, the tempo of life, what does that mean for life when Bitcoin bridges the two? How does life change when the tempo changes?
Yeah, so we can bring in a little land here, I think. If natural time keeps us human and machine time pushes us forward, Bitcoin time pushes us forward, Bitcoin bridging the two, well, what should that mean?
And that should mean if we take Nick Land at his theory and we accept that Bitcoin is the escape valve through which AI and robotics will take capitalism into autonomous capital and do all the work.
so bitcoin ai and robotics will do all the work to push us forward and then we should be able to
return to human time we should be able to return to natural time yeah one would hope yeah i i this
wasn't necessary i almost saw this as a contradiction in land or something that land needed to resolve
that brady's bringing to the forefront and that you know so land is describing a notion of capital
as acceleration, as there's a dynamic in it
where it's always moving into the future
at an accelerating rate.
Land defines it in the terms of intelligence optimization,
I think, with AI being the form that capital
will kind of push towards.
The form of intelligence.
Yeah, but in any case, capital accelerating,
but then even on Land's notion,
Bitcoin as a zombie, as an eternal thing, there's a slowness to that even in land's accounting for what Bitcoin is.
So if capital accelerates, but Bitcoin does not, if it stays in the same, what does that do to how those two mix accelerationism and the slowness of Bitcoin?
I think that's kind of what Brady is talking about here.
I think we need to distinguish what accelerationism is because it's not the capital being useful, I think, or capital perfecting itself is kind of, I think, what Land is talking about when he talks about acceleration.
and i think that can coexist with the idea of bitcoin being unchanged because bitcoin is just
part of the thing that makes that capital work and when he talks about perfecting
you know autonomous capital well if you perfect something then that means that the components of
it would be unchanged right so or that it's constantly improving on itself i don't know
that there's perfection but there's like an asymptotic i mean perfection means you're not
going to change anything if you arrive at a perfect state yeah don't change a thing right
literally what people say yeah i don't think i think accelerationism is not about perfection but
about constant improvement at an ever-increasing rate yeah and yeah an asymptotic yeah yeah um but
In any case, so acceleration, Brady would agree, and I think Lamb would agree too, maybe that acceleration, the fiat monetary system has a relationship to acceleration.
That it is instant, untethered digital creation.
It can increase just as fast.
And maybe that's kind of what Booth is talking about, that that's why it kind of counters deflation with technology because it keeps on bringing the future into the present through printing more money.
And that must be why time feels like it's passing so fast because we're not just living this moment.
We're living all of the future time that we've pulled into the present through death.
Right.
And so we're living the next 30 years at – or in the case of a government debt, you know, the next 300 years at any given second.
And so that would make sense for why we feel as though time passes faster and faster as we move further about towards the end of yet another fiat experiment.
Yeah.
The fiat experiment's interesting because it's one of those experiments that people – you brought up the other day the replication crisis.
I think that's what it's called.
Within the humanity.
Or not within science.
Within science.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, science is science.
Science just studies stuff.
I mean, study your Diet Coke.
It can study this table.
It can study the air.
It can also study fiat.
And there's no replication problem with fiat experiments.
They all turn out the same way.
Yeah.
They all end and they all go to hell and the money is no longer worthless and maybe it's kept around in a museum or something like that.
Yeah. So in this, how this kind of catches on to us, the instability of accelerating fiat as it keeps pace with technology is something the human experience of that Brady calls quiet coercion.
Yeah, that's the erosion of our human scale of time as we see machine time accelerating and money accelerating with us, with it, and money being the way that we try to, like, what, you know, freeze time into units so that we can capture value in them and store them.
and so is that that that combination is unstable essentially fiat money and a machine that the
machine time that keeps on accelerating giving way to the quiet coercion that operates on all of us
when i'm just to get into it like what this is what the kind of the core of brady's talk the
cadence of civilization is a quiet coercion on us right now how we no longer have long-term projects
We no longer do things to prepare for the future.
Time, pressing future time into the present because capital cannot rest.
Yeah.
And it can't rest because if it were to rest, then it would disintegrate.
It would fall apart.
Yeah.
Because if you let your capital, which is decaying at a rate of 12% a year, if you let it sit, then in a decade you have effectively nothing.
Yeah.
I mean, you've lost 70, about 60, 70%.
So, yeah, so you can't rest, which forces you to continually chase short-term profits,
which I've said on here before, that pushes you in the direction of iteration and away from innovation because innovation is unknown.
We don't know how long it's going to take to figure out teleportation.
We do know it's going to be better than a car.
but you can't put a quarterly earnings report on that.
And so what do we do is we just keep making a better car
because you can put a quarterly earnings report on that.
And so we get stuck in this, one of Elon's rules is,
you know, a good engineer should never optimize something that shouldn't exist.
And he says the most common mistake that all engineers make
is to optimize something that shouldn't exist.
And there's a lot of technologies that we have around today
that probably shouldn't exist
because we stopped thinking about
how to do things differently
and we only thought about how to do them better.
Quicker, yeah.
Things became disposable.
Instead of repairing, you just got rid of.
The plastic generation.
Plastic furniture, yeah, things like that.
And I really like the terms that Brady uses throughout this.
Quiet coercion is good.
Restless capital, too.
Like, that's the notion of capital we have.
Restless capital.
It can't sit still.
It's agitating because it's melting.
It's the ice cube.
It's got to keep on moving or else it's going to melt away.
Something like that.
It's tweaking.
It needs another hit, man.
Another stim, another Keynesian stimulus.
Just give me a little, just a little stimmy.
Just a little stimmy.
So you have restless capital, but Bitcoin bridges and changes because Bitcoin can sit still.
You don have to find the next form of capital to improve on your returns You can sit still You can put your money into Bitcoin hold the Bitcoin and then sit still and do something else It not everybody an investor
everybody's finding the next meme coin or meme stock
or trying to prophesy the next trend.
You don't have to do that.
You can dedicate your mental energy,
your physical time to something else.
Put your money in Bitcoin, let it sit,
and do something else.
The capital sits still.
Yeah, it gives you opportunity to innovate because you have a new hurdle rate and your hurdle rate is now Bitcoin instead of cash or fiat. And the reason why fiat is restless is because its hurdle rate is much lower than the hurdle rate of other things.
real estate, collectibles, wine, horses, racehorses, you know, fancy cars, whatever.
These things that because they do have some scarcity or at least relative scarcity, they
can, until the bubble bursts on them, they can outperform and therefore have a higher
hurdle rate than the fiat.
But because there's nothing more scarce than Bitcoin, it just inevitably will have a higher hurdle rate.
And therefore, you just won't do things unless they're worth doing.
Yes.
Yeah.
The end result of Rust is Capital is you move towards speed and short-termism.
Yeah.
The instant becomes the default expectation.
And this is, we were talking about this before, too.
this is the cadence of civilization point this is that there's a psychological result that comes
from our time keeping mechanism if we keep keep time according to the pace of technology and
restless capital then it socializes impatience yeah i love that term yeah a lot is impatient
why do you love that term because it's a more clever way of saying instant gratification and
I think it more accurately explains the phenomenon that we're experiencing because instant gratification doesn't necessarily give me the impression that it applies to everyone, but socialized impatience, that does.
That explains why we all have the same kind of undercurrent of anxiety.
We all have the same impatience.
We all have the same lack of ability to focus on long-term projects and accelerating it getting worse and forgetting that we actually, if you're our age, that you actually did grow up in a world that didn't have that, at least nowhere near to the extent that we do today.
um and so yeah that's i i just i i've never heard anybody use that term so tiktok next block and
socialized impatience yeah and socialized impatience too as we were talking about before
it also is a humane way to describe it because um it makes it general and acknowledges that
to a certain extent it's outside of our control if people can you can feel bad if you think that
It's my fault, wholly my fault, that I can't pay attention.
I can't sit still.
I can't plan for the future.
And, of course, we should retain personal agency with regard to that.
We can plan for the future regardless of the tempo of civilization.
But it's also good to note that, no, this is a more general problem.
We're all dealing with it.
It is due to—
It's environmental.
Yeah.
It's the science of habit formation says that if you want to change a habit, that you'll—
You know, you'll die trying to change it in the face of living in the same environment that you created that habit.
And so for that reason, when you serve time in a penitentiary and they release you, they say, don't go home because home is what got you here.
But whatever home was, go find a different one.
You know, when you get out of treatment, if you're in like alcohol or drug treatment, don't go back to your friends because those are the friends that got you here.
Yeah.
You have to remove those stimuli from your environment because it's not a question of willpower. It's a question of environmental availability. And if it's there, you're going to use it and you're going to become subject to it.
especially in this age when the technology that we use is truly weaponized in order to capture
attention, in order to drive you to more of that short-term gratification, because that is valuable
short-term for the companies that are doing it. I think one of the things we'll see when we look
back on this age 20 to 30 years from now hopefully we're completely out of this by now and i think
we're moving you see signs of that you see signs of people moving away from that and voluntarily
disengaging from these technologies that have just ravished their ability to focus and their ability
to form deep relationships and do things but yeah i think we're going to look back at a lot of these
behemoth companies, Netflix and TikTok and Facebook.
And we're going to say, whoa, not quite sure how much good they did for us.
Yeah.
This restless capital then socializing impatience and these technological trends
that, I mean, you give name to them in the form of companies,
what they're inhibiting or preventing are very practical things, very real things.
Things like, Brady notes, mastering a skill, building a family, saving, pursuing a long-term project.
Apprenticeship.
Apprenticeship, yeah, childhood topsoil.
We were talking about that.
It's such a great analogy because topsoil, if you don't have the right agricultural practices,
if you cut down all the trees, something like that,
you can lose the topsoil in one season that took generations to accumulate.
But it's fertility.
Yeah.
It's such a great analogy because we live in an extraction economy.
Yes.
Where we're extracting.
You need to extract because capital is restless.
You need to get it now.
You have to.
Yeah.
And because of the way now it's changing,
regenerative practices are becoming much more popular.
and I did my graduate work on some of those practices
and they truly are incredible,
but agriculture is itself an extractive process.
What you do is you have land
and you are extracting water and minerals
in water, minerals and nutrients
in the form of whatever crop that you're taking off of it.
And so as we have accelerated our desire
to maximize yield. And we have to maximize yield because the prices haven't changed. You know,
wheat is effectively the same price per bushel today as it was 60 years ago. So you have to
maximize the yield because all of your inputs have gone up, your fertilizer and your land and
your diesel and your tractor, all of these things, they've all accelerated. And so what we end up
doing is every single year we take off all of these things and then we go buy them in a different
form our nitrogen our phosphorus or our um potassium and our micronutrients and we put
them back off and then we plant we take them off again and we yeah and so we don't give the soil a
chance to heal itself yeah you know and we also we take more than we take more than it can give us
and retain health yes yeah um and he mentions forest here too this is maybe not what he was
getting at but we're talking about this also before before we hit record um one of the most
beautiful things i think is when an older person plants a tree yeah because they're making a
definite statement that it's worth engaging in a long-term project that they're not going to see
the fruits of which is so like it's heretical to our to our culture now that you would do anything
other than harvest everything from the future for yourself to see somebody plant a tree because they
think two you know 20 years 30 years someone in their 80s plants a tree they're not going to see
that um but doing that is such a it's such a beautiful statement of there are values that
the tempo the cadence of our civilization is not going to justify if you're not doing it for the
carbon credit you're doing it for some sort of credit to accrue to the future yeah yeah the
the tree moving economy has exploded you know you move to a new place and well i want some trees
I'm not going to wait 15 years.
I'm just going to buy something.
I need it now. I need instant gratification.
I need nature to conform to
the tempo that we're imposing on it
instead of us conforming
vice versa. And you're taking somebody else's
proof of work and calling it your own.
Yeah.
And then
at this point, we kind of talked about this before,
Brady does talk about
Bitcoin, how it does
bridge Satoshi solving the problem
of machine time.
Durjiji talked about this in Bitcoin is time.
Bitcoin being a time chain,
Bitcoin being originally conceived
as a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server.
Like the notion of time was always in the forefront
of what needed to happen with Bitcoin.
And so Bitcoin, Brady notes, reprices time.
It's hopefully going to get us back.
If capital is not restless,
if it can sit still to where we do want to plant a tree
because we have the time to.
We're not infatuated with doing something else with our time
in order to preserve our capital.
We have our capital, and we can act ethically
and act towards a future that is not ours
because we're not trying to steal it through debt, I guess.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, if...
If you have that lower time preference and you're looking at the future and not only looking at the future, but you're just believing that you have a future.
Yeah.
So many people today don't genuinely don't believe that they have a future.
You're never going to have a house.
You're never going to have a job that's going to pay you enough to do what to have with the previous generation had.
Yeah.
Yep.
Never going to have a family.
Never going to have.
Exactly.
You know, and so if you're not going to have those things, then why?
Why do that?
You know, why?
why clean your gutters? Why, why paint your house? Why, why plant a tree? Why eat healthy?
Why go to sleep at a good time? Why do any of these things? Because you don't foresee a future.
And I think for anybody who feels that way, go listen to Jeff Booth's talk and you'll get some
optimism for the future. Um, or go listen to Michael Saylor talk or, or Jack Maulers or somebody
like that but you know nobody nobody is um nobody deep into bitcoin is we we note this all the time
like you go to a bitcoin conference you hang out with bitcoiners they're the healthiest happiest
people i've ever seen in my entire life except when the price action's bad yeah but regardless
they're you know they're they're fit they're making babies they're making plans they're doing
big things yeah one of the parts here i wanted to also kind of highlight was the notion of
mastering a skill because that notion is also being robbed from us through at least for me
this the psychological effect of contemplating the acceleration of ai and its capacities i i learned
Spanish six, seven years ago. And it was so delightful to do. But my time frame was different
then. I didn't have the notion that all language capacity is going to be taken over by AI. It seemed
worth doing at the time. I knew I was going to have to invest a couple years, you know, some
amount of time into doing it. And then I, in the past couple years, tried to learn French. And,
you know, it's a little bit more difficult. But the real difficulty was the psychological
realization or feeling that what's the worth of this i i needed to nominate it to myself in some
sort of monetary worth first because of the notion of restless capital we need to be doing things that
um i don't have the capital in the bank maximizing your earning potential in the moment yeah in the
moment in the moment right doing everything in the moment to maximize value because you don't
conceive of value being preserved um but being able to have the ability to still like bitcoin
does and to take that time to master a skill knowing that you don't need to denominate it
in the instant it can be something that's goes beyond that yeah this is a huge question because
it takes us back i really think it takes us back to childhood and doing things for the sake of doing
things that's what a child does yeah they do things just because they enjoy them um and they're
They don't care that they're not the best at it.
They delight when they get better.
They experience, you know, the growth in incremental steps that we are often looking for some monumental improvement in order to justify our continued expenditure of time and capital and calories and such towards something.
So I think this is the huge existential question of our time, which is when you don't have to do anything, what will you choose to do?
And do you want to just try to do everything shallow?
Do you want to just try to do everything poorly and just experience everything?
Or do you want to truly dig in on just a couple things and make those choices that, you know, as Thomas Sowell says, there are no trade-offs or there are no choices in life, only trade-offs.
You're making these trade-offs.
Yeah. So.
No, and that notion that childhood is devoured by the cadence of civilization.
It's interesting, too, because childhood for the primate that we are is this extended biological stage of dependence.
Yeah.
And it is something that you can't biologically shorten.
And so when we try to shorten it because we feel we need to, because the tempo of civilization is picking up, then childhood disappears.
And maybe one way to put it is in an inadequate way, but we'll begin to quantify childhood even or think about how it can be monetized or how we can monetize the experiences of childhood.
um maybe this isn't a perfect analogy to it but like with the the only fans thing when you're in
when someone's in the bloom of their young beauty now the thought is how can i make this into capital
right how can i sell this instead of thinking no my sexuality is part of a long-term project of
starting a family that has a value that i don't need to pull all that value from the future and
cash out while I'm beautiful or something like that.
Yeah.
You can instead deploy it in a natural rhythm.
Yeah.
Enjoying that beauty for what it is as opposed to commoditizing and commercializing it and,
and yeah,
extracting it in that sense.
Yeah.
You think about like,
you know,
you've got an eight year old and they're really interested in gymnastics and they're getting
better and better.
And,
And, you know, and we would probably do this out of the goodness of our heart.
We'd be, well, you know, she's really good.
Let's start a TikTok account and let's show the world, you know, she's fascinating.
And then it becomes less about the craft and more about the views or it becomes more about optimizing the craft for the views.
Yeah.
For the attention.
Yeah.
Um, when, you know, like the beauty of, the beauty of watching somebody play a sport is that you see, you see the joy on their face when they play that sport and you recognize that they're doing this because they love it.
Music's the same way.
of course of course there's a lot of things like this you know law and baking and painting and
fixing cars and all of these things like there are people that you talk to them about why they
do what they do and they say well you know i do it because i like it i do it because i would do it
if nobody paid me because i enjoy it so yeah and that's words and interesting one this is also an
imperfect analogy but um i was watching a football game and there's this fellow is archie manning or
archman arch manning so he's making something like six million dollars right as a college athlete
and so instead of and this isn't to blame him or even to say that it's not the right thing to do
given the current system because somebody was making the money before exactly and now at least
giving it to maybe the college athletes but it's also something where you now watch a college game
and you're not watching like the development of virtue of the future generation by participating
in a difficult activity under stress through teamwork you're watching somebody who is like
yeah they're doing a job this is a job that he has and he's making a bunch of money and that's
you know it's part of the economy so yeah everything becomes the babylonians the babylonians
screwed us all over by quantifying time and it's only you know maybe a matter of time since then
that we arrived at the current moment where until we pull back from that quantification slow it down
um that we're gonna we we're gonna end up where we are yeah yeah and it's uh
it has an effect on the integrity and again like i completely resonate with what you say Like this is not judging the athletes or anything I you know in this specific example the NCAA makes billions of dollars off of students
And until this point, had really not given them hardly anything in return.
Not even an education given the college system.
Yeah, that's the thing.
It used to be that maybe you got an education.
Now you don't even get an education.
You just get a diploma.
And that's, those are two different things.
But you see the end of the football season, which we're, which we're in.
You're going to have conference championship games and you're going to have bowl games or the college football championship.
And what you're going to see now is you're going to see a ton of those kids not playing.
They're just going to voluntarily remove themselves because their season, as far as they're concerned, is over.
Because they put in their time.
they got paid and uh any further would risk injury and and stuff like that and so you know this used
to not be so much a problem it used to be oh you'd have you know maybe two or three guys that
might go really really high in the draft that were sitting out and even that was super controversial
but now it's like i think k-state played alabama a couple years ago or like right after the nil
came i'm not sure if this is right but whoever they played and the other team had like 20 some
guys sitting out they're like yeah we're good you know and so yeah it does put in a price tag on
things does kind of solely the integrity of it for sure yeah and so you mentioned music too you
were going there and that's where um brady also goes says culture thickens when time slows when
you bridge natural and machine time through something like bitcoin through capital that
and sit still culture thickens you get the return of arts festival and music that can maybe
be tied a lot so much of our entertainment is um a representation of instant gratification
even in the aesthetics of it there's a certain aesthetics to fiat which is real flashy and sexy
and fast and it's different than um maybe the aesthetics of something like bitcoin that is not
about showy displays of wealth conspicuous consumption but almost about conspicuous saving
bitcoin you know like what we allowed is oh my gosh you saved up and got a whole bitcoin through
hours of effort through days and years of of meticulous saving like that's the aesthetics
But you think about a modern music concert, some big name, Taylor Swift or Pink or Lady Gaga or somebody like that, they may have a half dozen, a dozen costume changes during a concert.
Only way to keep our attention.
Right?
Yeah.
But previously, you know, it's like those, the one thing that that artist wore became iconic.
Yeah.
Like, you know, Johnny Cash, the man in black.
So I want to get your thoughts on this.
So short form content is what everybody's moving to because that's what the attention is.
That's how you get your thing out there.
And you're doing that now too with your music.
Trying, yeah.
on tiktok like you've um done some really interesting things in the past with your music
when you were up in washington you came at music through community going to an open mic and trying
to foster amongst the people there a notion that we're going to come back every one night a week
and we're all going to play a song improve and make this a communal effort whereas now um you know
what you have to do is if you want to get the views is put together some sort of short form
content. Yeah. Although I did just recently discover TikTok studio, which means that now
I'm aware that I can just do live and go like there's, you know, little people that they'll
play four hours. Yeah. And now, and, and that, what I noticed in there, I, I scrolled through a
couple and I was reading some of the comments and what you have are repeat offenders. You have
people that are coming back to the same person. They're thickening that relationship. They're
forging a relationship. And so, um, yeah, that's, that's the direction that I think is far more
valuable than, you know, fighting, fighting, what do they call it? The 200 view jail that
put you in. 200 views is not bad. I know, man, we were on a fourth tier of podcast. I'm not
and argue 200 views.
That's right.
We're three and a half.
We're in a third and a half tier.
We're trying to step up higher.
That's right.
Yeah, lifting the leg.
But it is, I do think like 200 views.
Imagine yourself sitting in a room.
There's 200 people that around the world
you think something you do is of value.
That's good enough.
Yeah.
And if you don't have to monetize
and quantify in that way, it is enough.
It is enough to talk to 200 people.
I've played a lot of shows
for less than 10 people.
yeah um so slower time dickens culture it also brady says has an effect on our morality we've
kind of touched on that throughout this planting a tree um conscience requires time you need a
spacious time horizon brady sweat says to act ethically if you have low time preference i mean
our prisons are full of people with is it low or high time preference i always high time preference
Yeah, they want the marshmallow now, the famous marshmallow experiment. Put a kid in a room, say, I'm going to leave the room. There's a marshmallow here. If you don't eat it, when I come back, I'll give you two marshmallows.
You know, a certain subset of population just gobbles up the marshmallow and some are able to gut it out for two marshmallows.
And that's kind of really the wellspring of ethics is the ability to wait for later value and postpone.
And it becomes even abstract when the value becomes something that a future generation is going to have.
The two marshmallows is something my child is going to have or my grandchildren.
It's not even something I'm going to eat.
Yeah, I like a good marshmallow that's been left out for a while.
Marshmallows are gross.
No one actually wants marshmallows.
This is obviously an old experiment when kids had nothing better than marshmallows.
Peeps, man.
Not even peeps.
It's an Easter tradition.
Yeah, that's the only reason anybody gets it.
You got to have one to remind yourself of how disgusting they are.
And then you come back next year.
You have the cookie dough, caramel, just monstrous.
Oh, the Cadbury egg?
Whatever.
Just like the concoctions they make nowadays that are heroin and sugar form.
Yes.
I learned today that heroin was created as an alternative to get people off of methamphetamine addiction.
So then you make something to get people off heroin and you just keep on going deeper into the hole.
It was advertised as a way to get you off of amphetamines and also a cough suppressant.
Wow.
Yeah, dual acting agent.
I guess you can't cough when your vocal cords are so relaxed that they're like honey.
Nice.
Yeah.
So maybe we become more moral to when Bitcoin bridges natural and machine time, capital is not restless, and we can act for a future that we believe will actually someday come instead of collapsing that future into the moment.
I think we have.
I think, I mean, I can't imagine.
What have we done now?
So we've done 50-some podcasts.
So we've done well over 100 hours of recorded content.
And then for every hour that we record, we probably spend five to ten at least.
Easily.
The Zeno systems, man, I read that for like three weeks, putting in two hours a day, not putting in, enjoying it and enriching myself.
But a lot of time goes into each of these.
So figure 2,000 hours.
So we put in like a work year worth of work on this in less than or in right out of year.
Yeah.
And I just can't imagine, I can't imagine doing that with something that didn't, it didn't yield fruit, you know.
And the fruit is that we've talked about this, like, yeah, we're a fourth year podcast.
Thanks you guys for listening, both of you.
We really appreciate it.
We're working on the lighting.
We're working on the sound.
We're going to make it better.
There's nothing we can do.
about how we look.
That's right.
And we keep trying.
We're setting hard caps.
Grant keeps asking me to make him more handsome.
And I'm like, man.
Work with it.
Boy, you put so much lipstick on a pig, man.
That's right.
But whether or not this moves up and gets to be a bigger podcast,
we're going to continue having these conversations
because this is what's enjoyable.
Yes.
This is the part that's enjoyable.
It was always the goal.
The learning was enjoyable.
And it gives you a sense of peace as you walk around during the day.
And it gives you a sense of purpose.
And knowing that if no one listens to this, we still had a good conversation.
We shared space with each other.
I don't like the phrase share space, but continue.
All right.
It's such a hokey phrase.
It is a hokey phrase.
What do you want to say?
We sat in the same room and didn't.
We sat in the same room and had a conversation.
We weren't staring at a screen.
An extended conversation without interruptions.
Yeah.
We held a thought.
We did.
You've talked about this a lot, a lot, you know, the idea of a 10 minute thought.
That's one of the cool things about TikTok next block too is just 10 minutes is such a good time frame for an extended mental concoction too.
Like all of our thoughts, you know, it's like 10, what, seven or 10 seconds is the attention span, right?
And something like that.
And then if you can hold a thought for 10 minutes, what a cathedral of a thought you can build because you can layer it.
You can add to it.
You can do interesting things, make it intricate and beautiful.
Whereas if you move from, I mean, that's the true horror of short form content is you don't remember any of the various things you've seen.
Even if you have while you're watching it, the sensation of experience, it is not experience because it's gone.
It's like it's a void.
yeah and the terrifying thing if you you ever like so i would sometimes get on youtube shorts
yeah and i would look at those and then i would be like oh wait there was a podcast i was listening
to on youtube i don't want to go back and find it so i go into my history and i start scrolling
through i'm like oh you know it was just like an hour ago i was watching that podcast and it's like
you went through like 300 shorts yeah in and you're like all i did was poop you know
wasn't that much no the typical time for a bowel movement has gone up exponentially too because we
can put so much content into we can't even defecate without the crutch of a cell phone there you sit
down without a cell phone and there's like this existential horror of like what am i going to do
for the next minute and a half yeah like i'm left alone with my thoughts i for one am a fan of more
time on the pot but yeah it's just because i enjoy it but it's not time it's not time you enjoy this
This is true.
It's timed, again, that is 10 minutes, but it passes as if it's 10 seconds.
And I would say that, you know, like Elon's stated goal with X is to make it, like, enjoyable time or valuable time.
And even if they are making an honest effort in moving in that direction, I think we've seen that it's just damn near impossible.
It doesn't feel better to me.
As Twitter has gotten worse, I've enjoyed it more because it's almost like you look at it for a while and you're like, I can't.
Yeah, I'm done.
It's like as Twitter gets worse, it's better.
I think it's part of Elon's long game to like create something that seems enjoyable and valuable.
But when you do it, you're not going to get stuck in it.
So like I can't.
I can't.
There is that.
I will say that there is a genuine feeling now of and I think X is the only social media platform that I would say this about.
but you're absolutely right in that you get on it and you're like in about like five minutes you're
like i gotta do something yeah i'm it's not this like three hour two hour 45 minute thing
you're like you you see like one thing and then you're like nope the rest of this is shit
i'm out yeah so to put a point on it or to conclude at least with brady's talk here
Bitcoin won't build utopia, but maybe it will eliminate the quiet coercion.
So, I mean, he does note that it's easy to get your expectations up or to talk about Bitcoin fixes this as if it fixes this.
It does it. It maybe gives us the opportunity to fix ourselves.
It gives us the, you know, opportunity to help de-socialize ourselves from a cadence of civilization that is unsustainable.
But the work is still our work.
Yeah, it's a technology.
It's no different than any other technology.
In the right hands, it's a tool.
In the wrong hands, it's a weapon.
And the wrong hands can always be used against the person wielding it.
You know, so like you can always weaponize it against yourself.
Yep.
You can weaponize Bitcoin by checking price action every 45 minutes.
Yeah.
Freaking out about every tiny little FUD thing that comes out.
I mean, do you understand that we only check the price action because we have a notion of fiat that we're checking it against?
So hopefully that kind of declines as one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin.
Yeah.
It takes a lot of hearing that to finally kind of be like, oh, yeah, you're right.
It is useless for me to check what this dollar thing is.
But as an ironic point to this, in the middle of Brady's talk through No Fall to the Zone.
Big dual.
Dual bits.
You see at least the online video, there's an advertisement for dual bits.
I have no, there's nothing wrong with, this isn't something about gambling.
gambling being a vice, whatever.
But it's, you know,
there's an advertisement for something
which is all about gambling
on the price action of Bitcoin.
So it's like the most fiat-minded
Bitcoin-related activity
you could think to do
in the middle of this beautiful discourse
about slowing the cadence of civilization down
and returning us to a more humane cadence.
There's also like,
but you can gamble with Bitcoin.
You can still gamble.
There's always going to be that.
Tools and weapons, man.
That's right.
You know, so.
I can figure it out.
Well, that brings us to the end of at least my notes on Brady's talk.
Did you have any other sentiments, thoughts?
We're going to link the video when we release this.
And I'll put it at the end here.
So it'll be right after we get done talking.
But it's well worth listening to.
Yeah.
You don't have to want it.
It's a guy on stage.
You know, he's a guy just like any other guy.
He's good looking guys. Nice. Whatever. But I listened to it without watching it a number of times. And it's dense. It's thoughtful. It's philosophical. It's deep.
He's put a lot of effort into the words that he chooses to describe this and the myriad of avenues that he's trying to go down in order to make a complete circuit of what he wants to cover.
Morals and productivity and family and anxiety, all these things.
So, yeah, it did a great job. Like it, it doesn't have a ton of views on there, which is a shame because it's very good. I mean, we decided to do this because we felt, I think you tell me if you think I'm wrong. We felt that this was a continuation and perhaps a, perhaps additive to DirGigi and Zeno systems and the other concepts of Bitcoin time that we've, that we've learned about.
This is, you know, standing on the shoulders of some giants and seeing further.
Yeah. So listen to our discussion of Bitcoin is time by Duragigi. Read the essay. Listen to our discussion on Xenosystems.
It's the third one.
The third one is we talk about land's conception of time and also Bitcoin as a zombie, more so as an eternal thing, which implicates time.
But yeah, I think maybe to sum up, Lang gives kind of a philosophical taxonomy of notions of time or a description of the progression of philosophizing on time.
This is kind of like a quick popular summary maybe, but we maybe begin with Plato having this absolute idea of time.
Time is a container in which things occur.
Time is a separate thing.
And then we get an Aristotelian notion of time.
This is where Bitcoin is time is operating in this realm where time is a relation between objects in the world.
It's like a temporal relation.
Time is not a separate absolute thing.
Time is a measure of entropy.
It's the arrow of time.
The way that physical things move, we can then describe them in temporal language.
So there's the platonic absolute notion time is a separate thing.
the aristotelian notion of time being eminent to the movement of parts of a thing like a clock
ticking um there is then Kant after that where time becomes the limit beyond which we cannot
experience it's a condition of our experience and then land builds on that to say yes time is a limit
And therefore, the ultimate philosophizing, the primordial philosophy that occurs now is thinking about time because you can, as I'm interpreting land, you can only think about it. You can only speculate as to the operation of time because it's otherwise not tractable in any sort of way.
It is the limit of our understanding. So to go beyond it is to go beyond understanding. And that's valuable in Land's conception. Land conceiving a philosophy as an initiation into thought. It's something to get us thinking. And I just see that that's what Brady's doing here. He's getting us to think.
He's talking about kind of our experience of time, you might say.
You might say pretentiously the phenomenology of time, this quiet coercion, the way the time operates on us when it's very fast, how that affects our lives.
And so I do think that Brady's talk on time gives us a new angle for philosophizing and thinking about time.
And so it's just very interesting.
Gives hope.
What's that?
Gives hope.
Gives hope it does.
Yeah.
Bitcoin is hope.
Bitcoin is hope. All right. That's great. Thanks, man.
Thank you guys for listening. Appreciate it. Have a good one.