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some essays from. Ben is the CEO of ReElement Technologies Africa and is a founding partner
of Bridger Solutions, an Africa-focused Bitcoin mining company, and has also been a diplomat
in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. And all of that gave this article just a really
interesting take on Bitcoin that Lucas and I hadn't seen elsewhere. So we're really happy
to have Ben here today to go a little bit deeper in some of the themes in the essay.
So did I get your, that was the bio you had in this, Ben.
Is that still what you're doing?
Are you still with ReElement and Bridger?
I am, yeah.
So, yeah, quick snapshot.
I've been with ReElement, and I lead ReElement Africa, which is a subsidiary of ReElement.
I've been doing that for the last year and a half, while still very engaged and interested
on everything Bitcoin and trying to figure out how to fuse the two things,
sometimes to the chagrin of the folks at ReElement.
But I think I've won them over for the most part.
But ReElement, real quick, is a critical minerals refining company.
We took technology that was developed by Purdue University, commercialized it,
and we're deploying that overseas, in Africa, other places, in the United States as well,
to be able to refine critical minerals.
to take what comes out of the ground or out of recycled materials,
add value by refining it into manufacturing-grade products,
which is super important right now with everything going on with supply chains
and gaining dependence from kind of Chinese-dominated supply chains,
especially on the processing side.
And if we get to it, I think there's some interesting corollaries and analogies
between Bitcoin mining and critical minerals refining.
But it's such a big universe.
You know, Bitcoin is, you see analogies everywhere
and you go down lots of rabbit holes and it's been lots of fun.
Yeah, I think I saw ReElement Technologies mentioned
in a Bitcoin Policy Institute policy paper on Africa and Bitcoin mining recently.
You know, it's just occurring to me now.
I read that offhandedly a couple or a week or so ago.
Is ReElement doing stuff in Bitcoin right now or is it?
So the short answer is no, not yet.
But I think we will.
I think any industrial consumers of energy will have a Bitcoin mining unit.
And we'd love to be kind of leading the charge on that.
But I can confirm that we were in that.
So I'm impressed that you were able to pick that out.
That means you got to at least page 15 or 16 of that piece.
And that was written by a good friend of mine who's also a co-founder of Bridger Solutions,
which is the Bitcoin mining company with the Africa focus.
So we were comparing notes, and all the credit to him writing it.
But we decided together it would make sense to put that kind of industrial analogy in there.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and so maybe we'll get to that.
I wish I would have read that in more depth now.
It had a Bitcoin in Africa angle, which is something Lucas and I find very interesting.
And so the substance of your article, I mean, just the briefest summary is we usually start our episodes kind of with a summary of the content.
And we previously did an episode over your essay.
Lucas and I summarized it and discussed it at length.
I mean, just kind of the briefest summary of the substance of the article is something that like Africa, African sovereignty is in the U.S. national interest because strong self-rule and self-determination, as you argue, will serve as a bulwark against Chinese and Russian influence.
African sovereignty is already supported
and this is a really interesting part of your article
by what you argue is a strong kind of African village ethos
of localized, tradition-based and decentralized populations
and Bitcoin then could serve to further empower
this kind of local decentralized ethos
and from the bottom up allow Africans to opt into a freedom-preserving
techno-monetary stack
as opposed to kind of the Chinese alternative of CBDCs and other authoritarian surveillance technologies.
And so kind of in your piece, you argue that Africa is well poised to benefit also from Bitcoin
due to having immense natural energy resources, lots of which are stranded and can be monetized through Bitcoin mining.
So that's kind of just like a 10,000 or 40,000 foot view of the article.
Is that kind of what was the impetus, I guess, or what were you trying to get out when you sat down to pen this piece and talk about national strategic interests of the United States in relation to Africa and Bitcoin?
Yeah, and I think that is a good synopsis.
And I'm glad you started off by pointing out the issue of sovereignty and where that most optimally resides.
And this is not just a question for Africa, but it's a question for the United States.
It's a question for the entire world.
And it can quickly become just a philosophical discussion.
But I think it's super important, especially as you are seeing how sovereignty or lack of sovereignty is playing out in various places on Earth.
and really kind of getting an understanding of what Africa, and when I say Africa, I mean Africa is a big place.
It's 54, 55 countries depending on how you count, and of course you can't refer to it monolithically.
But I would say that in big parts of Africa, you have some aspects of sovereignty at the local level that I think are enviable and that we need to look toward as more aligned with kind of liberal democratic values as they were conceived by our founding fathers in the United States.
than arguably are in practice today, and why is that?
And so that's kind of going to the lowest level, almost a tribal or local level within Africa,
where today you still have social structures and day-to-day life defined by face-to-face relationships,
people waking up every day, figuring out what needs to be done to survive that day,
and doing that in a community and tribal and supportive structure, networks of families,
and how that is kind of supportive naturally of kind of local democracy building with kind of built-in civic institutions.
So how is that? You call it a vibrant localism in your essay.
You say a vibrant localism is essential for democracies to flourish.
I was really curious about that. I mean, it seems plausible. And I guess you were starting to mention institutions when I interrupted you. But how is that kind of those institutions that they have amongst the people and the African village idea? I mean, how is that conducive to strong national sovereignty?
So I think those are two different things.
And when you're looking at what is kind of the natural formation of social life in Africa,
and I think you could argue maybe across humans everywhere,
but you see it in Africa very starkly,
is that you have these very, very strong embedded ties at the local level
where there is kind of an ordered system of trust.
You've got elders.
You have religious leaders.
You have traditional values that are kind of unofficially enforced,
and there's unwritten code that people live by.
And that's sovereignty that's kind of unlocked in a voluntary fashion, and this kind of gets to my favorite philosopher slash sociologist, which is Alexis de Tocqueville, and what he, I think, rightly identified as super important if you're going to choose in kind of the American context to have a democratic structure of governance.
So you've got to have that at the base level, and it's defined by voluntary participation, voluntary associations, civic associations that people are involved in that is almost as natural as breathing, but are defined loosely as organizations of people striving, working together towards common objectives and common goals.
and doing that in some kind of values-infused way.
I think in the U.S. context and Western values,
that's very much been historically, not as much anymore,
associated with Judeo-Christian values.
I think, ironically, in Africa, you have Judeo-Christian values
that are infused into that vibrant localism more so than in the West and in the United States.
Not everywhere, but I would say where religion or religion-based values are constant
or on the incline as something that governs people and collections of people,
that's on the ascendancy or constant in Africa and has been on the decline in the West.
And that's a problem that needs to be understood, I think, if you're going to have a democratic structure
where you also have kind of varying loci of power that's decentralized into kind of a federal system,
a more localized state system and then where the rubber really meets the road in localities,
how people are governing themselves at that smallest local level.
And then arguably more important than that, how you're governing yourself in your own heart,
informed by the way that you were raised, the way that the communities decided to govern themselves,
the way those religious institutions kind of inform your life growing up.
So the other end of that is national sovereignty.
And so I think that's where you've got a lot of weakness generally.
Again, you can't talk about Africa monolithically,
but weakness at the nation-state level in Africa, and for good reason, right?
because it's still very much a colonial and post-colonial nation-state mashup.
These were lines that were not drawn by the people who lived there
but were drawn by great powers
and continue to get kind of reinforced by those outside great power influences
where you have more natural regional, ethnic, religious, cultural lines
that spread across borders very fluidly.
And so when you look at the map of Africa
and you look at kind of where sovereignty should exist at a bigger, more collective level,
we like to refer to that as a nation state,
it really doesn't conform to the map that everyone kind of accepts today.
Now, I argue that we also can't look back and litigate the sins.
We have to move forward.
We have to look at where we are today, ameliorate, make things better,
take the nations that are formed and, you know, how do you, in those constructs, have better rule of law?
How do you have, you know, governments that are accountable to the people?
How do you institute structures that are decentralized so that you have, you know,
opportunities for political and economic development at the most local of levels,
but you have core functions that are provided by the state or the federal levels
that make sure that everyone's safe and that there is a consistent rule of law
that does not collapse into chaotic mobsterism, patronage politics, corruption,
all of this stuff that you see.
So where Europe and then the United States was born out of kind of the formation of nation states that happened in Europe through the Treaty of Westphalia, Africa never really had a Westphalia moment.
They never really had a moment where there were nation states that were formed by kind of the will of the people and the class structures that made sense in those geographic areas.
So I think what is interesting now, looking at the map, looking at where borders are drawn, is how can something like Bitcoin, something like Bitcoin mining, resource nationalism, how can today these nation states be more infused with the type of sovereignty that we think in the West is more.
or we know to be in the West is actually supportive of a coherent social structure
where you can have flourishing local communities kind of working symbiotically
with those other layers of governance.
And the problem in Africa is they have become many African nations,
not all have been kind of victims of cycles of dependency where you have elite you know
formations of you know political class economic class that have been able to capture
a lot of the outside great power
influences and
provision of capital and quote unquote
development that these
quote unquote leaders that should be serving their constituencies
are more concerned with keeping those
cycles moving in a way that benefits
that elite and certainly benefits the structures of
outside powers that are seeking to gain influence
for a number of reasons outside of what's necessarily
good or promoting
the independent development
of those nations and the people that
populate them.
I love what you just took the time to walk us through.
So I want to come at this from a couple different angles.
So you really highlighted what I think was one of the three kind of big takeaways from your article for me,
which is the village model of Africa, the governance model that is dominant in Africa,
that is something that, if you go around the world, is somewhat unique to Africa.
It's not unique, but it's far more prevalent, I would say, in Africa than it is in other places.
And we'll get into this.
I'll kind of just lay this out, and I'll kind of let you take it where you want.
But one of the things that I think that is very important to recognize is because it lends itself to a Bitcoin solution like Fediment, which is dependent upon trusted elders, which is dependent upon kind of that Dunbar's number sort of high trust engagement, small number of people community.
And so I'd definitely like to get your take on why Fetiment is uniquely suited for Africa
and maybe how it fits, how it might be adopted in other places.
Because I can see that being actually a potential stumbling block for Fetiment adoption in other places that don't have those characteristics.
But before I let you take it down that road, let me kind of walk you through a couple other things.
So I said one of three things is what you covered that were big takeaways.
The first is the local village model.
That is sort of the trickle-up morality.
That the morality doesn't necessarily trickle all the way up to the national level, unfortunately.
But it is very strong in that family unit, those religious ties.
When you were talking about the importance of religion and how that really ties into, I guess, the binding factors of an economy and of a people,
I'm reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation series right now.
And one of the main takeaways there is that when everything crumbles and chaos ensues and it's just barbarism everywhere, the way that Harry Seldon's foundation, the scientific foundation, is able to start reestablishing control is by cloaking science in religion.
is by re-nuclearizing these nations under the guise of the galactic spirit
and thus being able to effectively tame the barbarism that comes out of chaos
by giving it a directed channel towards a religious spirit.
And so I think that's really, really unique that you pull that out.
so anyways again just throwing that to the side so it's the local the local model
what you really highlighted for me was the fact that africa is somewhat ground zero for
cold war 3.0 maybe i think probably at this point um we could probably call it 3.0 but um
The monetary neocolonialism that is African or that is sorry, that is Chinese autocracy on one side and Bitcoin, hopefully the point of your article, hopefully supported with full blown freedom on the other side by by the Americans in order to battle out and see who wins in Africa.
because the demographics of that country point, the demographics and the resources, natural resources,
point to Africa being a power player in the coming decades.
And so incredibly important.
I want to make sure that I get your take not just on the idea of stranded energy in Africa,
which is something that you know quite a bit about,
but the actual overall potential of stranded energy in terms of like, what are some numbers on this?
How much power can we add to the total exahash of the Bitcoin network?
And anyways, yeah, so those three things.
So kind of the local model being somewhat unique to Africa,
the fact that it is the ground zero for a Cold War 3.0,
And then the overall potential of, you know, we all know that there's stranded waterfalls and that there's rivers and we can go out there and we can throw a Starlink up in a generator and start mining Bitcoin and we can build out.
But what is the, I think you might be uniquely suited to answer this question because everybody kind of knows that, but I've never heard any like real numbers on it.
like just how much stranded energy potential is in Africa relative to other places and how much
of a difference is that going to make going forward so um I took you down a meandering path
it's not even a path I just I hopped I just hopped from hot rock to hot rock to hot rock so
you know anything that you can take out of there I would love to get your take on
yeah so many of those things that I want to I want to jump on um but I'll start with uh
the potential for
Bitcoin mining in Africa.
I'll try to connect it to
filling out a little bit better
the argument on nation-state level sovereignty
and why I think that's
important in the context of where
the world is moving. We're watching it move very
aggressively before our eyes from something that we thought was going to be a continuation
of what happened after World War II, which was setting up a number of regional institutions
and even international institutions that were going to have governance structures that created
international rules and norms
and democracy transition that comes with it
in a kind of a top-down approach
and from a supranational set of structures.
I think that the nation-state level is still very important,
even in the African context,
and even if the strength of African society resides in an exemplary fashion at the most local levels.
And that's essentially the argument of if we are moving today
and we're watching it happen under the Trump administration,
which is really kind of supercharging this,
but I think this is a trend that was in route probably for the last decade or so,
and that is that countries are going to need to work with other countries
based off of common objectives, whether that's security or economic.
There is going to be some work in and around regional blocks, but I think it's very clear that an unelected managerial class out of Europe or out of New York or out of Geneva is not what countries in Africa need to be able to be independently successful in terms of driving their economies,
driving industrial development, supporting the needs of their constituencies,
and working hand-in-glove with the localities that form those states.
But to Bitcoin mining and numbers, I actually can send it to you guys after,
But the numbers around stranded energy off of existing infrastructure, so hydro, solar, wind, is pretty staggering.
And then it's even more staggering when you look at planned projects or projects that are under construction once they're developed.
and then beyond that, what is untapped, what is still in the realm of possible,
whether it's geothermal in Kenya and Ethiopia, whether it's hydro,
whether it hasn't been a power plant built or solar and wind,
and add into that oil and gas and coal.
I mean, one of the great modern scandals that nobody really pays attention to, but I think they get it when they hear it, is that two things are true in Africa.
And that is that you've got 600 million people that still don't have access to electricity or consistent access to electricity, more than half of the population.
but you also have impressive infrastructure, energy-producing assets in place that are not producing at full capacity
or in some cases even near to full capacity because you don't have the investment around transmission infrastructure,
which is as costly or more costly to evacuate that power from power facilities
to get it to as many people, as many retail consumers,
as many industrial consumers as possible.
So those two things are happening, are true at the same time.
So then the question becomes, I'll go back and throw some numbers out.
In Ethiopia, I think a lot of Bitcoiners in particular have been following that story.
You have the Grand Renaissance Dam, which is the largest hydroelectric facility on the continent, along the Nile.
Once that is producing at full capacity, that's about a 7 or 8 gigawatt producing facility, which is extraordinary.
Today, about a gigawatt of that is energized.
and the reason for that is there's not the billions
or even hundreds of billions of dollars of transmission
that's needed to move that centralized power out to where people can use that power.
Cost prohibitive under how projects are financed today.
You have in Uganda Tanzania Malawi South Africa multiple projects in West Africa hydro alone where you have in the thousands of megawatts of energy that is not being energized is not being used for the same reasons And really that just the tip of the iceberg on what can be built out
based off of the energy resources that these countries have.
And so what is the answer?
I think China came in with an alternative as part of a geoeconomic project to extend influence, to be able to extend their Belt and Road infrastructure initiative,
be able to build at scale through subsidized debt packages to countries,
ports and airports and power infrastructure,
in order to bring those countries and those resources into the China economic sphere
as China is trying to meet the needs of its people back inside of China.
and extend its influence overseas,
and it's a great way for them to recycle the U.S. dollars that they want to spend
before we do a swift move like we did to the Russians.
so because of that you've seen a lot of these projects get built up but without without the
kind of the next step planning on okay this is essentially a gift granted you're going to have
to pay this back if you don't pay it back it's going to be ours and god forbid you know country
They're able to kind of move the EU on across that infrastructure complex, which would potentially tie those countries and utilities to transacting on CBDC rails that are controlled by a centralized power outside of the region.
but the result has not been all bad for the Africans.
They have bridges, they have roads, they have power facilities,
they have ports that they wouldn't have otherwise.
But in the context of the energy assets,
you've got massive power facilities
that are not going to actually meet the needs of the people.
So Bitcoin mining as a first and last resort purchaser of that power, I think we're seeing already and we're going to see more of this, is quickly going to those gaps in energy production and providing revenue for otherwise unmonetized energy,
which is providing a tax base, is providing a way to pay down that debt,
is a way to finance the transmission infrastructure that's needed to evacuate more of that power to retail and industrial consumers,
is a way to build more power projects.
And on top of that, it's a way for utilities that are usually part of nation-state governing structures to secure a tax base, get a hold of quote-unquote hard assets, not Bitcoin but U.S. dollars in the context of inflating local currencies.
and the needs to pay off or meet the interest payments for debt that just continues to pile up.
So as countries are realizing that they have this as an opportunity,
we're seeing them look more to data center development.
And the pioneer species of data center development are Bitcoin mining data centers.
partner with them in order to simply monetize energy that they couldn't monetize otherwise
and bring that into their treasury balance sheets to be able to deploy as a nation state
and meet the productive needs of a country that needs to develop organically,
independent of outside powers and influence.
So that's kind of what we're seeing.
I think Ethiopia is a super interesting example,
and it kind of brings into focus this Cold War 2.0 or Cold War 3.0 aspect.
Bitcoin miners that can no longer mine Bitcoin inside of China
because they were banned from doing so have not been banned from being a company.
I mean, they're still set up in Shenzhen and Beijing.
That's where their corporate headquarters are. And the CCP is more than happy to have them go out and bring revenue back to the mothership and go out and be capitalist as long as they are not minting non-controlled, non-CCP controlled Bitcoin and using it as a way to get capital out of China.
So as that is happening, we're seeing a lot of displacement of Chinese companies going overseas to set up shop.
And I think that is having the impact of, A, really motivating this capitalist class of Chinese entrepreneurs to spread their legs and do that within the Bitcoin ecosystem,
which is, I think, even if it's at a passive level, is reinforcing freedom principles amongst that important class of Chinese entrepreneurs.
And I think that that is going to have an impact downstream back into the CCP in China.
And then second, I think it's showing U.S.-based Bitcoin or Western-based Bitcoin miners that there is absolutely a market to compete over in Africa and other places.
And so you're seeing more Western Bitcoin mining companies go move to scale in more of a partnership approach with utilities and nation states, which I think and I know nation states prefer.
But we're still kind of at the baby stages of that.
Can I follow up with one point there?
So this is incredibly interesting when you mention, and you did this in your essay too, that Chinese entrepreneurs are getting into Bitcoin and that this could have an influence downstream or back into China, maybe in a broader sense.
And in your essay, you note that the CCP has a particular affinity for your favorite philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, and seem to take very seriously some of his musings that the serious risk to an authoritarian society arises once the sort of, I guess, like middle class gets to a certain level of wealth.
not when the heel, the boot is on the neck or whatever, but when the boot begins to lift is when the real danger is presented to kind of the ruling authoritarian class.
And I guess my question is, if that's a correct statement of, you know, how you think that they consider Tocqueville,
but also, do you have any perspective or have you seen any of this influence through Chinese entrepreneurs back into China
or have any sort of basis for saying that this is something that is occurring
or is it more just an extrapolation of this will likely occur
just given the way that ideas spread?
Yeah, I think it's speculative for sure.
We'll see how this plays out.
But I do think that we know that China is in a difficult position right now.
They're trying to open their liquidity spigots in order to kind of cover their indebtedness.
They've got some significant economic challenges internally.
They're letting off steam, I think, by allowing this entrepreneurial class to go be entrepreneurial
in ways that they wouldn't want them to be inside of China.
They're doing that outside of China.
We'll see if that does have that downstream impact.
impact. I think it does. I mean, we've seen examples of this outside of Bitcoin. Certainly,
Jack Ma disappeared for about two years. He got, I think, a little too big for his britches
in the minds of the CCP, and he had to go through some time in purgatory, and it looks like he's
rehabilitated himself with the CCP.
I think that for the CCP, they are absolutely committed to their model of a state-controlled,
top-down approach on the economic ordering.
they realize that they can't clamp down too hard
lest they have problems that rise internally.
But what they've been able to do extraordinarily well
is control the manufacturing of real things that the entire world needs.
that plus their ability to take innovation, kind of reverse engineer it,
and I think they've got a lot of innovative folks as well,
but applying that to kind of a top-down tech-infused system of control
where you have surveillance tech, you have a monetary system
along a digital payment system that would be controlled in a very totalitarian fashion
but very efficient by the People's Bank of China.
And it's based off of the premise of a social contract, right?
It's, hey, hands off of politics.
This is the way it's going to run.
everyone can be guaranteed a decent wage.
You can have all of the toys that you want.
You can play video games to your heart's delight.
You can have at an abstracted level the tech that enables you to escape into your own world
and fulfill your dreams.
but I would argue in a very abstract way.
The tradeoff in return is we are going to order everything.
There's going to be full compliance.
As long as you submit, we will make your life easy.
We will make your life fun as long as fun is defined by the things that we prescribe together.
you guys can participate in, but nothing can be questioned in terms of the way the state
kind of has total control.
And this was essentially the concern that Alexis de Tocqueville had, not of what Europe was
in the United States or America coming out of Europe as a new project,
but what he foresaw as the underside of democracy itself, right?
So the real concern of Tocqueville was you'll have two things,
two temptations of the human heart in the democratic context
that will bring on a new form of tyranny that's not unlike the Chinese model,
except the difference is we will reach into our pockets
and voluntarily give our freedom away as opposed to it being wrested from us.
And those two temptations of the human heart are,
one, to look to
in the absence of
God or religious values, you look to the state
as kind of
the all-encompassing, powerful
parent that we have to look up to for guidance
and will provide for us as long as
we stay in our place.
And then on the other end of sovereignty, we collapse inward.
We stop the hard work of vibrant localism, voluntary civic associations,
voluntary interactions in the meat space, like in the real physical realm with others.
and we collapse into our phones and our video games and into our minds,
talk only to the people online, not in person, that reinforce the way that we think about the world.
We can live that abstractly.
We can have Twitter fights as long as those don't turn into actually doing something about that in the street, in partnership.
with our fellow man trying to build a world together.
And so Tocqueville's big fear was we get to China, but we do it voluntarily
because it's too much for the soul to bear to be able to order ourselves,
answer the question of human loneliness without a powerful intermediary
who's going to solve that problem for us.
And so for Tocqueville, his concern was if we are no longer tethered to the things in life
that keep things in check.
In Europe, it was aristocracy,
and so you have reciprocal obligations between the classes,
and that was just something that was set.
That was something that was unquestioned.
You're born into it.
If you're a royal, you're a royal.
If you're a noble, you're a noble.
If you're a peasant, you're a peasant.
There are reciprocal obligations between those classes,
but there's no social mobility.
but you have core institutions of how that society works built in.
You have a prescribed religion which governs your soul.
You have a prescribed kind of social and family structure and order.
It never would be questioned that you would think about leaving the home
before the age of 25, after you've done your part to kind of help the family do what they need to do out in the fields.
And all of a sudden, we have a transition to democracy where everything is flat.
There are no longer any of these structures or tethers that are embedded, that bind ourselves to the things that make life livable.
So we have to voluntarily do that on our own.
And you do that, you know, Tocqueville's view was you do that through having decentralized governance.
Let's push everything down to the most local level as possible.
You do that through civic associations that you are voluntarily a part of that bring you out, you know,
into partnership and working with other people in your community on a face-to-face basis,
and you do that through voluntary participation in religious institutions
so that you have something that actually governs yourself.
And what I think has happened, and we're now seeing, thankfully, I think a backlash to it
in the Western context is the fact that we feel completely delinked
from anything that actually provides order.
We can become anything that we want to be.
We can become another gender if we want to be.
All of these things that have actually created a crisis in the human heart
and the human soul, which is kind of the fundamental layer from which a real democratic form of governance
that is salutary can exist.
And so in order for the American project to continue, in order for democracy in Africa to work
or anywhere else in the world, I think I lost your guess.
No, we can see you.
We're here.
Yeah, can you hear us?
You hear that you there, Ben?
Hold on a second.
Yep.
I'd be really impressed if you pick up the exact same train of thought.
Oh, here we go.
Yep, can you see us?
Can you guys hear me?
Yeah, perfectly.
Yeah, we never lost you.
No, I can't hear you all, though.
Okay.
No, I got you.
I got you.
Okay, great.
I think somebody called on me.
Oh, yeah.
Knocked me off.
Oh, nice.
Nice.
Yeah, so the issue is one of, you know, what are the salutary constraints that we're going to put on ourselves
lest we kind of spin out of control and force a centralized power to come in,
a centralized government to play the role of God in our lives and order our lives for us.
So that's kind of where we are.
And taking it back to Bitcoin at kind of a fundamental level,
Bitcoin, I think, Topol would consider as a salutary constraint.
And so freedom is only freedom in as much as it's connected to what binds freedom.
So if you have unadulterated freedom, if you can go do whatever you want,
central banks can just print money ad infinitum, where does that lead us?
Yes, that is freedom, but that leads us down ultimately to a path to ruin.
So how do we latch on to these things, whether it's a civic association, whether it's the church, whether it's vibrant localism,
whether it's bringing bitcoin or gold as a precursor to bitcoin
as something that is that salutary constraint on freedom
because it brings a real physical constraint to the human desire
to make something out of nothing and kick that can down the road.
And it's the same principle of an addict, right?
You know, the easy route is to just up the dosage.
You know, the dosage, the medicine is not the bad thing.
It's the fact that we take the medicine, which is a substitute for healthy living,
and then we turn that into a substitute and become completely dependent on that.
So that's where I think Bitcoin really fits in kind of in a philosophical framework to these two kind of competing spheres of how we're going to govern ourselves in the future, especially with the advent of technology and it being easier than ever before to rely on tech plus government to order our lives.
You know, what is it that's actually going to make life, you know, commodious living and life worth living?
And my sense is, and I think everyone senses it, you know, no matter where you live, is that despite, you know, having essentially the, you know, the riches of that, you know, 100 years ago, nobody ever would have imagined anybody could have, you know, a king or a peasant.
but we've all gotten the palm of our hands in terms of access to tech,
the ability to go do a number of interesting things, albeit in the abstract realm,
connection to the flow of information,
and the quote-unquote ability to live a life that is peaceful
and gives you more than you need in terms of what you need to live,
we're still unsettled.
Something is amiss.
we're missing purpose and mission
we're missing something
despite all of the things that AI and technology
and phones and video games and everything else
has brought to us
venture capital
the financial wizardry that has made this
fiat project kind of extend and then overextend
why does that not feel right
And that's because we've moved, I believe, away from some of the core things that are as simple as living a vibrant community life in a village in Africa.
Yeah, Jordan.
Sorry, you got it, Grant?
I hear so many things that I want to talk about.
Jordan Peterson would refer to that feeling as kind of the abandonment of the up, you know, just not no longer aiming up that you just need to in order to have that feeling that you need to be continually working kind of at your limit, which is often far more than what you think is your limit.
David Goggins will talk about, you know, like most people when they quit, they think they're done, but they're really only at like 40%.
And so that idea of striving for a higher purpose, of striving to take that block of granite and continually chisel away until there is this magnificent thing underneath,
to become more of your true self by letting go of the things that make you less of who you are.
I think you do a great job pointing that out.
I also love hearing you bring out these strands of what the Chinese are doing,
effectively taking the exorbitant privilege of the United States that exists by being able to print money out of nothing
that we've talked about in previous podcasts, which results in this downstream effect that probably wasn't foreseen at the beginning,
the Triffin Dilemma, where you have the exorbitant privilege, but the end result is that you lose your manufacturing capability,
you lose your middle class, you end up hollowing out your country, you end up becoming morally bereft.
And so we often think about the Chinese.
For a very long time, the Chinese have been sort of portrayed as good at copying but not good at innovating.
And one of the things I would say, by the way, that that's definitely not the case anymore, especially if you look at like DeepSeq.
That's a perfect example of innovation and especially innovation under constraint,
given that they didn't have access to the same type of super chips that the United States does because of controls put on them.
But what the Chinese have done is copy the IMF World Bank model pushed by the United States and folded that into their Belt and Road Initiative.
And now our exorbitant privilege has become their exorbitant privilege that they are using to flood Africa with this monetary neocolonialism and really gain a lot of influence in the area.
So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, because this is Grant mentioned before we got on, he said it'd be interesting to hear you and I talk about this, because I have recently listened to the siren song and the great temptation of looking at mining Bitcoin in space using solar-based space power.
So I'm part of a boot camp here at the network school led by Balaji Srinivasan and one of his fund partners.
And the challenge was to come up with an idea that may change the world.
And so I was sitting there and I was running through, in my mind, this sort of like stack of like, where does the world go?
And so we know that code is crashing to the cost of compute, which is electricity.
We actually just had a speaker who is from the company that makes the dog, the Chinese robot dog,
that's like way cooler than the Boston Dynamics looking one.
Like the Boston Dynamics one just looks like Terror and Terminator.
The Chinese model is really cool.
what is it, Chinese robot dog.
It's called, it's not deep robotics, but anyways,
so like, you know, they're cool as hell.
Like they talk to you and they bounce up and down and blah, blah, blah.
And anyways, during that talk, the guy noted that,
he was like, you know, where does the future of robotics go?
And he says, well, you know, hardware is crashing to the cost of metal.
like the cost that it takes to extract the metal, which is effectively the cost of energy.
So if hardware and software are both crashing to the cost of energy, then what's the play?
Obviously, the play is acquire capital, apex capital, which is Bitcoin, for less than the cost that that capital is worth.
And to me, that means that the only clear economic model that exists with a margin 50 years from now, not 5 or 10, but 50 or 20, even 25, the only clear model that continually exists with a margin is acquiring apex capital for less than the cost of capital, which to me means Bitcoin mining.
And to me also says that one of the, like everything is a commodity in that stack.
Bitcoin's a commodity.
The miner's a commodity.
Energy's a commodity.
So how do you differentiate yourself?
In a commodity market, you have to be the low cost producer.
So you have to be the last guy to turn off the miner How do you do that You have to have free energy Okay let go to space That was my thought As you can see I have a mark on my head
All the Indian guys were making fun of me. They said I look like an Indian gal with the red dot, the bindi.
That's what they call it, the bindi. Because I ran into a tree, a fake tree, while thinking about this
and was completely lost in space, lost in my mind, head-butted a tree, and had blood running down my face.
And after three days of just continuous fighting this around every angle I could think of,
I finally let it go by the wayside.
But I learned a lot in the process.
And so one of the things that I think is really important now
that I probably didn't place as much emphasis on previously
is Bitcoin miner engineering and production sovereignty.
And so this is the reason why Jack Dorsey changed the focus of his company Block
to creating Bitcoin miners, noting that there's basically two companies that create ASICs
and they're Chinese.
And so we don't have – it's very much a TSMC.
it's a superconductor issue. Much like we think about Taiwan being this tug and, you know, push
and pull United States, China, we are so dependent upon the superconductors that come out of Taiwan
that it's, it's a potential that we may go to war over that. And so we are desperately trying
to reshore as much of that inner as much as that capacity as possible but i actually feel that
bitcoin miner production being sovereign is something that is a incredibly under thought
under under attentioned issue and so being intimately involved in bitcoin mining yourself
What are your thoughts and what can you tell us about the state of Bitcoin miner production and the advancement of Bitcoin miner production?
So Bridger Industries obviously uses Bitcoin miners. Do they have an interest in or foresee a potential to become involved in creating Bitcoin miners and advancing the field in order to be at that bleeding edge where you are?
you're already trying to find the cheapest energy with the stranded energy.
And then the other side of that equation is to have the fastest horse, which is to have the most efficient miner.
So what can you kind of tell us about the Bitcoin mining world as far as miners and where that's going?
Because I can tell you that reengineering them to work in space, not a great idea, at least not right now.
So what are we going to do with waterfalls, Ben?
Yeah, well listen man, we have to think big
So kudos to you for thinking about that
And I encourage you to move it forward
Did I lose you again?
No
Nope
Another guy that I know is a Bitcoiner
And certainly thinks a lot about space is Peter Diamandis
You should probably talk to him
and Balaji probably knows him, maybe you know him,
but he would love to have a conversation with you.
I would love to talk to Peter about this.
This would be, yeah, a guy who is a rocket scientist, right,
from MIT and also heavily involved in that.
I'm great.
If you can make the introduction, we'll get there.
Maybe Balaji.
Yeah, I don't know him personally, but, yeah, talk to Balaji.
I've got a friend that participates in his Abundance 360 program,
so I chat with him.
and see if there's something there there.
There's another friend of mine, a guy named Worth Ray,
who is just a brilliant guy.
He's right at the intersection of Bitcoin and space.
His day-to-day is working with a company that's innovating on everything that's space and space adjacent.
and part of that, and I'll just touch on it briefly
because we can go forever down these rabbit holes,
but Tocqueville would be very happy to hear you talk about going to space.
I think that this is part of,
this would be a salutary extension of the American experiment
where we're continuing to push limits in a productive way
and finding frontiers and pushing against those frontiers
in order to kind of progress the human project.
And, yeah, I think this administration is going to be moving in that direction as well.
But on your question regarding Bitcoin miners, ASICs, the development around that,
It's more complex than just having made-in-the-USA machines.
There's a great company called Oradine that you guys should check out.
I believe they took over Intel's chip that was being purpose-built for ASICS.
They have a great team and company.
I think Marathon, the Bitcoin mining company, has invested in them and is working on some projects with them.
But that's a non-Chinese manufactured, built-for-purpose processor.
And we need to do more of that, especially as we're cranking into an escalating trade war with China.
these processors
almost everything electronic is still coming out of Chinese production facilities
whether in China or outside of China
that's potentially a vulnerability
as we move forward on what needs to advance
with the increasing decentralization
of hash rate and Bitcoin mining
all over the world in the United States
the downstream, I'm sorry, upstream of even
what Oradine does and manufacturing more
of these ASICs outside of China
is, and this is where my work with ReElement
kind of comes into play in understanding the critical mineral supply chain, almost
all of the rare earth elements today are sent to
China for processing inside of China. And so rare earth elements
that need to be processed into rare earth oxides,
whether it's light or heavy rare earths that go into ship manufacturing,
go into semiconductor manufacturing.
Right now China has a monopoly on that.
And so what do we need to do?
I mean, it's the same approach as downstream manufacturing.
We need to leverage the best of American innovation,
the best of American research institutes,
the best minds, the collaborative American approach,
to hitting new frontiers in technology and technology development
to have a deflationary effect on the manufacturing of these products
that compete and out-compete what China can do.
Now, there's some real macroeconomic structural challenges
that go back to Triffin Dilemma
and the deal that was cut essentially 25 years ago
which is, hey, China, you make everything, we get cheaper prices for our consumers in return,
that we're going through a violent shift.
I mean, it's just starting, I think, to upturn that apple cart.
And part of it is painful, right, with tariffs
and some of the steps that I think this administration is taking to be protective of U.S. industries
that's going to have an inflationary impact and maybe deflationary on the markets in the near term.
But it has to happen.
But what we're doing on the re-element side is taking best-in-class technology towards a disruptive approach
that allows us to refine critical minerals wherever they're found.
So whether they're in the United States, whether they're in Africa,
whether they're in Latin America.
So we can be scalable, we can be modular,
and we can do it on a cost basis that outcompetes what China can do inside of China.
And that then enables the resources that are under the earth in Africa and Latin America
in the United States to be refined in region
and kind of contributes to the idea of resource nationalism,
those countries don't want to export raw commodities to China for processing
and China for those value-added goods to then come back thousands of miles downstream into manufacturing.
And by the way, not in Africa.
So how do you work with countries, and this goes back to Bitcoin mining as well, and the base resource of energy, and refining that energy into monetary-grade energy through Bitcoin mining?
The same thing has to happen on raw commodities that need to be refined into manufacturing-grade commodities,
where the resources lie in a decentralized way to diversify and make supply chains more resilient
and then move those materials downstream into the manufacturing of ex-China ASICs.
Not that all ASICs should be made outside of China, but it should not be a situation where 95% or 97% or whatever the number is are coming from a single-source industrial center.
That's not good for any industry.
It's arguably not good for China if they want to benefit from global supply chains that are diversified and resilient that are supportive of manufacturing for needs all over the world.
So I think that's a long answer to your question, but there's a couple components to it, right?
So we've really got to figure out how to, on a structural basis, bring industry, making real things a thing again, outside of China, inside of the United States.
And there are fiscal and monetary issues and challenges that need to be overcome.
but the bottom line is that yes, there are companies that are able to do this,
that want to do this, but are hamstrung by vulnerabilities and weaknesses
along the entire value chain.
And so whether it's a Bitcoin miner, an ASIC,
or it's a magnet that you need for an F-35 to perform,
you've got to look at that entire value chain.
Where does the resource come from?
Where does that resource, that base resource, whether it's critical mineral or energy,
where does it need to go to be processed?
And then once it's processed into manufacturing grade,
where does it go for manufacturing and building an industrial base
where we haven't had an industrial base for arguably two and a half decades.
And then really, in addition to making the Bitcoin ecosystem as strong as it can be
and not have a segment of it dependent on single-source manufacturing,
this is also what absolutely needs to happen to bring high-wage industrial jobs
based off of manufacturing real things back to the U.S.
where the absence of that has created a social and economic blight
to include the real horror story,
which is something that's probably touched you guys in different ways
and definitely touched my life,
which is in the absence of a productive life and commodious life,
building real things in face-to-face relationship with your neighbor,
people turn to substitutes for the real thing, which in many cases has been opium or opiates,
has been fentanyl, has been a lot of the drug abuse that's claimed hundreds of thousands
of young Americans.
So it's all connected.
And it's daunting to try to get a grip on it.
But conversations like this that start with what is Bitcoin and the Bitcoin ecosystem,
Bitcoin mining in Africa doing to make the world a better place,
quickly goes to answering some of these core issues that are going to determine whether our future is great
or our future is dystopian.
It is all connected.
I'm just going to point out that this answers a question that was developing my mind.
You mentioned that Bitcoin could be a salutary constraint to help impose a constraint on our freedom and return us to a more vibrant type of localism, a habit of the heart, like local politics, religious conviction, family life, these types of things.
And I was wondering, as you said that, it sounded like a very bleak and dire prognostication for the United States, Western liberalism, more broadly speaking, that maybe we have Bitcoin as one salutary constraint, but that's, you know, what else is there?
But I like where you've developed that, that once we take a fuller picture, maybe we can return manufacturing jobs to the United States and that can, with higher wages, give people a bigger stake in their community and return some more meaning to people's lives.
And so I guess I wanted to toss that question back to you, though, and see how hopeful are you, I guess, that these local institutions, these types of things, this like strong situatedness of people in a social context in their community, development of personal virtues, development of a sense of meaning.
if things go the right way, Bitcoin develops into a dominant monetary protocol that many people use.
Are you hopeful that the United States can reignite from the bottom up into a sort of vibrant localism?
Yeah, I think we've got to be hopeful, and I'm absolutely hopeful.
I mean, I was hopeful when we were writing this book, which was kind of intended for policymakers
and to inform folks on the Hill and in the interagency,
especially those that we felt were ill-informed in the context of Chokepoint 2.0
and an administration that at most levels was taking a very adversarial approach to Bitcoin
and what Bitcoin represented to, I mean, in a very short period of time.
Not that I love Trump and everything that he stands for,
but it is almost unbelievable to see that in a matter of months,
that as the most powerful country in the world,
We've taken on kind of the most pro-Bitcoin, pro-what Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining can do for the future of innovation and for really putting us on firm footing from a fiscal and monetary perspective.
I just couldn't have ever predicted that.
It's extraordinary.
So that gives me even more hope.
But I will say that the trope of Bitcoin fixes this, I generally disagree with because Bitcoin, I think, is an essential part of what's going to fix a lot of things.
But one, nothing ever gets fixed completely.
And I come from a Judeo-Christian background.
I'm a Christian.
I, you know, my personal belief is that, you know, we are in a, you know, we're in a fallen state.
We're never going to be, we're not perfectible.
The temptation to be perfectible can take us to, you know, a very dystopian Chinese or, you know, techno dystopian tyrannical outcome.
And that's very dangerous.
we need to figure out what it is based off of our understanding of the human condition
is going to make things better.
What constraints do we need to put on ourselves?
What structures do we need to opt into?
What things that come into this earthly realm of coming into being and passing away
are most representative of immutable, call it divine, truth.
And Bitcoin, this is part of what just really, really grabbed me
as I got sucked into the rabbit hole about five years ago,
was that it seems to me to be as close as we can come to an instantiation
in this broken temporal world, an instantiation of divine immutable truth
that cannot be altered, cannot be changed by a small group of people
based off of kind of parochial interest and needs.
And I think that is something that is, in addition to that aching sense at some scale in the United States and I think in Europe as well,
especially among young populations, that the promise of technology plus kind of supranational managerial elite control was going to deliver and just did not,
especially at the kind of existential commodious living level.
So Bitcoin, I think, is one of those rare things that comes into humanity at just the time that it's needed that is either an anchor or at a minimum supportive of a renewal, a reawakening, a rebirth to take us back to kind of fundamental truths around what it means.
It means to live a good life with our neighbors and in a way that reinforces competent living that is never going to be perfect, is always going to be far from perfect,
but pushes us in the direction of striving towards something that we have to work on together
that is going to bring a better outcome that is going to build real things
and is going to create real productive growth,
not abstract kind of financialized, government-led spending-type growth
and then fiscal stimulus that patches things up as things kind of fall apart.
So, yeah, I mean, it's tough to have these conversations, guys,
because it's just so much to put your arms around,
But it's wonderful to have them because there's just so many components of what's going on in the world that are being knitted together that can take us in a couple of different directions.
But I'm an optimist at heart.
I think that we're living through an incredible time in history.
We've never seen it before.
And I think if we can survive some real geopolitical test without, you know,
attempting nuclear exchange, we're going to pop out the other side of this transition period
with a real kind of renewal of the human spirit.
Yeah, I want to echo a little bit of what you're saying,
maybe throw a bit of water on the fire, not intentionally, but just from observation.
so the reason I am where I am
I'm at the network school in Malaysia
which is the instantiation of Balaji Srinivasan's theory
thesis that just as you said
you can't fix things
if you read the network state
you can basically sum it up by saying
if you look throughout history
when things go awry
they never get better
something new emerges from that
and the old falls away. And so we have a crumbling United States empire. We have a
autocracy in China that is being challenged by the internet and the freedoms that that allows.
and so we are stuck it's very much a rock in a hard place and and they're
patriotically you really want to hope for yeah let's reshore let's bring these high-paying jobs
back let's recreate this middle class but in reality i don't i don't think that happens because
i think the only way that you can economically do that is to do what china is actually already
doing which is creating these insane scale and mainly robotic facilities what they call dark
factories right um we we had a speaker the other day who was telling us about um i don't you may
remember if you're if you're ever on social media i i used to i used to be on um i used to be on
Instagram every once in a while and I would see this uh this gal from China who would pop up and
there would be this little music and she was like if you want shoes this is the city in China you
get them from if you want umbrellas this is the city in China you get them from and I and she
would just name like products and then say the name of the city no cities of course I've ever
heard of like they we don't know what they are um in america but um this speaker that we had
clarified he's like you know it's really hard to compete with what the chinese are doing because
they literally build cities around one product so that there's a sock city in china i can't
remember what the name of it is but like all the socks come from one city and that city is centered
around producing socks and that's it um and you may see uh there's floating around the internet
you may see uh some news here lately of the byd which is the tesla copycat um car i see them
driving around here in malaysia all the time and they are straight up teslas like there's there it's
Tesla. But they are out Elon-ing Elon when it comes to gigafactories. The new BYD facility
is famously larger than the city of San Francisco. If you look at Elon's gigafactories,
they're about four and a half square miles. The BYD facility is like 50 square miles
just to produce cars.
So I think we want to hope that we can bring that stuff back,
but I think reality, the economics of it, and what we're competing against
makes that just so incredibly difficult that the only way is,
and I have this argument with myself all the time, and I keep settling on it,
that the reason why we hit stagnation is because we had dirty money that melted away
at a rate of 12% every year.
And if you have a cost of capital that you need to hurdle every year that's 12%,
and you're a public company, which means you have quarterly reports and annual reports
and short-term focus, then it's way easier to try and you're not even jumping over that hurdle.
You're just like barely crawling over it by saying,
we're going to go in the direction of scale and growth as opposed to the direction of innovation and world-changing,
world-just changing things fundamentally.
It's way easier to say if we build another wing and hire 50,000 more employees,
then we can crank out X more widgets and have Y more sales,
as opposed to if we throw 40% of everything we make into research and innovation,
maybe something comes out of it in 10 years.
Like that nobody wants to hear that in a Fortune 500 board meeting
because that tanks the stock.
And so it does.
It puts us in a very difficult place.
I as well, by the way, am incredibly optimistic.
I think that as we elevate the level of accomplishment with the aid of technology, we also elevate the level of human performance.
And there's a great parallel to this, by the way, which is the deep blue moment in chess in like 1996 or 8 or whenever it was.
But when artificial intelligence first surpassed human intelligence when the deep blue computer beat Garry Kasparov, what happened since then is that chess has been solved by computers at a level that humans can never approach.
However, if you look around, the chess world is exploding.
Chess is more popular now than it's ever been 30 years later.
The average level of gameplay is higher than it's ever been 30 years later.
And I think you compare this to like the Roger Bannister moment in running.
When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, all of a sudden everybody started doing it
because something that was previously thought impossible became possible.
And I think the analogy that what we can draw from the deep blue moment in chess is that it doesn matter if a human breaks that or if a computer breaks it Just raising the bar seems to raise human performance
And I think that's a beautiful thing that we're going to see become more and more clear.
I think we're seeing it with music right now.
We're seeing just incredibly rich and new, innovative ways to make and create music
assisted by technology that are at a level that we never could have considered before.
So I agree with you.
I'm an optimist.
Maybe not in the idea that we're going to be able to compete in terms of recreating a middle class,
but that we are opening avenues for deepening the richness and robustness of the human experience
by heightening that human performance level.
So I didn't really have a question there.
I just wanted to kind of tag on to that and say that I agree with you.
I think we're moving in a good direction regardless of the turmoil that we're entering,
possibly the fourth turning of it.
And you make a good point.
It's like, look, there's a meme right now that I saw floating around
that's the silhouette of a guy and his head is just exploded to cover the entire frame.
And the caption is something like,
I just thought Bitcoin might be cool and now I know everything about the universe or something like that.
It's like every rabbit hole that could have existed is tied to this.
And you learn that it's all there.
I have a question to tag on at the end of that.
Please save me.
So the optimism that you have and the hope that Ben has expressed to, I'm actually wondering, so you've noted that Tocqueville is somebody that you draw a lot of inspiration from.
Can you recommend to us any other thinkers or philosophers that have given you hope or that have helped you flesh out your worldview?
Because you said this is a difficult subject to talk about, like the meaning crisis in relation to Bitcoin and industrial reshoring, but it's all connected.
And it definitely is.
And I think you're very good at talking about it, too.
I really like that in this article, how you wove Tocqueville into it.
You don't often see any kind of a technical article, that sort of grounding in philosophy.
And I'm wondering if there's anything further you would want to recommend to help people draw some hope from this
and to see some inspiration about how we can renew kind of our civic roots and, you know, make America great again in the broadest sense.
Yeah.
so
yeah one guy that I
like to talk about I think I
quote him
in the paper
was a professor of mine in Georgetown
named
Josh Mitchell and
he
wrote a book called American
Awakening I can send it to you guys
after the
call
but
Yeah, he, take it back to Tocqueville, I mean, you know, one of the classes that he gives at Georgetown is on Tocqueville.
He's probably the foremost scholar on him.
But he, you know, draws from some of the greats from the Western canon to include, you know, Plato and Hobbes.
and really putting together a framework to help us understand where we are today
and what are the perils, but what also are the opportunities.
And so one of the things that he really focuses on, and he does it in a very erudite way,
and it's something that you see talked about a good bit
because of the debate around wokeism and identity politics.
But it's essentially that, and he draws on far more folks
than who I just mentioned,
but it is that at our core, we are a religious animal.
We have to believe in something. We will ascribe categories of life into the religious realm, whether we're admitting it or not.
And so in the American context, it's very interesting the move towards identity politics, categories around different classes beyond just male and female, the whole transgender stuff.
this has become essentially a replacement for a Protestant form of Christianity in America
and with folks not really understanding that but needing to understand that that's the foundation from which America arose
and that it has distorted itself or it has translated kind of the language of Protestantism
to things like identity politics, to, you know, wokeism,
to, you know, focus on climate change kind of as a religion,
and all of these different things that become like the universals that need to guide us.
And then underneath it, they have instituted a very kind of harsh Protestant form of enforcement around it,
like a very puritanical way of expressing and executing that form of puritanism.
and that then dislocates or attaches itself to political systems.
And so in as much as we pride ourselves on what it means to be a free people
and the separation of church and state as being kind of a fundamental part of our constitutional order
and the freedom of religious expression, we have fused a new type of religion to the state
through the enforcement of these, what are at their base form,
kind of religious ways of identifying ourselves.
and that when it's untethered from a religion, it doesn't have to be Judeo-Christian,
but one that is at its fundament, one that recognizes the imperfectibility of the human condition
and the fact that we need constant renewal, we need redemption, we need to be able to forgive each other,
we need to not live in the past, we need to move forward,
we get into a cycle of kind of neo-paganism.
And so this neo-paganism is one that is in constant search of a scapegoat,
and that scapegoat in this formulation might be a white heterosexual male,
and that scapegoat needs to be sacrificed at the altar
and that never stops
because in the pagan understanding of how the world must operate
to be at some form of peace or tranquility
with the gods that govern the world around us,
you have to constantly be making,
choosing sacrifices that can resolve the cycles of blood feuds.
And the Christian slash Christian philosophical thrust
that came into the formation of the U.S. or the American project
was pretty important even if you aren't a Christian,
but you understand that you need renewal, you need redemption.
There's an understanding that there's always going to be a delta
between principles and foundational constitutional order and practice.
And so it can be at once true that we have fantastic principles that should be followed, but we also are always falling short.
But in falling short of those principles, we elect not to go back to the pre-Christian pagan foundations of selecting scapegoats to crucify or to purify ourselves.
And so being able to move forward in a manner that doesn't look back on the past, understands our imperfectibility, understands that we are in constant need of redemption.
and the only way to move forward as a society that brings together a number of different peoples and backgrounds into a common project
is by putting our feet on the ground and detaching ourselves from these kind of universal secular religions
and actually just living a commodious life together and working on projects together
and doing that in a slow but durable fashion.
And Bitcoin then comes back into that picture of this is a salutary constraint.
This is something that becomes kind of the basis of value exchange,
can be counted on not as something that is going to solve all problems
and certainly not solve tomorrow's problem,
of meeting our debt ceiling obligations,
but is going to help us move forward in a slow, durable way with our fellows
and in a manner that can't be modified from its core immutability
is something that we can rely on outside of parochial interest.
So anyway, Josh Mitchell, awesome.
I'll send that to you.
I actually reached out to him on his work and what I've been thinking about with Bitcoin.
I'm not sure he's ready to go there.
But he wrote a chapter in the book that is only on fiat and how fiat is essentially an example of platonic substitutism.
And so something that, similar to medicine, is in the right measure something that can be helpful to the human project,
but when it becomes something that transfers from supplement to substitute, kills the project.
or in the case of medicine, if you have too much of the medicine
or if you use vitamins only instead of food, it's going to kill the patient.
Yeah, no, that's exactly the direction that I thought you might go
if I pushed you a little bit on kind of the roots of your thinking.
I hear echoes of, I don't know if this is Mitchell, this is you,
but of Rene Girard, of Alistair McIntyre.
Yeah, a lot of these thinkers. And I will just throw out there, too. I think that you mentioned getting our feet back on the ground as kind of resituating us in relation to universals and not being and losing a sense of perfectibility.
in doing that, getting our feedback on the ground
getting out, making and building things as you say
having salutary constraints like Bitcoin
another thing that I think can really help situate us
is just paying attention to really good art
and re-situating our cultural productions
around perpetuating a meaning
that is based in social context
and situatedness and development of virtues
and I wanted to recommend, I just saw this movie recently
so it's top of mind, but there's
Thomas Vinterberg has a movie called
The Hunt that
stars Mads Mikkelsen, it's a, I believe
Scandinavian Danish movie
but it's a good depiction of
that ending a cycle of memetic
violence through trying to
ritually sacrifice somebody
in the context of a false accusation
like a Me Too type sexual
accusation of sexual abuse, the whole community
goes after Mads Mikkelsen
and only through
a moment made
possible by faith is the community able to resituate itself without offering a sacrifice
to kind of propitiate all of the circle of violence that's occurring.
So I'm really glad that you recommended that book.
I really want to check that out.
Maybe it's a slight left turn of a question, but I really wanted, I don't want to lose
this.
I'm going to get your thoughts on the strategic Bitcoin reserve.
specifically
you know I follow Nick Carter
and George Selgin on Twitter
and they're two critics of the strategic Bitcoin
reserve because they don't
see the strategic element in it
and you know as a career diplomat
and as previous
having had a career as a diplomat yourself
and also
you know having
done all the reading and research you've done
in this article what is your
response you give to somebody who would say okay
Bitcoin, it's great as maybe a future technology or as a personal investment, but does the United
States having Strategic Bitcoin Reserve help in relation to encouraging Africa to adopt it in a
way that counters CCP influence or something like that? Or what's a case you might make for the
Strategic Bitcoin Reserve given your insight into Africa? Yeah, so I think there's maybe two things
there. I mean, one would be the strategic Bitcoin reserve in the United States, and then that is a
model for other nations to follow. And, you know, I think that, you know, among other things
that are very impactful, you know, the announcement, the recent announcements a couple weeks ago
by the administration, strategic Bitcoin reserve stockpile, making sure, you know, that's clear
that that's Bitcoin only, making it very clear from the most powerful leader of a country today
that that has his and the United States stamp of approval,
that now becomes something that is within Overton's window that just wasn't before that day.
And I was actually just talking to Jake, co-founder of Bridger,
and wrote that piece for BPI.
We're kind of spitballing on ideas for sovereign wealth funds in Africa
that could put, you know, if they're energy rich and there's hydros,
For example, Ethiopia, there could be a combination of things that they could do,
but being able to generate Bitcoin from Bitcoin mining that comes from energy there in Ethiopia,
I think is very interesting.
But I think the BitBond idea, which is adjacent to the Bitcoin reserve,
and I believe actually is being considered as part of what can drive revenue into a sovereign wealth fund in the United States,
can be part of the strategic Bitcoin reserve in and of itself.
It's super interesting solving United States problems where we're getting to a point where interest rates,
on bonds, on the Treasury.
The yield is increasingly putting Scott Messon's policy into a tough spot
to be able to raise the capital that's needed to fund everything
that needs to be funded in the government,
but doing it without breaking the bond markets
and being able to do it without blowing out the yields on bonds.
And so the idea kind of extrapolated from that to the Africa context,
I think is really interesting where you could have a sovereign wealth fund
that could go out and raise dollars plus Bitcoin in a similar fashion
where you have 1% to 3% guaranteed interest return,
and then once you hit 4% to 6% because of the amount of Bitcoin that is part of that bond offering,
then that is something that is split between investors and the nation state.
and I think that that could be really powerful for countries that maybe do not have a sovereign wealth fund
or don't have really capital associated with a sovereign wealth fund.
So Ethiopia, for example, has land and energy, and that's about it.
They could leverage that into putting together a BitBond based off of their energy resources.
And then in the Africa context, I think the additional layer that you'd want to add into that is that this is being raised for infrastructure needs and industrial development needs of that country.
So it would be a bit bond tied to a project, whether that's another hydroelectric facility, whether that is getting transmission infrastructure onto power plants so that more people can have more power from those facilities.
there's a number of creative things that you could do with that
and you could do it independently of being reliant on
China, the IMF, World Bank, the United States
other lending institutions
so I think watch that space
because that's something that I know Bitcoin Policy Institute
is ideating on
and they're awesome
So I've gotten to know a number of those guys fairly well.
Matt Pines literally wrote the strategy for the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve that was delivered to Besant.
And I'm sure behind the scenes is doing other interesting things in support of how the government is trying to be as thoughtful as possible
between executive orders and legislative solutions to really enshrine the role that Bitcoin is going to play.
the reshaping of the monetary order.
But they, I know, are also very interested in kind of taking those fundamental ideas
and putting them on the desk of other leaders around the world.
A good friend of mine, Ken Egan, former career CIA officer, did amazing things all over the world
and is one of the few former guys like us that's an out-and-proud Bitcoiner
and found his dream job as head of government relations at BPI.
I was just talking to him earlier, it was either today or yesterday,
about how to think about this and how BPI and others can be supportive of getting blueprints on the desk of presidents
and their advisors in Africa and other places.
That is excellent.
So I'm cognizant of your time here, Ben.
And we had set this for a two-hour convo, and we're pulling up on that.
So I suppose you've got stuff you need to do, and we don't want to monopolize all your time.
I'm very grateful for coming in here.
I wonder if there's anything that you wanted to leave us with.
I don't think you're on social media, but if you are, if you want to drop that and just let us know.
You have such a great perspective on this.
I wish there were more conversations out there that people could listen to you talk about Tocqueville and draw these connections.
Is there anything, do you have any connection, social media, anything like that?
Yeah, so, yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, which is, you know, social media nerds or professional nerds.
And, yeah, and that's, you know, that's where you can find me, you know,
Ben Kincaid, Raylement Technologies.
And, yeah, on that, I've stayed away from Twitter.
not because of anything that was government related before
but just because I know myself
and I'll just doom scroll six hours a day.
And then on Facebook, similar, I kind of rage quit Facebook
a couple years ago because it was doing the same thing
and I realized that most of my quote unquote friends
weren't actually close family and friends
and so why am I allowing this to take up so much space in my life?
And I think TOEFL is a bottom for that.
But in any case, I'm much more comfortable generally.
I mean, I love these conversations.
I go occasionally on podcasts when people invite me,
but it's not something I really seek out.
But I do love having these conversations.
I love having small group discussions on this.
I hope we have more of this offline and doing kind of what I can behind the scenes with writing a chapter of the book
and working with BPI and other friends that are still in government or are influential in D.C., moving back to D.C.
I'm really excited to be part of that community.
of that community. I know PubKey is opening a bar down in D.C. in partnership with BPI,
and there's just going to be a really, I think, cool Bitcoin culture there in D.C.,
so being a part of that and trying to be a participating democratic citizen in my own
country for the first time in 20 years, because I just really haven't done that.
So I'll be able to do that for the next three years, which is exciting.
The other thing, and then little side projects that are adjacent.
I've gotten to know and I work with the Simple Proof guys that, I don't know if you all know them,
but they are using Bitcoin timestamps to enhance election integrity.
So essentially insurance policies stamped on the Bitcoin blockchain to be able to very easily validate the results from polling and put it on the immutable blockchain.
so that you can be able to look at what came out of polls in the count
and be able to say six hours later or two weeks later that there were zero modifications to this.
And they saved the presidential election in Guatemala,
did a great documentary on that from being a victim of fraud,
worked with the county in the recent presidential election,
and are also doing this to verify and authenticate documents in the digital realm.
I'm just really excited about their mission and what they can do.
One of the things that we didn't get into, what I think is going to be increasingly a use case for Bitcoin
and the Bitcoin blockchain is how the immutability of the Bitcoin blockchain
can be a bulwark against runaway technology and AI and grift
and everything that can be so easily manipulated through that now universally accessible suite of technology
that can very quickly go in a bad direction.
So I see Bitcoin and Bitcoin blockchain being a defense, in a sense, from runaway tech, runaway AI.
And I think there's a lot more to be discussed there.
I watched a little bit of y'all's conversation around Jason Lowry and what he did.
I've spent a lot of time looking at that work and thinking about it.
I think a lot of that still needs to be kind of proved out, and I'm not 100% there on all of the thesis, but it's in that same category of what I think we're going to rely on, the immutable blockchain, in that power projection context to defend against as the physical realm is tied to or also manifested in the digital realm.
So anyway, awesome to talk to you guys.
I hope we can talk more offline.
And I want to help you guys with y'all's projects and want you all to be successful.
So please let me know how I can support.
That's awesome.
Thank you so much.
This has been an excellent conversation.
Absolutely.
I do hope we will continue this conversation.
You left too many interesting threads right there at the end.
And that was, and I will say too, inspiring what can happen when you're not on Twitter.
So that's a call to action to everybody out there.
Instead of doom scrolling, you could be doing all these other things.
Ben, you're a fantastic dude.
You're a deep thinker.
Your heart's in the right place.
I am happy to have helped to fund your career as a diplomat in Africa.
I'm sure that you did wonderful things for us that we probably won't ever be able to know about in some ways.
And so thank you so much for the service.
We really appreciate what you've done and are continuing to do in advancing Bitcoin,
not just by talking about it, but by actually being boots on the ground, especially in Africa,
which is the place that, as we said, this may be the kind of where the war is fought between freedom and autocracy.
and I think something very important is coming out of it.
So thank you for contributing your efforts to that,
and we really appreciate it, man.
Thank you so much, and have a wonderful evening.
I see it's starting to get dark behind that.
Thanks, Lucas. Thanks, Grant.
It's great to meet you guys. Take care.
All right. See you.
All right. Bye-bye.
Hey, thanks for watching.
If you like what you listen to, that's my brother.
That's Christopher.
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