Welcome back to Bitcoin Study Sessions. Today, we are honored and excited to have with us Sal Pineda.
Sal has a unique perspective, not just on Bitcoin, but on the global suffering of poverty,
on the understanding of justice in places where justice truly needs to be rendered.
Today we're going to talk a lot about Bitcoin and how it relates to the individual psyche of someone moving through the process of poverty and out of surviving and into thriving.
how we can do that as a community and what the value of things like what we're doing today,
which is engaging with other individuals, how the value of that can really raise the tide for all
the boats out there in the harbor. So Sal, I'm going to throw it over to you, Mr. Former Diplomat,
to let us know a little bit about yourself, and then we're going to get into the conversation here.
Of course. I think you sum it up, right? I think some people value things and fancy degrees, fancy titles. I think Bitcoiners in general value proof of work. And on that end, I'm just happy to be here. I'm a big fan of your work.
I remember sitting in the library at Cornell, fairly alone.
Nobody was a big coiner, but going over study sessions.
Shout out to software.
Hearing you guys go through that process helped me dive deeper and engage my own thoughts in that.
So I think with my background, it's a little multidimensional.
I have experience with a little bit of diplomacy, private sector, public sector, academics.
And I think now I'm just here. You know, I'm here. I can't. I got to pinch myself. They're even doing this. I remember listening to your study sessions and I actually get to be one. I'm just honored. And thank you guys for doing this. This is amazing.
Dude, the honor is ours. But give us some color on your background. You were dropped on the ground in El Salvador as a youth. And now you trod the somewhat free land of the United States. But give us kind of walk us through how you got to where you are and where you plan to go.
For sure. I, yeah, that's hard to keep it concise. So I was born and raised in El Salvador towards the latter part of the Civil War. And, you know, I was lucky enough to survive that. My family survived that, right? Where nobody was killed. 80,000 people were murdered. About 30,000 more were disappeared, right? Depending on your sources. So over 100,000, more or less. My family wasn't one of them.
But I did witness a transition, right? Civil war, peace agreement signed in Mexico, and then peace.
But how the hell do you go from war to peace overnight, right?
How do you, how do you, how do you, all right, so peace agreements were signed by some important individuals in Mexico.
But what about the people, right? What about the combatants from all parties that for 12 years or so spent fighting?
And for about a decade after, I saw that, right? And it influenced my journey of growing up there, went to school there.
And I was able to, unfortunately, towards the end of my stay there, I was able to witness the kinetic and experience the kinetic impact of how those transitions from war to peace are not linear, right?
They don't just go up and to the right towards peace, right?
There's a whole up and down, up and down.
So, you know, I spent some formative years there.
some government forces
assaulting my mom and I,
trying to silence their political activism
towards the emerging democratic
ecosystem, right?
A couple years after, they
killed my father, they tortured him,
shot him, survived,
which is a blessing. We're all alive.
And we
left. We left in like 72,
96 hours, you know, and
that was a fairly traumatizing process,
I think. How old were you
when you left then?
About 14, I believe.
About 13, 14,
13, 14,
fairly young,
but not too young
to not understand
what was happening.
And I think that was,
you know,
I'm grateful
I went through that experience
and survived it, right?
Not many survive
and can stay alive
to say this,
but I did.
And I think that
anchored me
to a framework of
not thinking that,
one, life is easy
and not thinking that,
hey,
if things don't go my way is because it's the world's fault.
Right.
Yeah.
And coming to this country that I'm very grateful to,
to the United States for, for the, the hospitality gave me, you know,
took about over a decade for my family to,
to go from political asylum to, to U.S. citizens, proud U.S. citizens.
I experienced a lot of other things in this country.
Like I experienced understanding that before I'm a human being,
I'm a Latino male, right?
This country has an interesting way of reminding me that several times a day.
And that just wasn't my experience outside of this country, right?
So there's an otherness in this ecosystem that I was able to compare it to where I come from.
And that was also very formative.
And it still is, you know, still is.
So I think I almost have served two completely different realities that I always carry with me in my life.
just my my serve my whole life you know so i learned that background right and then my journey
sort of integrating to this country um becoming a proud u.s citizen and and and and being part of
the social fabric you know i i'm fortunate enough to to have prioritized schooling as a way to
to trying to understand a lot of what i went through but also schooling as a tool of
transformation right and people have different tools of transformation right but for me it was
academics. And I spent some time in my undergrad. I majored in poli sci at the University of Maryland,
met my amazing wife there. The only reason why I'm able to do this is because I'm fortunate enough
to have an incredible partner. And then I ended up going to Georgetown, got a master's there
in Latin America studies and international development from their school of foreign service.
And I specifically chose Georgetown, one, because they were Jesuits, and I'm very familiar with
the Jesuit tradition in Latin America, that just, that is very appealing to me on how
Jesuits see the raw, right?
They pray for the poor, but then they feed them, right?
They roll their sleeves up to help feed them, right?
Not as a charity, but just as part of effecting change and transformation.
And that for me is distinctly powerful.
Obviously, Jesuits were killed up and down and priests in El Salvador during the war.
There was a saying of the National Guard, I believe, that was – and this is – you can Google it. It was called, be a patriot, kill a priest. Right? And they used to put it on walls, and there's images. And think about it, right? Be a patriot, kill a – fill in the blank, right?
So, yeah, that was in El Salvador, be a patriot, kill a priest.
That was from the during the Civil War.
The kind of regime in power would use that rhetoric against the Jesuits or against priests.
That's incredible.
Lucas and I were talking about the El Salvador and Civil War before we started talking with you, Sal.
It's something that in the United States, I mean, I don't think we nowadays really have a grip on what that country went through, what you went through.
and then are now bringing back and adding your perspective to the Bitcoin network with what you saw there.
I was reading from – you kind of give some of the stats.
There's a book here Lucas and I were talking about, El Salvador and the Aftermath of Peace.
Yes, I have that book. That's a great book.
Yeah, Ellen Moody is the author.
From the introduction here, peace officially arrived in El Salvador on January 16, 1992,
the day representatives of the government and the Faribund-de-Martin National Liberation Front signed peace accords.
The agreement brokered by the United Nations ended nearly 12 years of a civil war,
often characterized as one of the last battles of the Cold War.
And this is incredible here.
Lucas and I were talking about this.
The United States had sent the country $6 billion in economic, military, and covert aid.
I assume that's from 1980 and 1992.
$6 billion in the dollars of that era.
At least 75,000 Salvadorans died in the conflict and more than a million were displaced.
Nearly 20% had left their country, including you and your family.
And, you know, in the United States, I don't know if we often reflect on what a traumatic history that was for the people involved for the nation.
And that's what you reflect on now in your academic work. Lucas and I talked about your paper on transitional justice, this framework for how nations reconcile themselves to that incredible trauma of mass atrocity, of genocide.
and you discuss the framework, the arc that a country kind of has to go through to do that.
And then you circulate another paper to us, a working paper that you're working on,
which is kind of roughly about Bitcoin's knowledge network,
but which also employs that same transitional justice framework, but on the individual level.
And so we kind of want to get into that because it's incredibly fascinating.
And this working paper you sent us is just, it's so beautifully written.
Like it's so, it's some of the quotes, the turns of phrase in there,
It's just really beautiful, man. It's like a manifesto of sorts. It's not only an academic style working paper, but it's something that energizes. It's something that calls to action and brings to action. And I can't wait till you actually you get this done and get this out because people need to read this.
I think as a starting point to get into this, one of the important parts, this paper is roughly about kind of justice, violence, truth, knowledge, all of these things.
We start with the nature of violence.
That's one of the, I think, core pieces that maybe you bring from El Salvador to talk about Bitcoin and that you really elaborate very well in this paper.
What is violence?
That's right.
Well, thank you for the kind words.
That's very meaningful to me.
You know, I posted this online and I to hear that folks engage this, I it just it's beyond my wildest dream.
So thank you. Yeah, I can't wait to to this is probably my most intense and fun research that I've done so far because I'm able to reflect on a lot of pain that I've gone through and heal, which is a blessing.
But but also a lot of pain that I've seen. Right. And I'm not new to the ecosystem.
You know, I got into Bitcoin, went down the rabbit hole in 2017.
So I pay my fair share of dues with surviving the bear markets and just watching a lot of folks bringing fiat incentives and getting hurt, like getting hurt.
You can't really disrespect Bitcoin, right?
Bitcoin tends to support those that are respected the most.
And those that don't, you know, we've seen many of those cases, right?
So something I witnessed and, you know, after graduating from Cornell, I dedicated, I decided to dedicate this next chapter of my life to Bitcoin, right?
And what that means for me, you know, we all have talents and gifts, right?
That we can add value, whether that's marketing, research, building, engineer, coding.
I mean, so many talents and gifts, right?
My particular ones, I think, come from strategy, research, and whatnot, right, at the nexus of sort of policy, business, and politics as well.
And so I said, all right, well, let me just start traveling to this conference.
Let me start going full in, right?
And I went to a conference in Vegas.
I went to the ImagineIF conference in Tennessee by Bitcoin Park.
I ended up going to the Bitcoin Policy Institute conference in D.C. as well.
And then I went most recently to the Bitcoin in DC conference, policy-oriented in DC about a few months ago.
It has a bunch of other sponsors as well.
And something that was fairly easy for me to witness was there's a lot of pain about Bitcoiners, right?
There's a lot of, and don't get me wrong, right?
I'm not saying Bitcoiners walk around angry.
Of course, not most of them.
But when you look at the pattern of what unites Bitcoiners, there is an obsession with truth-telling.
But truth-telling can only come, and this is not just Sal's opinion.
This is just sort of like academic consensus and research and whatnot, more or less some consensus.
There's an order of operations to healing trauma at a nation-state level, right?
You can't just sign peace agreements and expect for people to go straight into peace after the signature.
And the next day, everything's perfect.
That's just not how it works, right?
There's a process of, all right, once peace is signed, you start with truth telling, right?
And you say, okay, so what happened?
Right?
What just happened?
What did the conflict just survive?
And usually there's a lot of violence, recounting, retelling, and trying to quantify violence.
So to your original question, what is violence?
Well, even that is contested in that process.
In the process of truth-telling for a country, the first pillar to get to peace, to get to healing, to get to rebuilding.
You have to start saying, well, what is violence?
And not only just violence, there's a gradient of violence.
There's cross-emissive humanity violence, and there's just then regular civilian-to-civilian violence.
And that's like very obvious violence, right?
But what about the not-so-obviously-invisible violence, the structural violence?
And I think Bitcoiners can connect with this, right?
And you hear them, right?
There's Bitcoiners that are saying, you know what?
I can't believe that my wealth is melting and I'm a libertarian.
I want very little government.
I don't want a Fed and I don't like politicians.
And I have 200 AK-47s and try to take my Bitcoin away from like 20 acres.
Well, let me tell you, they will and they can.
Right.
If you think guns can keep the government away from you, I got another bridge to sell here.
Yeah. And there's many places in many points in history in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. that that prove that. Right. That's not Sal's or Lucas's opinions. So violence then becomes.
is it becomes interrelated to violence.
Violence becomes interrelated to truth, right?
And it's like when there are massacres,
when there are at a nation state level,
when there's abuses,
when there's crimes against humanity,
who tells the story, the winner or the loser?
The victim or the perpetrator?
Yeah.
And it's a super interesting phenomenon to study, right?
And there's conflicts.
Maybe before we get, though, deep into the relationship between violence and truth, and I think you do a really good job in this paper talking about how violence hides what it cannot justify, but that then stimulates people to later seek that very thing out that violence is trying to obscure.
But before we get into that relationship between violence and truth, on the nature of violence, Lucas and I were discussing this because this is something I've always had an allergy to any sort of rhetorical description of violence as abstract, metaphorical, or not directly tied to physical aggression.
So you in your as you mentioned, you discuss structural violence. As I read in this paper, there's two forms kind of descriptions of violence. One violence is a form of multidimensional poverty, which is the violence of poverty, of affecting health outcomes, affecting ability to get education, affecting ability to move freely, affecting all sorts of things.
And in structural violence, it's kind of similar, comes from a particular academic point of view of violence as embedded in the social and economic systems, preventing people from realizing their full potential.
But I just I see that those are damaging things. But again, like I just have this. There's something important about for me preserving violence as physical aggression of one body against another of bodies against bodies of blood on the ground.
Whereas these other forms of kind of structural violence, multidimensional poverty as violence, these things are terrible and you can describe them as theft, which is also another terrible aggression.
But it just strikes me.
And so I want to hear you kind of make your case.
Why is this violence and not theft?
Why are these second order effects of an economic system not characterizable as something terrible?
You know, inflation steals from us.
But is inflation really violence?
And this, by the way, this is where you're settling a disagreement between Grant and I.
That's right.
Because we sat at this bar and we went back and forth on this.
And, you know, to kind of recap where we are struggling with this and we want to talk to you about it is I say violence is something that happens that has a negative or it's like an intent that has a negative effect.
And so it's like two things where I can walk up and punch a five-year-old and that's violent and that had negative effect. But I could also walk up and punch Mike Tyson and that has zero effect. And that's, is that violence?
And then I look at the difference between, okay, I walk up and I punch you in the face and tomorrow you're over it. There's no lasting effects of it.
But the violence that occurs from this out in the open debasement of of currency that is stealing the time and energy from the individual in the present and also taking away the ability to have any sort of say in the future debt and stealing that away.
When I read that working paper of yours, I wrote down a note. I think it was something like, this is multi-generational economic genocide that doesn't take life, but it takes hope. And a life without hope is no life at all. That's how you break a human spirit.
And if I kill one individual, then I've killed one individual. But if I kill the hope of an entire class of people, the poor, and I do that for multiple generations over and over, then I've effectively, in my view, I've committed a centuries-long genocide against the poor indiscriminately.
indiscriminately that to me has to be counted as violence because of the negative effect that is so
much greater than a bullet. So we'll put it to you. You may or may not settle the debate, but
yeah. So basically the question comes down to like, does violence have to be kinetic? Does it
have to be physical. Are we doing something to bastardize the definition of it by applying it to
these sort of economic assaults on poverty that are multidimensional and multigenerational?
That's fair. Good question.
Yeah. So I love it. I'm glad I have my capa-copa here because that's...
It's I.
So not only are you right, Lucas, but Grant is also right.
And he's almost there.
And I know I'll get Grant to get there and I'll do that in about three minutes because I.
It's beautiful, sir, of the framing.
Right. And Grant, you're you're a man of law.
Right. And I love it. Grant, you know, a lawyer.
You know, my dad is a lawyer. And I thought about wanting to be a lawyer for a while.
So law is binary, right?
Either it happened or it didn't happen.
I either go out and punch someone and I'm going to go to jail for assault or I did it.
And if I didn't, then sure, I could have threatened the person.
But if I didn't punch you, bye-bye.
That's not assault.
Within that framework, right, of law, I think what, and again, this is beautiful
because imagine this conversation
at a nation state level
after a massacre of a thousand people
like a village in El Mosote,
which was hundreds of people,
just literally civilians, children, women,
rape, kill, burn, just, you know,
then we get into the gradients of violence.
Was that a crime against humanity
or just a simple crime?
Right?
And I think, just took some notes here,
there's the law interpretation of violence
violence, and then there's a policy interpretation of violence.
And I'll give you an example.
So following what Lucas said, I can go out and punch someone and that's assault.
Absolutely.
Yes, that's violence and there's assault.
But what, so there's a kinetic component there.
What happens if I invest on Celsius and FTX?
I read the terms of agreements
I give them my money
and then all of a sudden
I'm bankrupt because they're bankrupt
and they didn't do what they said
they were going to do with my money
and then
what I
what they had told me
and the money that I had saved
for an emergency
those companies go bankrupt
then my daughter has an emergency
that needs $5,000
for a medical intervention
and I don't have $5,000
and my daughter dies
Is there violence in that process?
Is there a kinetic consequence to sort of what these two particular companies put it guilty to?
And the impact that it had on the people that it defrauded?
So I would say it has physical, it's theft, but theft can be terrible and result in death and dying.
And so the domain of physical violence is not the only type of vicious conduct that can lead to negative physical outcomes, is what I say.
At a certain extent, I mean, it's kind of a rhetorical or definitional thing. And I was, you know, thinking to so violence etymologically violate. It comes from violation to to in the Spanish, violar. It's even to rape. You have that in English, too, to violate somebody could be to rape them. And so it's this terrible assault on dignity.
And I mean, even as I talk to myself here, I move more towards your position because those types of economic assaults are violations. I mean, they are compromising somebody's dignity on a very, very deep level.
And so what else are they compromising? Because I like where you're heading. And as a man of law, let's dive deeper into that. Right. Because the fiat framework normalizes violin to think that it's just part of the weather.
Oh, the battery, you know, the wind pressure is 78.
Well, now hold on.
Why is the wind pressure so high, figuratively, when there's supposed to be no wind?
And it just becomes normalized.
So let's dive deeper on that because I like that.
So, okay, violencia, that's right, violation.
And if a crime, so inflation 2%.
Okay, sure.
So that might not be a crime.
That's a policy. That's a state policy. That's a federal policy. It's a national policy. But is there violence in that? And if there is, for who? Are the people closer to the printing machine experiencing the 2% the way that a single father, single mother that has to work two jobs and a part-time to make ends meet experiences at 2% inflation? What do you think, Brent? Where does the violence kick in in that framework that you're proposing?
So, as in, where does the – and in the inflationary situation, who is the victim of that type of violation?
I mean, it's as Lucas notes, it's class-based in a sense where it falls upon the people who are closest away from the sources of money production, right?
The Cantillon effect is this idea that the people closest to the money printing benefit from new infusions of wealth before its value has been debased.
And so it does have, as Lucas mentioned, kind of metaphorically a genocidal impact if we look at it as a type of violence that impacts a group.
And so, I mean, if I can get on board with talking about this as violence, as a form of rhetoric, the only reservation I still have is does that diminish in some way physical violence and the, you know, shooting somebody?
there's a finality to that, that there is not with 2% annual inflation or whatever.
There is a demarcation in the sort of violation that gets from dispensing with somebody's life
that you don't get when you dispense with their dreams.
They're different.
They're both terrible things.
And again, that's the only thing is, do you still see a distinction between physical violence
and this inflationary form of violence that you're mentioning, I guess?
Do you see any sort of hard line?
Is there any sort of bright line distinction or is it this continuum where you can't talk about a distinction?
No, there is.
So there's a gradient to violence, right?
My dad was kidnapped, assaulted, and shot by government death class.
That's violent.
That's a crime and violence.
He survived.
Many did it.
That was normalized for many years where I come from.
And across the world, in other geographies as well.
But I can attest to that one.
the impact of the violence that my father endured.
Let me make it personal.
A few years before that,
I was assaulted by government desks.
With my mom.
They came, they assaulted us,
put guns to our head.
I was a freaking kid.
That's distinctly traumatic
than the slow pace of inflation.
It is.
Absolutely. So I think it will be reasonable to agree on that premise of there's physical kinetic violence and there's non-physical sort of, you know, a different type of violence.
But what I want to start normalizing, and I see that as distinctly lacking within the narrative of the emerging political economy of Bitcoin.
And you see a little bit the big names, Mr. Larry Fink, Mr. Saylor, starting to hint at it, right?
I want to start normalizing saying, hey, this inflation, this debasement trade, let's hedge against money printing.
I know Mr. Fing has used, you know, this allocate 2% to your portfolio just in case.
Mr. Saylor's incredible words.
I mean, this is a man of independent means, very successful.
But I remember one of his first interviews that said, I was sitting there watching the U.S. government just print money during COVID.
And I've worked so hard for decades.
Yeah.
And I couldn't quite just make it to the big seven.
And it's not just me.
It's hundreds of our companies, thousands.
It's millions.
He wasn't talking about how the sun is beautiful and the sky is blue.
There is a different type of structural economic violence that he experienced, Mr. Saylor, against his effort, his life's work.
his shareholders most importantly.
Mr. Saylor is a representation
of all
the shareholders that he,
you know, that believe in him and
have invested in him.
Mr. Fink is
intermediary for people that
buy that, the service, the vehicle
that he offers, which has become the best performing
vehicle. So if you start
looking at that, right, it's, all right, these people
are not talking about joy is amazing things.
They're talking about, in very fancy terms,
Oh, yeah, you know, this is better
Yeah, but why is it better?
And that's sort of where this point of privilege comes
For some folks that have not experienced kinetic violence
And that's okay
You know, no kidnapping
You don't have to experience a kidnap to fuel violence
Right, you could feel the violence of having to work two jobs
And a part-time job
And I know many people like that
In Washington, D.C.
And they're struggling to make ends meet
I know people that cannot afford the electric bill, so they use gas furnaces to heat up, running the risk of, you know, years ago.
There was a famous case in D.C. that they use a furnace because they couldn't afford electricity, as it is allowed for them to jack up the price, right, for those companies.
And they ended up, you know, I didn't know these people personally, but they ended up, you know, the whole family died, right, because of the gas.
And so if the debasement of people's money, which is a representation of their time, and what is their time, it's your life.
That's the one resource we cannot literally duplicate, we can't expand.
So if they don't have ownership of their time, then how nonviolent is that?
I'm open to expanding my framework, but...
I can't land on another word but violence.
And there's fancy academic terms, right?
Structural violence political violence There fancy frameworks But at its core if you in Kansas City D or California you can make ends meet through no fault of your own
because you got your inflation and all this stuff,
and you just can't seem to make ends meet.
There's an element of violence there, not solely violence,
but it has violence.
And I want to start normalizing even having that conversation because otherwise one of the many hallmarks of violence is shame, right?
So that's a little bit of the framing that I'm looking to.
And by the way, this paper is going to come with a downloadable guidebook on how folks can engage the Bitcoin ecosystem, whether you are literally only investing and allocating a dollar a week of your wages because that's all you can, or whether you are a founding member of a Bitcoin treasury company and you have thousands of millions of coins or millions of dollars.
Right. Like, yeah, I'm showing how adding value to the network is not depending on people's wealth.
It's depending on people's sort of desire to do so.
And I think right now there's a little bit of a siloed narrative as far as, yeah, there's people in Kenya that are using it and, you know, good for them.
Yeah, there's people here in Washington, D.C. that are using Bitcoin because they cannot afford to pay the 10, 15, 20 percent transmission fees to Mexico.
I know many, many people doing that right now in D.C., not just Kenya.
And I think that what I saw in this conference is folks trying to weave things together.
Right. But then I started Googling.
I'm like, OK, so where's the handbook?
Who has written that?
And nobody has really put it together with words and with sort of a framework, right?
And that's sort of the effort that I say, well, hold on, but if we're all going to conferences, doing these study sessions, doing all this, then why are we doing it?
And lo and behold, we are now 46 minutes into our chat and we're not talking about fancy, amazing, sweet things.
We're talking about the gnarly things that Bitcoin seems to tackle.
So they all seem to be associated with violence.
Yeah. And just to tie up this thread, because I just want to read what a quote you have.
You kind of referenced this when you talked about looking at something like inflation as if it was the weather, as if it's like in a neutral scientific, you know, natural phenomena that just happens outside of our control.
You write, the modern monetary order has inflicted a quiet violence so normalized that most mistake it for the weather.
Inflation, debt, and inequality are treated as technical phenomena, not moral ones.
Yet behind every percentage point lies a story of delayed dreams, broken family, and unfulfilled potential.
So from my perspective, I'll just say debate resolved for the purposes of this conversation that whatever it is has the force of violence.
Like practically speaking, we can say that there's a lot of value in looking at something like inflation and then not looking at it as a dry academic or economic category, but looking at it as a moral one.
And if talking about it as violence gets us there, then I'm willing to do that because I do think that, as you say, behind every percentage point lies the story of some horrific thing that has happened.
And you speak from a point of authority on the continuum of physical violence to this type of economic violence.
And again, so for this conversation, I think we can go forward and say we're dealing with violence here in the problem you resolve.
The solutions that you talk about, the way that you talk about in this essay, I think, really get at the nature of that.
Well, and I think the first paper that we talked about of yours, you draw the direct line between poverty and violence.
You know, when you have no hope, when you've had your economic upward mobility stolen from you, then you're left with a set of choices that are undesirable.
And many people will turn to violence out of shame because they can't provide for their family.
And so I think you have to think about to me, you have to think about violence and you say, well, in in war is violence only committed by the person pulling the trigger or is it by the general giving the orders?
Is it by the politician putting in the putting in the vote in order to to commit that?
And I would argue that that's far greater.
These other people are just carrying out what they've done.
In a very real sense, when a government continues to confiscate the money, the wealth, the time, the hope, then what they're doing, they may not be pulling the trigger, but they are loading the gun.
They are putting it in the hand.
They are pointing it at a target.
And then to simply say that violence is only committed by the very final by the final commission there.
I think that that I think that undermines the responsibility that needs to be adjudicated towards those who who started that into motion.
And yesterday I told Grant Kobe, I'm not sure of his last name, but he's a big in the Bitcoin space, one of the founding members of the band Nirvana who moved big into tech.
And he just recently sold a tech company to Coinbase for three hundred and seventy five million dollars.
he talked about how when he got into bitcoin and he found all this wealth and was able to
take care of his parents um that he noticed their personalities change and he have bookmarked his
tweet i know exactly the tweet you're talking about in a video like yeah i know exactly what
you're talking about he saw the true nature of their character arise and he's very happy for
that. But he also commented on, you know, I couldn't help but feel as though, you know, that
was somewhat stolen from me as a child. Like, I never got to know my parents as a child because
they were always living in this poverty stricken world without hope, effectively, where we've
we've just taken away the ability for them to express themselves as people that are living in
in a world where they should be thriving,
but instead they're just fighting over
and trying to survive.
And so, yeah, I think-
Not only are you right,
and I remember the Bitcoin's drop in March, 2020
from 6,000 to 3,000
and his infamous, famous tweet
saying that his buy wall was for Satoshi.
I mean, it was incredible.
Anyway, long time follower of him.
And I remember reading that
and seeing that.
And I said, how must he feel?
Is he happy?
He has all this wealth.
Of course, I mean, there's a level of safety.
But you can feel the sorrow, the sadness,
the realization of, holy moly, not only was I stolen,
but it was because of these things that I now have
and that I made them through digital things.
So, again, he's not talking about how beautiful the sky is
and how the birds are fine.
There is a violence to it.
Now, a primary sort of signal of sort of victims of abuse is shame.
Right?
And again, Bitcoin is hard to understand
without a multidisciplinary approach.
Bitcoin is a little bit of sorrowful.
You don't know about tech,
or you don't know about politics,
or you don't know about economics,
all into one thing, right?
So to continue with Kobe, legendary German,
it's not just Kobe, right?
It's the people that did not sell a company
to Coinbase for hundreds of millions of dollars.
It's the people that are able to buy a dollar a day
outside of the U.S. or $100 a week in the U.S.
and see their wealth not melting away.
So within the shame of abuse and violence,
Bitcoiners emerge as aware, sovereign individuals
that evolve to become, some of them, Bitcoin maxis.
have fun stay poor a famous saying
if you look at the the sequence of that let's let's see what it really means for the people
that say that most of the time it really means poverty sucks i really wish you understood this
what's the other one that's famous and this is going to make it on my paper where i analyze this
quotes. The other one is, everybody gets Bitcoin the price they deserve. Well, what it really
means is, wow, I've tried to explain this to you. I put all this time and you still don't get it.
And I cannot help you. This sucks. But people are very rarely do what Michael Cedder or Mr.
Fink have said of saying, hey, I was wrong about Bitcoin. Now I understand it. Rarely. And to
have Mr. Saylor and Mr. Finks do that publicly,
you know, it is a sign of wisdom
to change your opinion with new information.
There's nothing wrong about it.
Yeah.
So you start seeing, right,
you start getting into this ethos of Bitcoin
that behind all this toughness,
behind this toxicity,
another one, Bitcoin is hope.
Well, from what?
What is it hope for?
Well, from economic structural violence.
Yeah.
Of what?
A fact of deflation, of not being able to pay for your kids, not being able to pay for rent, like working to like that.
I'm connecting it to the sources so we can all have a framework to normalize this.
Otherwise, it's just a bunch of us preaching to each other.
Yeah.
That we have already gone through this, right?
Honey badges don't care.
Another Bitcoin thing.
Yeah, but a lot of people do care.
A lot of people cannot even listen to this incredible studies.
It's just because right now they're in their part-time job to make ends meet.
And then Monday through Friday, they have to go to their other two jobs.
And I know several dozen people that have that lifestyle right now in this country.
Your paper does an excellent job of beginning with describing violence as a broader phenomena than we're used to, tying it to inflation, showing how it does affect a broad swath of people in the street, you and I.
talking about it as structural violence, but then connecting it to the individual experience.
And that's where I want to move this conversation because that's where the paper moves.
And that's where you've kind of been going, talking about Kobe's reflection in relation to his experience
and kind of observing the change in his parents.
And then Lucas noting in the introduction that your paper does talk about the individual psyche
of the person who is in the throes of Bitcoin adoption, the Bitcoiner.
You write, Bitcoin's political economy is born from introspection before it becomes infrastructure.
And I think that's a brilliant formulation that your monetization occurs from the ground up with every individual person having an individualized experience in relation to is Bitcoin money and their own life?
What pain can it redress?
Leading to, as you call it, a distributed civic awakening.
So can you discuss, you know, where you go with that in your paper?
Because it's just utterly fascinating.
I think it's exactly what Bitcoiners need to be talking about is the individual Bitcoiners experience, its relation to violence and how Bitcoin is the link that kind of redresses that.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, you're asking the very, very good questions.
I appreciate you sort of framing it as such because I was processing my thoughts here.
So Bitcoin doesn't care, right?
Bitcoin is just code, it's apolitical, and it will produce blocks.
And it survived already one nation state attack by the Chinese, the band mining, and it survived it.
So Bitcoin does not care.
Yeah, but people do.
And the members of this knowledge network of Bitcoin are many.
The miners, the users, the investors.
decoders, many folks.
So how does something that's neutral,
Bitcoin as a neutral digital commodity,
fire, petroleum, just things, right?
How does something neutral
become such a powerful tool of peace
if you are center left,
weapon of peace
if you are center to the right
or if you're in the center,
instrument of peace.
And we have everything
in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
How do we go from,
hey, this is just code
like Microsoft Word.
Why don't we get so protective
and want to advocate
for Microsoft Word?
A strategic Microsoft Word reserve.
Why don't we do that, right?
If it's code, code is code.
Strategic
AI restore.
Why is it Bitcoin?
Right?
And that's a little bit where I started kind of saying, okay, well, it has to be about the people.
It's not about the code.
The code is an element.
It's not just only about the code.
The code allows for people to assign a meaning that withstands lies.
it's not a role to talk about non-Bitcoin assets,
but trending against Bitcoin,
only Bitcoin is trending up, right?
So there's something there.
And I think, you know,
there's folks that have been in the spaces.
I mean, Hal Finney, rest in peace.
He wrote most of the things that are coming,
that we're seeing coming.
Bitcoin banks, Bitcoin, you know,
So incredible that he already saw that.
As this takes off in adoption, we're still early, I think.
Attack-wise, I think they're still coming.
They should say attacks.
We haven't even seen them yet.
And adoption-wise, we're still very early.
So within that framework, Bitcoiners emerge as individuals that are seeking truth from what they have been wrong, from the values that they've experienced.
And this is where I make a detailed sort of analysis of like 21 movers and shakers in the podcast space, 21 movers and shakers in the human rights space, 21 movers and shakers in the builders ecosystem, just because that's the beauty of this.
This is decentralized.
And I can't help but remember Victor Jara, a famous artist, singer, songwriter, educator, really, that was riddled with 40 bullets by the state, by the Chilean Pinochet regime in Chile.
And there's a story that when they took him to the stadium, they broke his hands, right?
The military broke his hands to make a point.
He used to play the guerrilla.
So there's some violence that he experienced before being dead, right?
Not one bullet, not 40.
And Monsignor Romero, now Saint Romero, who also never took up arms, was a simple educator through the gospel, right?
His interpretation of the gospel.
and as he was raising for a homily,
as he was celebrating a homily,
as he was raising,
as he was celebrating mass,
he was assassinated by a sniper
straight to the heart.
They were simply speaking truth.
Unfortunately,
one's body is not decentralized.
Bitcoin is the first ever asset in human history to emerge that I can think of, and I've spent hundreds of hours in this, thousands, that has emerged as a decentralized mechanism of truth-seeking and truth-telling.
Because it's apolitical, so it allows you to, the input is curiosity.
The output is truth.
Otherwise, Mr. Fink, who, when Mr. Fink says something, Wall Street listens, why else will he change his opinion?
From, I think he said in 2018, Bitcoin can be considered an index of money laundering.
Mr. Saylor, we have heard him, right?
And he's very open, and we're lucky to have someone like him as an educator in the space that has open-sourced his whole framework.
he went from seeing his company languishing quite a bit and saying,
oh my goodness, I've done everything I can and then some,
and I have access to all these resources.
I said, I'm very, very wealthy.
Yeah, I can't seem to make it.
And why is it?
And he led him to sort of study that economic balance,
and this could be controversial, but that even applies to the private sector.
Not everyone in the private sector is doing really well off.
Look at the Magnificent Sevens and then look at every other company.
So Bitcoiners immerse as folks that have been wrong one way or another.
And I always say this, Bitcoin is for winners.
I said this in one of our last podcasts.
Bitcoin is for winners.
And what type of winners?
folks that are saying, you know what?
I hate having my fee at the base, so I want to protect it.
I don't really care.
And I've had these conversations with folks, you know,
fairly center to center left saying, I don't like the term winning.
That's a little too greedy.
And I don't like those capitalists.
But I don't like losing.
I don't like just seeing my melt away and support wars I don't agree with,
support programs I don't agree with.
I'm like, hmm, so you do like to win then.
It's like, no, no, not really.
I just don't like to lose.
I'm like, okay, that's fine.
We got to meet everybody where they are, right?
And then you talk to folks from center, center, right, saying, I love multiplying my wealth.
I work so hard and it's just not multiplying as fast compared to other folks closer to the printing machine.
So this can allow a level of equalizing my opportunities.
Hmm, so you do like to win that from home.
And then you start seeing, okay, everything that's tying us together is a discomfort with the way the current system that we haven't voted for, by the way, treats all of us.
And I'm putting the light into saying, hey, there's violence there.
No, no, no.
Let's call it what it is.
You want to talk academics? Sure, let's do it
I got some academic degrees too
There's structural violence
Hey
You know
You're being oppressed and whatnot and you're really poor
Hey, let's talk about it
This could be a weapons of the week process
Like James Scott says
I want to shed the light
Because by then doing or at least
Hoping I do that
I could then
Help drive the conversation forward
In a multiplicative effect
And saying, yeah, you know what, getting folks comfortable saying, yeah, you know what, there is a little bit of violence.
Even though I have an Ivy League degree from the U.S. and I have a lot of privilege, but my wages have not gone up as far as inflation when you do the average movement rate over the last few years.
So we're working through a shame, but that is a very sensitive topic for a lot of people, right?
It's a little easier for folks that have been impacted with trauma, you know, because I always say this poverty sucks, period.
I don't care if you're in Kansas City, if you're in Illinois, if you're in D.C., in Boston, or if you're in Kenya, or if you're in Guatemala.
It sucks.
But if you think that you're not poor, you're kind of doing well, then there is a shame with it.
So this paper, the hope is, hey, no, let's name it.
Let's just name it because then that's going to allow us to connect with everybody else.
Being a bit comprehensive with somebody that's working two, two and a half, two full-time jobs and a part-time job does absolutely nothing.
Actually, matter of fact, it's off-putting.
And I say that as an educator here,
founding member of the Cornell Bitcoin Club.
You talk to people, grad school students
that are getting fancy degrees
and are going to go straight to Wall Street
for a quarter million studied entry-level salary
in banks or consulting,
plus, you know, 100, 150 more bonus first year.
You talk to them about poverty,
they will look at you like, get out of here.
Oh, I'm not poor because I have these things.
Yet, I have many friends that, you know,
they haven't taken that path and it sucks.
They were like, wow, I live in New York City and I can barely make his meat.
And I have two kids and a wife.
And so, right, there's a dignity to having this financial privilege checked that this framework is hoping to help demystify.
Yeah. So the idea is that by calling it what it is, violence, it removes the stigma of calling it poverty. I mean, and so reduces the shame of acknowledging that we're fighting back against all of us together in our own individual ways, an economic system that is impoverishing us all to some degree. I mean, is that what wipes out the shame is calling it violence and then acknowledging the gravity of it?
Yeah.
I think that's what Mr. Fink is saying.
And that's what Mr. Saylor is saying.
Yeah.
I think if we look at the nature of shame, shame is a learned behavior, right?
You're not born understanding shame.
You are taught shame by people around you who observe you do something and then give you feedback that makes you feel shame.
where had you done that in a vacuum, you wouldn't feel shame.
But knowledge changes that.
You talk about winning.
And I remember writing, you know, there's no such thing as a born winner.
There's just losers that kept trying.
And the better way to say it, Naval recently talked about this.
It's not 10,000 hours.
It's 10,000 iterations that get you from losing to winning, that get you from failure to success. And having shame as a blockade, having shame in the way of iterating is what keeps people stuck in that poverty cycle.
To be able to approach your failure with humility means that you are putting aside the shame and you're open to the curiosity of accepting a new idea.
You, in this working paper, you elucidate that these four pillars of transitional justice, truth-telling, accountability.
Reparations and then institutional reform.
Reparations and institutional reform, you spell out how this is the individual process going through and in this order of operations, but that these four pillars stand on a foundation of economic sovereignty.
That none of these things can actually stand if you do not have the ability to create and store your wealth.
And to carry that into the future.
And, you know, Lucas, what do you think of, not only are you spot on, but early on a few seconds ago, you said it stands in economic sovereignty at the individual level.
Let's dive deeper in economic sovereignty.
Let's remove, let's call it what it is.
So what is economic sovereignty if not owning your time?
And what is owning your time if it's not, hey, you only have one life, you're going to die. So far, we all die. We can't live permanently. So if you, economic sovereignty is a derivative of time. Time is a derivative of, hey, you only have one life, you're going to die. What do you want to do with it?
And I feel we kind of tiptoe around that in general, not just like in the political economy of Bitcoin, but in life, right?
Because we have normalized, look at the tax rates in Europe.
People work six, five, six, seven months of their year for someone else.
I recently had a family member that did not make it to the year
They're no longer here with us, they die
That's just the reality
Of life
One of us could not be here tomorrow
Could not be here in a few months
That's just life
So
That's the part I want to start anchoring it
I anchor into, there's nothing funny about this.
There is a violence to this.
And saying it allows a release of the shame,
of the loneliness, of the otherness.
Keeping up with the Jonas's or the Johnson's,
whatever the saying is in English.
What does that really mean?
oh, I have shame that I don't keep up with them.
Well, you don't know what the hell they're doing.
You don't know what they're going through.
So shame is imbued in all of this, right?
In the current economic system that
the benefits from this structure, right?
There's a benefit for high taxation.
There's a benefit for inflation.
Bitcoin is a counter to that
and a release, right?
for those that want to,
whether that's allocating 2%,
that's not Sal's opinion or Lucas,
that's Mr. Fink's opinion,
or whether that's a lot more than 2%, right?
Like Mr. Saylor suggests.
And I think that by humanizing
the dehumanization of economic violence,
and I'm going to say that again,
I think that by humanizing the dehumanizing process
and impact of economic violence,
we can then help the message of truth
that Bitcoin allows for those that are curious.
But you can't really be curious
if you have two full-time jobs and a part-time
because you're barely making it.
So this is like humanity's journey through knowledge, right?
It's not just unique to Bitcoin.
And that's how early we are.
You know, I think, you know, it's really early,
like hundreds of years, not really where I'm going to be in the next six months.
But I think we're well ahead of where we were back in 2000, you know, 2010, 2011.
So does that make sense?
Because you say economic sovereignty and that can get lost very easily on people that might
not even have enough financial literacy to understand what that means.
And by the way, most people don't have that.
Yeah, I think it's the question. It answers the question of morality, which you you take us through morality as as one of the tenants here, which Grant and I discussed last night, is that there is somewhat, at least to me, there's somewhat of a relief in going down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin and understanding the nature of the current system versus Bitcoin.
and being able to characterize the inherent morality of the fairness and justice and openness of Bitcoin as compared to the other system.
Because we grew up in the world of the thing to do was to sell out.
The thing to do was to take today and sacrifice tomorrow.
Well, the thing to do was to take on all this debt to get the giant house, to get the boat, to get the second house, to get the fancy car.
and while that by the rules of the game that we were inserted into that was the correct way to
play it there has always been this undercurrent this feeling that was ineffable that could not
be described but that we knew that there was something inherently wrong about that we knew
that there was something inherently immoral about that. And that to me, it was like a vindication
to understand Bitcoin and then to rationalize that with my own natural behavior. Like my own
natural behavior is to be a saver. My own natural behavior is to be risk averse with my money and
with my wealth.
Yet, like in my previous career as a banker,
one time I was educated on the system by a 22 23 24 kid who had million worth of debt And I was telling him you way too overextended way too overextended
And he goes, no, I want debt.
The more debt that I have, the better.
I would prefer to have only debt.
I don't want to own anything.
If you would allow me simply to have all debt, that would be fantastic
because that's how I win at this game.
And he had advanced past or put to the side the morality of that question of whether or not, you know, and that that takes that's all the way back to the Bible and, you know, the immorality of money lending and usury.
but you you do you know if I the monumental study if I tell you that the chores that you do around
the house are equivalent to a full body workout you lose weight your blood pressure goes down
your heart rate decreases if I tell you that the chronic pain that you suffer from is because of
repressed rage that you are not dealing with then just by knowing that your chronic pain decreases
And this knowledge where if I tell you that this is violence, that this is a structural attack on the poor, just by knowing that, then your life can change because you can take action.
And just because now you can put aside the shame of that and you can come to it with the first approach, which is to I need to look at this from a truth telling perspective.
What am I doing that is killing me?
What am I doing that's making me fat, that's making me poor, that's making my life messy, that's making my relationships bad?
And now that I can approach that without shame, then I can move to the next pillar of accountability where I can identify what is in that system that is causing that.
And then I can make those reparations.
I can move out of that system.
I can take the action.
Justice is truth in action, I read the other day.
And that to me is like this is the silent justice that is occurring with people onboarding themselves into Bitcoin, no matter what avenue they're taking to do it, is that they are inflicting justice upon this system that has been inflicting injustices upon them simply by the knowledge that they've gained where they know that this is the more moral approach.
And there was a line that you had in what you wrote, which I wanted to I wanted to ask you about. Morality cannot be cannot be rationalized. Conscience cannot be owned by the state. Morality cannot be rationalized. Conscience cannot be owned by the state. What do you mean by that?
And I think I think the word I used was nationalized. Morality cannot be nationalized.
Oh, yeah. Sorry. You're right. Yeah. Thank you. I have bad handwriting. Morality cannot be nationalized. Yes. Yes. Oh, well. All right. So we can use a specific example. First of all, thank you. That's a beautiful framing of it. And yeah, I completely, not only does that make sense, there's a particular BitCoiner. She has like 20 some thousand followers. Her name's Lindsay Stamp, I believe. And she makes it to my paper where she pretty much just films her story.
You know, she has a job, a regular job, nine to five.
But in the afternoons, at nights and weekends, she drives Uber.
She films herself at the end of sort of her Uber entrepreneurship journey every day.
And then she's just like, okay, well, guys, I, you know, it's like three little minute videos.
All right, today I made five Uber drives.
I earned, you know, 20 bucks a piece.
And this is going to go, this is a hundred and whatever.
and after gas and mileage and whatnot,
this is the net profit
and all of it is going to go straight to Bitcoin.
And then she ends up the video
posting that her Bitcoin purchase transaction,
which is incredible.
You know, I had the opportunity
to interact with her
and the reason why I chose her
and I analyzed her as well in the paper
is because without saying it, right?
Each video she does
Is a
Compilation of her actions
That whether consciously
Or not for her
And I'm very big
I admire her work a lot
And I mean I love it
She has engaged in one truth tell
Said okay I have this
Notified but that's not enough
And you know what I'm not
Just going to sit here and go
not do anything. I'm going to go work for more fiat because I know that that can be taxed away.
2% inflation out of 35, what, the half-life of 2% is like 35 years. So like literally your
wealth, if you don't do anything, a 2% inflation rate gets decreased by 50% in 35 years.
That's pretty horrific, just what it means, right? So she says in the videos, what she's not saying
And it's like, hey, y'all, I went through a process of truth telling years ago.
You know, she's been doing this for a few years.
And you know what?
I keep on landing on this truth that I need to stack my fiat into Bitcoin, a percentage of it, because, and that's pillar number two, criminal prosecutions, just in general.
Because through no fault of my own, and really there's nothing I can do by myself to change it.
But the system in which I live in within the U.S., it's really not helping.
And with this 2% inflation, it's really going to base the value of my life's work.
And I have family.
I have those I want to achieve, whatever.
So, guys, again, this is all unsaid, right?
So, guys, the third pillar, she's like, guys, my act of reparation, my act of trying to repair this is, hey, putting in the work.
Nobody's giving her anything.
She's risking her life going out at night during the afternoon, risking her extra work.
So think about the framework that Bitcoin transforms once you see the truth.
That nobody's going to come to save you.
That's just life.
So she said, I'm going to put in more work away from my family, away from doing things I love,
to earn this fiat, pillar number three,
to repair what's being done to me.
Of course, she will never say this, right?
That's just not saying it.
And then step number four, pillar number four,
I buy it and here's a screenshot at the end
and she finishes the video.
I buy it to show pillar number four,
my action of institutional reform
and reforming what I can control,
which is Lindsay's personal strategy
for protecting her wealth.
When you see that,
when I saw that years ago,
I couldn't unsee it.
And she does it in such an incredibly poised,
empathetic,
when the free market speaks,
she has tens of thousands of followers.
So clearly the message connects.
But the truth is there
It's underlay
What I want to say
In this paper
Is saying hey
For those that
That might not even take the time
To go down the rabbit hole
You are actually going through
A lot of economic violence
You might want to give it a shot
Because of X, Y, Z
And calling it
Shitting a light on it
Typically, it's the first, it's the very, I mean, entire psychology and therapy is based on that, right?
You examine the past by understanding what happened.
Right?
So I'm hoping that by saying, hey, there is violence.
Nobody really, I think, willingly and happily says, hey, fam, I already worked full time, but I'm going to go work some more to buy some Bitcoin.
You don't really do that happily.
I mean, you do it because you believe in it and you want to protect it, right?
You want to protect this network. But there's an element of she's doing this as a recourse to the violence that's been inflicted by a system through no fault of her own.
But we all live in it.
Yeah. And you do a great job. That was such a beautiful application of the transitional justice framework to an individual Bitcoiners personal redemption arc in relation to the violence they've experienced as a result of the economic system.
And by calling it violence, you know, that does allow you to do an excellent and beautiful thing in this paper of taking that transitional justice framework, usually on the national level, and then applying it to the individual's journey and reconciliation with the violence that they experienced.
And your description of what this person is doing on Twitter and the value it's adding is another really just deep and profound part of this paper, the knowledge network, that there is this idea that you have, which is excellent, that out of each individual's private reckoning with their own experiences emerges this network of people adding something to Bitcoin who are not coders.
who people who, you know, they don't maybe even fully comprehend the opportune debate or something like that,
but they feel on a deep visceral level emanating from their own experience that they need to talk about this,
their own journey, and that this produces a political economy of Bitcoin,
an additional layer to Bitcoin that is energy and not rhetoric.
So could you expand on that, your idea here of what the knowledge network is?
Absolutely.
And I'll definitely share with you the final draft
because what I shared with you was sort of the first half
and the other half, like getting the details of it.
But at its core, what I argue is,
all right, so Bitcoin doesn't care, coma, but people do.
Okay.
Sure.
I think we can all agree with that.
Mr. Fink and Mr. Saylor care.
Okay.
Lucas, Grant, and Sal and Lindsay care.
Okay.
Well, what the hell do we care about?
Why are we all converting on one thing?
What is this thing?
Obviously, we all have different access to different levels of resources.
Mr. Fink, Mr. Saylor, all of us.
But I think we care and we converge on this knowledge network
that Mr. Saylor and Mr. Fink went in the record
and said, hey, I've changed my opinion about BACOM.
That's how powerful this is, right?
They didn't say I changed my opinion
because of Lucas and Grant's study sessions
or South's paper.
No, they said, I went through my own process,
Mr. Fink and Mr. Saylor,
people with incredible amount of access to resources.
They said, yeah, you know what?
I was wrong.
I was like, okay, so what did they go through?
Well, it went through three things, right?
And the knowledge network tends to converge around these three elements, right?
And we have individuals that do this.
And I'll read them.
I'll have a screen here to my right, so I'll read them.
At its core, this knowledge network performs three interlocking functions.
Number one, translation.
This means education and explanation.
There's teachers, writers, podcasters, and open source contributors that translate the
complexity of Bitcoin into civic literacy.
They demystify energy, scarcity, and sovereignty, turning code into culture.
Clearly, Mr. Fink and Mr. Saylor, who have, again, and I only say this as far as, this
is folks that have incredible access to resources and could learn anything overnight and could
hire the world's best experts to learn it.
It took them years.
They actually initially dismissed Bitcoin.
But somehow, and they share a little bit of their own journey, right?
This is so public records.
Things were translated for them and they translating things that said, hmm, okay, you know what?
I am actually a Bitcoiner.
I believe in it.
So, element number one.
The network performs another one.
Verification.
Bitcoin doesn't care.
It's transparent.
Everybody can verify.
Yeah, no, but humans do.
as the folks that decided to support Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Satoshi Vision.
The network provides research and accountability,
what we are doing right now.
Academics, journalists, and analysts test claims, audit institutions,
and expose misinformation.
They ensure that truth remains measurable
and that no authority monopolizes understanding.
It is in that monopoly, right, that obfuscation happens.
And typically monopolies are allowed by people that have access
to huge amounts of independent means, right?
And the third element is creation.
So translation, verification, and creation.
The network, the Bitcoin Knowledge Network,
allows for innovation and application.
There's builders, there's miners, investors that are focusing on protecting and extending Bitcoin's utility through new tools, like more efficient miners.
Right?
Like that's super important.
And you need to get even more efficient every single while.
how it. They focus on infrastructure, on energy projects. The creation component of the network
embody its ethos, the ethos of Bitcoin by transforming knowledge into tangible progress.
So that's all fancy three elements to say one. So the knowledge network is made up of three things,
translation, verification, and creation. And I was able to, out of all of those three things,
I was able to create derivatives of everything, including the study sessions, Lindsay, Mr. Fink, Mr. Saylor, everyone.
Well, these three functions form what I call the thermodynamic metabolism of truth.
There's a metabolism.
And it's thermodynamic.
So it's anchored by physics.
Gravity is incredible and is amazing.
yeah but if you jump off a building
you might not make it because of gravity
but you can use gravity for
incredible things to do create peace
and abundance
fire is empowering yeah but you can burn
alive
and it's used as a torture by many
through history for humans right
so
these three functions form the
thermodynamic metabolism of truth
energy
is the input. It enters
us work.
Intellectual energy, what we're doing here,
moral energy.
People think of morality
different, and that's okay. There's a place for
everything. I'm getting ready
to do a post. I have a list of books
that I've accumulated over the years that I used to
help allocate at the Cornell Bitcoin Club, and I
have every type of book. There's a book
that's called Bitcoin is, thank God
for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is for
blue-collar workers. Bitcoin is
for Muslims. Bitcoin is for me.
All levels of morality have books about why Bitcoin is for them.
That's beautiful.
That's incredible, right?
And as an educator, my responsibility was to read all of it, to understand, not to judge, but to understand and be able to connect.
So if this three functions from the thermodynamic metabolism of truth, energy enters us work, intellectual, moral, or electrical, and leaves the output as understanding.
Over time, this feedback loop self-organizes into something resembling a living organism, and there's been work done on that before.
Ideas compete, adapt, and evolve.
But weak narratives in a free market tend to die, and strong ones persist.
So out of this process emerges what we call signal, verified truth that survives entropy.
And I think these two particular paragraphs are the essence of the other half that I'll send your way, where I say, okay, how do we connect Lindsay's incredible Uber videos, Branson Luca's incredible intellectual analysis?
Shout out to Natalie. Her work has been fundamental, absolutely fundamental. Jason, absolutely fundamental.
I mean, just folks that are, you know, if we're analyzing the now, they're thinking decades, centuries in advance, right?
And it's beautiful because we all make this knowledge work.
But we're looking for the signal.
And that's where many folks, depending on their frameworks, their emotional backgrounds, their perspective, the levels of shame,
And that's for many folks to revive, but many, many more do not.
And they lose their wealth.
They lose their life's work.
And we've seen it.
And it's not just particular to the market within Bitcoin.
It's the markets in general.
I remember all the suicides that happened in the great financial crisis of 2008.
I'm old enough to remember that suicides.
I mean, it was horrible.
So, you know, this is serious topics.
We're talking about people's lives.
and the knowledge network aims to provide an aim
that I think can empower Bitcoiners
to support the curve that's happening,
the adoption curve that's happening,
aligned with the truth-telling and truth-seeking process
that Bitcoin, and really only Bitcoin, enables.
Does that make sense?
Does that answer the question?
It makes perfect sense.
And the part that I find, one of the parts that I find very beautiful about the Knowledge Network is acknowledging contribution from members outside of specific kind of technical aspects of the operation of Bitcoin.
I mean, you know that miners are part of the Knowledge Network.
You know, better technologies do emanate from the Knowledge Network as part of the production of truth.
But also part of that Knowledge Network is, you mentioned artists.
That is, I think, one of the kind of parts of Bitcoin that we're really going to see flower in the next kind of stage of adoption is the production of Bitcoin culture.
that is in the vein of all true art.
It's not nail on the head specifically about Bitcoin saying Bitcoin is beautiful.
Bitcoin, it's people who are Bitcoiners creating art from the premises
that are deep in their bones because they are Bitcoiners.
They have experienced like the revelation of Bitcoin,
part of what you call the distributed civic awakening.
And they have this fire in them and they're going to translate that into culture.
Just to bootstrap off that, we have an artist here in the room, Lucas.
He is a musician.
And as part of one of the things that we're going to see is music as kind of the flowering of the knowledge network, this art aspect.
And you've been working on some music that is in this vein, that is a person who is a Bitcoiner making music that's not, quote unquote, about Bitcoin,
But that is deeply informed by like the energy that's stored from having explored Bitcoin and having come to the realizations about Bitcoin.
Yeah, I think art is fundamentally about expressing truth. And the greatest truths are those from which other truths arise. So I think it's the foundational truth from the other things, like the laws of physics are the greatest truths and from them, these other things arise.
And like the fiat, you know, the difference is that like the fiat system is a truth that only goes up to here because it's only true for a certain number of people.
It's only true for the people who can take advantage of it, which is a very small amount of people.
But Bitcoin is true for everyone, as you know.
It's for Muslims.
It's for taxi drivers.
It's for dog walkers.
It's for everybody.
but underlying that is the morality
and art, you know, the beauty of art
I think comes from the morality of it
and that's what I've found is that
trying to write songs and create music
post-Bitcoin understanding
is to draw on this
wellspring of morality which underpins Bitcoin that is the source of truth that makes it true
for all the other people who engage with it. And I do think that the Bitcoin culture and the
Bitcoin art is going to be appealing to everyone because it is true for everyone. Because this
morality of openness and fairness and equality and justice that is embedded into Bitcoin through
the physics and through the code. It does apply to everyone as opposed to the system that we've
come out of, which is only applicable to a certain subset of people. And you think about the
degradation of modern art, you know, the banana duct taped to the wall, you know, the pop art
of the Campbell's soup can that it's appealing to a certain subsect of people. But when we go back
and we look at like Renaissance art and we go back and we listen to Renaissance music, it is
seemingly undeniable that there is beauty in that that appeals to all people. It's very difficult
to look at a gothic structure, to look at a Michelangelo painting, to listen to Beethoven
or Mozart. It takes a very unique person to observe that and not find the beauty in it. But it is
very easy for a large subset of people to look at the fiat economy and not see the beauty in that
it's very easy for people to look at to listen to the music of bad bunny or ariana grante or
modern art it's very easy for people to listen to that and not find the beauty in that um because it
it has become very polarizing because it is only meant for a small,
a small portion of the people for whom that truth speaks.
But yeah, the morality that underpins Bitcoin speaks to everyone.
And so I think that it will be,
I think that it will be largely appealing to nearly everyone.
What do you think of this, Lucas?
And I played the violin for many years.
So I, you know, I love musical.
I think artists, there's no freedom with no art.
Where art is prohibited and banned, there is no freedom.
Freedom is also prohibited and banned.
But I would love to see, because I get into this paper.
In the paper, I actually choose a few artists and just kind of within Bitcoin and examine, right?
Authors, people that do sculptors, the Lugano art about Satoshi that was vandalized,
thrown into the water about two months ago.
That's the beginning of it.
That's what's coming.
That's how it started against Victor Hata.
And he was riddled with 40 bullets
and he broke his fingers.
But that's what's coming.
That's a sign right here.
People don't, again, my paper does go,
I shed light into it.
I'm like, no, no, no, that's coming.
And there's a famous,
eventually it's going to come against people.
Right.
So I would love to get your perspective
because this is sort of what I argue in the paper as well
when it comes to art specifically.
There's no freedom for artists, right?
There's an element of sharing it.
There's an element of sharing,
whether there's a sculptor,
the Lugano sculptor that was vandalized,
letting people assemble, right?
Whether that's playing the guitar, the violin,
having people listen to you.
Just there's no,
it's hard to say that there's art
if there's no freedom of assembly.
But freedom of assembly
is a derivative of freedom of speech.
Because if you are only allowed to assemble
but they control your speech,
then how much art can you say?
But then I say freedom of speech
is a derivative of humanity's freedom.
There's many places where you're free to say
whatever you want within the framework
of what's allowed in the government.
So is that freedom of speech?
And then the freedom of humanity is a life,
it's a history of back and forth
on the scarcity of the world's resources,
whether it be land, coal, oil, anything.
So you can't have freedom of assembly
if you don't have freedom of speech.
You can't have freedom of speech
if you're not allowed to have freedom as a human.
You can't have freedom as a human if there's no scarcity of resources, if there's no control over the means as opposed to just an infinite printing machine.
Therefore, there is no Bitcoin adoption without an exponential growth of art.
Because art is a symptom of the freedom that's allowed.
particularly when it comes to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly,
which are inalienable rights within the U.S. Constitution.
Obviously, this is a U.S.-centric conversation.
What do you think of that?
Because that's sort of the framework I'm bringing specifically to artists
and tying it on why, right?
Again, because we can all get caught up, oh, art is beautiful.
Yeah, but why?
Well, because this allows you a framework of assembly.
Well, because there are also a framework of speech.
So I would love to hear your perspective on that as an artist yourself.
Yeah. So just to reframe or not reframe, but just to restate. So what you're saying, and I completely agree, is that the wellspring from which these freedoms arise, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc., is that there is the economic sovereignty under that.
the freedom and the ability to create and store your own wealth, to own your own time.
Yes.
And there's two things that I want to kind of maybe we'll add a little color to that.
The first, freedom of assembly without freedom of speech.
So in China, there are people who protest and they gather and they assemble.
and the way that they protest because they don't have freedom of speech is that they hold up blank
sheets of paper. Wow. Right. So you have freedom of assembly. Wow. But because you don't have
freedom of speech, this is all the power that I have is to hold up a white sheet of paper with
nothing on it. Wow. And freedom of speech within the context of your own. Yesterday I was or two
days ago, I was recording and my producer was telling me a joke that he had heard about a Soviet
and an American arguing about the freedoms that they had. And the American says, well,
I have freedom of speech. I can walk into the president's office and pound on his desk and say,
you're doing a terrible job, President Reagan. And you don't have that. And the Soviet guy goes,
Well, absolutely. I have that. I can walk in. I can walk into the walk into the Soviet commander's office and I can pound on his desk and I can say President Reagan's doing a terrible job.
and you're absolutely right in that um if we don't have the ability to call and
and this is why you know violence you you mentioned this in the paper but violence is always there to
paper over something it's always there to paper over something that we're trying to hide
um and and art is the thing i think for me my understanding of how it works is that it always
starts with comedy because comedy is just the ability to note the absurdity of injustice.
It's the ability to laugh at injustice and to call that out. And then it goes to music and then
it goes to art. But, you know, freedom of speech, expression, assembly, all of these things are
inherent to that ability to have a moral society that is constantly able to take its own pulse
and check its heartbeat against the injustices and the absurdity of those injustices.
Yeah, I like where you go.
I'm excited to hear what you write about that because your writing has just, I told Grant,
and please take this as a compliment.
I said that the difference between the first paper that you sent us and this,
I said this is like going from grade school to PhD.
The beauty and the power of the phrases that are used in here
and just the thoughts that I had like reading through this you know you so very correctly note that political power follows economic power which follows capital ownership
You know, I have to own capital in order to have cash flow.
And in order and and and, you know, like your your mention of you've been at these.
You've been at these conferences where there are politicians and billionaires and they don't go there by accident.
And we were talking about like, what is power? And I was like, I'm not sure if I can define what power is, but I can tell you that a politician will always be standing right next to it as close as they can get.
That's right. So, yeah, you can sometimes you can identify things not necessarily by the definition, but by by the nature of how things around them behave, you know.
So, yeah, art in that vein.
And Grant's in art.
We have beautiful pictures here on the counter over here that Grant has taken.
And what art is able to do in picture form is capture, you know, love, beauty, injustice, sadness, grief, horror in a millisecond.
And to not be able to share that.
That's right.
And to not be, and if you're able to share it, but you're not able to comment on it.
That's right.
You're able to comment on it, but you're not able to assemble around a unified belief that arises from that.
Again, you're right.
All of these things are underpinned by the ability to create and store your wealth to have ownership over your time.
Grant?
That's really beautiful.
And I also agree with what you say about your writing, Sal.
Like there's an artistic element to what you're doing as part of, you could say, rhetoric, but I would be to diminish it in the vein of what art adds to the conversation.
Another quote you had that I really appreciated here, Sal, you wrote, a person who cannot save is a person who cannot plan.
A community that can plan is a community that cannot dream.
And so artists are the dreamers. And if you take away somebody's economic security, you take away somebody's ability to have the cause and effect of I do and therefore I prosper, therefore I have something to save, then you can really snip off a person's ability to dream and create.
And then you get a society without dreamers. You get a society of endless TikTok videos. You get a society where people create in order to consume immediately, not to create a thought that's going to last a generation, but to create a thought that can be sold to somebody in a second.
And so the relationship to Bitcoin and art is just so deep, but I'm incredibly excited to see what you write about this.
Well, just to go, this may get a little evangelical, but when you kill the dream, you know, what are what are dreams?
Our dreams are subconscious speaking to us.
And we don't know where that comes from, but we do know that it's not us.
Right. It's it's either, you know, the unified consciousness of of of humanity or it's God or or something like that.
And so what are we doing when we are enacting this structural violence that destroys hope, that kills dreams, is that we are silencing, we are suffocating, we're killing the beauty of the human consciousness and of a spirit or God speaking to people.
we're taking away their ability to commune with the spirit that connects them to other humans.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, not only it's, I mean, I have goosebumps listening to you all interpretation of that framework because it's beautiful.
It's incredible.
It's truth, right?
But the reason why for this paper, I chose to keep the reader engaged to two separate words.
lives, right?
A religious life.
Monsignor Romero, now Saint Romero.
First Salvadoran ever to be
elevated to sinhood by the church.
And the second one is
Victor Jara, the singer.
It's because
I use those threads throughout
to help
the reader, the audience,
humanity, really, to help humans,
right?
have a signal, have a way of saying,
okay, not only has this happened before,
but if I remain curious,
there's a chance I have a way out.
I have a way to protect my life
through private capital in this lifetime.
There's a framework
There's a framework I've heard
And it's interesting
As far as seeing time
As an intergenerational tool of change
So you don't plan
For your life
You plan for your multiple generations
And obviously
The really wealthy folks call this state planning
So it's
It's true for them
Somebody working two full times
and a part-time job, that's not truth at all.
They're like, they can't even think that, right?
But within that framework of using time
as a tool for intergenerational growth,
wealth, protection,
then what Bitcoin allows in this lifetime
compared to any other commodity I have come across
is that it actually allows you to change it
in your lifetime right now.
when I, the conversations I've had
through all these trips, engaging people,
when I start framing it like that,
there seems to be a shock value to,
wow, if I really huddle, hold on for your life,
yeah, but what does that really mean?
What's the other side of that?
If I really allocate and study it
and find truth about this,
that means that the half-life of my wealth
is not going to be diminished by 50% in 35 years.
That means that in 35 years,
I will be able to retire multiple generations.
So that's a little bit of where I think in general,
the concept of art,
you cannot have art, true art,
without freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
So art for me, as the Bitcoin adoption curve, a sign of Bitcoin adoption will be the increase of art.
And I agree with you, whether that's comedy, whether that's paintings, everything.
And we see some of that already.
I mean, I'm so happy to hear that you're already writing some songs about this.
There's the Lugano, the Satoshi sort of thing.
So it's already happening, right?
But I do agree with you, this will be eventually institutionalized. And I, you know, I finished this paper with several predictions where one of them is the scalability of art. Another one, I anticipate sort of a CNN network style for Bitcoin.
I anticipate, you know, consolidation and proliferation of podcasts.
We need more, not less, because that's an antibody, right, that protects the podcast,
protect against this, protects against obfuscation, right?
And I think in general, just again, to also not get lost in the message here,
what you both have been doing, think about it.
I found you in Cornell.
I did not know it at all.
But here in Cornell, in Ithaca, New York, as I got Jason's book, in my own truth-telling process, my own prosecution process, accountability process, my own reparations process, and then institutional reform, I find two other folks, two other guys on YouTube chatting about Jason's thesis, chatting about Lynn's work.
Shout out to her as well.
I said, this is incredible. This is beautiful because guess how many sponsor ads I saw? Zero.
So the incentives were very clear. The signal comes through very fast for folks that are in the space that Lucas and Grant's incentives are truth-seeking, period.
Nothing wrong with sponsors. I actually think that, you know, there's nothing wrong with doing well while doing good.
I think that's the beauty of Bitcoin. It allows competitive cooperation.
Goal leads to exploitation
So art
You cannot have a meaningful free society without art
And that's something that I do spend a couple pages just trying
To name it
And again, it ties to violence
Lack of art is a lot of violence in those ecosystems
And there are societies right now that
I did not know that about the Chinese, for example
Well, that's very sad to hear.
Yeah.
One observation I want to make.
So you were talking about the, so institutional reform is number four.
Yes.
The unique thing about Bitcoin is that Lindsay, when she conducts her own reparations by taking her Uber money and putting into Bitcoin.
Yes.
she is part of an institutional reform that does not require politicians amen the institutional
reform is happening from the inside out it's happening outside of
parties making the institute because that's always the problem with institutional reforms
that in order to take out the bully you need a bigger bully as a bigger bully comes in and they
institute their own reforms that while they may not harm the same people as before, they certainly
always will prefer some over others. And so this institutional reform is fascinating because
it is institutional reform that happens without the institution. It does not require any sort of
institutional involvement, that it's all on an individual basis rising up. We're concurrently
reading The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth. Oh, that's an incredible book. I'm so happy you are.
And so he does a fantastic job of identifying what is the thing that allows monopolies to build,
and it is infrastructure. If it was the railways, then it was who had the best physical railway
infrastructure. When it was video, it was Blockbuster that had the best infrastructure
of having all the stores and the availability. When it goes to digital, it's who has the best
digital infrastructure. And so it's always about infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure,
because the infrastructure is what allows the creators to come to it. The infrastructure of
Amazon is what allows millions of suppliers to come to it and put their products on it.
The infrastructure of YouTube is what allows millions of creators to come to it and put their content on it.
Of iTunes allows the artists to come there and put it on.
So the infrastructure of Bitcoin is what allows millions of people to come to it and put their time into it and put their wealth into it.
So it is, it is always an infrastructure. It's a competition over who has the best infrastructure. Yeah. So I, that, I just, I find that fascinating to be able to identify that one thing that builds a monopoly. The thing that builds the monopoly, it's not the strategy and it's not this and that. It is, it is the infrastructure that allows for other people to come to it and, and, and, and utilize that infrastructure.
in a meeting place of buyers and sellers,
of educators and curiosity.
Yeah, so.
And not to mention as far as infrastructure
and he's, I mean, Jeff,
where the ecosystem is so lucky to have a thinker
like Jeff and a practitioner too
through his venture capital fund.
So thinking and practicing, I love it.
He does everything.
Just to show two specific examples, right?
Bitcoin is multidimensional because what gridless is doing with energy infrastructure in unserved villages in Africa is bringing energy, which with no energy, more likely for disease, more likely for early death, more likely to all sorts of diseases and not thriving in your life.
But because of Bitcoin, it monetizes what monopolies, it monetizes things outside and beyond what monopolies can.
And what do I mean by that?
A bloated public-private partnership in those countries obviously makes no monetary sense for them to go where GreenList identifies it.
It makes monetary sense.
Like, obviously, that's not Sal's and Lucas' opinions.
That's just the facts, right?
So imagine that at scale, and we're seeing it, right? Realists, and they're very open. People can Google this. This is happening right now. So it's not just Lindsay's life being transformed in the United States through her own institutional reform, but it's also that entire village.
And out of that village, not only are we empowering folks back with dignity that they didn't have before electricity, but we're empowering the next generation of God knows what type of trailblazer, thinker, entrepreneur, innovator, all because of energy and the infrastructure that Bitcoin allows.
And we'll continue scaling through the how it ends, right?
Bitcoin incentivizes all of us to get stronger, more efficient.
And Bitcoin is going to have another paper coming into international development, right?
Like NGOs are incentivized to, on a FIA standard, to keep the problem going.
Because that's where their funding comes from, right?
Typically, right?
This is very high level.
There's nuances here and all that.
but on a Bitcoin standard
or something like BitBonds, right?
Like using some level,
some of the upside of Bitcoin,
then that entire business model
is going to be completely changed.
And there's a few, you know,
folks doing that.
John Donahue in El Salvador.
There's another one, Merck's Lives in Ecuador,
I think, and in El Salvador as well.
You already start seeing
through a Bitcoin standard,
these folks are affecting meaningful change.
So it,
What I learned from Jeff Booth among the many things that I've learned, but the key one is there has never been a true free market.
That's a tough one.
And I've been here at the MBA with folks that go straight to finance, Wall Street.
That's a tough one for me to set my own process.
I'm like, okay, I have to tell the truth here to myself.
And not only that, but what I thought was a free market with a 2% inflation rate, which is obviously higher, but the half-life of my wealth will be about 35 years.
That's another tough one.
And the thing about Jeff Booth, and I think he only mentions Bitcoin twice in that book.
So he's not, you know, it's not a Bitcoin book.
It's a life sort of economic framework book, a technology book.
I think that
When you start seeing that
You can't really
Unsee it
Right? And we go back to how
We started this conversation
Well, but why?
Well, because
There is a violence that we're enduring
In this
Debasement. Is it a physical
Crime? Did somebody come and punch me?
Did the Fed come and punch me? Of course not
No. But in
35 years, it's very like
that with that inflation, I might not even have enough to invest in a life-saving plan that might
save my life and I might just perish, not to get fatalistic, but there's real kinetic implications
to this, right? So I can't wait to hear the study sessions about Jeff. He is an incredible systems
thinker. No, and we're looking forward to talking about that one. I mean, thank you, Sal. Like,
I felt like this conversation brought us through the transitional justice arc.
I mean, we went from violence through truth, through reconciliation to knowledge.
And I mean, I feel like I came in greater understanding to having you expand a bit on violence and then connecting it to your personal experience and then moving us through the purpose of the knowledge network.
You had generously said you kind of had until maybe 12 your time and we're at that point.
So I wanted to see, was there anything else you wanted to add that you didn't get to say you were hoping to reflect upon or any?
You're so, what you do on Twitter is so amazing.
You're such a booster of the knowledge network.
You're always like Sal underscore Pineda1 as your Twitter handle, X handle.
What you do on Twitter is just such a great thing.
It's such a positive and energetic presence.
Are there any projects, anything else you want to share?
Thank you.
And we can, you know, have like 10 more minutes so we can kind of land the plane in the next 10 minutes.
I think, listen, and somebody asked me this in a space a couple of days ago and it got me very, it was very interesting.
I never quite had experience it in a space that quick.
It was a lady that jumped on the space towards the end.
I was talking about, you know, I think I did a pullover.
was a post on the Bitcoin army and just how live folks were sending sats and it was happening live
to get more folks involved in the Bitcoin army has like no sponsors. I'm not a paid sponsor. I
don't, I literally have no affiliation. I mean, I am a member of it, but I don't pay them. They
don't pay me, but I'm a student of the dollars network. And I said, people are spending their
Bitcoin to bring other Bitcoiners, to bring newbies or a little more advanced into an ecosystem where
It is a safe space for folks to have a wide array of opinions to learn.
Like, this is an example of a Bitcoin network.
And it's happening all over the world.
So I, you know, highlighted that.
Thank you for the kind words of elevating.
I think that I cannot understand my life, my life's purpose, if it's not in service of followers.
I just can't.
I've been through enough
scarcity and pain in my life
to know that I was only able to overcome that
not just through healing and self-growth,
but by giving, right?
When you focus on impacting others,
you have very little time to focus on your misery.
And that's just something that for me has worked.
Obviously, I'm a big believer in therapy.
I'm big of like people, you know,
there's a wide range of tools, right?
But sitting there and just sitting on the misery,
It's a very dark place to live, right?
And somebody asked me this, this Latino lady got on space.
She said my name is Spanish.
And she's like, I would love to hear your perspective about, you know, for the Latino community, what can we do?
You know, how can we access the space?
And why can we do more value?
Because, you know, things, you know, there's a lot of complexities, right, for some minorities in the world.
and right just hearing that right this is after like talking to to an audience of oh yeah this is
a u.s. centric perspective but just kind of hearing that and she was so enthusiastic i remember being
taken back and saying okay she said what are like the key messages you want to give to latinos and i
was like okay well this is this is this free open space so you know this is not prepared questions
I said, you know what?
The recording is somewhere online.
But I said, there's three things I recommend to anyone.
Because this is beyond any, any type of age, race, country, geography.
On the framework that poverty sucks, to me, that's the truth.
But to some people, right, they think poverty does not suck.
And everybody has a right within freedom of speech.
To think that.
I said for number one, don't ever settle for accepting poverty.
Just don't.
Do not settle.
Number two.
Do not.
Give up on hope.
On a better tomorrow starting today.
Right now it might be miserable.
but it could be that the day could finish being less miserable.
It could be you're going to have a breakthrough in the next few minutes.
And number three, I remember telling this lady in this space,
don't give up faith.
Whatever that might look like,
whether you have a particular sort of interpretation
or framework of a God,
whether you're atheist, whatever.
It is.
Don't give up because having that framework
then allows you to not quit right now
and try for one more second.
And the breakthrough might come in that next second.
And as I start investing thousands of my hours
traveling and doing all this,
and we stand on the work of giants like Jeff Booth,
how funny, you know, he's no longer with us, but his work is still open.
What Bitcoin allows people, right?
And it's up to Bitcoin is a political and I talk to folks from the left and from the
right and centrist and libertarians.
Bitcoin allows is to not give up right now.
So that gives you one more second for a possible breakthrough.
It allows you to not give up on the hope because nobody can print or finagle Bitcoin away.
It's transparent.
It's very viable.
And the third one, and this is up to people's journalism background, it reinforces or it gives you back hope, faith.
Absolutely non-religious.
This is just however people want to take this.
But those are the three steps that, at least for me, serve as a guiding light as an educator.
Because some of the best conversations I've had are with folks that have the breakthrough during the conversation.
And obviously, I mean, I love the conversation that we're having right now.
And I can't wait to, you know, send you the other paper.
This is amazing.
Yeah, but we have put in the thousands of hours of work.
educating and preaching, you know, and helping folks in the presence of truth telling,
that's a distinctly purposeful journey for me.
And I feel very confident speaking for you both, for yourself as well.
I mean, your study sessions impacted a young man in Cornell that was trying to do something
in an ecosystem that everybody, that most people did not believe in what he was doing
from Bitcoin.
That's you both.
that's not that's not in there that's not the books that's not the books helped her but that
was seeing your conversation with my headphones in a library that has led to so much growth and
added value it was you know it was supported through the work you guys are doing because
you guys thought framework so just that you know to me that i always leave it with a very
empowering message because what is life if not evolution and growth right not sal's opinion just
objectively. What is life if not evolution and growth?
And I think that it's easy to
not take that, to take a
sorrowful, a dark approach to life.
And it takes strength to take an evolution and growth.
But the reason why my paper sent to deal with dark, heavy
topics is because I was fortunate
enough to survive some of those impacts
that I described, desk walls and whatnot.
But most importantly, I came out the other side.
Like I did put in the work.
I did spend time in the fiat world.
I did do all of that.
I did use our fiat standard.
And I did feel hopeless and it was miserable.
So my well of empathy is quite long.
It's quite deep.
I can empathize, right?
And I think that landing the plane here,
the darkness of my research
And the intensity, I will say, maybe not necessarily darkness, right?
Because we will have it, but we will have experienced this level of pain.
But my ability to call it out comes from a place of empowering.
And when I see Lindsay in her Uber, when I see the Bitcoin army, when I see you all, when I see so many folks I'm taking the time to categorize, it just fills me with joy, literally.
So I hope that makes sense.
And I'm just super grateful that we have you guys.
I mean, we feel this, like, thank you so much, Sal, for the kind remarks on the conversations that we had.
If we had to formulate a purpose for what we do, I don't know that we could have had a better, like, you disembodied it, to reach out, to expand the conversation on these books that we want to talk about, to bring others in.
And it's tough to find people sometimes to have the conversation that you need to have about a certain book or idea.
And thank you so much for sharing that.
And I just want to share something you also shared with Lucas and I.
We were kind of talking via DM about this conversation in the paper and whatnot.
And you mentioned, you know, the connection to liberation theology.
And you summarized it in a sentence.
I think your summary just beautifully kind of puts, you know, states what you're doing.
The summary you gave was that liberation theology summarized is you don't just pray for the poor.
You also roll up your sleeves to go help them.
and that's like to connect faith to the practical operation of Bitcoin on the ground and the
individual. I mean, what you're doing is so beautiful. And Lucas, I don't know if you have
anything to add to that. Only that what you elucidate the way that I envision it is that
we need this knowledge network. We need a million different podcasts and people talking about Bitcoin
because every one of them is a different avenue for someone to reach truth.
And by reaching truth, as discussed earlier, if you reach that foundational truth,
then you can expand back outward and you can see the other truths.
You can come to Bitcoin from the avenue of inflation and understanding that truth.
But once you're there, that is the truth that allows you to see the structural violence.
It's a truth that allows you to see the endless wars and how those are funded.
It's this truth that allows you to see the eradication of hope and faith among the impoverished.
And so it gives you this expanding circle of consciousness that allows you to come at the world from a place of morality and a place of truth.
And just giving people more and more avenues for it.
We just started a sub stack.
And so we'll have a sub stack article where we break down our post interview thoughts about this because.
Oh, that's amazing.
I love it.
Yeah.
But that's, you know, that's another avenue.
That's right.
The Knowledge Network grows.
I love it.
And so, yeah, putting up that putting up that impenetrable net, that impenetrable wall of truth that encompasses and brings in other people and they become part of it and outwardly project their truth to other people as well.
It's the kind of virus that we we want to be infected with.
You know, it's yeah, it's that hive mind that we want to be a part of.
So, Sal, we really thank you for your time and we thank you for your writing and your contribution and are very excited about what you will be doing in the future in order to advance, you know, advance humanity kind of the way that you're putting it in the service of other people.
And you've chosen the avenue of education through Bitcoin as your weapon, as your tool, as your instrument for that.
So thank you for your contributions.
You guys are too kind. Thank you all. We all do this together. And I think that the next paper is the most exciting one for me. And what I do there is exactly this, empowering because what is life if not evolution and growth.
So I can't wait to share it.
Give me a few more weeks.
It should be finalized.
But I'm glad you got to see sort of that preview.
And yeah, the other part that's coming, it gets in the weeds of things.
And hopefully that helps, you know, this type of conversations become multifaceted.
So no, just thank you.
Thank you for what you do.
Full of gratitude for everything.
Yeah, thanks, Sal.
So Sal underscore Pineda1 on Twitter and then substack at Sal Pineda.
That's another Bitcoin Study Sessions.
You bet.
Thank you guys very much.
If you've made it this far, Sal just said it perfectly.
Remember, we're all in this together.
Like, subscribe, share with somebody else in order to expand this knowledge network
that is bringing truth and beauty to the world.
Thank you.
We're out, buddy.