I think it's really important to understand that cryptography in and of
itself provides a new form of sovereignty and that this new form of sovereignty, in
my opinion, is the only way that we return to having a true law that is actually
a common wealth where we all have the equality of the law Or, better yet, we
have the equanimity of the law, but the respect of the individuality through it.
So for me, what cryptosovereignty is, it's about the artistry of
utilizing cryptography in this way to create new systems that we
can utilize for self empowerment.
Welcome back to the Freedom Footprint show, the Bitcoin
philosophy show with Knut Svanholm and me, Luke the Pseudo Finn.
Today we have a very special guest returning to our podcast, Erik Cason,
Bitcoin philosopher, crypto anarchist, cypherpunk, and good friend of the show.
Erik is with us in person this time, recorded at Baltic Honey Badger
2023, to take a walk through history, philosophy, politics, bitcoin, and more.
In this episode we talk about Erik's views on crypto sovereignty, the
topic of his book of the same name.
We also draw parallels between the atomic bomb and the risks that AI poses . We
discuss progressivism and conservatism in the bitcoin community and investigate the
conjunction of cryptography and bitcoin.
It's always great to talk to Erik, this time was no exception.
Before we jump in, a quick reminder that the best way you can support the
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a bit more about them later.
And now, without further ado, here is Erik Cason on the Freedom Footprint Show.
how are we doing this, Luke, and are we?
Oh, we're already
rolling, guys.
So, I mean, uh, let's just, let's just, let's just keep it going.
I mean, as, as Knut said, like, you're, you're our first proper returning guest.
And, and I mean, we didn't plan this exactly, but this is awesome.
Like, uh, awesome to run into you and, uh, meet you in person for the first time.
And, uh, for me.
Yeah, it's funny,
because like, like, it felt more casual with you.
Like, I realized it was our first time, but at the same
time, because we know each other.
I know, it's awesome.
it's funny cause this hap, there's like a number of people this
happens with like with John.
Yeah, yeah.
Every time I start talking to John, he's like, God dammit, I wish
y'all were recording it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And there's so many, like, especially here in Riga, I've had so many.
Similar experiences with that, that's bumping into someone and
you instantly connect on like this level that is just beyond, because
there, you meet people that actually think about things and it's, yeah.
Well, I mean, like, isn't that the truth of, of, we're not all here
because of Bitcoin, but because of the form of thought that Bitcoin allows.
Yeah, and
instills within us, like.
And that's the, yeah, I mean, my shtick nowadays is that you are your bitcoins
and we all are the network, like we're not only Satoshi, but we are the
actual bitcoins because they're just information and that makes them us.
And I think that's, to some extent, why they, why they change us so
much, because like, you don't change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you.
That's, that's profound.
Like, that's so true.
Like, you are the killer app of this thing.
It's not, this is not a killer app of, it is you, like, and it changes you.
When I
think it's that, that spark of realizing that there is a truth that we can follow,
that like, it, it jumpstarts thinking in like the truest sense of what it is.
Yeah.
And I think because, like, part of the nihilism of contemporarism is that it's
so deeply authoritarian that it feels like thought itself is almost seditious
and misleading because how could this thing be of value to you when, you
know, you can see out in the world if you just obey what's being told, you'll
live a relatively comfortable life.
But then having this experience and encounter of, like, Wait, there's this
other radical truth that's happening that maybe can resolve all of the problems of
fiat and of the nihilism of politics and the inescapability of the fiat economy.
It truly awakens us and starts to transform us.
You know, and I was sharing earlier, like.
I literally don't know who I would be, or even if I'd be alive without
Bitcoin, because of that hope and the way that it rescued me from the nihilism.
Yeah, and I mean, a caged animal at the zoo can live a relatively comfortable
life as well, but it's still caged.
Yeah, and I mean, a lot of sort of my presentation in Crypto
Sovereignty is this understanding...
Yeah,
Crypto Sovereignty is your new book, we should...
Oh, yeah.
Let's
show it.
I'm not good at showing stuff.
So I have a new book.
It's yeah.
Buy
his book and my books.
Yeah.
And Luke's whenever he writes one.
Yeah.
We're all going to have books soon.
Yeah.
Um, but it's available through, through Bitcoin magazine, the publisher.
Um,
if you, if you buy it within two weeks, you get a set of steak knives, right?
Uh, yeah, maybe you, you might be one of the ones you pick.
All of a sudden,
if you want, I'll sign and I'll put a steak knife.
It can be hard to ship to Riga though.
Yeah.
I thought I was supposed to get my books.
I'm not sure if they actually arrived, but anyways.
The reason for the book isn't to show a book, but because I just want my
thoughts out there and I think it's really important to understand that
cryptography in and of itself provides a new form of sovereignty and that this
new form of sovereignty, in my opinion, is the only way that we return to having
a true law that is actually a common wealth where we all have the equality
of the law Or, or, uh, better yet, we have the equanimity of the law, but the
respect of the individuality through it.
Equanimity?
Maybe not.
I'm kind of Explain the word, the word equ equanimity is one of
those words that I find difficult.
Knut speaks Swedish.
Yeah, yeah.
It's more of the, uh, the access to the equality of opportunity as opposed
to actually saying that we are equal.
Yeah.
So, so it's like providing the level playing field so that
we can have the fair game.
Yeah.
Uh, and I think a lot of people will mistake that to like essentially
trying to homogenize everyone and say, no, we're all equal no matter what.
Even if you happen to have brain damage and I happen to be Albert Einstein.
A T I
Q . Exactly a D I q, me, you know?
Yeah.
Did you see Giacomo's?
I did.
We had a great fantastic.
Yeah.
Oh
yeah.
Yeah.
Cause I was pointing out like, uh, there seems to be a real quality of midwittery
where there's an esteem and ego that asserts itself that both the midwits
and the geniuses seem to actually lack.
And, and, and them just questioning themselves to be like, well, I'm kind of a
dumbass.
I think we're, uh, it's, this show is going to be quite hard to follow
if we just keep on talking about.
Stuff that recently happened as it's kind of hard to follow thoughts
about a talk that didn't happen.
No, but this is okay.
Like,
like, uh, this is, this is super relevant because this A D I Q thing is,
is, is part of a current issue within the Bitcoin community, and the, the
finding is like sometimes we get to a point where we're talking about like
a so-called current thing and then.
It goes away in like a month or something like that sort of happened
with ordinals, but, but I think I think what we're talking about here is
like a fundamental difference between actually, I'll give I'll give some
credit to Peter McCormack on this one.
He had a tweet that observed that the ordinals crowd and the drive chain
crowd seem to be liking the same things.
And it sort of exposed a bit of a liberal Bitcoin community and a conservative
Bitcoin community, as in conserving...
Liberal might have also been the wrong word.
It's just more like, uh, progressive maybe actually is a better word here,
but like, what do you, what do you think about that division that there's
sort of an opening up of, of, uh, the people who want to conserve the protocol
and keep it, safe and running and then the people who want to do stuff to
it.
I think that this is this really healthy dynamic of essentially like the
toxic Bitcoin crowd are these internal agitators that are always going to
remind us of the truth of the mission, the need to have a true alignment of
incentives in a thoughtful way, and the understanding of that introducing
anything else is going to change those incentives in some way or form.
Uh, and also the people on the outside that are pushing ongoing
developments that truly are needed.
And a great example of this is like, much of what's being built
today was only possible because of getting SegWit integrated.
And that was a long and difficult and arduous debate.
And particularly once people stopped pushing as hard and there could be a real
open dialogue about how this was going to help Bitcoin, did the possibilities that
it introduced actually start to come in.
So, so.
To me, like, this is the truly political process of Bitcoin that's very sloppy,
messy, difficult, and important because this is the only way that,
like, we're actually going to figure out what we need as the developments.
like, I personally don't think that we're at a place of ossification yet because I
still think that there are some updates that need to be done in addition to, you
know, like You think it will ever hard
fork again, successfully?
I mean, it hard forks all the time, but
I I think Yes, because of the, what is it, like the, the 2093 bug?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
That thing that needs to be fixed.
So there, there's an issue in Bitcoin that needs to be fixed, otherwise we're fucked
basically.
Yeah.
And I think that this is important because it gives us the responsibility
of knowing and understanding that this will happen at some point in time.
And the question is, is how much do we want to get in front of that?
Or do we want to get right up to the boundary for it to be a real crisis point?
Yeah.
And, uh, ultimately at the end of the day, I really appreciate that there is this
responsibility coming from both sides.
Yep.
Um, and like, I've gotten some shit for, uh, like, I, I think inscriptions are
like a pretty important new technology that, that Bitcoin can access in a
meaningful way and utilize, like, the fact that Tankman is now on the time
chain, I think is a really important.
And I think future, yeah, this, the, during the, the
Chinese democracy protests and,
oh, yeah, yeah, the Tiananmen Square guy,
yeah, so, so, so Tank Man and Tiananmen Square, that's an illegal image in
China and you can now see it directly on Bitcoin's blockchain because
of what inscriptions have offered.
Now with that being said, like, Ordinals itself is just a randomized catalog, you
know, anybody could do it or present it.
It seems to mostly be for people to present kitsch NFT bullshit that's
going to be trend towards zero.
And at the end of the day, like, if people want to waste their
money on that, that's fine.
If, like, if you think that a stat is going to be worth more than
a stat, you're welcome to that.
I think it's dumb, but.
Feel free.
And this is one of the places that I think people can get too extremist, is that, uh,
in the purity ness of being like, nothing on the blockchain except for financial
transactions, I don't necessarily accept that on its face because there
could be more valuable applications that I simply don't know about.
Well, well,
to begin with...
What constitutes a financial transaction is entirely subjective,
like homogeneity is subjective.
Like there's no such thing as fungibility, really.
Yeah.
Everything is different to different people.
Like, so there are no clear boundaries here.
And that's, that's why it's so hard to box in and like explain in
simple ways, because it requires this understanding of the subjective
nature of everything in economics.
Right.
Yeah.
And like that.
It's a real double edged sword because on one hand that provides, like the
total field of possibilities that we can actually access through economics.
Yeah.
However, also like that means we have to do the real work to
understand all of that stuff.
And that's one of the reasons that we have such endemic fiat brain
is that people don't know how to actually think for themselves.
No.
Because they've been told what to think for so long.
Yeah.
That the foreignness of thinking for themselves feels wrong in and of itself.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, and for me, that's been one of the greatest struggles in me
trying to orange pill people is people being like, why does it have value?
And I get really frustrated because I'm like, well, think about it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, I'm going to give an outline, which I think.
Uh, has tangent saw this, like the, the way, first the way I see like
Bitcoin conservatism and bitcoin progressivism, whatever you may call it.
Like, I got a question two days ago about like, what do you think
would've happened if it would've been 42 million instead of 21 million and
like the a hundred sets or uh, uh, a hundred coins the first four years
instead of 50 and so on and so forth.
And the thing is, we know that Bitcoin works now.
And we know that history played out the way it did.
What we do not know is if you change any of the parameters, if
that would have ever happened.
So, so we're here to study this thing and observe it behave in
certain ways, but we, like, we cannot know what would have happened
if any of the things were changed.
And it's very close to, like, You know, the parameters of the universe, the
universal constants, like pi, or stuff like that, the speed of light, and what
not, the weak force and the strong force, we don't know, we're here to observe it.
The thing is, this is the thing that religious people often tell me,
that it seems designed because it couldn't have worked if the universe
wasn't as fine tuned as it is.
But the thing is, if it wasn't as fine tuned as it is, you wouldn't have been
here to observe it in the first place.
So, like, that's a loop argument to me.
And it also, in history, when you say that, like, We figured out
free market economics in Western democracies, or, or that Judeo Christian
tradition led up to this point, and we wouldn't have this without that.
I mean, it's impossible to, to know, and like wars created great inventions
like the GPS and the radar and whatnot, and it's impossible to know
if those things happened because of, or despite of, The course of history.
So I think we ought to be a bit more humble when seeing the correlations
between things because like, it's very likely that the scientific process
would have been smoother and faster if we hadn't had, you know, religious
institutions trampling down on scientists.
During the Enlightenment, for instance.
But also, the other point of view that we had this robust Judaeo
Christian tradition, maybe that's what led up to these people
thinking about these things at all.
But my point is that we don't know, like.
There's no way to tell how history would have played out if any of the,
it's the butterfly effect thing.
Like if you changed something here, you change everything else.
It's like, it's like the back to the future loop.
If you could go back in time and change a little, little
thing, you change everything.
So, so, uh, and that plays into this Bitcoin conservatism thing, because, uh, I
mean, Many of the people don't understand the BIPs and understand the issues, myself
included, a lot of the time, uh, but there's a case to be made for conservatism
in Bitcoin just because, it's delicate, like changing any of the parameters
might ruin the entire fucking thing because for some reason we don't know.
Uh, so, so that's, and I think there are parallels here to the history with
organized religions, the history with, like, how we view the universe, the
history with science and everything.
Like, there's, there's a lot of parallels.
Well, it's interesting because you actually touch on, like, a much
deeper philosophical point of that.
This idea that we know something is actually like the path towards hell.
And like, and like very real genocidal, horrific amounts of killing have happened
under this rubric of that we thought we actually knew what the right answer was.
And we insisted upon that answer so intensely that, you know, here in Europe
it had, you know, World War II was about.
that becoming so loud and escalated that there was literally a class of
people that were like the only way to deal with this jewish problem is the
final solution you know and like like and like to be clear when you look at
the Nuremberg trials like these dudes literally thought they were doing the
right thing yeah and like It's insane, and this is what Hannah Ardent pointed out.
She was like, look, Eichmann sincerely believed that he thought he was doing
the right thing by obeying his duty to the state, and he made the whole
argument that if people weren't going to do their duty to the state, that it
would just be chaos and anarchy, and she was like, look at this midwit And
how when you ask him to think about an ethical prerogative on his own
accords, he has no self referencability except for pointing back to the state.
She was like, this is literally what evil is because it's incapable of thinking.
It reminds me of one of the last chapters of The White Pill by Michael Malice about
the Soviet Union and the East Bloc and how people were wrongly accused of different
crimes and they willingly admitted to having wrongly committed these crimes and
willingly put themselves in the gulags, in the actual gulags, because they thought,
you know, defending the system that put them there was more important than
defending their own civil rights, you know, and that that's what a bad enough
system can do to to people's brains.
You know, you're like, you, you refuse to let go of this appeal to authority.
And all hell happens.
Like that's, that's the most dangerous thing, like the atomic bomb.
And yeah, my talk tomorrow is about Oppenheimer and Satoshi Nakamoto
and the similarities, like how they harness the power of physics to
change human incentive structures.
And I think the, the crucial thing that Oppenheimer left out of his He
saw this thing, he rationalized it, at least according to the movie, he
rationalized it to himself by thinking that if we construct this extremely
destructive thing, then we end all wars, because game theory says so,
because no one will bomb one another anymore, especially not, especially
not attack the US, because doing so is in all probability a suicidal move.
So that's how you stop wars.
But he missed.
His own incentives, like, he did all the things, all the funding for the Los Alamos
and the test bomb and everything, and for him to do his science was this big bag
of dangling shitcoin, American shitcoins in front of him, and he grabbed it and
thereby put this destructive force in the hands of the Absolutely the wrong people.
I mean, this is the thing.
Science is beautiful.
Science is fantastic, but it always ends up in the hands
of the absolute wrong people.
That is governments, because they're a force for evil, like, and this thing is so
left out of the equation all at all times.
I think like the, uh, the lessons from world war two and everything,
The thing that's missing from the conversation is just that, I mean, if
you don't want to be a Nazi, don't be a nationalist, and don't be a socialist.
Like, this is like,
we're missing the point,
like, stop, stop appealing to authority.
That's, that is the problem.
Well,
and...
It's interesting because Oppenheimer had the particular danger of who
and how he was in the world that it gave him a particular egoism to
have him believe that that was okay.
Yeah, it was put on a
pedestal.
Well, and it, it, it makes me think of the parable of the frog and the
scorpion where the scorpion, you know, it's like, Hey, like, give
me a ride across the river frog.
And the frog was like, well, you're a scorpion.
You're going to sting me.
Like I shouldn't do that.
And he's like, no, why would I sting you?
If I sting you, we both die.
You know, that.
Why would I do that?
And frog's like, okay, frog gives him a ride halfway through scorpion stings.
And the frog goes, what the fuck, man, we're both going to die now.
And he's like, yeah, I'm a scorpion.
Like, what did you think I was going to do?
You know?
And it's really important to understand that like.
This is just the nature of what the individuals who wind up in
politics wants because it's a power game and a power dynamic.
So they're going to say whatever they need to say in order to be successful.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's like, I empathize towards Oppenheimer because it's important to
understand that there was a whole class of powerful men who came to Oppenheimer
and like, if you don't do this, we're all going to die because the Nazis
get the bomb first and it's going to be a catastrophic and horrific thing.
And what's really interesting is that...
Which, in
the end, it became anyway.
Yeah!
And like it, it almost became this sad unavoidability that, you know,
because of the way that the conflict was escalating and how technology
had offered its service in this way.
Did you see the movie, by the way?
No, I did not.
Okay.
Uh, I...
I probably will at some point, but I just wasn't necessarily inspired.
No,
uh, I mean, it's what you'd expect from Nolan.
I mean, it's, so it's well acted.
The cinematography is great.
I mean, a lot of the things about the movie is great, but it's somewhat,
uh, unnecessarily convoluted because I think he sometimes does that for its own
sake, you know, makes, makes the movies more complicated than they need to be.
Okay, but yeah, overall, it's a very good movie, I would say.
I also just kind of take issue with some general historic revisionisms that
happens through Hollywood, and like it, I think it's a general inevitability,
but I just find it, it dramatizes all of this in a way that I think it's...
It's really important to understand that like when Oppenheimer was
doing this, like he had no idea if he was going to be successful.
He didn't understand the consequences of it, which I think for Oppenheimer
particularly is important of that.
Uh, I think it's really interesting because in the actual literature, he
says that the quote about, you know, I am becoming Shiva, the destroyer of
worlds, he said that that specifically came to him, not that he thought it, but
that like, that's what came into him.
So that's a quote
from, uh, who, who wrote that?
The Bhattagravita.
Yeah, the Bhattagravita, yeah, yeah.
You
know, and, and, and I think that that's of particular importance just
because when he witnessed the horrific destruction it could entail, he realized
the, the fundamental truth of that.
Like he was engaging.
And some very serious metaphysical stuff that could destroy humanity on
a whole.
There's a quote from the movie, there's a near zero chance that we might
destroy the entire planet because we might set off a chain reaction.
Well, like, to me, this is one of the places we're at today that I think
is so important with where panoptic technology is at and with where the
developments of AI is at, is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
These are very, very powerful and very, very dangerous tools that,
uh, we have put them in the hands of morons that have politicized it.
And furthermore, like we're already seeing what the structures
look like when implemented.
And like, I always like to point out that the Uyghur genocide going on
in China, like this is the perfect genocide because they realize that it's
different from what happened in the Holocaust because they're not trying to
actually just destroy an entire people.
And the reason why is that they found, utilizing both propaganda and
technology, why should you destroy these perfectly useful bodies?
What you need to do is hollow them out first.
And so once you can thoroughly destroy people's culture, when you can totally
surveil them at all points in time without them knowing when or where, you can
actually just liquidate their culture.
Propagandize them to make them into good little Chinese citizens,
and you release them back out into the world to be your slaves.
And now, now you have the perfect genocide, because you've liquidated the
actual identity of a people's, and you've replaced it with a national identity.
Yeah, yeah, you turned, you turned people into dogs, basically.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah.
You know, and as we were joking earlier, Ben's version of dog is God.
And this is, you know...
This is how you get a subservient population that acts like dogs to a god
of the state is by doing this process
to them.
And this appeal to some type of authority seems to be inherited in people.
And I know, like the, I buy the argument for.
Uh, religious belief that it's better to believe in a, you know, guy in the sky
than a guy on earth, because a guy on earth is way more dangerous than, but, but
I think the, the, the core issue is like this appeal to authority to exist at all.
And it seems like.
A majority of people, it's inherent in them.
They need this, you know, they need someone to tell them what to do.
It's like, uh, they're lost without a, uh, not without the compass,
but without the compass salesman.
You know what I mean?
Sure.
And, and compass salesmen are, are dangerous.
One, I, I think that the...
This, again, is a product of our general world, because I think, as we
see with Bitcoiners, when you're part of a culture where it encourages self
thought and the ability to rely on yourself and to think for yourself,
that's like a muscle that people can work and cultivate for themselves, and when
you're in a bigger community that does that, you've now elevated this behavior
to be an honorable and virtuous thing.
Yeah.
And so this is one of the things that gives me great hope is that, uh,
like as many NPCs are out there and as dangerous and destructive as it
is without being able to have people think for themselves, this is all a
product of pliable people that have been manipulated on under, under terms of
both duress and promises of good stuff.
And this is one of the things I always find the most intriguing about talking
with NPCs about their perspectives is that they, they always have a very optimistic
and hopeful viewpoint that trusts.
The goodness in the other, which is like that.
That's a really great thing that we need to have, but we absolutely need
to make sure that that isn't polluted with just a general appeal to authority.
That's, I have a point on, on, on this one.
This is, this is like a thing in, in.
The vision of where Bitcoin is going to take us that I still
somewhat can't get my head around.
And it is that if we, if we do fix the monetary system and get that all
working fine, and its incentives are good and everything and reduce the size
of government and all this, what do we still do about people who are just going
to still ignore that and be aggressive?
And even though the incentives might be reduced towards aggression, there
are still people who ignore them.
Just naturally wants to take, and I mean, I'll be specific as
well, like, it's a male thing.
The way I see it is that what you remove is the smart criminals.
You don't remove the stupid criminals, like, that are gonna just, you
know, go to a football game and kick the shit out of one another.
Because they supported the wrong team or whatever.
So that will probably still be around, just this, ooh, brute aggressivity.
But still, a clever person will realize that if you don't know how much another
person owns, and you can't really take it by force, because it's in
their heads, so you can't kill them, then no one gets anything, what game
theory tells us about that is like, uh.
At best, you get away with 50 percent of that person's Bitcoin, so it's probably
better to, to interact peacefully.
So, so you, like, remove the, the real dangerous people, the
psychopaths, the, the people in charge that conduct world wars and so on.
So that's what you take away, but petty crime, like...
Uh, there will, of course, still be teenagers, and there will be grunts,
people in British pubs saying oi, you
know.
What was the example
you were going to use?
What I was thinking of is that, uh, our friend Joni was telling me a
little bit about this, that there have been some gang attacks in
Sweden, where people have like...
Chopped off fingers or something if they don't give them
whatever they're looking for.
And like, it's just dark stuff, right?
And, and, and I think, what was I latching onto from, from what you said?
It, it's, it's just, it's something, it's something like, where are we headed?
I still don't see the solution where, uh, It's not exactly about solving the, the
issue of human nature towards violence.
It's more like, what structures are we going to still need to have that
look a lot like today's governments?
Like, that's, that's the, the, the thing that still gets me.
And, and I'm not even thinking in the, in the vein of, of that we're going to need
some kind of actual daddy government.
That's not what I'm thinking.
We're gonna need
law.
Well, yeah, and I think that the...
This is where stuff gets really interesting, because where we're at
right now is so extremely rudimentary in terms of the form of law that
Bitcoin provides, because it's essentially all transactional right now.
But one of the things that I imagine is using something like,
like, mini scripts or mven or whatever multisig scheme you want.
That there's essentially an ability to put your money into that multisig scheme.
Guy shows up to cut off my fingers and I go, look, you can look at the address,
you can see how much money is there.
This isn't a multisig that I don't control.
And because you asked me to put my password first, I put in actually,
uh, like a panic password, that that has now messaged all of the
other owners of these private keys.
Yeah.
And they know if they show up within the next block with a shotgun to kill you,
Uh, they're gonna get the amount of money.
You know, they're going to get 10 percent of the wallet or
however much we've agreed upon.
And also that's fluid based upon how quick they respond,
who they are, where they're at.
And essentially, like, I think what we're going to do vis a vis cryptography and
essentially with the time chain as this backbone to sort of keep truth within.
The sort of law that we're going to implement, we're going to create a
new form of law that utilizes the cryptographic protocol in such a way that
we're going to start playing with it and doing these really interesting things.
And it's funny, this reminds me of a quote from my favorite philosopher, who
I based most of my work off of, Giorgio Ambighen, and he says that And this is
kind of paraphrasing, but essentially it's like, when humanity starts to play
with law as like a disused object, similar to how children play with a disused
object, we can return law, not in order to restore it to its canonical use, but
in order to free us from it for good.
And so to me, like, the great problem with law today is it represents a raw and
thoughtless form of authoritarianism that has nothing to do with the law at all.
The law is actually about the consensus of what we agree upon to be the law, and
it's very, very important to understand what the law is in its traditional form,
as it is the traditional idea of what...
Laws supposed to be.
So, first of all, common wealth, that's literally what Bitcoin is.
It is a wealth that we hold in common because it provides a
unitary form of law for both of us.
But even more interesting is the Latin translation of
common wealth is res publica.
This means the public thing.
And what's interesting is that the law is the most public
of all things to all people.
And we live in a world today where we don't have a law anymore.
There is a two tiered society where there are some people that can get away
with the most heinous of all crimes.
And most particularly, the 20th century was a story of multiple genocides where
hundreds of millions of people were killed and not a single individual was murdered.
That's extremely important to understand that a hu hundreds of millions of people
were destroyed and deprived of their life, but not a single human was murdered.
Because murder is a legal crime.
And not a single Jew was killed in the holocaust was illegal.
Because they were all stripped of citizen citizenship.
And that made sure that they had no access to the law in and of itself.
This is where we are at today, and I also believe that the crimes that
happened in World War II were so extreme and significant that it, it
obliterated the law totally, because it showed that once you had psychopaths
in charge of a nation state, they could utilize the, the policies of the
state to destroy other populations of people, and we've witnessed so, uh...
What about the case for optimism, though?
So, like, we, uh...
I'm always
so dark that people really
need to press that.
Yeah, yeah.
So, so, because the way, a way to look at this is like, we have
Bitcoin, we have social media.
Sure, you can be shadow banned and you can have a harder time reaching the
person you want to reach and whatever.
But still...
Even the flawed social media platforms we have today, and then
Nostr and other alternatives are blossoming slowly but surely as well.
But we have those tools and like post.
COVID or post the lockdowns, uh, zoom calls and, and, uh, stuff have
become insane, insanely, but much better than they were pre COVID.
Like no one was really doing zoom calls on a daily basis
before, before the lockdowns.
So that sort of forced us to develop this technology.
And now you can reach any person.
Regardless of where they are on the globe, I mean, we can record a podcast
with Rob, for instance, when he's in Hawaii, with no lag, and the program we
use, the AIs are so good now, and there's a race to become the dominant software
for stuff like this, so the program can edit this stuff for us, cut out the
noise, you know, and, you know, Uh, if we have two cameras, it, it, it, uh,
switches to the other, the person that's about to talk before he starts talking.
All of this stuff is happening in real time.
It's the, the, the speed of the technology improvements is just insane.
How, how good that is.
And so all those tools are there.
And yeah, and you add Bitcoin to that.
It's just all the tools are there.
I, I talked to the, um, So my friend Christian, the founder of BTCX, the
oldest Swedish exchange about, and he gave me some numbers of how many
customers they have had over the years.
And he said around 300, 000.
And there's another big Swedish exchange.
And so if you take into account that there might be some customers that use
both services, but they're about as big.
So add another hundred thousand, that's 400, 000.
And let's say there's a hundred thousand people that bought
off of other exchanges or...
Freedom's
population.
10 million.
Okay.
So it's 5% of the population that has the power to pay people in Bitcoin
because they all own Bitcoin and a hundred percent of the population has the
ability to, to uh, uh, receive Bitcoin.
So the, the, the economy's already there.
? Mm-hmm.
. We just have to tap into it.
And people just have to start accepting Bitcoin for the goods and services.
And you are out.
You don't have to worry about the government anymore.
like, it's, it's really that simple.
And if you add all the.
You know, as you were alluding to the multisigs and the coinjoins
and whatnot, and like all these technologies, they are already there.
And the, the educational platforms and the, the content that is out
there, you, you can learn how to be a sovereign individual.
I mean, I'm working on a, um, a course, um, based on my praxeology book on
a platform called, uh, Emeralize.
Uh, which is like Udemy and, um, uh, powered by, uh, Lightning.
So it's a cross between Udemy and maybe Substack.
Yeah.
Uh, and this course is going to be a part of a master's program in self sovereignty.
Like, and this is not the only thing.
I'm just a tiny part of, and Emerlize is also just a tiny part of this.
Ecosystem that is building around this thing.
So I think there's a great case to be made for, you know, we've got this.
Everyone in this community knows that CBDCs are shit.
And we know that like, there are ways around all these things.
And once, I mean, people are going to look at us like.
Uh, . Look at those guys.
They seem to be happy and like not worried about stuff.
And, and that's gonna, it smittens people, like, uh, so, so I think,
and I think there's, that's smittens, is that even a word?
Uh, To be ssm, yeah.
Yeah.
To Besm.
That's the word now, , that is important because, uh, that's how
we grow the community and like the.
Spreading this optimism about the future, like, because being angry at stuff,
and, and, you know, just focusing on, oh, this was so fucking bad, and this
is so fucking bad, and we, we need to, to, uh, fight this, and we need
to, well, just don't worry about it, it's okay, don't retweet shit corners,
don't, don't promote governments, don't even talk about it, just show people
There's a way to live life without worries, because you've got a tiny stack
and you know it's gonna last forever,
like.
No, I mean, there's a great point, particularly for like the angry rant guy.
It's probably pretty important for me to emphasize that like.
Uh, I, I feel a greater amount of hope than I've ever felt
and every day it grows more.
Good to hear it.
And you said at the beginning, uh, you, you'd use the word bloom and that hooked
me because I think right now we're going through a renaissance that is a
bloom of ideas that are exploding and, and there are so many things going on
and it's growing and like you said, we have all the technology, the ability,
so much is just an educational aspect.
And so maybe I'm mistaken, but.
Maybe that gap is going to be much shorter than we think.
And I think there's a pretty strong argument to say that it will be shorter
just because we have such a pliable herd population that once where they
actually see that like fiat has been defeated and that Bitcoin is here.
Yeah.
And I love pointing out that like the word evangelical in Latin
means the bringer of good news.
And that's what we're doing as Bitcoiners.
We're bringing the good news of what Bitcoin is.
And it could be very possible that all of these evil forces
see this and they go, Oh shit.
Like, Oh, like our, our, the game's up.
I guess we got to play nice now.
Um, but in addition to that, This is all initiated through a totally
new form of thought that is the self responsibility to think for yourself.
And like that, that's causing for this extraordinary bloom that, you
know, like I think Fiat Jaffe even said part of his inspiration for how
he built Nostar was seeing how the Bitcoin network operated and getting
that, having that core cryptographic protocol at its core was what allowed it.
You know, and so for me, what cryptosovereignty is, it's about the
artistry of utilizing cryptography in this way to create new systems that
we can utilize for self empowerment.
And Nostar is an excellent example of that, you know, Tor
is a great example of that.
But what I want to see is pretty much the entire internet get rebuilt on
top of cryptographic protocols like
this.
It should have been there all along.
That's, that's something we have to, we sort of have to rebuild it.
Okay, so this actually gets into like a, like a question that we've been
going at with, with a few people.
The Noster stuff?
The Noster stuff.
I think to, to your point, I think there's, there is a, like a kind of a
general, uh, idea here about kind of these protocols that are built on cryptography,
but they're not built on Bitcoin, right?
So, so it's Bitcoin adjacent Nostra in that it heavily endorses the use of.
Bitcoin zaps and using your Bitcoin private key to generate your, your
Noster profile and all this, but, but it's not built on Bitcoin.
It's, it is a separate protocol.
Like, what is the role of the cryptography part in this?
Like, how important is that part where Bitcoin fixes the money, but
the cryptography kind of can do other things that are not Bitcoin?
Uh, and I, I would guess you don't have like a shitcoin y perspective
on this in the, in the sense of that.
No, and
like, one of the things I, I think is really important about understanding
shitcoin ery is, is I reject shitcoin ery because it does not elevate
itself to the position that Satoshi Nakamoto presented Bitcoin on.
Look, like, if...
If Ben Armstrong wants to issue Bencoin, and he wants it to get to a market
cap of 10 billion dollars, and he doesn't spend a single cent of that,
and the state doesn't destroy him, and he distributes it, and he does this
bootstrap from the very beginning, like, Maybe there actually is merit to
that and maybe it should be successful, but he absolutely didn't do that.
Every single shit coin project has been a cash grab for the founders.
No one has tried to actually emulate what Satoshi Nakamoto did.
And even if they did, like the best example I can think of is, uh,
GrinCoin tried to do a fair launch, had an anonymous founder, all that.
And even with that, all the VCs fucking piled in and they all spun up AWS
servers and it was a total shit show.
So I think.
What Satoshi Nakamoto accomplished at this point in time is fundamentally
unachievable by shitcoins because of how he presented it and what he did
to it, but furthermore, to get back to your question about cryptography
itself, to me, this is the absolute key of all things, because He was.
What allows for us to understand the supply of Bitcoin is the
cryptographic proofs that are provided.
If we didn't have those cryptographic proofs, there would be no way
to actually tell otherwise.
And so to me, it's about a technique of presenting information
and then proofing it in such a way to say, look at the truth.
That I've actually implemented here, and so Nostra does the same thing
with having a chain of information.
And so I'm extremely excited about seeing this generalized technique
get applied to other places.
Because what, what happens when we get a protocol for.
Say, self encrypted VoIP, where you get to own your own servers, you know that
the connection is going to be end to end encrypted, and like, again, this
is one of the extraordinary things that happened in the concourse of
human history, is up until the Diffel Hyman paper in, I think 1976, A New
Direction in Cryptography, there was a single direction in cryptography that
none of this shit was even possible.
It didn't even seem possible.
It was, You And this is one of those funny things is that like, I think if you were
to go back, you know, a century ago and to talk with philosophers and to say,
hey, there's this like magical space that you can ride into and talk to anybody on
the planet, and they would just be like, like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Like, this couldn't happen.
It doesn't make any sense.
There's no even point of thinking about it.
Okay.
Uh, the problem I have with all of this.
Cryptography talk is this, uh, yeah, which was the title of Gigi's talk.
Cryptography is not enough.
Yeah, exactly.
the thing I, like, it's all just numbers.
It's all just information at its core.
Bitcoin is just a bunch of on and off switches in a, in
a specific 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1.
That's all it is.
Communication through numbers.
So Satoshi found a way to, to do numbers and communication in such a way that we
figured out how to bootstrap a system that was, uh, that created a number
that was resistant to replicability.
So any attempt at replicating that discovery to me is redundant at best
and a cheap cash grab for the most.
Part because people are stupid and they don't realize that
you can't copy un copyableness.
So, so that's why I don't really get how the, all the other stuff
comes in because this system already exists and this number, the Satoshi
represents that it represents something that can't be replicated.
So any attempt that, I mean, end to end encryption is fine, but it's
not more valuable than, you know, the value lies in you being able
to send a message and making sure that no third party can see it.
But that's sort of end of story.
um, economic incentives for a social media platform, for
instance, like the users may all.
Own their data, quote unquote, but, but they're still subject to whoever
runs the relay that knows the relay or whatever, or like, I somewhat suspect
that the same thing that happened to, uh, you know, the email protocol at SMT.
And, and whatnot, all the other internet protocols that had no, you know, Bitcoin
in the base layer that the same type of centralization may play out on all these
other attempts at making it decentralized.
Because the word decentralized, it gets thrown around like it's a trivial thing,
but you know, decentralization is.
First of all, subjective, like, I view decentralization differently
than any other person and like everything else, it's subjective.
And to me, Bitcoin is sufficiently decentralized because I saw
the Segwit2x hard fork fail.
That's the point in time for me that made me believe in this thing robustly.
Like, holy shit, the users really are in charge.
It is unchangeable.
None of the other things that are, you know, throwing this cryptography
buzzwords around and the word decentralization around have ever shown
me something even remotely akin to that.
Or like, like the mm-hmm.
, the rejection of the Seg two X artwork.
We, we haven't seen that anywhere else, so I don't really see how,
how North Noster, for instance, can, uh, achieve something like that.
It, it might, but at this point we, we.
We have no clue if it will do that or if it will just turn
into this centralized nightmare.
Like, well, and I, I think one for Nostra that's really important to
keep that question sort of open ended because I think up until we feel certain
about it actually being decentralized.
That, uh, that is a true
open ended question.
And right now it's sort of a taboo subject in the Bitcoin community because like,
Oh, we got this new decentralized thing and Jack Dorsey's on board and we need
to promote this thing and, you know, leave all the other networks without even
having, without knowing where it's going.
Or if it
even works.
It's interesting they sort of tap onto this idea of taboo subjects.
Because like another great one that I think is taboo is, uh...
Like El Salvador.
Like I'm very suspicious of El Salvador and what they're doing.
And of course it's a government.
Yeah.
Well, and like the, the idea of what Chivo Wallet is, is like, I think that this is
a really great way to backdoor Bitcoiners and be able to create surveillance on
a generalized chain, which, you know, essentially you use Chivo Wallet to
then pollute all of the outside users that then gives you, uh, you know, a
tainted perspective that you can utilize.
Okay, another thought about I think what most people misinterpret about
AI, and this comes a lot from deep diving into praxeology, that what,
the thing AI lacks is agency.
So, we don't even know if we have free will or not, like, I love the Hitchens
quote, like, of course I have free will, I have no choice but to have it,
but it certainly seems like if you take praxeology for a true science, which I
happen to do, like, I think it's a very good framework for understanding the
world, then you see that deliberate...
In order for an action to be deliberate, there needs to be a,
uh, it needs to be preceded by a felt uneasiness on the thing acting.
Like so, in order for you to act, you need to feel somewhat uneasy.
You imagine a future where you do a thing and you get into a better state.
Like that's It's the pursuit of my desire.
Yeah.
There was a pursuit of your means and ends.
Like that's the basis of all action, deliberate action.
And an AI.
It's absolutely not that.
It can never be the master.
It can only be the slave.
It can never make decisions on its own.
And people fear this general AI.
What they really mean when they say general purpose AI is an AI with agency.
Basically Skynet, Terminators, or whatever.
Yeah.
Or the Matrix.
Like that it...
All of a sudden it's, uh, consciousness pops up in it, in this string of
ones and zeros, and all of a sudden it can make decisions by itself.
Like right now it's not doing that.
It's making micro decisions about whatever you're prompted to do, but
it's never acting out of Uh, because of a felt uneasiness, because it doesn't
feel anything as far as we know anyway.
Sure.
And so, so I think that's what the fears about it are exaggerated
because of exactly that.
It doesn't have agency.
It doesn't know what it wants.
Like, it doesn't want anything.
Well, to,
to be fair, first of all, The, the people that are really worried
about it, um, they're retarded.
They're midwits.
And, well, like, this is the same people who utilize the term hacker,
who like, hacking is a magical way that you just get access to information,
and they don't realize, no, it's like flawed security protocols.
Yeah.
And so to me, AI is like a meta tenche, you know, like it's a
technique that we can apply stuff to.
And it's really valuable because, you know, like if you need to build
out a database from your coding, instead of doing that, you just go,
yo, ChadGBT, like build my database.
Yeah.
Super valuable.
Great.
The big problem I think is that, again, with people are retarded,
that there are people out there specifically in government who are
like, Hey, like, let's plug this AI thing, like, into our surveillance
system and, like, have it locate all the people that we think are bad.
You know, I'm like, what's a, what's a bad person?
Uh, like, somebody carrying a gun.
Like, that's a bad per you know, I'm like Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so, like, I'm afraid that the general idiocy of people who don't understand
technology, which, again, is the vast majority of government, are going to
essentially implement these things with no idea about what they're doing.
And, to be clear, We've already seen that happen in the United States, like,
the, I, I forget, and I'm very sorry for this because this person needs to
be honored and respected, the individual that recently leaked the data from the
United States showing that 90 percent of the people that were fucking murdering
with goddamn drone bombs, that AI.
Like, literally people are being destroyed by a fucking machine saying, Yeah, I'm
pretty sure that those brown people need to die because I'm 8 miles away, You
know, 3, 000 or 30, 000 feet in the air.
Like, that's a very special kind of insanity that's deeply worrying.
And so, it's not AI at all, it's the fucking retards behind
the AI.
This, this reminds me so much of a particular scene from the
Oppenheimer movie and it's where they pick the targets for the bombs.
Like, so they're in this room and they're like, uh, how do we demonstrate how
fantastic our wonderful new bomb is?
And they're like, oh, we should choose a military target.
Nah, but it needs to make bigger headlines.
Let's use, oh, Hiroshima.
That sounds nice.
Like, and okay, Nagasaki as well.
So like, and then boom, boom, 210, 000 people die from a
split second decision like that.
And I don't know how historically accurate that actually is, but still the.
This is the problem of human incentives that needs to be solved.
There needs to be a way to prevent some guy in a room from making a split second
decision that kills 210, 000 people.
Like,
that's...
I would like to point out before you go any further, the truth is actually much
more horrific, because what happened was after the first bomb was dropped...
Yeah.
They were given a 48 hour window to give an absolute and unconditional surrender,
which the Japanese were more than happy to provide, and they tried to provide it.
We prevented them from providing it, and we dropped the second time.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Oh.
You know, and to me, like, this represents the same horror and
catastrophe that We, as in?
Oh, yes, we, I should not identify, the government.
Those assholes.
And yeah, and this represents the same fucking insanity that was the armistice
at the end of World War I, where, and this is an extraordinary fact to
me, is that the final day of World War I, more men died on that day II.
And it was because these, these...
Absolute, despicable, disgusting parasites that call themselves humans in
government said, well, now that we have the armistice established at 11pm on 11.
11, let's do a full press assault and see how many of the other people
we can kill before the game is done.
This is a sort of madness that happens when we relegate the
responsibility to other individuals to make choices about life and death.
But to me,
this is the most important aspect of, of Bitcoin, uh, . Because what it
does, it, it re, the core invention is that it removes the, the hands
of these parasitic institutions to, to leech off the value of.
Other people transacting voluntarily with one another.
There's no way to, you know, shadowy tax people through inflation
when, when there's a, when people are transacting in Bitcoin.
There's no way for a third party to get any of that transaction.
Sure, you pay some fee to the miners, but that's, there's a free market for that.
Like there's no way to, to, for these assholes to, to extract value from others.
anymore.
And that's, that's the key thing because that's what kills the
ability for these people to sit in rooms and just pick targets at
random.
Absolutely.
And a lot of people don't understand that, like.
That function by itself collapses all world governments today.
The simple inability to be able to steal from people, that collapses
every single government today.
And to be clear, like, that doesn't just mean now we live in willy nilly
chaos and everybody murders everybody.
No.
Like, this is a process that we must go through to clear out the space to allow
for the potentiality of the next form of the political to present itself, which
I'm convinced the internet is going to play a major and pivotal role in
the next form of And I'm very pedantic about this idea of the political versus
politics, because to me, the political is about the radical potentiality that
people will always have to choose their forms of life versus their identities.
The contemporary parliamentary democratic forms that we're told
creates law and is politics.
And so to me, that's a very important distinction because today, there
is no people anywhere that have access to any form of the political.
Because we've all been forced to be subservient to politics.
Yeah.
And Bitcoin, to me, opens us up to the possibility of the political.
That's a
great way of framing it.
And, uh,
like, That's a concept from Carl Schmitt, the, uh, famous Nazi
jurist who I do a lot of work.
I, it, It's fucked up.
I do a lot of work with Nazi philosophers, not because I'm a Nazi, but because
I have a very, very strong critique of these philosophers, who are very
important, but because the way that liberal wokeism won't deal with them,
they avoid what they present entirely, and it's extremely destructive to philosophy.
Yeah, I think you just hit on something important, like, uh, the
idea of, I don't have this thought fully formed, it just came to me from
what you just said, but the idea that you can just, just memory hole ideas
because they're somehow associated with the wrong thing, like It's 1984.
Well, sure, like, say, like, uh, not a real example exactly, but if
someone, if someone says something, J.
K.
Rowling.
Okay, this, this I'll use as the example.
Like, there are, there is a serious group of people who, who will not
touch Harry Potter anything because J.
K.
Rowling has wrong think.
And, and like, this is one of the, the most popular, uh, book
franchises ever, basically.
And people liked it for certain reasons, right?
But because someone has a wrong opinion, they get completely memory holed.
And, and, uh, Uh, y yeah, pro . I won't mention these.
Well, I'm mentioning it explicitly.
Uh, JK Rowling is not a Nazi philosopher, so just to, just to throw that out there.
But, but the example is the, the memory holding of ideas
and then not dealing with it.
So, uh, I guess to come to an actual point here is like, how do
we deal with the type of culture that wants to erase ideas instead of
dealing with them?
Yes, just to emphasize on the J.
K.
Rowling thing before, before, because, like, before the answer, because these
young actors and actresses that shun her because she claimed that trans
men aren't, trans women aren't women or something, whatever she said, uh,
the only reason that they have a life at all is because of her works, like,
so imagine in the, what's the word?
It's so gross that people, people who are, talk about biting the hand that
feeds you for the wrong reason, like, they would be nothing without her.
Yeah, but like, so, so, that whole idea though, like, like, you look at these
philosophers, you, you, you, like, What, what even compelled you to do that?
And how do you think we, we combat the, the memory holing of
these, of, uh, of ideas that are associated with controversial
people or non controversial people?
I mean, one of the things that inspired it, first of all, like,
my whole philosophical pursuit is like my own leisure and pleasure.
So, like, I wasn't contained within an academic framework, framework that,
that, that usually deprives people of it.
So, like, uh, A philosopher that I deeply respect, Michael Millerman,
he, he was a doctor at the University of Montreal, I believe.
Like, he, he was blackballed and kicked out because he was studying
individuals like Heidegger.
And to be clear, like, Heidegger was a Nazi.
And I think his philosophy does fundamentally deal with ideas
in Nazism, because of how it presents an ethnos of peoples.
And I also think it's extremely important.
To be able to deeply read Heidegger and critique him, and I critique him
through one of his students, Levinas, and I think it's extremely important
because Levinas deals with all of the problems that Heidegger tries
to present, and then overcomes them through his presentation of the other.
But what's really important in regards to your term is, is that as much as
they want to memory hole stuff, You, frankly, you can always bring it back up.
And to me, the great example is, is that, uh, like, I, I have contentious
issues with my own family for a number of reasons, but one of the main ones
is, look, what happened in COVID was really, really destructive, and it
raised certain truths of that in the United States, vaccines are given a
very special treatment so that they don't have to go through the same
rigorous process of all other medicines.
And as much as these people yell and scream and freak out saying, no, it's
safe and effective, you can turn back and go, but, but we have the documentation
from 1985 when the vaccine acts passed that specifically say vaccines are
unavoidably dangerous or unavoidably
unsafe.
This is basically the RFK's, RFK's point that people, people listen to, like,
the, the things that he says and it's just, it's, oh, it's anti vax, but that
is specifically the key point, right?
That, that, that act enabled
all this.
Yeah.
And like, this is very, very, very important because as much as we engage in
the denial and the propaganda of saying safe and effective, Very real people
are getting hurt and dying because we're not actually looking at what's going on.
So, to answer your question, as much as stuff gets memory
hold, and like with the J.
K.
Rowling thing, like, Look, like, trans people with their individuality, how they
identify, how they present themselves in the world, I absolutely want to
honor and respect that for who they are.
But when you come to me and you insist that, you know, a man is a woman or
a woman is a man, that A is B or B is A, I have to stop and go, look, there
are some other things going on here.
That's part of a long and convoluted debate that I don't think you're available
for because you just want to shout me down in the same way that like, and this
is really important to me specifically around free speech and propaganda
is I want other people to be wrong.
It's really important for other people to be wrong or, or for them to
be right and for me to be wrong and them to present their perspectives.
Cause we need to have dialogue in the same way that look like.
I, I think Mein Kampf should be published, that National Socialists should be
public about what they believe in their stances, because I want people to
know, these people are fucking morons.
They're absolutely smooth brained idiots, and I want them
to present their philosophy...
So that you can go, oh wow, these guys are just actually racist
assholes who don't believe in the agency of other individuals.
Wow, what fucking shitty people, huh?
Well, whereas you censor them, they go, this Hitler guy, they won't, like, they
won't let anything about him be out.
Like, maybe he had something really important and powerful to say.
Maybe he was actually like a really smart and great guy, and they don't
even was backfires well, and they don't even see that they, they contribute and
feedback into that in a very powerful way.
Yeah.
That contributes much more so than I think, just letting him speak freely.
Did,
did you read a book by Rothbard called The Ethics of Liberty?
Yeah, it was a while ago.
Yeah, to me it was profound because it changed my views on freedom of speech.
Because he makes the case for, like, the question everyone, uh, forgets to ask
themselves is freedom of speech where?
And if in a libertarian society where everyone, where there's absolute property
rights, you as the property owner get...
to set the rules of whatever anyone gets to say or not say on your property.
So there's no public space and therefore, I mean, each individual
owning whatever platform, like, gets, gets to set the rules on that platform.
And I, I think this, this Misinterpretation of freedom of
speech and what it is like, because freedom of speech laws are only
necessary when there's public property.
So, so they need to be preceded by theft and, uh, um, It reminds me
of the, I don't know if you heard about the Koran burnings in Sweden.
Yeah, I have big awareness.
So, so the whole Arab world is, or I shouldn't say the whole Arab world,
but the Muslim world, or the Islamist world, or whatever, they're pissed
at the Swedes now because there have been some public Koran burnings.
And there's a lot of bad things happening because of this, but, but the thing
is, and the thing is, That, in order to protect free speech, the Swedish
government need to employ a lot of police officers to, to guard these people who
want to, to burn the Quran publicly.
And the media reports about it all the time.
And there's debate about whether to change the free speech laws and blah, blah, blah.
And the government always apologizes to the Arab nations afterwards and like,
oh, sorry, but we need to do this here.
The thing is, if there was no police protecting them, if a guy was just, I
mean, I could go out and burn a Koran on the street here and no one would care.
Like, so the attention this thing gets, that is the problem, not the actual act.
It's just that all of these arbitrary things.
Become important because the, the, the media machine and the, the, the government
machine around it fuels the fire.
And that's the real problem.
It's not the, it's not the act and it's not even the people
getting pissed at the act.
It's, uh, well, then again, the real violence is from the people
wanting to actually kill people.
If you buy a Quran and burn it, it's your property, your perfectly natural
law tells you, you can't do that.
This is the whole point of the media, in my opinion, is that.
When you make these things into extreme things, you pump the emotions to make
people get upset and dramatic, you've now prevented all dialogue, you know?
And so like, I actually think from crown burning, if people weren't
showing up all pissed off wanting to hurt each other and be like, why the
fuck are you burning my holy book?
Maybe there could actually be a really deep and constructive conversation.
And I can't help but think like, this is the same debate that's going on in
the United States around trans stuff.
Like I said before, honor and respect these people for their...
There's a very complicated dialogue here that I think is really important to talk
about family values in the United States, what we want to represent, and what does
it mean that we want to have, present a culture like this, and more importantly,
and I think this is one that doesn't get touched on a lot, is that one of the
most important things to me about women is their child rearing ability and the
ability for us to make a family together.
Yeah.
Like, a trans woman fundamentally doesn't have that capacity.
And there's probably a lot of people that would want to say
really hateful things to me.
And again, like, I don't want to take away from their ability to identify
how they want, but no, it, it seems a little disingenuous to me to have this
whole dialogue about, you know, trans women are women, but we don't have to
worry about child rearing in any way.
And that also like, it sets up like a pretty dystopian worldview of like, Let's
accept what you're saying is totally true that, you know, like I can be
Erika and, you know, you can be Kanuta.
Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
Well, and
look like I...
However you want to live and choose to live, that's great.
But like, there's this whole other problem that gets presented
because we're trying to act like what the media has given us is the
truth.
And it's sort of like a pendulum thing because like all of
these fights for, for, for...
Certain group rights, they come from these groups being very mistreated in the past.
So they come from a, so they're trying to replace one system of
authoritarianism with another.
So if you, if you think deeply about all of these issues, it all boils down
to individualism and property rights.
That's, that's the only solution to all of it.
yeah, I want to take this back, like, uh, just to the general
level a little bit, the, the, the.
I've been playing around with an idea that this, this, the entire denial of
a biological reality comes from that society has abandoned individuals from
being able to be comfortable and safe in their identity, and the reason that this
That I dig into this area is that I, I think we've understood this as a society.
This is important to avoid.
So there's a, there's a Finnish poem, Valla, it's, it's,
it's the Finnish epic poem.
And it, it's, it's an oral tradition thing.
It was largely untouched by Christianity.
Other things like this compiled in the, uh, the 18 hundreds.
So, so this is, this is something that came from a long, long time ago.
And there's, there's a whole cycle of how the, the symbol of
society, uh, a guy named Väinämöinen and it is this magical wizard,
Väinämöinen, Väinämöinen,
Väinämöinen.
Yes.
But he's the, he's the embodiment of, of society essentially.
And, and he is supposed to take, uh, for, for, uh, a wife,
the, the, the maiden Einel.
Her name is Einel.
The poem is called the fate of Einel in English.
But the idea is that, that.
The society put an overbearingness on the, the ability of the, the young
woman to come into her identity and so she drowns herself in a lake.
Drowning in a, in a woman drowning herself in a lake is, well, literally quite bad,
but symbolically it's, it's the, the feminine drowning itself in nothingness,
putting itself into emptiness.
Like, uh, a girl chopping off her, her tits, complete denial
of, of biological reality.
It's.
The, the, the thing that these stories I see is actually kind of pointing to
is that society is rotten and society is, is making these things happen, uh,
because, because everything is wrong.
Everything is, uh, bad incentives.
Individuals can't live within themselves.
So that's, yeah, it's, it's like another one of my...
Back to
optimism.
Well,
well, Eric, what do you think of that?
This is such a complicated topic, and I think that the media has made it
so reductivist that it becomes very difficult to have real dialogue about.
And so, like, one of my main struggles is that, and I read this from Ambigan,
is that, uh, I'm so deeply suspicious of that part of what these ideas
are is about trying to create, uh, this, like, false idea of individual
empowerment to actually strip them of any other form of empowerment that
exists in a deeper societal level.
And so, like, I think, uh, because, like, one of the phenomenon,
like, specifically around this biological and trans thing is...
Why does it seem that there's so many more male to female trans
people than, than male to female?
In addition to the male to female, or, I'm, I'm sorry, the, the female to male,
sorry, the, that, that identity, it, it's not as hypervigilant or heard about.
And what I think is so interesting is cause like, like the frank truth
is, is like, look, if, if a male to female trans person wants to come
and compete with me in almost any competition, like, I'm probably gonna
win, and it's gonna be kinda funny.
Uh, and like, not to be an asshole, but because like, if I am, like if
you're matching me up with somebody who is my same weight category but can't
hold the same muscle mass, like, yeah, I'm, I'm probably gonna dominate them.
But then there's this other weird part with, uh, the male to female trans
population that presenting themselves as a woman, and this is what Ambigan was
pointing out, is that It seems to align with consumer capitalist culture almost
perfectly, and I'm very, very suspicious of that because why is it that you, as
a woman, have the full presentation of a very feminine, sexualized woman, um,
But you don't have the child rearing capacities, or the presentation around
that, or around, uh, like, aged womanhood, or, like, it all seems to be a deeply
sexualized thing, and it, and it just leaves me questioning, in a lot of ways,
like, I actually find, like, it, it's the most sexist thing that can be presented,
because, like, the identity that you have as a woman is as a sexual object,
and not as a child rearer, and I, like, look, I want to respect, too, that, like,
Saying a woman is only a child rearer is also extremely sexist and that there's
a balance in between the two, but you
can't really have one without the other.
Well,
yeah, but, but what's so interesting is that the extreme viewpoints are
both very sexist in that, like a woman is a child rearer needs to
stay in the home, sexist as hell.
A woman is like a sexual fuck object that should only be used
for sex, totally sexist as well.
And I think that it's all of the in between, it's the nuance
and the complications of having dialogues like this that.
In my opinion, traditional media absolutely does not want to
have more than anything else.
It's very important to make these very contentious...
Angry, emotional debates that can't reach thoughtful conclusions where we can say,
Hey, maybe we don't see eye to eye on this, but maybe we can have dialogue.
And to me, like, that's the most important and critical thing that we
need to return to that I think returning all the way back to Bitcoin we're doing
is that we're having open dialogue because there aren't guardrails for us.
We need to include everything and have all of the debates possible because.
We just don't know what the real answers are, but, and this is a very
important but, I know through the true process of dialogue, of us working
together through dialogue to try to figure out what that truth is in
between us, that's how we can find it.
Yeah,
and there's no other way, because if we remove violence from the equation
entirely, which is sort of what Bitcoin does, there's only dialogue left.
Like, uh, humans have two ways of resolving conflict, speech and violence.
That's what it boils down
to.
And it's so important to know and understand that the very act of trying to
engage in speech helps negate the violence that is there otherwise, because we're
saying, I don't want to engage in that.
I sincerely want to know and understand and talk to you.
And I think that's so important, particularly with where we're at in
our media, because our media is deeply uninterested in having conversation.
It's very interested in offering vitriol.
Yeah,
it wants clicks and likes and retweets and stuff.
Yeah,
and it turns out when you say hateful, radicalizing, and absolute dialogue,
that that drives a lot of clicks.
And this is in a large part One of the greater problems that are going on is
because it's reduced our time preference to such a short window that literal
journalists are now just media mouthpieces that, that fundamentally don't even
understand what journalism is, you know, and this is part of the destruction
of society on a whole right now.
That's really sad.
Yeah.
Did
you hear about the Chess Association?
I don't know what the name of the organization, but there's
some international chess club.
Association or organization that have, uh, uh, they're now preventing trans,
uh, females from competing the chess
championships.
Oh, yeah.
So it's okay for Leah Thomas to win a swimming competition and her shoulders
are like twice as wide as the, the girl, the poor girl who got the
silver medal, but in chess it's okay.
But in chess.
Yes.
They can't compete.
Like, that is so ironic and so awful and so funny at the
same time on so many levels.
So like, I, I don't really know how to.
Yeah.
Well, I,
I think the concept of, of a separate women's division in chess is super sexist.
Yeah.
And then, well, the only reason it exists, basically, is, is that there,
that there aren't any women who have climbed the ranks, uh, to, to compete
with the, the guys, basically, because there's, there's been a couple of female
chess super grandmasters that have come into basically the top 10 of the world,
and, and, and one of them was raised as a chess prodigy from, um, Her very
beginning, Judith Polgar, and, and, and she, she was in the running for
one of the world championships like 10, 15 years ago, something like that.
But there aren't, there are hardly any other women who do that.
So it's like, and you can
have whatever theory you want on why that is the case.
But, but it's still, it's a game where nerdiness
and time in the game plays a big part.
Yeah, yeah.
But regardless, if you.
Uh, if you think that there are differences, inherent differences
between male and female brains or not, uh, why are there different categories?
Like why is that , why is that a thing at all?
You know,
like I, and like this is one of the, the great problems that I think have
been presented is that through this homogenizing of all people and saying that
a man is a woman like Blackbody, yeah.
Everybody's equal no matter what at any point in time.
Uh, like, it, it, and like, this is the same thing that's going on in the United
States, you know, with ideas like, uh, reparations payments towards people
that are former slaves or whatever.
First of all, like, there is no one in the United States
today that is a former slave.
That's really important.
No, they're a current slave.
Well, we're all current tax slaves.
But, uh, It ends up going to these places that, despite the fact that it
doesn't want to be racist or sexist, it becomes, like, the most racist
and the most sexist possible thing.
Yeah.
And it's really funny because, uh, this is something that my ex actually pointed
out to, was that, like, in her opinion, and I hope I don't get flamed too much for
this, in her opinion, like, Trans women are like the most sexist presentation of
women, cause like, you have a biological man telling women, insisting to women
that they are a woman, and if you deny that they are a woman, that person
actually is sexist, and then furthermore You're having men come into women's
competitions, beating the shit out of them in it, and saying you need to respect
and honor that because I'm also a woman?
And again, like, to me, this is a leg too far.
We can say, hey, if you want to have your own category, however you want to
identify, but you trying to take away the actual differences between us as
people, and furthermore You just not actually respecting enough in a way to
say, Hey, maybe, well, and the thing that I find the most interesting is that, I
don't want to go into this cause it's a slippery slope, like dangerous territory.
Okay.
So to me, it's, it's easy.
Like anything with the word anti in front of it is that thing.
So an anti racist is a racist.
An anti fascist is a fascist.
If you're just a non racist or non fascist, that solves the problem.
Like don't.
Don't put people into group categories and you're, you're fine.
You're not, you don't fall into any of these categories.
An anti sexist is also a sexist, like a non sexist is a non sexist.
So an anti trans is trans?
Maybe, I mean, like, maybe that's why they're so inflamed about it is because
maybe they really identify that way.
But back to individualism again, like the, the, the smallest
minority group is always the person.
So respect people like for what they are, individuals for what they are,
they are not their group belonging.
They are not their, they're not their passport, they're not
their skin color, they're not their sex, they're not their...
Gender.
Absolutely.
Like, they're not their fucking football team, they're a
person.
And like, one of the interesting places to extend this to is like, there's
totally intersexed and intergendered people that have two Xs and a Y, or
two Ys and, you know, however, and it's important, again, we want to have space
for them, but I think one of the main problems that we've gotten to is that...
Like you were saying, you know, by being anti racist we start to become racist, by
being, you know, pro trans or anti bis, that it escalates to the forefront of the
dialogue, that feature, which then almost becomes a sort of inescapability, instead
of just saying, hey, you're Jenny, like, okay, you used to be Jeff, whatever, like,
that's cool, like, you know, we can still have a great debate and dialogue, uh,
and, and like, I think the biggest one is, is why do we have to lead with that?
You know, like, why, why do, why do we have to Why do I have to,
you know, like, you don't see me coming in the conversation being
like, hello, I'm Eric, a white male.
How are you today?
You know, and like, people would be like, well, that's because
you've always maintained the patriarchal position of white power.
You know, I'm like...
Some of these leftist catchphrases though, I really like them because they...
They're actually true.
Like my body, my choice.
Yes.
Apply that to everything, please.
Like not to
absolutely everything.
Well, I'm like, same thing.
Guns are horrific tools of violence and we absolutely need to make sure that that
dangerous people are stripped of them.
Let's start with the military and police.
Cause they kill
the most people.
And there's also defund the police.
Yes.
And every other fucking institution.
Please start wherever you want.
Just defund everything.
Yeah.
Leftists get really, like, they kind of glitch out when I do that.
I'm like, yeah, absolutely.
Women need to have a right to abortion.
And, and just like in the same way, I need to have a right that nobody should inject
me with anything that I don't know about.
And they're like, well, hang on.
Or to inject yourself with whatever you want for that matter.
Sure.
Yeah.
And like a hundred percent, I want to respect your body.
You should respect that.
I want to put all kinds of different drugs and stuff into my body, you know?
And like.
Yeah, I don't know, at the end of the day, like, I'd
even try baklava if it came to that, you know,
yeah, absolutely.
And like, going back to earlier, what we were talking about, about
the positivity, like, we're in the middle of this extraordinary bloom
that the internet's providing.
And we're like, these dialogues wouldn't happen anywhere else.
There would never be a space for it, and people wouldn't even be
aware of these forms of thought if it wasn't for the internet.
And so it's so extraordinary that we get to have a space
where we get to talk about it.
Maybe I'm totally wrong, maybe there's some point here that I'm
absolutely missing, and that, you know, leftists are 100 percent right.
I'm pretty sure they're not, but I'm open to having a dialogue
about it, because I probably am
missing something.
Yeah, and what is the internet?
It's just us communicating.
It's just an easier way for us to connect and communicate.
That's all it is, and it's all through mathematics, which is also language.
Like, it's all about communication.
As a substitute for violence.
That's
what it is.
And like, one of the key differences though is that now getting to sort of
zoom in and use this language of math.
Uh, like if I'm providing a cryptographic proof that is one number off, you can
be like, that's, that's fucking wrong.
And I'm like, well, hang on.
No, no, no.
We're like really close.
And you're like, yeah, it doesn't fucking matter.
You're wrong.
Yeah, it doesn't kill the rabbit.
Like,
where, like, if I say this beer bottle here is amber, you could go, well,
no, that, that's more of a brown.
And I could go, well, maybe it's an ant.
Well, and there's this metaphorical difference that always happens in language
where we're always one degree removed from being able to have some, like, like
we can never actually conclude whether this is brown or amber or something in
between, whereas with a cryptographic proof, it's absolutely certain whether
or not this is the same proof or not.
And to me, like, that's sort of this more hyper resolutioned language that
we have access through cryptography that we're at a very, very rudimentary stage.
Yeah.
You know, like, we're using it, we're using it almost as monkeys, just with
the most rudimentary communication, which, you know, again, in the tradition
of all of humanity, returning to the very beginning, is like, This
is the fucking origin of language.
Like I encounter another savage in the world and I go, Oh, he's the shit.
Me Tarzan, you Jane, go away.
He goes like, Oh, wow.
This is a great hat.
I can't just like steal his hat.
His gods will kill me.
So like, I'll like take this hat and then you're like, Oh shit.
Like if I, if I like leave these stupid hats, this guy will like,
give me these super valuable bottles.
And like, lo and behold, the global economy begins.
Yeah,
all trade is, is communication.
And amber is a good word because Bitcoin is cryptographic amber, right?
And the more blocks that get added to the time chain, the more amber, layers
of amber is around that transaction.
And it's more and more irreversible, the more time flows.
This episode is sponsored by Amber App.
Oh, is there a plug for amber?
Yeah, no, just,
just kidding.
Give us money, Izzy.
So, uh, I wanted to do this one.
Uh, one of my favorites comic strips is from Gary Larson, where he explains
the four different personality types.
So would you say that this glass is half full or half empty?
We'll say half full.
Okay.
So you fall into one of these four categories.
And the first category, it's the people who say it's half full.
The second category is the people who say it's half empty.
The third category is the Indis indecisive people who say it's half full, half empty.
I don't really know the agnostics of the world, you know?
And the fourth cate, uh, category, which.
I have observed through life, it's by far the largest category of
people, and it's the people who say, Hey, I ordered a cheeseburger.
Yes.
That's a good metaphor for all of life and the way people approach it.
Yeah, yeah.
Erik, thank you so much for coming on again.
We fucking treasure your friendship and, you know, give us a hug.
let's get it on video there we go there we go and we need to get back to the
conference and do stupid shit it's
true we're we're below on gears so yeah but i'll get to you next thanks again eric
thank you thank you guys thank you guys
So what did you think of that episode with Erik?
His views on crypto sovereignty are definitely thought provoking.
I'm really looking forward to reading his book on the topic.
What was your favorite moment?
Let us know.
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