four years ago, there was very little content that really spoke to the
layperson, the working individual that removed a lot of the jargon.
And so Looking Glass was our attempt at trying to create something which
the content was not behind a paywall.
Anybody, no matter who you are, Wherever you are in the world can access it.
And we have a range of courses.
We have long, deep dives, you name it.
And we just wanted to be able to speak to the layperson, remove the jargon and
support them in their educational journey.
I believe that there is always going to be some form of state,
but I think that Bitcoin massively limits and impedes the overreach
and the boundaries of that state.
The challenge that we face today is naturally that we have a monetary
system that is governed by the state.
And so when we have a monetary system that is governed by the state, the tax
system doesn't even need to be there because they can simply just print
money to be able to fund operations, which is what they are doing.
If we are able to separate money from state, all of a sudden it realigns
a lot of the incentives in society.
Seb, welcome to the Freedom Footprint show.
Thanks for joining us.
Fantastic.
Uh, the bunny, it's a, it's a curious name.
Uh, I have a bunny.
Where does the name bunny come from?
You know what?
For me personally, I've spent a lot of time down rabbit holes, so I feel like
the name is very fitting, but I would say that when it comes to, I think the
history of it, I think it's a British name, and I think we can trace it back.
There used to be the Bunny family home that was in the UK, somewhere
in the UK, and up until a few years ago, it still existed, even though
it wasn't within my bunny family.
It was way back when, but we used to own bike shops, you name it.
Alright, so it has nothing to do with O'Hare.
Oh, yeah, yeah, oh, this is too silly.
Um, okay, um, yeah, rabbit hole, bunny, where are we going with this?
Yeah, we
How about you start with the normal first question.
That's a good, that's a good start.
Yes.
Okay.
Uh, so for our listeners who don't know who you are, it's a, could you
give us a TLDR on Zeb Bunny, please?
Hmm.
You know what?
This is always the tough one.
People are like What do you do?
And it's a really hard one to answer, but I would say that I'm an individual
that absolutely loves being curious and questioning the world around me.
And I think that started very, very young.
And so I started off as a mountain bike instructor.
I was just obsessed with the mountains, being out there, being involved in
nature, and that kind of evolved into, you know, Naturally, teaching mountain
biking, coaching mountain biking, but I realized quickly very early on
that if I wanted to be able to pursue these things that interested me, I
needed to have passive income streams.
So then I started looking at the financial world and you name it, uh, macroeconomics.
Uh, options, derivatives, all these kind of things.
And that quickly got me to questioning the world around me, which led me to
where we are today, which is ultimately where I think that a lot of the issues we
face stem from a broken monetary system.
And my, my goal is given that I love teaching, given that I love
educating and distilling things down into their simplest form.
I've kind of found myself in this role of kind of supporting people in their
journey to understand macroeconomics, the world around us, Bitcoin,
and how we show up in the world.
And I love it.
I fricking love it.
And so that's kind of where I'm at right now in a very, very short version.
We, as always, it's a frigging internet relationship, met on a dating app,
no, met through the Bitcoin community.
And, uh, naturally it kind of just evolved from there.
I would say.
We met, when was it?
Four years ago now, around four years ago, we were kind of connected through FOSS and
we founded Looking Glass Education, and so for those who are not familiar, Looking
Glass Education is just an educational platform that kind of breaks things
down into their simplest form, kind of removes a lot of the jargon, talks about
macroeconomics, Bitcoin, kind of the stuff that I was just talking about, and uh, we
started working together, started writing together, and started communicating
pretty much every single day, and so I'd say DAZ is Arguably my best friend, one
of my best friends, and up until Madeira recently, which we were all at, uh, at the
start of March, we had never met before.
And I think, Knut, you and I met back in Prague in 2022, that was the
first time I think we met, and then
Free Cities thing, right?
Yeah.
and then I think you and Daz met at Bitcoin Alive last year.
I
In Sydney.
. And when you say FOSS, you mean Greg Foss, right?
I mean, Greg Foss.
All right.
Greg Foss is, he's a connector.
You know what?
Like I ended up, given that my, my background is man by constructing.
I love teaching.
I like distilling things down.
And when I, when the pandemic hit, I, All of a sudden I was like, you know what?
I love teaching mountain biking.
I love supporting people in their educational journey.
But I feel like I want to make a bigger difference than just supporting
people in a fun little hobby of theirs.
I want to try and help maybe explain some of the challenges that we're
facing globally, given that I have a lot of friends coming to me to
ask me, how do I see the world?
What has Bitcoin got to do with all of these macroeconomic
issues that we're facing?
And so from there, I started to write, and at the time, I think, honestly, I
had about seven followers on Twitter.
I'd never written anything in my life.
I dropped out of school when I was 14, dropped out of English when I was 12.
It did not interest me in the slightest, but given that it was a pandemic, and I
didn't have a camera, I didn't know how to express myself, I just started to write.
And The first article I wrote when more, when more isn't better, inflation
in the 21st century, and it's kind of discussing how our monetary environment
is creating wealth inequality.
At the time, I just put it out there, I think it was on Medium or
Substack, and Greg managed to find it.
And Greg reshared it and from there it's just kind of snowballed and I've
just, I've honestly, I felt so humbled by the opportunities that was presented.
we have very similar journeys.
I guess you hadn't done the, uh, uh, Austrian economics deep dive before
you started writing either, right?
Uh, or had you?
you know, it's a tough one.
I would say that in my late teens, I realized very quickly as a mountain
bike instructor that a lot of my idols, a lot of these individuals
that at one time or another have been the Top of their game globally.
They've been in all of the biggest movies.
These professional athletes, a lot of them were struggling.
They had credit card debt up to their necks.
They were, most of them were renting.
Most of them were not able to pursue the things outside of just riding.
And so it made me realize very early on that I needed to
have passive income streams.
I needed to invest because the world we live in is a very hard world
given our monetary environment.
So that led me down the rabbit hole of real estate.
And then from there, I was like, well, I'm still pretty young.
Long term real estate is a little slower, one second is quicker.
So I started looking into the financial markets and I started day trading,
trading options, trading futures.
And then from there, what I quickly realized is that I was looking at the
world through the lens of a free market.
I was taking these positions, assuming we were in a free market.
And all of a sudden, many of these positions would blow up.
When I didn't expect the Fed to come in and hike rates or cut rates or, or
do very interventionistic practices.
And so it made me start to question the system doesn't feel like a free market.
What is happening underneath this?
And so that led me down the quickly down the rabbit hole of gold.
And then I realized, well, we've already gone off a gold standard.
What's going to change if we were to move back onto a gold standard?
And that led me to Bitcoin.
similar to my journey.
I, I, uh, uh, I never, uh, I was never, uh, Trading guy, but I was on a tall
ship working for a long time and I saw quite a lot of countries and it always
intrigued me, how these, that, that um, Different countries had different
economies and why was that and why wasn't it all interconnected and what
was wrong and the political systems and how, how does this, how does this work?
And whatever they taught me in school was obviously wrong.
So like, how can I connect the dots and see the bigger picture here?
And it's only in, in when you start to question money printing.
that you sort of do, that you see that, oh, holy shit, it's all bullshit.
And yeah, there's, there's no way back after that.
Absolutely.
And when I was going to add something, which is, What I think is so fascinating
about Bitcoiners or many, many Bitcoiners out there is that I think we have
stumbled into this journey as opposed to approached it from like an academic lens.
And so many, many of us have tried to just express ourselves through
our own lens of how we see the world.
And what is interesting is many of us have.
Kind of started to express a lot of these like Austrian, uh, Austrian
kind of approaches without ever actually even understanding that
this thing called Austrian economics.
And so I think that's what's really, really interesting.
And then you start diving down the rabbit hole and you're like, Oh my
God, there's already hundreds, if not thousands of people writing about this.
And I've just approached it from my own perspective because I've
realized something is wrong and tried to backwards engineer what would
a system look like in order to be able to resolve something like this.
exactly.
And, and, um, I mean, Austrian economics is repressed by the system, like, you
don't, it's still mind blowing to me that you never hear the word, the name
Ludwig von Mises in school anywhere, because to me, he's obviously one of
the most important thinkers of the last century, if not the most, like, he's
right up there with, like, Einstein and Maxwell and, All sorts of people.
So, so like, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's mind blowing to me that so few people
have heard, even heard the name.
Seb, yeah, can, can you tell us more about, about Lookingglass education?
Um, dig into that a little more for, uh, our our listeners
who might not be familiar.
What are you doing there?
For sure.
So very early on, um, when I released this article, Greg kind of started
to connect me with Daz and a few others because he realized that we
have this passion for educating and especially educating for the layperson.
We realized that there's incredible content.
If you want to dive into the philosophy of things, you can go and read Breedlove.
If you want to dive into corporate Bitcoin, you can go
dive in Summer Sailor's stuff.
If you want to dive into the technicality of Bitcoin, you
can dive into Antonopoulos.
But what we.
started to recognize, and this is changing now, but four years ago, there was very
little content that really spoke to the layperson, the working individual
that removed a lot of the jargon.
And so Looking Glass was our attempt at trying to create something which
the content was not behind a paywall.
Anybody, no matter who you are, Wherever you are in the world can access it.
And we have a range of courses.
We have long, deep dives, you name it.
And we just wanted to be able to speak to the layperson, remove the jargon and
support them in their educational journey.
And it really has just snowballed from there.
And now we, we kind of, we focus a lot on the educational component, but then
we also have a custody component where we support people in their custody
journey, whether that's taking pure self custody or collaborative custody through
something like the Bitcoin Advisor.
I remember, um, when we started the Freemadera organization that we, we
sort of wanted to collaborate with you guys and, like, the, the, this.
Obviously, a lot of networking and a lot of links between all these projects.
So what are the connections between Looking Glass and other educational
efforts, such as Plan B Network and this, like, and the El Salvador stuff,
you know what?
It's living in Whistler.
Whistler is such a small place.
Like Whistler, the little ski resort of Whistler, there's about, I think
there's a population in the summertime of around 5, 000, expands to 10, 000.
And so whenever you start dating, you realize that very quickly that, oh,
my best friend has dated this person.
And then two, two other friends have also dated this person and
everyone is kind of interwoven.
And I feel like the Bitcoin community is very similar.
You go start working with someone and you realize that there's kind of an incestuous
pit where everyone has worked with one another in some function or another.
And so for even us, like we have one of, uh, one of our kind of, um, co
founders or someone who came on a little later is Dahlia and Dahlia works a lot
with, she wrote the, what is it called?
The diploma for ME Premier Bitcoin or MyFirstBitcoin down in El Salvador.
So we've worked very closely with John from ME Premier Bitcoin.
On top of that, we have worked with Tether and the Plan B guys.
Those guys, we helped write a big, kind of long form course for them.
And Giacomo helped alongside that, which has just been absolutely phenomenal.
And then we're also working alongside AmityAge with Doosan as well, and
Doosan and his project down in Honduras trying to help with Bitcoin education.
And so that's where what I think is just so phenomenal about this community
is that when you think about the U.
S.
dollar, I don't know anyone who's dedicating their life to trying to push
forward the US dollar, whereas I know thousands of people who are just giving up
everything and tripping head over heels to be able to just work in the Bitcoin space,
give up their time for something that's bigger than them, for something that is
trying to help move the world forward and try and support those that are struggling,
trying to support those around them.
Because I think that more and more what I'm starting to realize,
and we can get touch on this in a moment, is that money really does.
We've its influence into every single aspect of our being, how we show
up, uh, the environment, the people around us, the business practices, the
politic, political kind of the scene.
I think that it's so important for us to be able to understand
Bitcoin, money and macroeconomics.
the term macroeconomics, uh, can we dive into that a bit more?
Because like to, to an Austrian, there is no such thing, like, uh, everything
starts and ends with the individual.
So what, what defines macroeconomics in, in, uh, in your words?
All right.
And
So I wholeheartedly agree.
I think that ultimately what matters is the individual.
Everything is made up of The collective efforts of the individual.
And I think that when I think about macroeconomics from a personal, uh, kind
of description, I would say that I tend to think about things obviously on a macro,
on a large scale, how countries interact with one another in their own way, even
though obviously that country is made up of individuals, that country is made up
of people that are seeking their own self interest, but it's just kind of that,
that inter exchange between larger nation states, uh, jurisdictions, you name it.
Obsolete the nation states in the long run.
This is a big question I know, but how do you see that playing out?
Like what role does Bitcoin play in the evolution of the nation
states over the next thousand years
Straight into the question of
what is the purpose of life that's inside.
uh, you signed up for this?
Yeah.
And you know what, I think when we were in Prague, we had a conversation
about like anarchy versus like democracy versus all of these kind
of various different structures.
It's interesting.
I think that we may look at the world slightly differently, but I think we come
at things from very similar viewpoints.
I believe that there is always going to be some form of state because
people, how would I word this?
I believe that there's always going to be some form of state,
but I think that Bitcoin massively limits and impedes the overreach
and the boundaries of that state.
I think that first off, the challenge that we face today.
And this is obviously from my perspective, and you guys can
push back as much as you want.
The challenge that we face today is naturally that we have a monetary
system that is governed by the state.
And so when we have a monetary system that is governed by the state, the tax
system doesn't even, it doesn't even need to be there because they can simply
just print money to be able to fund operations, which is what they are doing.
They're running huge deficits at the expense of the currency holders, whether
it's debasement, creating inflation, you name it, which is impacting us.
And then they're putting in capital controls, restrictions on where
we can spend our money, and all of that is impacting us as individuals.
Thank you.
I think that if we are able to separate money from state, all
of a sudden it realigns a lot of the incentives in society.
I think that the state almost becomes, just like Free Cities talks about, it
becomes an entity just like any other corporate entity that has to offer value.
It has to be able to exchange something of service, and people have to
voluntarily want to hand over capital.
in exchange for whatever service they are offering.
And so I think that there may still be a tax system, but that tax
system becomes a lot more voluntary and based upon value creation.
And what that does is hugely limit the role of the state.
And not only that, but it means that the state in itself, given that
it now has to balance its books, it has to be fiscally responsible.
It has to think very carefully and consciously about
where it directs capital.
And so an example that I would kind of give is, at the moment, the challenge
we face with our current system is that whenever we come on, whenever
we hit an issue, whether it is a welfare issue, whether it's a health
issue, the state simply just runs massive deficits and we've got a very
interventionistic, impulsive state.
Whereas I think that the moment you have to force fiscal responsibility,
they have to budget, and the moment you force budgeting, they
have to think very carefully about where they direct that capital.
And so if you've got an unhealthy society where a lot of capital is going towards,
let's say, the healthcare industry because we have high rates of obesity,
We've got to start thinking long term.
If I've got a budget and I've got to balance that budget, well, how do
I minimize my health care expenses?
Well, I've got to think about how do I actually improve the health of my country?
So why don't we actually start educating about actual nutrition
rather than just pharmaceuticals?
And so it starts to realign those incentives towards that longer
term thinking, uh, whether the state will disappear completely.
I'm not 100 percent sure.
I think that we transition more to a free cities model where the state itself is
more of a corporate entity than it is a, uh, state system, a government run
system that we're currently operating by.
Yeah, it also depends on how you define the term state.
But, yeah, my, my definition would be like the entity who has the monopoly
on violence in a geographical area.
But it's, but it's interesting in that.
And that's where I think that what Bitcoin does is given the, and I think
we actually, I remember the conversation that we had in Prague when we were
kind of sat at that dinner on the last night, because I think we even had this
exact conversation and we were kind of discussing this idea that The challenge
with every other asset ever in history is that either it's physical in nature,
which means it can be taken by force, or it is digital in nature, like stocks,
bonds, you name it, but the problem is that those are held by third parties.
They're held by institutions, and therefore the state
can seize them very easily.
And so because of this, We have very little sovereignty and control over
our assets, whereas Bitcoin, for the first time ever in history, we have a
digital asset that is non jurisdictional.
It's not based anywhere, and we can take self custody.
It's like having cash in your pocket without someone ever being able to see.
You can walk around naked with cash in your pocket.
And so, the profound aspect of this is the fact that Given that you
can no longer take it by force, you can no longer seize that asset.
The only way to obtain that asset is through offering value.
And it's a voluntary exchange of that asset.
And I think that what that does is all of a sudden it's going to minimize war
significantly because a lot of war is fought over assets and value and power.
And on top of that, it's going to mean that if an individual does not agree
with their nation or their state and whatever the state is doing, then
they're able to Flea and capital flow to where value is being created.
And so, therefore, it incentivizes those nations that are seeing capital flooding
out of their country uncontrollably.
It incentivizes them to look at themselves and look at, well, how
do we want to show up in a way that maybe is going to draw capital?
And I think that ultimately, again, it goes back to a free market.
It goes back to value creation being whoever is able to offer the most
value, the most service to someone, individuals, their populace, the more
capital is going to flow their way.
So, it realigns those incentives.
Absolutely.
I, yeah, we totally align on this.
When, when there's no way, easy way to take your stuff, then, uh, the,
the, the more profitable option becomes, uh, offering you something
of value back instead of attacking.
So it's a really turns the turns that the, the, the, The model, the perpetrator
has in his head before attacking someone, regardless of the perpetrator is, you
know, a state or a mafia or a criminal or some other, or a cartel or whatever,
whoever the attacker is, before deciding whether to attack or not, The calculation
is made like, is this worth the risk?
And with Bitcoin, it's almost obviously not because the Bitcoins aren't, they
don't even belong to the Bitcoiner.
The only thing the Bitcoiner has is the secret of how to unlock them.
So the Bitcoins never, they're never in anyone's pocket.
They're all over the world all the time.
And that's, I think this is a crucial difference that it's, it's still, uh, uh,
such an under, Appreciated concepts that money is now nothing but information,
uh, the information about how to unlock it, the 12 magic words are actually
magic, like there's, you, when the EU wants to ban, uh, unhosted wallets,
well, you're an unhosted wallet, I'm an unhosted wallet, so is everyone else.
Anyone who can, who knows 12 words in English from a certain dictionary, sure.
But you know, if I know the number one and zero, I'm theoretically an unhosted
wallet because I combined those 256 times.
And there you go.
You can send money to me, like literally to my brain.
Uh, so I think that this changes everything.
And most people don't of course, don't see Bitcoin that way, uh, because it's so
abstract and so hard to get wrap your head around that it's just information now.
Do you understand?
It's just information.
Oh, it's information.
So it's everything else on a computer.
No,
Well, and you make a really, really good point.
And I was just going to, I was just going to build on that quickly, which
I think is really, really profound.
And this is where, when I started asking this question of like, what is money?
It really got my gears turning because I started to realize that when you're
talking about money as information, the way that I view money is information.
Money is a form of expression.
It's an expression of what it is that we value.
It's information about what it is that we value.
And you can see this.
If you go into a, uh, let's say a grocery store and you see someone
buying grass fed meat and organic vegetables, and then someone else
buying microwave meals and cigarettes, you can see what it is they value by
what it is that they're purchasing.
And so money gives us an idea about how someone wants to show
up, what it is that they value.
And on a societal level, where money flows in society highlights societally
What it is that we value, but the challenge is that it can also be censored.
And so you've got things like inflation.
Well, inflation, as we're seeing debasement and rising prices, that is
the theft of purchasing power from us, the individual, our ability to be able
to express what we value, and it's being taken and expressed elsewhere in society.
And so to give an example, I may, as an individual, be very against war.
I may be a conscientious objector.
I do not want to Uh, kind of pursue any form of violence, but if we have a
government that can print at our expense, they're taking my purchasing power.
They can spend that on war, so it actually doesn't matter what it is that I believe.
I'm not able to express myself how I believe, but my purchasing
power is going towards funding war.
So on a holistic, uh, on a, on a grand scale, it looks as if society
supports war, capital is flooding towards war, when in reality, it is a
few small actors who have control over the monetary printer, directing it to
what it is that they're interested in.
And this is where I think that.
On a grand scale, when we have a money printer that can be governed
by a centralized entity, we get a very distorted view as to
what it is that society values.
Because we don't actually see where the real flow of capital in
society is going to trend towards.
Would it head towards war?
I'm going to bet that it's probably not going to head towards
war and it's probably going to head towards small businesses.
It's going to head towards value creation and collaboration, but instead
we're seeing it trend towards war.
totally.
It should be an expression of the total sum of the fruits of your
labor, minus the total sum of all your expenses during your life.
Which is, which people, people are scared of that, I think, because
they think that's almost inevitably a negative number, because that's,
but that's just because they don't understand the power of the division
of labor, especially in the era of the internet, when there's 8 billion people.
Your efforts, no matter how minuscule you yourself think they are and how, how
worthless they are to others, you have 8 billion people to sell your effort to.
And this is the power of the division of labor.
Someone will appreciate you.
If, if, if there weren't hinders in the way, it wouldn't be hard to make ends
meet when you got, when you got a, such a well oiled machine as a global economy
of 8 billion people, without friction.
And this is, this is like, I think this is something that Bitcoiners
see, but that other people just don't have the truth goggles for it yet.
Like they, they, they, they don't see the world this way, uh, because we're so
used to, you know, money being corrupt.
So we're so used to prices going up.
So we think that's a force of nature or even prices being stable
when they ought to actually be.
They actually ought to go down, so we don't see we're getting robbed by prices
just being stable over time, but like ask yourself the simplest questions.
If I practice doing something, do I, in general, do I get
better or worse at that thing?
And most people would say you get better.
Yeah.
So why are prices going up?
Like, or why aren't prices going down?
It's as simple as that.
If you.
You can just assume that people get better at doing stuff.
And if that is the case, and if we have a free market, then all prices must go down.
It's just inevitable.
And if you're denominated in Bitcoin, they do.
So it's just a lens to view the world by, which is more truthful.
Now, and you make a really, you make a fascinating point, which is the fact
that when I look at a free market, and I'm sure you do too, it is a
system built upon trial and error.
If I want to come out and I want to start a business, but that business does not
offer value, I'm going to quickly realize that zero capital is flowing towards me
and I'm going to have to pivot gears.
I'm going to have to figure out something which offers value to society.
So ultimately humanity.
As a whole, trend towards growth, a trend towards actually creating value, whereas
the challenge that we are facing right now is that we have a system whereby
the government needs, feels they have to intervene, they have to cut interest
rates, they have to stimulate, because otherwise we're going to see a large
collapse of the economy, given that how much debt we have, given how many
fiscally irresponsible companies we have.
But the problem is by intervening, all we're doing is we're propping up
businesses that are not offering value.
And when you look at like the Russell 2000, which is 2000 of
the small cap companies in the U.
S., 40 percent of them are zombie companies, which basically means that
they are not earning enough money to be able to service the interest and
the debt obligations that they have, let alone be able to kind of support
growth and research and development.
So if basically two out of every five companies shouldn't even exist.
Then this is artificial capital that is going towards these
companies, propping them up.
And all that capital could be used in a free market elsewhere to
create value, where people would be using that capital productively.
And so I think the challenge that we face in our current system is we continually
intervene, we continually prop up these fiscally irresponsible entities, these
entities that are not offering value.
And that's hugely expensive to us as individuals.
It's hugely expensive to humanity trending towards kind of security and prosperity.
Yeah, I think this is, this is, uh, since you're, you can only see the timeline
you live in and the results of that.
Uh, so you, you never see what could have been, and when things are getting
gradually better, even at the slow pace, people think they're living in the best
possible timeline they could live in.
And they don't see that by doing things differently, and not intervening,
things could have gotten way better, way faster, at a way faster pace.
Like, uh, and, we don't see it.
Yeah.
And when you say we intervene, I mean, this is the thing.
Is it a we, or is it a they?
And what Jeff Booth says, there is no, there is no they, there is only we.
And there's some truth to that.
I think like the expression, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I think that's wrong.
I think absolute power attracts those already absolutely corrupted.
I think that's what's going on.
Because I don't think people who have a high moral standard
get corrupted very easily.
I don't think I could bribe you with a million dollars to, to, uh,
to promote Dogecoin, for instance.
Like, uh, I just don't think that will work.
It's, you know what, I would say, I'll push back slightly
and I'll push back in the
I agree that there are people that naturally have a propensity to lean
towards giving in and corruption.
That said, I also believe that the environment in which we live
in supports certain behavior.
I believe we are a product of our environment.
And so, if certain incentives in society incentivize corruption, then ultimately,
I think we're going to trend towards that.
And the analogy I'll give is, you're, let's take India or some developing
country where you, no matter what, you're always going to see some people
like Gandhi or All these very incredibly spiritually enlightened individuals rise
above the challenge at which they're in.
But for the majority, the majority are kind of stuck in the system and it's very
hard for them to get out of that system.
And when I think about money, I tend to think about how does
money actually impact behavior?
And so there's kind of like three main aspects which I talk about in
the book, The Hidden Cost of Money.
The first one is time preference, and Bitcoiners are probably
pretty familiar with this.
Do we think about the future?
Do we have a low time preference?
Do we think about building security and prosperity?
Or do we have a high time preference, where we're focused on meeting
our immediate impulsive needs?
We're very short term thinking.
And the reality is that when we have a money that is losing purchasing power
over time, that's very unpredictable, we're incentivized to consume in the
present moment, given that money is worth its most in this present moment.
The flip side is with something like Bitcoin, when you have a money
where there is a fixed supply, where purchasing power over time trend, tends
to trend upwards, all of a sudden we're incentivized to save given that we
have greater propensity to the market.
So, all of a sudden our money is altering how we're showing up in the world.
And then the second one, it's like meaninglessness and apathy.
I think the challenge that we face in our current society is that because property
prices are rising so quickly, the cost of living is becoming outrageous very fast.
It becomes very hard for the average working individual
to be able to plan ahead.
Well, I want to save for a property.
But all of a sudden, that property is growing quicker than I can actually save.
So because of this, we're falling very quickly into this, this apathy, this
kind of, this nihilism, because people aren't able to plan, and we've got the
highest rates of suicide, we've got the highest rates of depression, you name it.
And then last is just kind of, um, uh, what is it called?
Uh, compassion and altruism.
Which is where people have probably heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, where
you've got this five tier pyramid, and on the base of that, you've got your
basic survival needs, food and shelter.
And until we achieve food and shelter, it's very hard for us to think about
relationships, love life, and then self actualization, you name it.
And so, what I think is that our current monetary system, because it is so hard
to get by, it's so hard to be able to even just support ourselves, Many
people are stuck on this bottom layer.
And because people are stuck on this bottom layer, I think that the environment
in which we live in is also having a major role in shaping and incentivizing certain
behavior, which is extractive behavior.
Can I get what I can to be able to support myself?
The political environment is, I need to stay as a politician, so I'm going to
do what I can to stay as a politician simply to be able to support myself.
And so I think that that's where.
We're trending towards a world that is slowly eating itself from
the inside out because of the incentives within the system.
But that's not to say that in every situation you're always going to get
people that stay true to their values and you're always going to get people
that also are very easily swayed.
I don't know what your thoughts are on that.
No, I, I totally agree.
There's a, you have, you have your biological inclination to, to be a
certain way, but then there's also the social layer on top of that.
And we can debate to which extent one influences.
More than the other, but yeah, it's a mix of both at some point, absolutely.
And time preference, uh, being a product of broken money,
I think definitely plays in.
And if you, if you, if you do the flip side of that coin and explore
that and explore, like now we have perfectly sound money or perfectly
scarce money that will deflate over time because people will lose their sats.
Like then, then you have something that is.
Almost guaranteed to go up in purchasing power over time, which
sort of eliminates consumerism.
I think about this a lot because I think that that world where that is
the dominant form of media of exchange, then it's such a different world,
which it would just begin, begun to scratch the surface of what that means.
Because first and foremost, when, when you prioritize, uh, if you,
if you think like, Uh, what's the lowest time preference I can have?
It's just a hodler of last resort.
Like, I just sit on my bitcoin stack and I never do anything, and I become
a Buddhist monk and I don't spend any.
So, so what do you do instead?
Because, like, most people want to have a life and not just sit
and consume as little as possible.
Well, would you start just being nicer to people?
Um Fewer transactions, but more transactions in terms of love
and, uh, you know, altruism.
Value for value, this movement within Bitcoin is, is sort of a product of that.
Like, instead of shooting sats to one another, I find Bitcoiners
To be very generous with their time and reputational capital.
And they're like, like we're engaged in a trade now and we're not shooting sats to
one another, but we do, uh, you value your time with me and, uh, or I presume you do.
And I definitely value my time with you in doing this.
Uh, so, so I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the future
that people just automatically help one another with stuff.
Because no one wants to touch their stacks, and I think it's just beautiful.
It's, it's this, uh, that which you can do without your own.
Sell all your, sell all your chairs, uh, or at least all the ones you don't need.
That's, there's a lot to that.
Uh, and it made me, just when you were talking about time preference,
a word came up in my mind.
This is my ADD, uh,
Space preference.
Why haven't we heard the word space preference before?
Uh, so if you have a low space preference, you don't want that
much space and therefore stuff.
Like you realize that, uh, you could basically live a minimalist
life and a high space preference would be buying all sorts of stuff
and taking up a lot of space.
Is there something, is there something here?
I've just literally just brain farted it out.
I don't know if there's anything in there.
Can we introduce the term space preference and explore that?
I would definitely say that it's interesting you say that because I think
that our current system, given that our money is losing value and we're
incentivized to spend, we're incentivized to consume, we live in this world
whereby we're trending towards believing that happiness is this external thing.
I just need the newest shoes.
I just need the newest car.
If only I could have this, then I'm going to be happy.
Yet, I think a lot of Bitcoiners, a lot of people that have spent any time looking
inwards, you realize that actually, you Happiness is purely internal.
It is an internal state of mind where we're spending time getting
to know ourselves and how we want to show up and pursuing the things
that matter to us internally.
And so I think that fiat money very much incentivizes, to your point, this
high space preference, this high space preference of trying to get whatever
I can to be able to fill this void of longing and internal kind of support.
Whereas I think when we have a system of sound money, something
built upon something like Bitcoin, it flips all those incentives.
When we're incentivized to save, given that our purchasing power
is increasing in time, all of a sudden, less capital is going to go
towards these consumerist companies.
And if less capital is going towards these companies, then naturally we're
going to see a lot of them wither away.
The ones that survive are the ones that are actually, okay, I've got to
think about, if I want to create a product, I want to create a product
that's going to stand the test of time.
I want to create a product that is quality, that actually supports
the needs to the best of my ability, the needs of the consumer.
And so naturally we start to see quality rise, production value rise.
And I think that this is huge because it realigns the incentives.
And a lot of people, I think, don't quite just understand how much our
current monetary system just impacts even just our environment around us,
to your point earlier, whereby I think climate change is definitely something
that I don't tend to like to talk about, given that I think the climate has
been changing since the dormant time.
But environmental destruction is definitely happening, and our consumerist
society is definitely impacting our waterways, impacting our forests,
impacting the natural environment around us because of our consumer habits.
And today, when you've got artificial interest rates slashed incredibly low,
It's so cheap for companies to borrow.
So we see the expansion of supply chains.
And now what we're seeing is the average product touches six countries
before it ever lands on our doorstep.
One of the man and bike companies that I used to work for, um, our
competitor had carbon bars that were made in Vancouver, and it was
cheaper for them to get the deckle of those carbon bars put on in China.
And so, this is where it's just like, this is obscene.
So, I think that as we start to move towards sound money, I actually
think that we start to see more community driven, uh, endeavors.
I think we start to see the domestication of supply chains.
I think we start to see less impact on the environment because
the quality of goods goes up.
And I think this is huge.
And to your point, I think it also incentivizes, given that
we're incentivized to save, we're incentivized to start to look inwards.
How do I want to sharpen this world?
I don't know.
How do I want to build a future of prosperity, support my family?
How do I want to kind of pursue the things that actually interest me?
Who am I?
I think that we trend towards a world with a low space preference.
Yeah.
I'm gonna devil's advocate that one a little, because I don't really, uh, buy
the idea that, raw materials will be produced locally to any larger extent.
I do understand that the incentives are skewed right now, and therefore
it's cheaper to produce stuff in China.
But it's also a question of where the materials are on the globe.
And, and, uh, and, uh, you know, sending stuff across the globe is not
necessarily inherently bad, uh, for anything if it's done efficiently.
And if, if we have a sound money, global free market, we allocate resources
in the most truthful way we can, and therefore there is less waste.
So I do, yeah, while I dispute the concept of nationalization of, uh, of, uh, That's
not exactly what you said, but like, uh, um, um, of raw materials, I do think
that yeah, Valgo consumerism will go away and, and that is the only solution
to any imaginable environmental problem.
Trying to do anything else politically or, or, uh, you know,
just, carbon taxes and whatnot.
Uh, it's.
It's like putting a band aid on a cancer, like you're not removing the source of the
problem, so yeah, consumerism, regardless of your stance on climate change, I mean,
it's pretty clear that human activities are increasing CO2 levels, it's just,
there's not just a big consensus on what I don't know what that actually does to
the environment long term, but there are other impacts, and over consumerism of
course leads to more garbage and more crap everywhere, and all sorts of unnecessary
behaviors being carried out every day, like tons of trucks and people buying
Christmas gifts with cheap plastic shit and giving to one another, I mean, fewer
resources, uh, could be misallocated in a, in a, uh, more sound free market
and with less consumerism built in.
So the consumerism is a very Keynesian idea.
Like that spending is the only motivator and not building up
capital and saving up for later.
But, uh, to me, that's just, uh, you know, Well, you can go back to Robinson
Crusoe, uh, catching fish with his hands.
If he, if he never stops doing that and takes his time to build
a fishing net, he will never increase his production of fish.
Uh, so, so he never gets anywhere.
And that's what the world economy sort of feels like since the seventies.
Like we have all these, all these great inventions were made back like 50
years ago, and now we're just getting, you know, I mean, newer versions of
the same things, but if you buy a toilet today, for instance, I bet
you the toilet you bought 50 years ago for the same money is way better.
And you know what?
I just wanted to add one point, which you're talking
about, um, the supply chains.
I fully agree that naturally, We're going to have certain resources that
are abundant in certain areas, and we're going to have scarcity in other areas.
So there's a certain amount of, uh, travel and the movement of resources around
the world in order to be able to create.
Absolutely.
I think the challenge that we face right now is, first off, when we move
towards efficiency and productivity, we try to limit the amount of steps
that take place in order to be able to improve the efficiency of the system.
If we're moving something around the world six times before it ends on the consumer
doorstep, that may mean It literally does take six steps because it's gotta pick up
the resources at each of those locations.
But what I think we are seeing today is that we've got a lot of authoritarian
nations that are suppressing the cost of capital and suppressing labor to be
able to artificially draw in capital.
And I think that we're seeing this in Pakistan and India and and China,
and I think that that's leading to the artificial movement of goods
and services all around the world.
Whereas I do believe that we may not see everything nationalized whereby.
You're only going to be consuming stuff that's made in Canada if
you live in Canada or if you live in the US, you're only going to
be consuming stuff in the US.
But I do believe that we would see a reduction in the amount of nations
that it touches before it ends up on the doorstep in the long term.
Yeah, I totally agree.
We would see elimination of the unnecessary steps like that.
That's, that's what it means.
I mean, still, uh, the, the, uh, carbon footprint, if you will, if there is
a better word, I don't know, but the, the, uh, uh, uh, A good on a container
ship, like the container ship is a very efficient, uh, transportation device.
Like I think that the shipping container is one of the most underappreciated
in inventions of the last century, because you can move shit around
the globe for at almost no cost.
Uh, and the, like, if you.
Take the diesel consumption of the, uh, of the tanker, which is massive, but if
you divide it up by a number of things in those containers, and you, um, you,
um, put it alongside, um, the, the fuel consumption of, uh, uh, the truck that
drives it to the, uh, to the store, uh, or the car that drives it to the home
where it eventually ends up, I bet you the car has the, like, biggest footprint.
Bye bye.
Um, but this show is not about Carbon Footprints, it's about Freedom
Footprints, so let's get on to that.
Uh, um, I was going to say something about the Suez Canal, but I forgot what.
Uh, anyway, what are you doing to increase your Freedom Footprint, Seb?
Hmm.
I don't think I've ever been asked this question before.
I would say,
it's only here.
It's only here.
Um, I would say when it comes to my Freedom Footprint, My
focus right now is, one, I love educating and supporting others.
And so, part of me not necessarily increasing my freedom footprint is
actually just supporting others in their journey to understanding what
self sovereignty means to them.
Because I think in order for the world to be able to trend towards prosperity,
I believe that at the foundation of that, we need to have self sovereignty.
I think if we do not have self sovereignty, if we don't have control
over our action, if we don't have control over where we direct our capital,
if we don't have control over being able to voice our opinions and what
it is that we believe, then I think the world can quickly trend towards
chaos, which we are seeing right now.
And so, I think that what is important to me as an individual
is to stay true to that ethos.
And voice what it is that I believe in, because if I'm not voicing
what it is that I believe in, then I'm only supporting the problem.
If I'm scared of the repercussions of voicing what it is that I believe in,
then I'm only limiting humanity's ability on my own tiny, tiny level to trend
towards others voicing their opinion.
And so what I really value about Bitcoin is, is that we stay true
to what it is that we believe.
What is interesting is, if you ever read the book, The Psychology
of Totalitarianism, uh, Matthias Dessmer, who's kind of the, uh,
Professor at Ghent University of
Oh, love him.
Love him.
incredible and he talks about how there tends to be three categories
of people within a population.
Around 20 percent of the population, 20 30 percent of the population will, no
matter what the government does, they will always side with the government.
You then have another population, which is about 40%, and this is kind of, you can
think of them as like the swing voters.
These individuals, they're kind of, you know what, we'll go
whichever is the easiest direction.
So if you've got a very vocal minority, the 20 percent that is very supportive
of the government, they will tend to swing towards those individuals.
And then you have another 15 to kind of 20%.
Which is the individual who values sovereignty, values freedom, and
values expression, and is willing to stand up for what they believe in.
And the challenge that I find is throughout history, depending on
where, kind of, we're trending as a society, it depends on how vocal
either the supporters of government are, or the supporters of freedom are.
And I think that what we're seeing more and more of, increasingly,
is people are starting to maybe wake up, and they're starting to
voice their opinions a little more.
And so I think that it's incredibly important for us to be able to
Voice what it is that we believe in.
You're about to say something?
Yeah, what happened to the last 25%?
I
only 80.
There's only What is it?
40?
50?
60?
There's about 20 to 25?
15 to 25?
It adds up to 100 somewhere.
Just think about it as in A small minority, a small minority, a large
minority, and depending on whichever small minority it is that is most vocal,
Maybe the last 10 percent are the, hey, I ordered a cheeseburger
kind of person, you know.
Just complains about everything.
Regardless.
yeah.
And so I think that it's, it's so important as individuals to be able
to stand up for what we believe in.
And so there's these little endeavors, whether it is looking glass and trying
to express my values through writing, whether it's the books and trying to
express my values through writing.
Yeah.
But then on top of that, I have a blog called the Chi of Self Sovereignty, and
you can find that just at saidbunny.
com, and the Chi of Self Sovereignty is outside of even just money, and I
think this is what I really value about you, uh, Knut, is the fact that you
don't just talk about money, because ultimately, money is just, it's a medium
of expression, it's how we express to the world what it is we value, so
I think being able to discuss that.
How does the world around us impact how we are showing up, our behavior, you name it.
And everything kind of interconnects with that.
So being able to educate people on our world and sovereignty I
think is incredibly important.
I totally believe, and I can back this up with a bunch of, a handful of
irrefutable axioms, which you prove by trying to argue against them, that each
and every living person, grown up, that can support themselves, they do have
the right to do whatever the fuck they want with their lives, and other people
don't have the right to violate that.
They do, and there are consequences, and they may throw you in jail if you
do something stupid, but there's no fucking natural right for any person to
sit on top of another and, and direct where they're going with their lives,
like, you, you do have the right.
To defend yourself and try to get the fuck out of whoever's
trying to steer your life.
Like, uh, and the more people that take that seriously and, um, really stand up to
the man and, uh, refuse to take the orders and, and refuse to obey when necessary.
The better off we all are.
I truly believe that, that we need a resistance movement.
And Bitcoin is inherently a resistance money.
It cannot not be.
Because if permissionless, it's like, totally needed.
If it's permissioned, or if it needs an approval stamp from somewhere,
that will inevitably lead to someone abusing that approval stamp.
So we need people to resist uh, pressures from, from violent groups.
No matter what those violent groups are.
So that's it.
And now we have new means of doing that.
We have a strong cryptography and we have communications channels we didn't have
before, things that can't be censored.
And most of all, we have Bitcoin.
One, I've actually got a question for you guys.
So for me personally, I find my background is more in sport.
I spend a lot of time in the mountains.
And so although I'm very, I would say, sovereign in that I understand my body,
I understand what my body can take.
When it comes to the technological side of things, that is, I would say, my weakness.
I don't have much interest in understanding the deeper intricacies
of like deep, deep cryptography and how to The Anonymous on the internet
or how to protect my privacy.
I have certain measures in place running a node, you name it.
But I was curious on you guys and how you guys show up maybe
more on that technical level.
How do you think about self sovereignty and what would you say like the core
steps which you guys take on a personal level to maybe add some form of whether
it's privacy or security to your setup and how you show up digitally?
Would you care to answer this first, Luke?
You're the security expert after all.
Yeah, fair enough.
Sure.
Great.
Well, uh, digitally is a, is a larger, uh, sphere starting just in the, in
the Bitcoin world, self sovereignty.
I mean, the, the thing about Bitcoin privacy is that if you don't, uh, send
your coins in a careful way, people can track what you're, you're doing.
Right.
And so, I mean, uh, Wasabi is the, is the.
The, um, mixing service that, that we use and recommend and all this.
And I mean, it's, it's a great, it's a great service that, uh, coin joins
your coins with so many others, uh, that, that you get an, an anonymity
score and you can't, uh, be, um, detected in that, in that group anymore.
And so then you, you can go and spend your coins freely on anything you
want and no one will know it was.
You.
Right.
And I mean, this isn't to say go ahead and, and, you know, do this for the
purposes of evading, uh, laws or taxes in your jurisdiction or anything like that.
But it, but it does break the, the privacy thing.
So that's, that's a start.
Oh, node is, is great.
We, we were just talking to Matt Hill from Start9, uh, just putting a server
for your data into your own house.
So using your node for multiple things, there are a couple of, uh, schools
of thought on this, I guess, one being that, uh, say you should only
use your Bitcoin node for running.
Bitcoin and the related protocols and all that.
But another side of it is you could run a Bitcoin full node and use that
to verify the network and then also use a whole bunch of other things,
run your own services and all that.
But a lot of this other stuff just comes to, I think in the digital realm
is a little more about sort of being conscious what you're putting out there.
Social media apps.
What information do you give them permission to use?
Or what information do they take from you if you're using your system, right?
So for example, not letting everyone in the whole world
see everything that you post.
I mean, that's an easy way to reduce the amount of information
that's out there about you.
Not posting, things about every little moment in life.
I mean, that stuff is, uh, um, maybe something.
I mean, for anyone listening who has kids, uh, I mean, I think this has started to
turn into a thing that, that, uh, parents that are maybe a little more conscious
about, about social media and their kids are on social media are consciously
deciding to not not put pictures of their kids or information about their kids
and let them make a decision about what information they want to put out there.
So it's choosing selectively, choosing to what to reveal to the
world basically is, is the idea and using things that facilitate that.
So it's, it's going to look.
Different for, for everyone, but another example was when we talked to
Lawrence Lepard about he got hacked and sims swapped and, and, uh, um, had
his Twitter account taken over, for example, and, um, talked about just
a few things to, to safeguard against that you can, for example, use a, a
hardware token, like a hardware wallet as your two factor authentication
one of those and it's phenomenal.
Exactly.
So, so, I mean, all of these things together, you don't have to do
everything, but I think what I would say is add layers of defense.
That's, that's a common cybersecurity term, defense in depth.
Add layers of defense into your life and think consciously about what
you're putting out into the world.
Yeah, I'm going to give a more, more philosophical answer.
but, uh, The gist of it is the same.
Make it costly to attack you.
Like, uh, if we go back to the, uh, this is a long, I'm getting to a point here.
Uh, did you see Milton Friedman's, uh, rant about a pencil and how no
one on earth can make the pencil?
Because all the, goes back to, you know, the, the, Raw materials coming
from different continents, right?
So all of the parts of the pencil comes from different factories in
different, uh, different countries and no one can make it on his own.
There was also a TED talk about a guy trying to make a toaster from scratch.
By, you know, mining for iron ore and melting it down and like trying to
make a toaster and it looks awful.
Of course he can't, you know, because so, so my point with that is that
there is no such thing as trustless.
You always have to trust someone.
Uh, in some supply chain somewhere.
Uh, and this is definitely true for hardware and software.
There's always a layer of trust somewhere.
So, so the, the, the question really becomes who to trust and who not
to trust and what to prioritize.
And there's a saying by, um, I'm all over the place here.
I know, but there's a saying by Marilyn Monroe.
Uh, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
And this means.
Like, if you have powerful friends, no matter how you define powerful,
but if you have knowledgeable friends, that's powerful.
If you have, uh, so if you surround yourself with people who know stuff
and know how to help you with this and that, and, uh, can help you out
in certain situations, uh, then it becomes more costly to attack you.
I, I truly believe so.
I mean, um, being, having lots of friends.
It's, it's a good thing.
Um, and maintaining relationships with people.
That's part of why we do the show, by the way, to, to, you know,
maintain the relationship with you.
It's not only, you know, grasping for views and likes and stuff like that.
We want to maintain relationships with other Bitcoiners that we love.
and that's part of, part of at least my, uh, thinking around safety and security.
I know that's not a very technical answer, but, but, um, at the end of the day, like
human connections are the most important thing and Bitcoin is all about that.
It is a network of human beings first and foremost.
So if there's one takeaway from this episode, it is to go and download Tinder
and go on to the friend setting and then go and build out a huge friend
network of just people in your community.
Well, you have to pick and choose.
It's like one of one of the sailors ten ten tips for
success was curate your friends.
And curated colleagues, so like, weed out the bad ones, like, when people
show you who they truly, truly are, believe them, and, uh, weed them out if
necessary, give second chances, but don't give third chances, and, uh, uh, try to
befriend as many good people as possible.
It's very rewarding.
You know, I would definitely say something that I lived a lot of my life by is
that like we are the average of the top five people that we spend our time with.
And I think that I'm very conscious of who I spend my time with.
And I noticed that there are many relationships, just like a, whether it's
a business transaction, in the long run, you want that relationship to be mutual.
Whereby there's a give and a take.
That's not to say that in the short term, sometimes, yes, you may lean on them
more, or they may be leaning on you more.
But every so often, you're going to find yourself in these
relationships where they're draining.
They're absolutely just sucking life force from you.
And I think that it's challenging, but in the long term, it's healthier to be very
conscious of if there's a relationship that is just depleting my life force
over time, then maybe that's something that I want to trend away from and
trend more towards those that actually rejuvenate me, those that actually
instill confidence and prosperity.
Yeah, and it's hard because it's hard to evaluate friendship.
Like, I truly value the friendship I have with friends I had since my teens.
But I spend less and less time with them for several reasons.
One being me being in another country is one.
And also You know, when you, when you start a family, that, that
inevitably leads to you hanging out with your old friends less,
but also like getting new friends.
So there's, there's just not enough time at the end of the
day to hang out with everyone.
I
and choose wisely.
choose, yeah, choose how to spend your time carefully, like, uh, and doing,
and also nothing is something worth doing every once in a while, uh, just
doing nothing and letting yourself, you know, letting your mind wander.
I find that, uh, some of the best ideas I've ever had comes from a, a, a state of
mind where I just don't give a shit about productivity or, or, uh, value this and
value that or, or any, uh, I, I just let, it's like sort of a dreamlike state where,
where you just let things float away.
You know what?
It's, it's, it's interesting you say that because I would say that from 20
probably 2018 to about 2022 productivity was just front of mind all the time.
I was trying to consume content.
I was trying to get as much information in as possible.
So I started to, I listened to a lot of my books.
I'm a useless reader.
I feel like I'm partially retired at half the time and can't consume.
So I like listening and I go and take the dog walking.
I go and walk through the forest somewhere where there's no people where
I can really start to like concentrate on what it is that I'm consuming.
I would listen to things that far faster than regular pace.
And that meant that at my peak, and this isn't more of a brag, but
just to highlight at my peak, I.
I finally read over a hundred books in a year and I was like, fricking pumped.
And then what I realized, I, last year it went down to kind of 50 books and
this year I think I'm at one book.
And I realized that actually it's one thing to consume content.
It's another thing to understand and distill content.
And I think that more and more as I'm getting older, I'm really realizing that.
If I just really focus on one book at a time and just go slowly through that
book, and then I take time to think about that book and even when I'm not actively
thinking about that book, it's still tinkering away in the back of my mind.
And every so often these little things pop up and it creates those, those connections
and so more and more these days.
I'm kind of letting things sit, letting things sinking, uh, sink in.
And what I'm noticing is I'm having just as many insights that I was
having, if not more, from when I was reading and consuming a ton of content.
But those insights are more, they're deeper and more
authentic to me as an individual.
They're not just parroting what someone else is saying.
Absolutely.
Uh, yeah, I can just echo that and say, like, you wouldn't listen to a symphony.
On 3x the speed, like, so why would you
Don't you do that?
I would imagine in listening to Stravinsky on the sped up, like
it makes absolutely no sense.
It's complicated enough as it is straight away.
I, um, I don't know if I'm the only one here who's a big Stravinsky
fan, but anyway, uh, yeah,
You also may be the only Meshuggah fan in the room too, but so
we all appreciate different things.
Yeah.
I wouldn't listen to that on a sped up either.
Maybe slowed down though.
Maybe slowed down.
Anyway, but yeah, but, but just, you know, meditating is one thing where,
where you, you're like literally forcing your brain to not think about anything.
But I find that most of my really good ideas come from when I not deliberately,
but I just end up in this state where I don't just don't care about my brain
anymore because it's, it's always talking like it's a cacophony in there.
Like.
It's very hard to make it shut up, except for falling asleep, uh, it's hard to,
hard to explain what that state really is, but something in between dreamlike
state and yeah, maybe daydreaming.
It's, it's, I think it's fascinating.
You just brought that up because the hidden cost of money.
So my book, I wrote 95 percent of it in about a two week period between the hours
of one and five o'clock in the morning.
And what I noticed is that I would arise out of sleep.
And I would know chapter one needs to be this.
This is the key points of chapter one.
Chapter two is this, this, and this.
And I would write down all of this core content and the flow and
the structure and the narrative.
And then during the day, I would expand on that and piece it together.
And I remember digging into this a little more because I was
wondering why it was happening.
And I started to realize that like Picasso, and I think it was Einstein,
both recognized that all of their core ideas, A rose as they awoke, and so what
they started to do is they would take naps during the day, and I think this
was Einstein, he would hold a set of keys in his hand over a little metal tray.
So the moment he fell asleep, his hand would open, he would drop the keys
onto the tray and awaken back up again.
And then all of a sudden he noticed that's when all of these kind of creative
ideas and these connections were joining, because it's almost as if We're kind
of connecting to that unconscious, that deeper level of knowledge that
is sitting below the surface that our conscious is not readily able to access.
And on a neurological level, there's a lot of evidence to support that
at those times, we have a lot more, I think it's gamma frequency.
And that gamma frequency, again, helps us get into that state
where we're very creative.
yeah, can totally relate.
Like, you know this Luke from like writing, writing right now.
Yeah, for the longest time I had writer's block.
I really wanted to write, but I had nothing to write about.
So like, I couldn't get a single original thought out of my head.
And then all of a sudden, mid December, just, It just poured
out of me like word after word.
It just came from somewhere.
I don't, I don't know what that is, but like it's creativity in general
is such a weird beast to try to tame, uh, because the, the whole point
of it is sort of to be untameable.
Like that's where the best stuff comes from.
There's an excellent book by John Cleese, by the way, it's just an hour long.
Uh, um, Audio book on normal speed called On Creativity or something.
And John Cleese is reading it him, uh, himself.
So, so he laughs at all the jokes and stuff.
It's, it's absolutely excellent.
So you can really recommend that.
That and Six Days to Air, the, uh, the documentary about how they make South
Park in six days, uh, every episode starts six days before it airs and uh,
they make the entire thing in six days.
So those two, uh, helped me a lot in, in like understanding creativity.
And Klees argues that you need to not only not be interrupted, You also need
to know that you're not going to be interrupted, which for me, I think is
like the even bigger reason why I write in the morning than waking up and having
a good ideas when, when I wake up at like, say four or five, I know that I
have a couple of hours to just hyper focus and I will not be interrupted.
I think that's key as well.
Absolutely.
You know what?
There's There's a, a, guy that I know who lives in the interior of BC, and he
is an incredibly successful businessman.
And I remember one night, uh, we were kind of hanging out, I was teaching
this group, taking a man on biking.
And I asked him, I was like, are you a fan of efficiency?
And he was like, oh, this is my freaking love language.
And he shows me his calendar, and from 5am in the morning when he wakes up
till 10pm at night, he's got 15 minute interval blocks, and he knows everything
he's doing, for every single 15 minutes.
And to me, that's my idea of hell.
I think that when I think about my calendar, I get so frustrated when, like,
first off, I should say, I feel incredibly lucky to work in the Bitcoin space.
But given that, and you're probably the same, Knut, I have a lot of people
reaching out that want to discuss whether it's a book or potential
opportunities or collaboration.
And I struggle when I have a week where I have a very broken
week, where I have two or three.
Meetings half an hour to an hour long that are distributed throughout the
day, and so I have all of these one hour blocks of free time, but in a
one hour block, I feel like my mind doesn't get into that flow state.
I like to know I wake up and I at least have half the day to be able to explore.
Absolutely.
Like a meeting can ruin a day completely by just being
there, by just being scheduled.
Uh, I, I truly believe like, and especially as I say, if you have three
meetings in a day, that day is, you might as well just do fuck all that day.
There's so much, but there was a tip from John Lennon to George Harrison,
I believe, uh, where, where, uh, George, So it tells it, uh, that John
told him to, whenever you get the song idea, finish the thing then and there.
Don't wait for it.
Don't, don't wait.
Don't postpone it and try to finish it later.
And yeah, I, I can relate to that.
Klees has a sort of a, uh, A different approach.
Like if, if you're stuck, this is talking about writing sketches and not songs.
So that, I guess there's a difference there too.
So you can have a problem, a storytelling problem, uh, and so just sleep on it.
And what he found out was that when he woke up, not only had he found
the solution to the problem, but he couldn't remember why he had
the problem in the first place.
And another thing he did was some, uh, sometime during, during his early career,
Uh, lost the script to something he wrote together with Graham Chapman for Python.
And, uh, so they had to rewrite the sketch and then he found the old, the
old, uh, sketch, the old manuscript and the new one was way better.
So when he like rewrote it from memory, it became like 10 times
better, which is also weird.
Uh, so, so there, there are so many, I think, yeah.
It's worth exploring your creative side if you have one, uh, definitely,
uh, there's a lot to find.
no, and I think that again, going back to the fiat world, when I think our time is
increasingly being infringed upon, when our cost of living is constantly rising,
we're increasingly pushing for just productivity, productivity, productivity.
And the challenge is that from my own experience, there seems to be a spectrum
between productivity and creativity.
And as you trend towards productivity, you start to lose creativity.
And so that's where I really, for me personally, I'm trying to actually
create more space these days.
And actually there's a, um, uh, a famous value investor that I used
to follow called Manesh Pabrai.
And he used to keep all of his calendar completely open.
And unless it was something important, meeting Warren Buffett or whatever,
he would not schedule it in because he wanted to be able to, Sit there
and sit with problems because again, to your point, the moment you start
to block up that calendar, all of a sudden you start to impact creativity.
You prevent the mind from flowing where it wants to go.
Absolutely.
And which is why you should turn off your notifications as well.
Like, uh, they, there can be a huge distraction.
So like, yeah, we need some notifications, I guess, like, uh, so
wife called three times, uh, means emergency or something like that.
Uh, But most of the notifications you can just turn off and then you are in
charge of selecting whenever you, uh, whenever you want to check your messages,
at least, at least to a larger extent.
And it almost parallels with Bitcoin again.
I think that the fiat mindset when you're looking at Bitcoin is
that you've got to look at price.
And so every single day you're constantly looking at price.
What's the price doing?
Is it going up?
Is it going down?
Whereas the more you're able to disconnect from the impulsive nature
of price, the more you start to see Bitcoin for these bigger, more creative
ideas, these more philosophical ideas.
Absolutely.
And there are a lot of productive people in Bitcoin and sometimes you
can feel like Or at least I can, this is very subjective, but I can feel
envious that someone is such a, uh, has such a high work ethic and can just
go on for hour after hour and do the thing, you know, whatever the thing is.
but then again, like, because on a daily basis, I'm almost, when
the day is over, I'm almost always disappointed in myself for not, you
know, Doing more shit that day, like for procrastinating a bit too much.
Even if I just procrastinate for five minutes, I'm like,
I lost those five minutes.
But when I look back at a year, I'm impressed by myself.
Oh, holy shit.
You, you, you, you did all this in a year.
How the hell did that happen?
So I think that's like, our brains are sort of wired in a way, um, to be,
I mean, productive, more long term.
There's some reassurance there that some type of low time preference,
I think, is inherent in our brains.
I don't know where I'm going with this.
It's just mostly subjective.
No, and I'll add one more point as well, which is, and I know in, uh, in your book,
everything in 20, everything divided by 21 million, you talked a little bit about
maybe spirituality in the afterlife, and maybe we disagree a little bit here, but
I think what is fascinating is that I do believe that the world always gives
us what it is that we need to grow.
And sometimes we can try to force growth through productivity and
trying to be productive when more and more what I'm trying to do is
separate, am I just being lazy here?
Or is it that right now at this moment, this is what interests me and maybe
I should direct my energy towards this because naturally whatever it
is that I'm trying to do on the side where I'm trying to be productive and
I just don't have that inspiration, uh, it's giving me time to think.
And one of the interesting examples I'll give, if that didn't make any sense,
is I got, I've just started working in the last kind of two months for a new
Canadian company called Block Rewards.
And we deal with like pensions, benefits, you name it on a Bitcoin standard.
So supporting payroll and stuff in Bitcoin.
And so my role is the educational side of things.
I want to build this educational journey that helps employers and
employees look at the world through the lens of Bitcoin rather than look
at Bitcoin through the lens of fiat.
And I've been struggling with this because I've been like,
okay, how do I actually do this?
How, how do I best achieve this?
And so I've had a few ideas bumping around in my head, but every time
I go to sit down to your point, My mind is blank and I'm just like,
I don't even know where to start.
But actually that blankness has actually created pause and that
pause has opened up other doors.
And so in Madeira, on the first day I was on an educational panel on the main
stage with Dusan and John Dennehy from MIPRME and we're talking about education.
And I mentioned this one point, I mentioned The traditional
education is very linear.
We, we teach in modules.
You've got to learn this, this, this, and this, and this order.
And the challenge is our mind doesn't work like that.
Our mind is not very linear.
For us to be able to be engaged in something, we need
to be able to jump around.
We need to be able to pursue things that interest us.
Oh, this, this brings up this point.
I want to dive into this point quickly, and then I'll come back.
And so I made the point, which is.
For Bitcoin to be, for Bitcoin is to be successful in our ability to
orange pill, we need to change the way we think about education, and
we need to start to think up ways.
How do we create more dynamic ways to educate?
Ways that allow you to pursue the things that which you are
interested in as an individual.
So if a mother comes on board an educational journey, we're not just
talking about the technicality of Bitcoin, we're going to lose her quickly.
But at the same time, if an economist comes on this educational journey,
we're not going to lose them talking about Bitcoin and relationships.
We've got to find that balance that allows for a dynamic learning journey.
And so I have this idea, but I didn't quite know how to fulfill it.
And from that one talk, I had two or three people reach out saying, Hey, this
is my background, and I'm an educator.
Do you want to jump on a call and just chat?
And from there, it's amazing what has unfolded.
But it's actually only unfolded because of the time and the space.
If I tried to force something, if I tried to rush something,
those ideas would not have come.
And so I think the world always gives us what we need to grow.
Absolutely.
I mean, the mind, Needs to play to come up with new things.
You need to allow the mind to play.
Uh, let me ask you a personal thing.
Were you, uh, like when you were a child, were you very imaginative
and often in your own world playing with your own, like building your
own stories or were you very social, like, where were you on that spectrum?
Now, I would say I've always, I would say I'm like an extroverted introvert.
In that I have my like core little friend group and that friend group means a lot to
me, but I don't, big social settings, even things like Madeira, I struggle with it.
Like they absolutely deplete me.
I feel, I feel destroyed after a few days in these large social settings
because I love time and space.
And for me, even now as an adult, I spend a lot of time, I would say
multiple hours every single day walking the dog through the forest, whether
I'm listening to content, which more recently in the last kind of, as I
mentioned, in the last six to six months to the last year and a half, I have been
increasingly not listening to content.
And I've just been in silence walking through the forest
and seeing what comes up.
And my mind is just always turning.
There's always stuff there.
And what I also notice is I'm driving more and more without
music on, without any stimulus.
And I find it fascinating, just being more, more in my head
and noticing what's coming up.
And it's interesting, When I spend more time internally, you
start to notice more information.
You start to learn yourself.
And Carl Jung, the like famous psychologist from the, uh, 100
years ago, he spent something like, he spent a year or two documenting
every single thought that came up.
And he started to notice that so many of these thoughts were even, and people
can say this is BS, but so many of them are actually being predictive of
things that were starting to happen in his life and globally around him.
But to us as individuals, I think many times we ignore so much of the
information that comes up, or we just don't even hear it because we're
just, we've got way too much stimulus.
We're looking at our phones, we're looking at social media, we've
got friggin headphones and we're listening to music, you name it.
And I think that that impedes us from getting to know ourselves, being
imaginative, to your point, and, uh, Asking the questions about like, who
am I and how do I want to show up?
I see so many similarities here and yeah, I think this, Uh, leads into Bitcoin not
being the signal, just the greatest noise remover ever invented or discovered.
Uh, that, that's the way I see it, that it allows you to find your own signal so
that you can engage in what David Bowie called, uh, uh, aging, which is the,
according to him, the, the slow process of, uh, becoming who you were always
meant to be, uh, which, which I think is true for all people who self reflect.
But not necessarily for everyone.
I don't think NPCs ever grow into what they ought to be, uh, or always
meant to be, but, but if you do self reflect, I think that's the
journey, like, uh, self realization or like discovering new things.
Who you are in order to be valuable to other people.
We talked about happiness before and chasing happiness, which, which
I think is a very fiat thing too.
Um, I don't think you can ever achieve happiness by, by chasing happiness,
by, by having that as your end goal.
Happiness is always a by product.
I would say almost always, if not always.
I mean, always, always a byproduct of helping others
or being valuable to others.
So if I, you know, write a book or make a song or draw a painting, I
feel happy when others appreciate it.
Uh, I, uh, any artists that say they only create for themselves is, uh, is
lying to a certain extent, even though I think, uh, You have, when working on
something, whatever the pro, if it's a book or if it's whatever is a film,
your job when working on the thing is to make the thing as good as possible.
It's not thinking about what comes after, uh, if that makes any sense.
So it must be good to you because you imagine yourself as
the viewer, as the listener, as the reader, you're the reader.
And what would you, what would you like to come from this piece?
to your point, I think what comes up is actually a few years ago, probably
about five or six years ago, someone who I truly, truly admire mentioned
to me, That the world at which we look at, unfortunately, when we, when we set
goals, when we kind of think about what we want our future to be like, we tend
to base it around the three P's, which are power, prestige, and possessions.
We want to buy a new car.
We want to get a new job.
We want to kind of have power over those around us, whatever that may look like.
But if you actually just ask someone the question, what would you say are
two or three of your most favorite moments throughout your life so far?
They don't resolve around, revolve around power, prestige, and possessions.
Instead, they revolve around contributions.
Connections and um, challenges when we're challenged to be able to do
something that is hard, that we feel like we've grown as an individual, when
we've contributed to society, we've given back, or when we've connected
with individuals and had that bond.
And I think the reality is that many times when people are setting goals, I'm not, I
don't actually truly set goals these days.
I try and go more of the flow, but a lot of these goal setters, a lot
of people in the fiat world, We're constantly trying to strive for,
okay, I want this new job, I want the newest car, I want the newest thing.
And it's not creating happiness, it's doing the antithesis, it's
this fleeting moment, and then all of a sudden you want to crave more.
Funny thing that the three piece you just mentioned are all penis enhancers
or alleged penis enhancers, right?
That's, that's why people strive for them.
Uh, so it's all about signaling then.
And that's why you never go happy.
You can never be happy.
by trying to signal stuff like that's, that's not the thing.
And yeah, it's, it's very true.
I mean, if I look back at the conferences to, by the way, to
me, they're also exhausting.
I love every second of them.
And I value the, the, the short time I get to spend with this amazing people a lot.
Uh, so, so, uh, so I try to squeeze as much out of it as, uh, as I can,
but then I sleep for like 40 hours because it's completely exhausting.
Like, uh, it happened after.
Madeira happened after first time in Miami.
I, I, I, my wife told me she's never seen me sleep like that.
I usually sleep like six, between six and eight hours per night.
Uh, used to be even less, but I tried to sleep more now because I appreciated more.
Uh, but it's completely exhausting.
Um, where was I going with this?
We were talking about something
Three
Ps, contributions.
three pieces, yeah, because I can easily remember my favorite moments
from each of the conferences.
And they're never, you know, what they, what you think they would be.
It's usually something funny or like a heartfelt moment or something one
on one it's, it's not like basking in the glory of this or that, never that.
It's just a silly moments.
It's like, for instance, in Miami, when I'm sitting, uh, having
lunch, uh, with Fractal Encrypt.
And all of a sudden, a very American looking guy, uh, walks up to me on
the street, takes off his sunglasses and says, Knut, Knut Svanholm?
And I'm like, yeah.
And he points at himself and he says, Greg.
And I finally connect the dots and it's Greg Saj.
So like the first time I ever saw Greg Saj in real life, I got to stand up and just.
Hug him and say, fuck you, Greg.
And very few people understand that joke.
But to me, that was a special moment because my very first
words to him were the meme.
So living the meme.
That's, uh, that's what I strive for.
No, and to your point, I think that when I think about even say Madeira,
naturally you think, well, is my favorite moment being able to speak on
the main stage, is my favorite moment?
And it's like, no, my favorite moment is, there was just a little.
One morning, before the show had even started, I bumped into Robert Brinded,
and I don't know how to pronounce his last name, I think I pronounced it right,
um,
we ended up just having like a heart to heart deep conversation for 20 minutes.
And it was those little moments, that like connection that to me was
actually arguably my favorite moment of the whole, the whole experience.
And so I think that we've got to be aware of, especially for those that are
listening to this and that set goals.
Question like, is this actually what I want?
Is this actually what makes me happy?
Or maybe I should redirect towards something that, what is
it that actually motivates me?
What is it that actually makes me feel warm and fuzzy and feels
like I'm contributing to society?
Yeah, and it's a hard question to answer.
There's, there's so much to choose from.
No, no, Seb, this is, this is great.
Uh, I think, uh, um, it's awesome to hear what's kind of driven you
in, in the directions you've, you've taken the writing, the education.
I'm curious how you ended up in Whistler of all places, because I'm, I'm, Uh, from
Calgary, um, originally, so just over the, the mountains for anyone who doesn't
know the geography of Western Canada so well, but yeah, I'm, I'm curious what,
uh, what made you settle in Whistler?
No,
Well, first off, I've just said, I've just started dating this, this, this,
this girl, and she's from Calgary.
I've never dated someone from Calgary before.
So I'm being introduced to the Stampede, I'm being introduced to all of the country
music, cowboy boots, all of these things.
So it's a whole, whole new world to me.
But, um, I would say, I would say from a very early age, man and
biking just absolutely hooked me.
I'd say that it was my first true love.
My absolute first full passion that I wanted to put everything into.
I'm full ADD child.
So the moment I get interested in something, there's
nothing else in my mind.
It's the only thing that I can think about.
And I'll push aside everything just to do that one thing.
And so mountain biking was the first time that I found that true fire inside
of me that I wanted to drive towards.
And I was probably about nine years old when I found it.
And from then on, all I could do was think about mountain biking.
And so I think the first time that I ever even heard about Whistler, I actually did
a school project and they asked, where do you want to live when you're older?
And I did this whole project on, I wanted to live in Crankworx.
And for those that are not familiar, Crankworx is this mountain bike festival.
I didn't even know Whistler existed, but I just wanted to live
in this mountain bike festival.
So at nine years old, I wrote up this whole big poster and that kind
of started this journey towards how do I actually achieve this goal?
And so I ended up, I dropped out of school at 14 and moved out and spent the summer
of 14 and 15 out in Whistler on my own.
And I moved out here full time when I was 16 and started teaching
mountain biking and working in the industry because I really realized
that for me as an individual, and this is obviously unique to everyone,
everyone needs different things.
But for me, when I was younger, I needed independence, and I needed to be able
to pursue the things that motivated me.
And so I feel really lucky that I had a mum who, she had
a very challenging upbringing.
She unfortunately was kicked out of the house at 13 years old to parents
that kind of had their own addictions.
But what she realized from that endeavor is that Because she was
kicked out of the house, she had that independence to be able to
pursue the things that motivated her.
And so from very early on, she supported me in pursuing the things that motivated
me, that being mountain biking.
So I found myself in Whistler, and it forced me to grow up.
It forced me to, uh, look inwards and, and discover who I am.
And so I think that it really has shaped me in trying to be more self sovereign,
being more independent, being more self sufficient from such a young age.
to shaping me as to who I am today.
And that really started this whole passion and this curiosity about being,
how do I want to show up in this world?
Which has led to all of this stuff, writing, you name it.
And do you take the mountain bike over the mountain to
Calgary to meet your girlfriend?
If I was to pedal to Calgary, I think the drive is what, 13 hours?
I think it's just going to
take a few days.
no, it's, it's, it's great.
It's a great story.
And I mean, it, it also really plays into exactly what you've been saying.
It, it makes perfect sense, sort of the, uh, latch onto something
and, and it, it kind of sticks.
I, that, that really is, uh, I've, I've got a parallel with that on
how I, I ended up in, in Finland.
Just, just something about when I started to find little cultural artifacts,
uh, from Finland, especially music.
I, I just got right into it.
Similar age to it.
Well, no, I know I wasn't nine, but, but around, yeah, 13, 14, 15 was when
I really got into the, um, music and, uh, started to, uh, dabble with the
language cause I was in the languages and then, you know, fast forward 10 years
and, and I get a chance to, to move.
Here and, and yeah, now, now I live here.
So, I mean, it's, it's, it's interesting how life, uh, how things
that are so meaningful can latch on at such an early age and, and,
and then it just takes you there.
It's, it's fantastic.
No, and I think it's so important for Us to be able to pursue what
it is that really motivates us.
And I feel so lucky to be able to have had a life where I've been able to
pursue the things that motivate me.
I've never, like, we came from, I'd say, just like a lower middle class family.
Um, and So we didn't grow up very wealthy, but I was in a position
whereby we weren't struggling.
And because we weren't absolutely struggling, I did have some
opportunity to be able to pursue things that motivated me.
And so I've had the opportunity throughout my life.
Man on Biking has been able to pay me enough just to be able to get by.
And that has meant that I've never had to take a job purely
just to be able to survive.
I've been able to take jobs because they offer me something, whether
it is internal happiness or growth or a skill set, you name it.
And this is still stays true to Bitcoin.
And what is interesting is that I've actually, for a lot of my life, I
felt like the system was unfair.
I felt like our monetary system creates a lot of inequality.
And not only that, Um, I have felt as if, I've felt, I've felt frustrated
and kind of demoralized by money.
And the reality is a lot of people are like, well, why are you working in money?
And what I find is interesting is that actually working in Bitcoin, I
don't feel like I'm working in money.
I feel like I'm just working in a way to be able to trend the world towards
something where we can express who we are.
We can express our true selves, and our current fiat system, unfortunately,
revolves around money, and increasingly, no matter who you are, you have to
spend so much time thinking about money.
What I love about Bitcoin is you don't have to think about money.
As we trend towards a more Bitcoinized world, less and less we focus on
money, which ultimately, again, to your point, um, Knut, which is the
fact that what is phenomenal about Bitcoin is it's a noise remover.
It removes a lot of these issues.
It removes a lot of these financial pressures, a lot of these strains, so that
we can actually get down to who we are.
And I think that is phenomenal, because the fiat world is not doing that.
It's doing the opposite.
Yeah, I once tweeted calling Bitcoin money is degrading to Bitcoin.
Because our interpretation of the word money is so skewed
by, you know, just bad money.
That doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
So, but there's a question for both of you.
Would you consider yourself still as passionate about, you know,
mountain biking and, uh, well, the Viking metal stuff, uh, look
like, or the mythology stuff?
You go, Luke.
Oh, sure.
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's right down there.
I mean, maybe I've got other things on top of it, but, uh, yeah, at
the heart, it's, it's still, yeah, the music, the cultural stuff.
Absolutely.
Um, I don't know.
Nothing more to it.
Seb?
I would say, I would use a relationship as kind of a comparison, whereby
initially you always have in the first year, a few years, there's just that
honeymoon period where you're completely enamored, because every, New week,
there's something new you're learning, and your learning curve is exponential.
But naturally, that learning curve does start to plateau as you've
consumed a lot of information, and then it goes into that strong, reliable
friend or that strong, reliable partner that you know you can rely on.
And so mountain biking Although I don't ride to the same extent because
I'm not, I don't teach anymore.
I used to ride a hundred plus days a summer back to back to back and
just kind of destroy the body.
Now I probably ride once a week.
It's something that I can always lean on and I know that it is there
and it's a huge part of my life.
But at the same time, my ADD mind, I've always got the new next thing that I'm
kind of directing my energy towards.
So, Some of those things, they, they stay for a few months and they disappear.
Some stay for a few years and some, some kind of latch on, uh, and join
mountain biking as kind of these core companions that I use throughout my life.
And so I think that that's kind of how I tend to look at activities.
Yeah, I'm asking because I totally ditched what I thought was my passion,
which was traditional ships and sailing traditional ships, which I did for a long
time, and I don't do any of it anymore.
And I don't miss it at all.
It felt like I did all the things I could do with it.
And like, then chapter over.
Onto the next thing, and I've never had any regrets about,
like, not doing that more.
I got the chance to sail a really old boat the other summer, like
two summers ago, and that was good fun for a couple of hours, like,
oh, yeah, yeah, I remember this.
Uh, but, but it's not, I wouldn't call it passion anymore.
Uh, I think, like things change sometimes.
You know what?
A few years back, I went through like a challenging breakup, and I ended
up seeing this counselor psychologist here in Whistler who works a lot with
professional athletes and Olympians, because here in Whistler, I think
we have the highest, what is it?
The highest percentage of, like, Olympian athletes in the world.
Like, we've got, it's, it's, it's incredible because we're a mountain
town with a world class ski resort, mountain bike resort, you name it.
And because of this, one of the things he, he told me, which really stood out,
because I was, before we even got into the relationship stuff, I was just asking him
a few questions, and he said to me, When it comes to these athletes, they've built
their whole life around a single pillar.
And so, when they've been aspiring to get a gold medal and all of a
sudden they get a silver medal, their whole world crumbles.
Well, they've been training for the Olympics for freaking five, six
years, and then the Olympics comes around and they injure themselves six
months before, their world crumbles.
And I find that what I love about Bitcoiners, many Bitcoiners out
there, is that we're curious.
And so we have so many different pillars that support us.
And so for me, I have my mountain biking, but at the same time, I also
paraglide and I also ski tour, but then I also have my more philosophical stuff.
I love reading and learning about psychology and trauma.
And then at the same time, I also love nutrition and I love
Bitcoin and I love macroeconomics and you name it, my dog walks.
So the more pillars that we have that are supporting us, We can
lose some of those pillars, but we're still whole as a person.
It doesn't impact us as an individual.
And to your point, Knut, I wonder if, um, at some point, that was a
large part of who you were and your identity, these, these, these boats.
But as time went by and you picked up more and more interest, more things that
kind of took that curiosity, at some point that pillar no longer needed to
support you, so you leant on other things.
Yeah, exactly.
I think there's a danger in tying your persona too much, your
identity to a certain activity.
I mean, you're more than, if you identify as the running guy and all of
a sudden you lose a leg, like, you're not going to be the running guy anymore.
So like, but I mean.
You can change your life if it's, if it's not as fulfilling
as you think it ought to be.
Like to me, life is much more about figuring out what you don't
want to do than figuring out what you do want to do with it.
Like, uh, it's like, if you're on a path that is not, Satisfying to you?
You, you should try to, you shouldn't be afraid of making change because like,
uh, I had neighbors back in Sweden who, uh, an older couple who had lived in the
same house for all their lives, and the one of them hadn't ever been on a plane.
The, the lady and the guy, uh, he was.
An electrician, uh, he lived all his life in the same house on the
same island, um, outside Gothenburg.
And he, um, and he died like a year after we moved here and
never having seen anything.
And like, to me, that's my greatest fear, uh, a mundane life where nothing happens.
Like that, that's way scarier.
Then taking a risk every now and then, like, uh, to me, like, uh, that scene from
Papillon, when, when the guy gets judged by a jury in his dreams in a desert,
says, you're, uh, but I'm innocent.
I didn't commit the crime.
And the jury says, no, you're not guilty of that.
You're guilty of a wasted lifetime.
That's brutal to me.
Like, uh, um, You need to fill your life with stuff like and to figure stuff
out like what you want to do with it.
It's not a rehearsal.
You only have one chance.
I couldn't agree more.
And it's interesting because I see I've got a brother who's
18 months younger than me.
And he's been struggling in that he wants to find the thing that is him.
But he's very scared to try something in the event that that's not who he is.
And to your point, which is sometimes it's not about what it is that we like,
but what it is that we don't like.
And there's an interesting analogy that I heard years ago, which is kind of
like, When we are approaching life, it's, it's similar to carving a sculpture.
You start with a giant block of marble, and that block of
marble, you try something.
Nope, that's not me, so you chip away a little bit, and then you try something
else, and you chip away a little bit.
And at the start, you started with a giant block of marble that didn't really
have any distinguished features, but the more you try stuff, the more you
chip away that material until you have that, that marble sculpture underneath.
And so sometimes we can get that paralysis, that, that, that fear of
trying through the fear of failure.
And ultimately, I, we need to push through that because ultimately it's
only through trying that we understand if we actually enjoy something.
And the questions we can sometimes ask ourselves, if we don't know
what it is that we enjoy, is actually what it is to your point.
What it is that I don't enjoy, because you're removing material in that way.
Mm
Yeah, skin in the game.
The Taleb book was a huge influence on me when started when
I started writing about Bitcoin.
Like, that's the influence.
The decision to dare to put my name out there on the internet for people
to find, like, sorry, am I good enough?
And all of these, like, I mean, with any intellectual endeavor you'd set
out on your, I bet you feel this too, that you're, you know, that
you, that you, if you have total imposter syndrome here, and I am the
lizard king, I can do anything here.
You know, that you're somewhere in between those two points,
but you have no clue where.
Like, uh, and I, I think all creative people feel that, uh, once
in a while that it's very hard to evaluate your own value to others.
And it's, it's probably something you shouldn't think too much about.
Uh, you know, lack of self criticism can take people.
I mean, look at Joe Biden and Donald Trump, lack of self criticism took
them to the fucking oval office.
So, uh, so self, while self criticism is good.
And you need it to a certain extent.
You shouldn't let it hinder you.
It basically boils down to not letting your ego stand in the way of you.
Because even too much self criticism is an egotistical thing.
Like, not ever daring and not ever putting yourself on the line is egotistical.
It's vanity, right?
So, so, uh, and being afraid of failure is a fear of vanity or a
fear of, of something to some extent.
And that is to, to me, that's just another aspect of your
ego standing in your own way.
hmm.
Thoughts?
No, fully agree.
Fully agree.
Hey, I think this is a perfect place to wrap things up and I'll throw it
right back at you one last time here.
anywhere you want to send our listeners and viewers, we're going to find
more about you, what you're up to, Looking Glass education, all of that.
For sure, and I should mention, because we kind of got a little sidetracked,
for those that Want to kind of dive into the head and cost money and don't really
know necessarily know what it is about.
I basically realized quickly that again, there was the Bitcoin as a standard.
There was a lot of Antonopoulos books, there were these phenomenal books,
but very few of them looked at money holistically and actually what, what
is money's impact on society and not just from kind of a financial
lens, uh, the Bitcoin standard does it somewhat, but I really want to
tie in more of the psychological lens and the behavioral lens.
And we even talk about totalitarianism to a certain point.
And only after we describe the problem do we actually start to discuss
what does a solution look like.
And even then, I don't dive straight into Bitcoin because a lot of people
may feel that aversion to Bitcoin.
I look at what would a monetary system need, what are the characteristics
that we'd need to see to be able to realign those incentives.
Because ultimately, For me personally, it's not about Bitcoin.
It's about how do we create a world that supports us as individuals and allows
us to be more self sovereign because I think that is a world where we trend
towards greater prosperity and we trend towards a world where we maybe have
more joy and happiness and you name it.
So, uh, that you can find the hidden cost of money just on Amazon.
Um, you can also check out the Looking Glass education and we
have a bunch of free courses, free resource, uh, resources.
And then finally, If you're an employer or an employee and you're looking
to be paid in Bitcoin in Canada, you can just check out blockrewards.
ca.
And yeah, we deal with kind of pensions, benefits, payments,
you name it in Bitcoin.
But yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on.
It really means a lot.
That's a great name, Block Rewards, by the way.
It's really cool.
Seb, thanks a lot for coming on.
This has been a fantastic conversation.
Uh, looking forward to more.
This is really our first time, um, yeah, connecting ourselves.
We, we barely talked on, on Madeira.
I'm, I'm, I'm looking forward to getting to know you better, uh, going forward.
So yeah, thanks again for coming on.
And, uh, yeah, looking forward to next time we see each other.
Thanks guys.
Thank you.
This has been the Freedom Footprint Show.
Over and out.
Brush your teeth.
What is it we say, Luke?
No, I think we'll end with that or with this.
This has been the Freedom Footprint Show.
Thanks for listening.