Some historians credit coffee with kicking off the Enlightenment.
America was built by coffee drinkers.
Coffee has played a role in radically changing the world for the better.
The greatest intellectuals, writers, and thinkers like to mix coffee with their cigarettes.
But in modern days, there has been an attack on this revolutionary being.
The Wokes are taking it over.
infiltrating every good coffee house in america is an angry looking lesbian white suburban women
are demanding more cream and sugar than coffee in their drinks and the culture around it has
shifted towards soft tops instead of straight black nectar of the gods but the pumpkin spice
drinking soccer moms have not completely destroyed intellectualism joining us tonight is a renaissance
man a plumber an electrician a coffee roaster a musician a bitcoin podcaster father and husband
looking like a paper bitcoin company cobbler joining us tonight otis bitmeyer
you did an incredible job at lake satoshi with your coffee shop next to your boss
how you doing tonight great real good thanks for having me what's it like running
a coffee shop uh on the on the bitcoin standard uh you live a little bit of an alternative lifestyle
um you kind of like uh richard said you look like i don't i wouldn't say you look like a cobbler i
that would say that you look like somebody who's friends with a cobbler um and so but more
importantly somebody who uh serves coffee to cobblers and to homesteaders and to plaids and
to ungovernable misfits uh to ai musicians to guys like baba what what is it like running a
a coffee shop on Nostra?
You know, it's,
I'd say it's a lot more fun than running a shop,
a coffee shop on Fiat.
Lake Satoshi was just really,
okay, so when I,
when I closed or when we closed our coffee shops,
I was tired.
I was tired of running, like working more, more hours per week than I wanted to.
And it felt like for the, as long as I wanted to stay in that industry, it was going to require
more than I wanted to give just to keep the lights on and, and get by, you know?
And so I decided it just wasn't worth it to me to give my life to that type of extractive arrangement.
And it felt like Lake Satoshi was a way, was kind of the first iteration for me to try doing it a different way and pay really close attention to where is my energy being returned to me?
where where am I able to give in a way that is that I'm excited to give and
it was super fun to just get to show up and share coffee with people while essentially hanging out
at the same time so I'm not sure where it goes from there but I feel like we I learned some things
yeah like satoshi that i'm excited to to dig deeper into you did you didn't it sounds to me
like you didn't want to just serve people coffee you wanted to participate in the experience
of your coffee shop with your customers it wasn't you didn't just want to be the person serving it
You wanted to be there to enjoy it with them.
And I say this seriously, a thermodynamically sound way.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, it was tiring.
It was a lot of work.
And it took some planning and it took some intention to make it happen.
But I kind of view what I did as setting the stage or maybe providing the canvas.
And then we're all just there painting on the canvas together.
Or if you want to go back to my stage analogy, we're all there creating the play together.
And that feels way better to me than, you know, someone coming in, we're separated by a counter.
and their expectation is that I essentially am their servant
and get them their thing as quickly as possible.
And in exchange, they'll give me some money
and that's supposed to be satisfactory arrangement.
It's not. It's not for me anymore.
And I think it's not for a lot of people,
even if they don't realize it yet.
that sort of exchange is just not going to cut it moving forward i don't think and last thing uh
about this for me is that it sounds like you didn't want people to uh come to your coffee shop
just because it was convenient that's the coffee shop nearby it's the quickest whatever you wanted
people to like get on a plane with their daughters and fly across the country and then like miss a
flight and it's still looking up the next day and make the connecting flight and then order a trailer
and drive a couple hours into the forest to get your coffee because it's that good like you people
will fly across the country just to get a chance to talk about bitcoin or anything really uh it
is my at myers coffee shop well yeah i mean totally that's that's exactly what i want because
I know that those people want to be there. And I know that if they want to be there that badly,
they're invested in making it a good time as well. So yeah, you're absolutely right.
And they have to listen to your, uh, your podcast stories or your orange peddling theories because
they drove all the way there. It's like driving out to the outlet mall. You got to stick around
and check out the deals, right? Like it's, they're going to listen to your theories.
Yeah. And, and I, I have to listen to theirs as well, but I'm happy to do it.
Gotta listen to Carl explain the six forms of capital.
Yeah. Yeah. As many times as it takes for it to, to seep into my brain for sure.
So yeah. So like, tell it, tell us about running a coffee shop back in the day,
you know, you were slaving away. I think you and I had similar experiences. You know,
my experience was with the media, you know,
where I felt like it was soul sucking and I quit to leave, do something else.
And it radically improved my life.
It sounds like you've done the same with closing down your coffee shop.
So did you like employ people?
Did you have to employ these angry lesbian ladies with a bunch of tattoos or
what was the structure of the coffee shop?
Like,
yeah so we we did structure it so that we had to employ people and um we definitely got some of that
angry energy that um i'll say i mean it happened under my watch so ultimately it was my responsibility
to weed it out but i didn't uh at the time i i kind of i hadn't fully realized how toxic
that mentality was and uh i let it go for far too long and ended up i wouldn't i wouldn't say
it ruined our company but it's significantly like that that mentality of uh outrage and
essentially it seems to me requiring everyone else to solve your problems
and like you just getting to sit back and poke fingers at people like that was a that was
something that was a real challenge from our employees anyway like that that mentality where
we i get to blame the boss you know the boss is always wrong that uh it's it's very common
if you look into the drama because there's always like little dramas between coffee shops and their
employees there a lot of times it's these coffee shops who they claim it's like a group chat or a
spaces in bitcoin where it's like the they seem to agree on the most things or it's like the most
esoteric little meme gang communist meme gang um but they get in the biggest fights and biggest
quarrels and they end up having to shut their co-op coffee shop down because the employees
are in the mindset and it's not just coffee shops but it's definitely in coffee shops too
that the employees feel like they're being exploited by the employer it's it's whether
it's an exploitative uh relationship or not the tone especially in a corporate like starbucks
or something but even everywhere it's is my boss exploiting me and it's like pretty incongruent
with what a coffee shop experience is supposed to be is not the foundation of it being exploitative
Yeah, precisely. So, you know, before I owned a coffee shop, I worked in a roastery as an employee. And one of the reasons or one of the visions that I had, or that Jubilee and I had when we started our shops was we want to try to do it differently. We want to try to treat our employees better.
Well, I didn't realize that we're still within this exploitive system of fiat that it doesn't really matter whether you're an owner, whether you're an employee, whether you're a landlord, everybody's getting squeezed.
And so I felt like I had played enough roles within the system by the time I was an owner that I could kind of see, oh, wait, the employees are just feeling like they're being exploited by me, the owner.
As an employee I felt like I was being exploited by the owner And then as an owner I felt like I was kind of being exploited by the employees in a way or at least certainly beholden to them in ways that
didn't feel like it was in my best interests as I think personally and for the good of the business.
And so that was kind of around when COVID started that all of this started coming together for me.
And COVID just was a clarifier where I was like, there's no win here for any of us within this system.
We can't.
It just, whether it's by design or whether it's just the way it happened, the system essentially breeds and nurtures this kind of division.
And I'm just, I'm not going to participate in shit like that anymore.
Right. It boils down to, I'm not going to build my coffee shop on a foundation of fiat. I got to build my life on a stronger foundation. This one is, you can't fix it.
Right. Going back to our, you know, our church background, there's that don't build your house on the sand. I definitely feel like that was pertinent in this situation.
And just felt like I was keeping on trying to build something on sand that was constantly shifting.
You know, like we had COVID going on and then we had Black Lives Matter.
And I remember being in the midst of a employee meeting where I'm like, I'm coming to this meeting.
Like we had just spent a couple of months shut down because of all of the, you know, all of the stuff going on with COVID.
And we're just getting back, getting our feet under us.
And I'm like thinking, okay, let's be strategizing how we can make this, make this thing work.
And my employees are all bent out of shape about Black Lives Matter and are like urging me to start a nonprofit.
And I'm like, guys, do you want a job or do you want to, you know, like there's, there's more going on here.
than this storm that's currently raging right outside,
you know, the Black Lives Matter storm.
Well, coffee culture is really interesting.
So coffee is incredibly important in the United States.
Yeah.
I don't know what the percentage of people that drink coffee is,
but it's probably well over 50%, probably daily.
But there's a huge split in the dynamics
between different types of coffee drinkers so like there's um like when you think about the
working class american you think of people like they're drinking like gas station coffee
they're going through the drive-thru in the morning to get their black coffee from the
the lady in the bikini you know that that's the thing that i learned about recently i don't know
if you knew this but if the uh the bikini uh coffee drive-thrus uh they're drinking Folgers
they're drinking you know just you know whatever just kind of trash coffee you know what I mean
and then you've got the intellectual like college educated left that's drinking like a lot of I would
say like a lot of the middle class educated um individuals they'll do like drip coffee at home
or something along the lines of that but then you you talk about the the leftist like it started in
seattle like i think it really started in seattle where seattle is like the capital of coffee in the
united states as far as i can tell which is one of the most looney tunes leftist uh areas like
pinochet might have invaded the united states over it it was it's so bad he couldn't resist
throwing those guys out of helicopters but um and we would let him and we would let him
it'd be a favor to everybody um but um but like the the type of coffee shop that i imagine that
you were running you know where it was kind of hipster-ish in a sense is how i would describe it
where it's not just like a chain you're doing different types of brews uh you probably have
like an ethiopian uh blend of coffee and you know um a colombian blend and like people can choose
which blend they want over the eat is it a pour over or is it that poor it's that's all dominated
by leftists like you the the people that like work at those like want either are from seattle
or want to be from seattle yeah i think you know i've been out of the uh i guess the mainstream
third wave coffee scene now for a few few years so are you familiar with the terms the term third
wave to like third wave feminism uh i have no idea could be um so first wave was kind of like
Folgers uh that kind of like coffee out of a can when coffee became kind of accessible to
the common man here in the united states um what years when were the that's a good question
question i i can't tell you specifically i i want to say like post-world war ii maybe
um but i could be wrong with that prior to world war ii coffee was a delicacy for kings and
presidents and then it became you get some uh some folgers in a can that's kind of my perception
um okay so second wave then was when like peat's and and starbucks came up and they kind of made
a higher higher grade coffee and all of these more you know like the the lattes and that type
of experience so first wave wouldn't have been wouldn't have included much espresso
So second wave was when espresso kind of started to become more popular here.
And Starbucks was a big part of that.
And then third wave was a response to the second wave from people who wanted to experiment with lighter roasts and really highlighting the terroir of individual beans, as well as a renewed focus on sourcing relationally, sourcing like fair trade.
Um, that sort of thing. And whether it was like, what, you know, like there was a lot of focus on
how, how we treat the farmer, what, what the farmer gets paid, that sort of thing. And I don't
know if there's a relationship or a correlation there between what those little, my question is
my question why is it so prefer why is it so specific to coffee where everybody is questioning
or look trying to look out for everybody else in the supply chain's best interest for the
nobody seems to trust or uh feel good about everybody just following their own incentives
it seems like everybody's worried about exploiting each other in the coffee industry whether it's the
farmers, the employees, the shop owners, the managers, the, um, you know, exporters, importers,
why is everybody just not focused on their own incentives and just serve coffee?
You know, that's an interesting question. Um, and so I've been talking to the importer that I work
with about things like this.
A lot of what sets the price of the green beans that I get is the commodities market.
Even in specialty coffee where my importer is paying significantly more than the sea
market price, when she's talking to the farmers that she's working with, she's still...
the sea market is still in their mind as like kind of the standard for coffee, what coffee
should cost. And so they're still basing their pricing on sea market plus instead of,
I would think what the logical thing that the farmers would do is they would look at their
input costs and then they would decide what amount they of profit they need to make on top
of that and then that's what they would charge for their coffee and like my importer seems
willing to pay whatever it is that the the farmers need to charge for their coffee
but for some reason the sea market still seems to loom large in a lot of farmers decision-making
processes so i don't know maybe we're in this period where we are starting we'll start to be
able to affect some change there and be like no farmers just charge what it is that you need to
charge to make it worth your time and we'll pay it um i don't know that's it's it's um
I don't know it just seems like there's a lot more to this whole coffee industry and the coffee as a service coffee as a commodity as a cultural staple as a stimulant as a drug as a there's a pathology to this coffee thing.
And it is there at, did they just need more like coffee podcasts so people can get kind of drill down to what is so deep about this coffee rabbit hole?
It's like, it seems like something that's perfect for Bitcoin to fix.
Like it's got a Bitcoin is going to fix the coffee industry.
So the farmers and the blue haired, you know, lesbians will stop bickering and just do their jobs.
Yeah, I mean, I hope. I hope that works. Yeah, I do think Bitcoin could be really helpful in just something as simple as payments, like streamlining payments, making it really easy for payment to get to these small farmers.
but it takes time and a lot of them are really not super ready to take risk and
try new things because they already kind of living on a knife edge as far as they not ready to be node runners they not ready to be node runners i guess yeah so are the the farmers
they're they're not charging enough is what you're saying they should charge more uh i don't know
it's hard for me to tell because when i hear somebody making decisions based on what a
commodities market is doing, that is confusing to me because I would think like as a human being
who's trying to grow coffee, if I was trying to grow coffee as a farmer, I would be looking at
my input costs. I'd be looking at the amount of time it takes me to do this and like what I want
to be making to make it worth my time. And then I'd be pricing accordingly.
but it seems like for some reason the sea market still is something that people look at
or that farmers look at a lot as far as a source of kind of, sorry, I'm struggling for words here,
But the farmers seem to be putting a lot of weight in the sea market for what they should be charging.
And it doesn't make sense to me.
I don't quite understand why you would look outside of yourself and outside of your farm for guidance on how to price your products.
It's a price signal.
And it's a global market is probably what they're thinking.
right but it i mean we see this in farms here where like the sea market price at times
has is decoupled from the actual costs of production and then other times like right now
with with cattle uh the market is ridiculous and so people are are actually incentivized
to sell off their herds because uh the the market is extremely high but that's not in the best
interest of us over the long term like collectively it's not in the best interest of humans
to uh have all of this volatility i don't think yeah that's interesting i
so one thing that was kind of a shift focus here i guess my question is we were talking before the
show about music uh and we could probably go on this topic of music and and technology is kind of
like merging with the ability to produce and distribute this music uh what time what kind
of music do you play at a coffee shop that's like as uh unique as your own and in many different
contexts with many different vibes of crowds um how important is music to the coffee shop oh i
think music's very important nobody wants to walk into a coffee shop where the music isn't playing
where it's just silent. And nobody wants to walk into a coffee shop where the music is
not supporting the vibe that's going on. So I think, I mean, to me, it just depends that
the kind of music that I like to have in a shop depends on the time of day, depends on the number
of people in the shop depends on what the people are in the shop to do um if it's a business meeting
it might be it's going to be different than if it's i don't know a bachelorette party
um what if uh what if what if a broccoli haircut shows up and starts playing wonder wall
by oasis and you're is that allowed it again it depends on the time of day i'd say maybe
maybe about two in the afternoon that probably feel about right uh when when the shop is mostly
empty but a few people that are there i think would appreciate that that's my thought i mean
do you guys have thoughts on that were you the dj or were your employees the dj we we gave
discretion to whoever was working to curate the their own tunes there there was a coffee shop i
used to frequent that uh would play metal music and i liked that a lot but that was really unique
but like were there any songs that you would consider a fireable offense like if they were
playing margaritaville like it just crosses the vibe like this boomer slop is not allowed
you know i'm trying to think of when margaritaville would be appropriate i'm sure there'd be a time
i would say if you had a coffee shop in a casino or on like a cruise ship that'd be oh absolutely
yeah yeah um i think it just this is just my personal my personal opinion i am not a fan
of like screaming
screamo
or
like I guess in general like super
intense music at a coffee shop
so like
EDM
you look like you might
prefer the Lumineers
or
what's the other one
the
Of Mice and Men
yes or alabama arkansas i do love my mom pa are you into that like the the folk music
oh yeah mom villain what about wagon wheel wagon wheel uh one of my daughters
we listened to wagon wheel every night for maybe a couple years putting one of my daughters to bed
so uh wagon wheel has a special place in my heart definitely and you're and you're and your wife is
named after a lumineers album right is that correct or am i confusing that yes that's correct yeah
oh that's so good yeah yeah so that i mean that sounds like uh this sounds like a sitcom you could
you could have a sitcom coffee shop you know it's like the lumineers coffee shop the um but
to be more serious uh what is it how do you find customers and convince them
to fly across the country to try your coffee and to come to your coffee shop how did how do they
what's the marketing like for that what is the outreach how how does one succeed
in that business model well i don't know how one succeeds i'm still figuring that out but uh
i do not have any interest in trying to convince people to buy my coffee so here here here's how i
view it. I roast the coffee that I enjoy drinking and I share it with my friends and I'm looking
for more friends to enjoy it with. But whatever that number, whatever the Dunbar's number of
friends is that will enjoy my coffee with me, I don't know. But beyond that, you know, it's kind
to take it or leave it. If you want to come and enjoy the coffee with us, you're welcome.
And if it's not for you, then it's not for you. But I'm not trying to convince anyone that they
should drink my coffee because, I mean, it's not where I want to spend my energy. I've got plenty
of other things that i want to do with my time and so it's kind of like i'll roast coffee
up to a point for as many hours a month as there is interest and then the rest of the month i have
freedom to do to pursue other interests if that makes sense yeah makes sense so so i guess my
But advertising wise, it's like it's the fans.
It's the people that enjoy the coffee that do the advertising.
So like early on, it was Carl.
I mean, it's still Carl Fundamentals.
But like Carl was one of my first.
He was my first customer, if you will.
And he has introduced my coffee to numerous other folks.
fundamentals was another early adopter and he's been a tremendous ally and spread the word so it's
like you know just find find your fans and let them do the marketing for for you is my approach
you your marketing style is by harnessing social capital yeah yeah exactly so um would that make you
would that make you a social capitalist uh yeah yeah sure that's a new boy that's a new yeah that's
that is a new that sounds like a new podcast genre social capitalism well i might put that
on my business card social capitalists i can't wait till like the new wave of communists are
coming after the social capitalists like you can't have friends you can't have friends that
podcasters that talk about your coffee it's exploitative um you talked you talked about
you're like all right i will roast uh for as many hours a month is there his interest and then i get
to move on to other things so what what are those other things who is the person or the interests
of the coffee guy Otis Bittmeier besides coffee yeah um so I'm really interested in
permaculture and centering my life in such a way that um what I do is is productive in multiple ways
So, like homesteading and developing, like building land to over time produce a yield that requires less and less input from me is something that I'm really interested in.
so
that's all a very
low time preference
endeavor
and
it just looks like
a lot of spending time
on land
and slowly over time discovering what wants to happen there So it a process that really a lot of days doesn look like there much going on
But my hope is over time that it will yield other revenue streams.
You know, like we're looking at getting rabbits.
It's we've got some chickens that were taken care of.
And I guess my,
my goal would be similar to with the coffee that I'm roasting the coffee that
I want to be drinking.
I'm also growing the food that I want to be eating and then like making more
of it than I can consume and sharing it with my friends.
So very similar to like the coffee is kind of the prototype for how I want to
live in general you just you want to do things with more intentionality everything you do
everything you consume the way you spend your time your energy just very intentionally and not
um for you know pay at work and 50 percent of the time to pay the state or to pay the bills or to
whatever pay taxes you don't care about affording taxes you care about uh affording to have a time
to do everything exactly you make sure you want to do it yeah i just don't think life is long
enough to spend it uh doing like working for other people and their dreams uh at least that's
I, my life isn't long enough for that. So I've got to figure out what it is that I want. I am
figuring it out. Uh, you know, another, another huge, uh, another big thing that I spend a lot
of time on is my kids and my family. And, uh, I gotta, you know, that's just not, there's no
shortcuts to parenting and teaching our children besides spending large amounts of time with them
I kind of view it as like maybe I'm not that great of a shot like the basketball analogy
but if I keep shooting the ball eventually I'm going to have a decent number of shots go in
and also uh if i'm shooting the ball a lot i'll probably get better at shooting as well
so that's kind of how i view like time with my kids um it's like just got to be around
got to be around and try to be available as much as i can well it seems like
a good portion of the world has structured their entire life around primarily paying taxes for
first and parenting second, especially in the United States.
And the public education system has really allowed for this to be a thing.
And it seems like you're structuring your entire life around taking care of
your kids first, paying taxes second.
Yeah.
Again, it comes back to like putting my energy into things that return
energy to me uh and i've not really discovered how paying taxes gives my energy back to me
it's an extractive process it takes my life force and sends it to kill people in other countries as
far as i can tell uh in yeah in a very real sense you can either pay your taxes or pay attention
to your kids and when you pay attention to your kids you are putting in and receiving
uh the right energy back from that uh you know experience that that way of spending your time
and you're not giving it you're not getting that energy back when you pay your taxes
they don't fix the roads they don't they don't help people with their taxes they they launder it
yeah and they and they give it to Ukraine and in Israel and so you're everywhere just everybody
else right people who Jeffrey Epstein connected them to right like it's but I don't time just
paying attention to your kids I think so you know and not everybody agrees well and that's fair
that's fair but we each got to make our own decisions and I'll say since I started
moving more in this direction and uh trying to orient my life this way it has
i won't say it's been easy or that it is easy but i feel like the results that i'm getting are much
much better than what i was getting before yeah so what what would you say to the average american
that looks at you and they say here's this hippie guy riding around the bus he's not
primarily focused on paying taxes i'm working my ass off here trying to give the state as much money
as it possibly can he spent time with his kids he doesn't have a white picket fence he's not out
there mowing the lawn and watching sports ball on saturday and sunday he's he's a threat to my way
of life like he is a challenge for my worldview i just want him to uh take on a mortgage and uh
focus primarily on paying taxes just like i am what would you say to somebody like that
i'd say they should probably read more atlas shrugged
um and that's that you know like i don't really have an argument for someone who says that
because we're just on such completely different pages and in that way.
So yeah, read some Atlas Shrugged and then check back.
Yeah, if in 2025, if you're still proud to be a taxpayer,
you need to read Atlas Shrugged cover to cover twice a year.
And that's the only way that you can be helped.
And if you try everything else, except that my answer is the same.
There's only one solution.
And particularly, I would say it's difficult, but you really got to dig into John Galt's speech and make sure that you catch what he's saying there.
because in my experience, a lot of people that like paying taxes
haven't really done the work to understand what John Gald is saying in his speech.
Right. And so this goes back to that you like to do things with intentionality.
And so when you pay your taxes with intentionality,
it makes people suicidal, makes them depressed.
it makes them question everything so like when you sit down and you actually think about what
you're doing when you're using turbo tax and you pull up pictures of cnn on the news you see what's
going on in the middle east you see what's going on in chicago or you see what's going on uh you
know with ocean mining hey you you say to yourself like i'm paying at blood for this and if and it
just doesn't make sense you can't live that life anymore um but if you yeah you know so it's just
it's a perspective thing you're an intentional person and people who are proud to pay taxes
are maybe they should be more intentional with their how they spend their time well you know
if you're intentionally paying taxes and that really gets you going uh great but i i come back
to like, what is the fruit of whatever it is that you're doing,
whatever you're investing your time, your effort, your, your,
your physical capacities, your mental capacities, all of your, yourself,
what are you giving yourself to? And then what does it give back to you?
And if it's not leading. So, you know,
we talked earlier about again about coming back to this religious
the upbringing that we've had, I come back to what is it that I want in my life? I want
the fruits of the spirit. I want more of that. I want love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
gentleness, self-control, whatever the other ones are that I forgot. But I'm going to put my energy
and my time into the things that produce more of those things for me. And if it doesn't produce that,
I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to keep doing it because like,
what's the point?
Right.
I will sum up my thoughts on this with,
would people say to me 40 hours of Bitcoin podcast per week?
That's a lot of time.
And my only answer is I'm taking more out of 40 hours per week than it's
taken from me.
I'm getting more out of it than it's getting from me.
uh and when you put the things into that perspective it's like same with with cigarettes
you know i'm getting more out of cigarettes than they're getting out of me and as long as that's
true as long as that's true you know it it's a it's a good guide for uh smoking you know smoking
six and how many to smoke i think a lot of people need to ask the question like does it make you
gayer to do this activity too it's important even if nobody else knows even if even if only you know
how gay it is uh should you still you know maybe it's time to slow down well you know and maybe
maybe uh maybe being gay is leads to goodness for some people you know yeah it might get them where
they want to go i don't know i would i would say my advice would be whenever you start feeling gay
stop doing what you're doing
and go hang out with your wife.
I'm using gay
as a slang term.
It's like a synonym for
lame. It's not like actually homosexual.
If you're
arguing with Matthew Crabber on
Twitter at 10 o'clock at night, that's
gay.
Go watch
Netflix with your wife.
A lot of homosexual men
are pretty gay you know like matthew cratter he's very gay uh he's just sitting there just you know
being when i say gay i mean lame but he's also probably homosexual probably had a special
relationship with peter thiel back in the day but there's a lot of straight men that act pretty gay
too like platterder actually
pretty gay and like vaping makes you gay and um listening to little bubble music makes you gay
so so if we're if we're going down this route where uh gayness is things that are lame i would
say that there are things that i've done in the past that used to be life-giving that they were
giving back more to me than they took. And then at some point that changed and they started taking
more than they were giving. And I think maybe that's something that I've noticed is that some
people seem to, they recognize that there's something in their life that they want to change
And then they change it to a new thing and they find a lot of value in it for a while.
And then they just keep doing it even after it seems like it's lost the benefit that it once had.
Uh, I, I've noticed that in my life and then it's like, okay, it's time to, it's time to move on.
There's something new that wants to be born here.
Yeah.
Like not wearing a suit to work.
like it felt good when you were like a kid showing up at like mcdonald's well i guess
they make them dress up at mcdonald's so that's a bad example but yeah felt good when you were a
kid showing up to whatever your silly job was entry-level job like not dressed up but when
you become a grown-up you want to wear a suit to work i think tattoos i've kind of gone through that
that uh trajectory as well a bit tattoos are dangerous because if it's a gay tattoo it makes
you gave for life yeah tattoos are a low time preference decision you need to lower your time
preference when you get a tattoo and a lot of people go in there their high time preference
with their selection and that's how you get you know uh barbed wire you know the things on around
your arm you know move the the trance stamp for women um getting 58k tattooed on your butt cheek
if you're uh in a mean gang you know it's you know not to not to shit on tattoos i think
don't get a bitcoin tattoo until your second cycle that's what i'm saying don't get a bitcoin
tattoo until at least your second cycle yeah i think there's there's nothing like bad to be said
about tattoos but the problem is a lot of people do it impulsively when they're young
and it defines them for the rest of their lives yeah and they change yeah i think that's that's
what i'm getting at is you know if you memorialize a particular period of your life on your body
does that make it harder than for you to leave that period behind
when it's time to grow up a little bit i don't know uh i can't speak from experience with that
Yeah, it sounds like there needs to be more rituals in our lives, in our communities as men for like, all right, you are going to your podcaster phase in life.
And that's going to hit you.
It hits everybody differently.
And then you're going to have to retire from podcasting.
And you're going to you're going to have to go into a new phase.
I think we're finding out what happens to podcasters when they retire.
But it happens with MMA fighters, right?
Or athletes or musicians who kind of had just like a short career.
They can't seem to move on.
And they keep trying to relive, trying to succeed in the role that they outlived.
and it's, it's roles. It's about roles. Um, and what do you think your next role might be?
Or where do you think, what do you think your role is right now? Um, a father is out, you know,
a father you've made that clear. Yeah. So that's pretty, you know, that's going to be ongoing for
quite a while, I think, but as far as everything else, it feels like it's always a process of
discovery. Even the coffee, the coffee endeavor is, so I recently had this realization that my
first, like the coffee shops, I had a very clear vision for what I wanted to do and how I wanted
it to go, what I wanted it to look like. And that really was a hindrance to certainly my happiness
and my ability to enjoy the process because it never really lived up to my expectations,
no matter what happened, no matter what successes came our way. It was always falling short of what
I had in mind that it should be. And so this time around, I've been trying it a little bit differently
and more just responding to opportunities and interest as it comes my way and holding it
loosely and openly as a kind of, well, we'll see what this thing wants to be. And, you know,
never would I have imagined that I would be sitting here with you guys talking about coffee.
Never would I have imagined that I would start a podcast about coffee or coffee adjacent
material with fundamentals. You know, it's, it's, so I think where I'm currently at
is just trying to stay open and keep my eyes open for the opportunities that come my way
and then respond to them in whatever way feels like I'm able to respond.
You want optionality. You value optionality.
Well, and I just, I don't know, maybe it's just me, my personality. Also, I don't think this is
the time in like this the current epoch that we're in uh i don't think this is the time to be
strapping yourself down to all sorts of commitments like i feel like we're in a volatile season
be able to yeah if business cat and fundamentals are right there might be a pole shift and you
want to be able to drive south and get you know to a safe spot in the event of a pole shift or a
fourth turning if you if if we get a fourth turning you know load up the bus head down south
the door or you know wherever wherever you want to go uh it just seems like the future is extremely
uncertain and that the revolution will not be geographically evenly distributed so you want
optionality you don't want to plant roots yet you're not ready to uh to to start a homestead
next to rev huddle yeah i mean that sounds great but yeah it's i mean and it's hard you know it is
hard to do what I want to do without tying into some land somewhere. But real estate's a shit
coin. We get that. Yeah. But I think there are ways. Yeah. There are ways to, you know,
what I come back to is not everybody's in the same boat where everybody feels like they need to be
as mobile as I do. So that's where I come back to like, this is, this is maybe the role that I play
in that I'm more available to come alongside folks who want to build things together with other people.
I want to build things with people.
I don't want to just be out here doing things.
You want to be with the pioneers.
You want to go and be mobile.
You want to go on the Oregon Trail with the pioneers.
the El Salvador Trail,
whatever you want to call it,
whatever it turns out to be.
Right.
You want to be out the edge,
at the fringe,
change there,
you know, just changing,
like Richard said,
being a threat to the NPC lifestyle.
You don't want to stop being a threat
to the NPC lifestyle.
You know, I don't, I mean,
view it as a threat or not.
I just think
we need examples of people.
So all of my life, I've kind of felt like if I wanted to do the things that I want to do, I simply cannot do them the NPC way because it's too expensive.
It's too extractive. I'll never be able to do what I want to do by following the rules per se.
And so, yeah, here I am.
You know, here we are doing the things that we want to do, living the life that we want to live.
And I would say to anyone who's kind of sitting there in their Fiat job, wanting, like dreaming of someday living whatever it is, whatever their dream is, you got to do it now.
You got to do it. You got to start in some way now and you got to be willing to think outside the box. You got to be willing to say no to the status quo, to the way that things are done.
yeah otherwise you know like the rules are not set up for you to accomplish your dreams
the rules are set up to keep you away from them or to to like set up roadblocks
so the baseline is retarded you don't want to be striving to be the baseline
there you go so was that always something that you were like or is that relatively new that you
started adopting that type of mindset i think i just i think i've always been this way
i i you know i went to school for accounting and all through school i just was like what
is going on here this is stupid this is just a waste but i knew i needed to finish
and I think it was just because I needed to really see how the whole system worked.
But as soon as I graduated, I knew I could never be an accountant.
I could never sit in that office and push pencil for 40 hours a week.
So yeah I think I always known It was value you mentioned something about this earlier that it uh sometimes it is good or it valuable to have uh the you know these
very extreme like options and these sides and these perspectives uh to be able to kind of like
immerse yourself and so it was like valuable to try out the role of the accountant to try out
these different roles because you finally you're looking for something very specific
and you can't articulate it you experimented with doing gay you experimented with doing gay stuff
you experimented with suit coin or stuff and you're looking for something better and i guess
growing up in a conservative religious tradition um where there were lots of rules there was a
certain way of doing things um like that started early on and then just always feeling like
i needed to be able to explore more i needed to be able to have more optionality as you're saying
um so yeah i mean it's it's been a theme it's been a theme what's your what's your favorite
weird uh religious rule that you grew up with i wasn't allowed to wear shorts or a tank top
so when i played basketball in middle school i was wearing sweats and a short-sleeved shirt under
my jersey and uh it was pretty hot interesting so were you like the odd odd one now pretty
different for that you play competitive basketball in sweatpants yeah yeah i definitely was
uh like even other kids from my church like that was that was my family rule even other kids from
my church would wear shorts um okay so that was like super you were like super maxi ec like
fundamental extra conservative uh on top of the base layer of the conservative culture you were
already kind of in yeah absolutely yeah yeah do you draw pride or like does that do you feel bad
the experience was that probably a bad feeling or was it like i'm proud to be extra sweaty when i
play basketball it's tougher and it's not as gay it's like this is this is kind of a point i was
trying to think of making earlier where it's when he says being gay has nothing to do with being
homosexual if you grew up like i did and it sounds like you did very in a very conservative
upbringing being gay just means wearing shorts being gay your grandpa called you gay if you had
Your grandpa would call you gay or would think it's gay to get a tattoo, to wear shorts, to drive a four-cylinder vehicle engine.
You know, it's kind of like you want to have the freedom to be a little bit gay.
At least, but not homosexual.
Just make your grandpa a little, your ancestors maybe pass the boundaries of what they would find acceptable.
but do it in such a genuine, intentional way that they would still be proud at the end of the day.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, and as I get older, I have a lot of respect and appreciation for the community that I grew up in.
Increasingly so, I would say, because there was a lot that I think there was a lot about that community that we as Bitcoiners who are trying to build citadels
and Mesh Tadels and all of the things that we're trying to build,
I think there's a lot that we can learn from communities
like the one that I grew up in that was very tight-knit,
very relational, and there was a lot of back and forth,
a lot of value for value being traded that I didn't recognize at the time,
but now I see it.
And so, yeah, there was some of the stuff like not wearing shorts to play basketball that I feel like probably doesn't help our mission a whole lot.
So we can leave that one back in the past.
but as far as like helping your neighbor being connected to the people around you
that's as far as i'm concerned that's uh we need that yeah more of that it it's for me
this hits very close to home i tell you i nobody wants to tell their wife that they did something
gay but when i show my wife my ai music it is gay but it's it's good it's the song is so good
that she's still proud of me uh and that's just kind of what i want out of life like sometimes
i'm gonna feel a little bit ashamed to tell my dad that i'm going to be a full-time bitcoin
podcaster why once he listens to it and hears how good it is he's still proud of me even though he
things I'm gay for sure you think like it was you think it was a valuable lesson just learning how
to survive being a weird one not fitting in that you could survive being a little bit outcast
that it wasn't the end of the world the square were in sweatpants during a basketball game
yeah yeah I mean I guess now I'm to the point where I'm like I have no interest in being a normie
because that seems that seems terrible to me so yeah i mean it's it's empowering it's empowering
to know you can yeah sorry it's empowering to know you can wear goofy clothes and still be your
girlfriend that's true yeah oh man it's it really is a marvel that jubilee ever uh agreed to
like that we ever got together because when we first started
uh dating i definitely was wearing goofy clothes well it's part of the wife's job is to kind of
you know domesticate the man in a lot of ways yeah well that yes definitely tracks with our
experience yes like we said you your wife's job is to make your bed for you your wife's job is to
pick out your clothes for you so you don't you're not looking doing wrinkly bitcoin podcast t-shirt
in dirty corduroys it's like we're going to church we're going to the meetup we're going to
work like we gotta we gotta look sharp or we gotta at least look uh we gotta look we gotta look
right for the situation right yeah totally i think it's a good lesson so it was like that
your kind of story arc so far has it been like you know growing up in this very religious setting
being surrounded by people that weren't feeling kind of you know disconnected from them in some
degree because of the the family's values then going off on your own like trying to be normal
finding it super unsatisfactory and then kind of reverting back to being being different so like
college you know trying to become an accountant was kind of like what do the amish call it rom
stogger or whatever oh room springer yeah room springer yeah yeah yeah so we didn't have that
technically uh but essentially i guess that was what i was trying to do is explore the world
which i think is important you gotta i needed to to see what else is out there you know and i've
I've gained a lot. I've learned a lot from being out in the world, but, um,
I guess as I get older, I'm coming back to, yeah, I think a lot of the,
the bread and butter, the, the values that the underlying values that I grew up with
are really worth preserving and yeah we we need to figure out how we can bring them along with us
into the new world we need to figure out how we can integrate bitcoin into them you know but uh
there was a lot there that uh there's a lot of value there yeah it's um it might sound crazy
today but there was a time up until a few years ago where the normie npc like life trajectory
things seem that bad and you it would be easy to be fooled into thinking you should pursue it um
and now it's it's kind of obvious looking back but it's it is important to to see for yourself
sometimes you know if you're actually drawn towards something you should at least learn about it
to know that you're not you know it's not for you right but there might be some value there yeah
do you think the the guys that are really excited about running knots like that's their way of
reverting back to their religious upbringings that they grew up in well i've noticed that there
are people like people that i grew up with that just kind of substituted one type of fundamentalism
for another so a lot of them would hop over to like they'd go from conservative to liberal but
then just essentially the the woke angry liberal mindset is the one that they adopted and so i i
think it's possible that it's the energy that i get from the knots people seems to be it it kind
of feels a bit similar to the fundamentalist energy to the hardcore liberal fundamentalist
energy i don't know it's people yeah it's just like people who some people are good at taking
tests in school and some people are really good at passing purity tests and so they just like to go
from like situation to situation where it's like i'm going to pass the most purity tests
get to the rise to the top you know succeed i can succeed in this little niche yeah it's it's like
having correctness of belief is a seems to be a religion for some do you believe that everybody
is inherently religious in one way or another could you define religious i would say where
you had richard it's very good definition because i would say anything that you you know
would consider sacred uh something you're defined sacred and the way that aspect of your life or
your routine and your background,
if you find it sacred,
that would kind of substitute for spiritual or religious.
I guess there's different ways to define religious.
I guess in the way I framed the question,
it wasn't a great question
because it just assumes everybody is religious based on the definition that I have which is aligned with this one i just looked up but uh religions a system of beliefs practices and values centered around the questions of
existence purpose and the sacred so i guess there's some people that just don't really
believe in anything like there there's like the true npc if you know what i mean
it's hard for me to imagine that those people exist but uh sure i think you never you never
well i think everybody believes in something you know uh even if you claim not to believe in
anything there's still something that you yeah like atheists their belief is that they
though they can get everybody to fail a purity test like that there's no purity to us that it
can be passed uh and because the the nobody can pass all the purity tests uh you know none of the
purity test issuers are get to be right right yeah which in its way then become which in its
own way kind of becomes a purity test um yeah so i don't know i think these people who are so
damaged from spirituality and religion that they need to deny all of it. That's fine. Again,
I would say take the time that you need to go through that season, but recognize that like,
for most of us who are like going through some sort of, for most of us who are living life,
that has its end, you know, it reaches its end as far as its usefulness, that belief. And
many of us find on the other side that we come back to some sort of spirituality, some sort of
belief, some sort of religion, if you will. So as a kid, I went to Bible memory camp.
So it was summer camp for a week every year. But to get to Bible memory camp,
you had to memorize like 50 Bible verses every year. And so I memorized a lot of scripture
and whatever, it was fine. I did it so I could go to camp and hang out with my friends for a week.
That was good. But I wasn't really necessarily like the scripture that I was memorizing didn't
necessarily resonate with me in a life giving way in a generative way what i've noticed though as an
adult is that a lot of the scripture now comes back to me in a way that does connect in a way
that makes sense in a way that is helpful to me and it's usually a very different interpretation
than the one that i grew up with so yeah i don't know if that i don't know if that makes sense or
connects but would you would you um send your kids to to bitcoin white paper camp so that they can
memorize you know the sacred texts of bitcoin like the um the text in the genesis block and
in the white paper so when they they might like not find it life-giving in the moment but like 30
years down the line when they're uh you know being tempted with supporting some sort of
contendious fork that would turn bitcoin into shit coin or like you know support like some sort
of government policy that prevents people from spending it they remember the words the white
paper a peer-to-peer cash system oh man yeah that's a great question i have no idea um because
it's like is it useful to me because i was forced to learn it um or would there have been other ways
i wasn't forced to learn it i chose it's this is yeah this is where this is where we go back to the
conversation earlier is overthinking it and just like breaking it down to what it really is and like
the simplicity it's like you what you said when you were a kid you went you memorized the bible
verses you memorized the songs you went to camp you did all these rituals you did all these uh
obligations or like structured uh social you did it so you could hang out with your friends
with the right type of friends it's like what's the what should we talk about on the podcast what
How should we structure it?
What should we memorize?
It's just, you know, not everybody likes the Bitcoin conference.
Just like not everybody likes going to church.
But it's a reason to see all your friends.
It's a reason to go and have a community with people who share your same values.
And to be able to connect with them and have these.
These are like church or camp or conferences.
They're just ways that people all plan and organize their energy and their time so that they can come together and have a coffee shop in the forest in the middle of Michigan in July, you know, or, you know, or August every year to get together in this city and do this thing.
you know every mid whatever it is fourth of july it's um it's just a reason to hang out with your
friends and talk about podcasts and talk about life and uh you know build things together
including community and families and and bonds and culture just it's just it's just a reason to
hang out with your friends absolutely i i guess i'm one so richard to come back to your question i
I would hope that I could arrange experiences for my children where they see the value in the moment and they're not feeling coerced into doing something.
I don't know.
Like kids need to be pushed to do hard things, too, and things that are uncomfortable that they don't want to do.
But I'm trying to foster an environment for my kids where ultimately they get to decide what they want to do and how they want to push themselves and where they need my help to be pushed instead of imposing so many of those things on them from the top down.
I don't know you know I don't know how it's going to work out for them I'm sure they'll have their
their complaints about our parenting but um growing up in a in a system where
so much was prescripted to me uh like obviously like I said it can still turn out to be beneficial
but i think in general i'd like to see a world where we're moving from top-down prescription of
beliefs actions yeah all of that you know to each of us get to operate out of our own volition less
um less rote memorization less daily pledge of allegiances less uh you know just this structure
that nobody's thinking about and more intentionality with everything into that yeah i and in
when you like you said kids don't like to do tough things they have to be um pushed into it's like
you do you do it by showing them that you are going through uh you're sat making sacrifices
to go through this process uh to make you know everybody better on the other end you're going
through it together you're not coercing you're not forcing them you're doing you're experiencing it
with them yeah that's an important important point well i think one of the things that kids
really need is just things explained to them the importance of why and i think one of the reasons
a lot of kids struggle a lot of times is they don't the parents didn't explain the to them
the compelling reason of why and really it's just like this is the thing that you have to accept
and struggling with understanding the why of it it just means your your story is unclear
i guess if that makes sense yeah and it's tough because kids ask why for all sorts of things
um and sometimes i just don't have the time or the energy to explain to my five-year-old
why I made the decision that I made about, I don't know, why she can't have a sucker this minute.
But I think you're absolutely right. And most of our, I guess my experience in the normie world,
normie fiat life was it was even harder because of how busy I was.
it, you know, like a large portion of the changes that I've made in the last three years
has been leaving just a shit ton of space for those sorts of conversations with my kids.
Whereas before it was like, we're just running from one thing to another.
And we don't have time to sit down and talk about those sorts of things.
And so that's, I think, for me, clearing out my schedule and leaving time in my day where I don't actually have anything scheduled has made it a lot easier for me then to take the time to explain to my girls why it is that this is happening or what, you know.
sometimes you just have to tell them yeah from over their time preference sometimes you just
have to tell your hormonal or emotional daughter to lower time preference or son you know and that's
they have to think about what that means and that's the value but they get from that is thinking
about their time preference yeah and being willing to say it over and over for years on end have you
ever considered recording a bitcoin podcast for every question that you'd get asked repeatedly
and you could play it you just like you go you have it uh stamped as a vinyl
you set it up on your record player you're just like okay here's why and you just play it that's
a great idea you know at lake satoshi john was saying that his daughters know exactly what he's
going to say like to like whenever whenever he has you know whenever they ask a question like
that they know exactly what he going to say and i was kind of reflecting on i like to have that consistency and i think vinyl podcasts definitely could help with that yeah vinyl really interesting
uh baba gave me a new appreciation for music uh i interviewed him the other night on my music show
and he was talking about the difference between like new vinyls and old vinyls so
the way that they used to record music was on tape and they would have individuals that like
go and actually cut pieces of tape and splice them together and that's how they made it so it
was it was very like analog way of recording where now things have gone digital the entire
recording style has changed so what they used to do is they used to record a band all together
playing at the same time and now they're doing it with individual tracks but what what he was
explaining is there's there's so much less life on the vinyls and like one of the reasons why
people go back and they listen to the vinyls is because they uh there's more feeling to it in the
way that it's recorded versus like a digital recording uh and i thought i found that really
fascinating but i almost wonder like to make the process more pleasant for your children
to listen to it maybe you should record it analog like you could do
probably the easiest way is to record the podcast on a cassette player onto a cassette of you
talking yeah definitely uh this is good i don't think i don't think digital is the way to go for
this endeavor i mean it might be don't overthink it i think it's the key though don't overthink it
yeah but it is interesting for the for this group of children that are being raised by bitcoin
podcasters yeah you know like there's people are like you're a pastor's kid or you're a
missionaries kid well it's like i can see people being like you must be a podcaster's kid
yeah definitely well there's that thing of being kind of in the public eye a little bit yeah
it's fascinating to think about your bitcoin podcast for your children after you die that
you're putting out all this content of you expressing your thoughts and opinions on the world
and they're gonna because you know when a parent dies you like you want to connect with them
you know what i mean in all sorts of ways you want to look at their pictures you want to you
know remember them uh hear stories about them your children are going to have all these bitcoin
podcasts to listen to you to remember you if they want yeah if they want and you don't want your
you don't want your kid to like listen to your brain like oh my shit my dad was a retarded big
blocker that's embarrassing so you it's like yeah you gotta be you gotta state your opinion
and express yourself in a way that not only makes you proud in the moment but makes you
that you're assured that you're gonna be proud of when you're when your kids are listening to
your podcast in 30 years yeah definitely as far as like you know because i think all three of us
like we grew up on photo albums of our families is the future going to be like the way that kids
remember their parents instead of like a photo i guess platforms like instagram and facebook have
kind of become photo albums but is the future like the zoomer generation when they're dying off
are their kids gonna look at their tiktok videos or how's that gonna work do you yeah it's like do
Do you want your great-granddaughter, your great-grandson,
are they still going to be listening to your podcast?
Are your ancestors going to listen to your podcast?
Because that's got to suck if you spent a lot of your time and energy
and you put out 500 episodes of a podcast
and your kids and your grandkids won't even listen to it.
Yeah, is this kind of a new world we're living in where it's so easy now for so many of us to create things that could potentially live on to be...
Right.
Our UCXOs are not the only thing that are going to live for a thousand years.
our podcasts our memes are well you know we talk about the fourth turning on here all the time
and if the fourth turning is tv believed we're going to have to be building a lot of new
institutions to kind of be the foundation of society communities everything the new
the new world um so it's we better be intentional about what we're building right now because that
might be those institutions in the next few decades and do we want our kids to be like i
can't believe my dad created the gay ass united nations yeah or the fed you know right yeah i mean
so here's a question that i have been rolling around it's maybe a bit related what
what is the role of institutions um we're kind of at a point where it seems like a lot of
institutions have outlived their usefulness to us and so i guess yeah i'm just i'm thinking a lot
i think it's kind of like a trying to build a cultural protocol to solve certain problems uh
you know when you kind of start scaling your community or you're scaling your enterprise
whatever it is like you can abstract it all you want it's uh it's it's a protocol it's a framework
on mental model that kind of you know how would you define the intellectual silk road
or how would we define i don't know but like you can extrapolate that out and it's kind of
And how do we broaden the aligning of our incentives?
Yeah.
I think the institutions are somewhat necessary because when you think of what an institution is, it's just a system or organization that plays some sort of role in a society.
So you could argue that Lake Satoshi is an institution.
You could argue that the Bitcoin conference is an institution.
You could argue that Matthew Cratter's Bitcoin university is an institution.
The Meshdel is an institution.
Meshdel is an institution.
So I don't think it's a matter of institutions being unnecessary, but I think there needs to be more critical thinking about what the institution is.
It needs to be an intentional thing.
Yeah.
And it needs to be clear. I think everybody needs to have consensus on what the rules are, what the purpose, what the creed, what the what the value system, what the word.
Everybody has to be in consensus with kind of a certain amount of foundational assumptions.
assunctions it seems like we've seen this pattern we've seen this pattern over and over again where
a new thing starts and then it becomes institutionalized and then it loses the magic
or some of the magic you know i mean i feel like this happened with christianity
and then like christianity jesus does his thing gets gets the ball rolling a bunch of people are
excited and there's new stuff happening and then all of a sudden the state gets involved
and starts using it for its purposes and then all of a sudden the thing that was life-giving
and really beneficial
becomes a cage for a lot of people.
It's beneficial until it gets exploited.
Yeah, exactly.
So there are still pockets of Christianity
that have continued to be useful to people here.
I mean, obviously, Christianity continues to be useful
to a lot of people,
while also at the same time being a cage.
I think about this a lot in regards to Bitcoin
because I think the same thing is happening right now
and with institutional adoption of Bitcoin.
Anyway, I think you're right.
Intentionality is very important here
because otherwise we just keep recreating the same systems that we've been trying to escape
and doing a better job of it's like with christianity and i think it's going to be very
similar uh if under the very bullish future of of bitcoin it's like you don't have to be
a fundamentalist an on-chain maximalist uh a devout follower of this protocol of this institution
But we also need to do a better job explaining to people why they still benefit from a broader cultural appreciation of these voluntary value or thermodynamically sound institutions.
bitcoin do you value from bitcoin even if you don't want to make it your life you value from
this my religion or my ideology my culture society needs to start to do a better job of
appreciating each other's culture if we're going to get a law and it makes the make things work and
build new institutions yeah i think we need bigger stories or different better stories
as well um better memes better ideas the stories is a a very good um that's where you have to start
if you don't have them but then it's you kind of build from there a story becomes
reality becomes communities it becomes institutions i mean institutions are stories
that's what they are institutions are stories and a big enough good enough story that enough
people believe can really build powerful institutions, powerful communities.
But, you know, you have to have people like Portland HODL to come in and try and exploit
exploits and patch them before the state or, you know, the communists or whoever the leeches
are come in and start to institutionalize and exploit everything and turn it into a
to you make it all fake and gay yeah i agree i think we need better stories for sure um we don't
have any fountain booths to go through tonight this is the first episode of the intellectual
silk road series that we're doing our goal is to talk to people on the uh intellectual silk road so
otis what is the intellectual silk road mean to you so i guess for me it's the playground where we
We get to try out all of these things that we've been talking about,
try out the new institutions or I guess maybe even the precursors
to what eventually will become institutions.
But we get to experiment and be intentional,
do new thing kind of outside of
outside of the current systems
I would say not even needing to
try to fight them or
resist what's going on but just
kind of stepping outside and playing around
with possibility.
Acting as pioneers, building our own institutions, exploring the world for ourselves.
We're not going out to the Capitol to paint the lawn orange and rally.
We're drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes outside of Otis's bus.
Yeah.
We're traveling across the country to spend time with friends because it's important.
and uh yeah we're building things together because that's yeah some people some people
are outsourcing their thinking nobody's outsourcing the thinking to the media anymore
uh that that kind of fell apart credentialism really suffering uh but people are outsourcing
their thinking out to chat gpt and you can either outsource your thinking to chat gpt
or you can take an intentional approach to life lower your time preference a little bit
uh stop prioritizing paying your taxes over paying attention to your kids Um and start to
reconnect with the value and the lessons you learned that maybe you overlooked before you
learned to be more intentional and, uh, try to appreciate the values that, uh, you would have
gained a few if you if you thought about it a different way perhaps yeah there you have it
play the right music at your coffee shop or else people will stop coming in well where can people
find you are you on Noster is that your thing um I'm on Noster and Signal is mostly where I hang out
and then in person so I really prefer I prefer for people to come hang out with me in person
but to do that, you gotta, you gotta build up some social capital.
So what's the, what's the minimum social capital score to come hang out with you?
Um, I'd say a good, a good 50, 50 units of social capital.
I think that's pretty reasonable.
Yeah.
But yeah, Noster, I'm not super active on there quite frankly, because I,
even Nostra you know Nostra
compared to X
is much higher signal but I'm
finding that
the next step
up for me as far
as signal goes is signal
like the groups that
I'm in on there and then
the apex
signal is
in person
or like
conversations like this person to person interaction face to face
one of uh one of your most popular and controversial podcast episodes of sound
coffee was with our friend pies um we love pies pies is great love the episode however
does it give you pause if like if if pies and you ever came uh face you know cross paths irl in real life um what what it would be like if serving him caffeine like can you imagine pies on like a lot of caffeine do you think he could
handle that do you think he could handle the vibes um i think so because i believe pies
generally functions on a lot of caffeine so it almost concerned me more to encounter him
without caffeine you do not want to see pies in the morning before he's had a cup of coffee
like that's probably worse than pies on you know a couple of uh a couple of espressos
i would assume so yeah very cool well i really appreciate you coming on
otis look forward to hanging out with you soon well yeah uh thanks for having me and
And if you guys are ever in the area, please, let's get together and hang.
Thank you, everybody, for listening to this episode, the debut episode of The Intellectual Silk Road.
bullet from a gun enjoy it while you can the past can't be undone
across the road choices to be made it's your story to write embrace faith
this is not how the journey ends no need to wait
Run with the wind
Explosions all across the sky
They try to make you quit but you can't comply
Cigarette in hand, fire in your eye
You rather really live before it your turn to die A crossroads choices to be made It your story to write embrace faith
This is not how the journey ends.
No need to wait.
Run with the wind.
Focus fixed on the path ahead.
The road is long, but you came prepared.
Open sky up above your head.
You'd rather try than submit to be misled.
A crossroads, choices to be made.
It's your story to write, embrace fate.
This is not how the journey ends.
No need to wait.
Run with the wind.
Here's where your story begins.
The journey will be long.
There'll be dark days, but you'll choose to be strong.
Time is running away like a bullet from a gun.
Chase it while you can.
The past can't be undone.
Across the roads, choices to be made.
It's your story to write.
Embrace faith.
This is not how the journey ends.
No need to wait.
Run with the wind