is that everything is downstream of money.
A lot of these effects, whether it is poverty, wealth inequality,
our environmental burden from our consumer habits,
whether it is our politics, our business practices,
a lot of these stem from misaligned practices from broken monetary systems.
Let's just stop printing money so people can actually just save back in the currency again.
People change when the pain of staying in the existing system is greater than the pain of transitioning.
We just need to separate money and state.
And by separating money and state, you realign the incentives towards value creation.
Yes, you've still got all the politicians.
Yes, you've still got all of these legal frameworks.
However, what you've got is a system whereby those in positions of power have to be fiscally
responsible.
It's always tough to find your space in the Bitcoin space.
It is, but when you find it, it rewards you, I think.
Oh, 100%.
I've ninja launched on you, Seb.
How are you doing, man?
i'm doing good good um we've got a lot to talk about today it's it's funny i was doing a show
a few months ago with brandon quittum um for turning stuff he's just the goat on that and i
was saying to him in that show it feels like bitcoin's lost something in terms of the way
people write about it everything is very analytical very financialized as like the trend goes in
Bitcoin. And I really miss the more abstract sort of philosophical pieces that we used to get a few
years ago. And so when I was talking to you about doing the show and you sent me over a couple of
the bits that you've been writing, I was like, ah, this is what I've been waiting for. So we're
going to get into some weird territory here today, Seb, and I'm excited for it.
It's, you know, I found the space, being in the space for a few cycles, you start to see it evolve,
as I'm sure you've kind of seen. And you see these changes kind of take form. And one thing
I've noticed is that because of Bitcoin, obviously, you've got number go up technology. A lot of
individuals, if you've been in for two, three cycles, if you've invested a decent chunk of
your net worth, you're probably in a position where you now have some sense of freedom.
And so what I've noticed is when it comes to who is the front facing kind of front line of Bitcoin,
it tends to be people that are only have only been in the space for a few years because they're the
people that are most vocal the people that are two three cycles old most of the time just drop
off and then just disappear into obscurity because now they have the capacity to lean into family
lean into community go and buy that plot of land live off the land and so to me i just find it a
really interesting environment where the people that talk about bitcoin tend to be the people
with the least knowledge about bitcoin and we see this as you're saying at the very start we see this
taking form where each cycle kind of tends to have a seam and it's almost as if this cycle
i don't want to judge it too much but it feels like we've almost gone a little too financialized
it feels like we've lost a little bit of the ethos of uh the the the reason why a lot of people came
into bitcoin and the the the reason why we had like cryptographers coming in and trying to create
uh privacy and sovereignty in a world that feels like it's infringing upon that so hopefully we
can find our way back to that and hopefully there's enough people in the space that still
hold those values true. Totally. I think there is. And people say that the financialization of
Bitcoin, just natural form of it maturing, which I think is probably true. But if, for example,
this year, the big narrative, or the last couple of years, the big narratives were ETFs and then
Trump coming in and sovereign Bitcoin reserve and all this stuff. And it's like, if none of that
happens and obviously etfs happened but like if if nothing that trump said he was going to do
he does then what's our narrative if we don't have the like freedom money core ethos of bitcoin
behind it and that's kind of what i worry about and when like a few years ago when it was like
gg and brandon and and all these people writing like very interesting philosophical takes on
bitcoin it was like it felt like that ethos was the main narrative and without that i don't know
what we have at the moment. Totally. I think you're absolutely spot on. And I think that
as you're saying that, what comes to mind is that I think number go up technology is what has
drawn a lot of people in. People are like, you know what, I'm struggling in life.
Hey, there's this thing that just keeps going up. Maybe that's going to make my life a little easier.
Then they get into it. And all of a sudden, it's the famous saying, you come for the gains and you
kind of stay for the revolution. And what I'm realizing is it's just like previously, as you
kind of went down the rabbit hole and you peeled back this number go up technology you're like my
god this thing to me the way that i kind of see it is although it is digital money the irony of it
being digital money is that it gets us to stop thinking about money and it gets us to start
thinking about how we're showing up as individuals and have a little more capacity to look inwards
and figure out like what are my values what i want to contribute how do i create value and such
and what i'm finding is that it's almost like people are coming into bitcoin and all they want
to talk about is just the financial aspect. Whereas to me, what I find really, when you kind
of really dig deep into the financial side of the world, the financialization of everything,
I would argue that financialization is only a byproduct of broken money. It's when our money
no longer holds value that we have a whole industry crop up trying to create products
that preserve purchasing power. Whereas if we actually just had money that preserved purchasing
power, you wouldn't have this whole financialized sector out there, which is arguably one of the
biggest sectors in the world totally and maybe maybe you say like come for the money stay for
the revolution um maybe it's because they've not had the gains you know like if you bought bitcoin
in in 2015 or 2014 or whatever and you're buying it for a hundred a couple hundred dollars and then
a few years later it's twenty thousand dollars that kind of forces you to reflect on what the
fuck have i just bought um but if if bitcoin's a little more sideways maybe people are going to
take longer to come to that realization yeah oh no no i fully agree and i also think that sometimes
people get a little lost in the narratives and such. And like at the moment, we're seeing this
price action. And I think anyone who's been through a few cycles, I think that you understand what
this Bitcoin thing is. And you understand that there's always going to be people that are willing
to spread FUD and push certain narratives that are trying to impede price action. But I think
that there seems to be a lot of this noise around, obviously, the quantum side of things and the
knots versus core. And you see a lot of tweets about, well, this is why Bitcoin is going down.
And in reality, I'm like, okay, if you walk up to someone on the street and you ask them,
do you know what knots versus core is or the quantum threat to Bitcoin?
Not a single person has any idea about what you're talking about.
So in my mind, I tend to think that what we're seeing is just a bunch of movement as a result
of macro factors and other things.
And people just want to attribute some form of narrative to it because it gives them confidence
that they understand what's going on.
Yeah.
I mean, it's funny, those two things like quantum threat to Bitcoin, that might be a
real thing in a number of years to come. Maybe we'll talk about that. But if people truly believe
that Core30 releasing is the reason Bitcoin has gone down, I don't know what to say. You need help.
You need to go and have a long, hard look at yourself, I think. But Seb, we've not really
introduced you. Hidden Cost of Money, this is your book. You came on the old show a couple of years
ago, but introduce yourself. Tell everyone who you are. Totally. First off, I just want to say,
I mentioned it very briefly at the start, but it has been such a pleasure seeing this evolution of like Peter McCormack, what Bitcoin did, seeing you on the sidelines increasingly over the years, kind of speaking your voice, asking questions, getting a little more involved in the podcast.
And now seeing you take the torch from Pete and kind of running the show yourself.
And I just I can't thank you enough for just the work you're doing in the space and carrying on these conversations, because I think the space is always evolving.
And I understand Pete has done hundreds and hundreds of episodes.
And there's a certain point where maybe he wants to focus on the UK.
But I think there's still a lot to be said in the Bitcoin space.
And there's always new voices.
So I just want to, first off, just really thank you for just like everything you do, Danny.
It really is amazing.
Thank you, man.
I appreciate that.
Now, chill you though.
We're here to talk about you, Seb.
Me.
Okay, where do I start?
I would say, so I wrote a book called The Hidden Cost of Money.
And I never in a million years expected to write a book.
never in a million years and so if I take a step back like how did this actually kind of unfold
and I would say that my like first love was mountain biking absolutely loved mountain biking
I love coaching I love kind of supporting people in their journey I love trying to break down these
complex biomechanical movements into their simplest form and then try and teach them and
so I started teaching mountain biking around my mid-teens and by my late teens I was like wait
I'm living in I live in the ski resort of Whistler and uh this is British Columbia in Canada and it's
it's a pretty high demand place the property prices are expensive and I'm looking at my
paychecks and I'm like I'm getting paid $15.75 an hour how am I ever going to be able to afford one
of these houses how am I ever going to be able to raise a family and so that kind of led me down
this avenue of okay I've got to figure out how to have some form of passive income stream coming in
so I can pursue the thing I want to be able to pursue which is mountain biking and coaching
while at least having the income coming in to support me. And so as I started going into real
estate, and then I kind of went down the rabbit hole of the financial markets and equities,
I was looking at the world through the lens that we were in this free market, this capitalist free
market, where prices fluctuate based on supply and demand and what the public perceive the value
of something is. And what I realized increasingly was I was taking positions. And these positions,
when I thought they were going to do one thing, they were going to do the opposite. And I was like,
I don't understand what's happening here. Why are these things doing the opposite of what I expect
them to do? And so as I started digging a little deeper, I started to kind of stumble over, oh man,
what is all this monetary policy? There's a central bank behind this stuff. There's someone
manipulating interest rates. There's someone injecting money into the economy, quantitative
easing, quantitative tightening. And from this, I realized that we don't live in anything close to a
free market. We don't live in this capitalist society that we supposedly live in. And that
eventually led me down the rabbit hole of gold. And then you start realizing, well,
the central bank's balance sheets, which hold a large portion of the gold in society,
have never been audited. We have no idea how much gold is on these balance sheets.
And then you start digging into the fact that it's just like, well, gold also has its own
supply and demand issues. When there's more miners, all of a sudden you get more supply
onto the market, more supply suppresses price and these kind of negative feedback loops.
So ultimately, long story short, I stumbled into Bitcoin. And I thought Bitcoin was the biggest scam. My brother used to buy drugs with it. I was just like, I'm not touching that. No way. And in around kind of like the late teens, like 2017, 2018, I really started to watch a lot more documentaries, read more articles on it. And then by 2020, I was just like, this is arguably, I think, one of the most important technologies in our time. And I quit my job and just dedicated full hog into Bitcoin.
So I've been working in the space since 2020, but I just feel really honored.
I think the space is really incredible.
And Bitcoin opened my eyes to realizing that if we can fix our monetary systems, I very
much believe that we can fix a lot of the challenges we face in society.
And so one of the key phrases that I say in my book, The Hidden Cost of Money, is that
everything is downstream of money.
A lot of these effects, whether it is poverty, wealth inequality, our environmental burden
from our consumer habits, whether it is our politics, our business practices, a lot of
these stem from misaligned practices from broken monetary systems. This episode is brought to you
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could you argue that the first realization that there is a hidden cost of money was when you
realized that being a mountain bike instructor which obviously is a job that like people wanted
to come they wanted to pay they want to learn from you but that still wasn't enough to give you a real
step up in society enough where you could afford a house you could afford just to live and have a
normal life is that like the first broken incentive in that system that you saw i would say so i think
that it's interesting you point that out because I do mention this in my book. There was like a few
little moments throughout my life when I look in hindsight that I feel like were these pre-Bitcoin
orange pill moments. They almost set you up for understanding Bitcoin when your time comes and you
kind of get kind of introduced into Bitcoin. And so one of them was that point. It was the fact that
I don't get it. I'm really passionate about this thing. There is demand for this thing.
and there's just no way I can survive
from the income from doing this thing.
And it's not just mountain biking.
Like we're even seeing it,
although I know that he's not a Bitcoiner
and I think he gives Bitcoin as a lot of flack,
Professor Plum, Mike Green,
just released an article,
I think yesterday or the day before.
And I think it says something,
it's called like,
why my life is a lie.
And he dives into the poverty
that we're facing in the US and such.
And it really is eye-opening,
but it makes you just realize
that I think a lot of individuals
are living subsistence lifestyles where they're really struggling and they're performing amazing
tasks in society they're trades people they're blue-collar workers and they can just barely
barely like scratch the surface so that's kind of like the first point when i kind of started
teach mountain biking i started to question i'm creating value but i'm not getting rewarded for
that value creation the second point was i started to recognize that like i was raised by my mom
and my parents separated when I was about five years old. I was raised by my mom so we relied on
a single income for most of my childhood and as a result of that my mom had to go and work five,
six days a week while we kind of entertained ourselves, went to school, spent the evening
sometimes alone kind of doing our own thing and when I look back on this I started to realize that
man, money is really impacting even just how parents show up because if parents don't have
capacity to the point where they're having to go and work, they're not being able to spend that time
and direct that time to meeting a kid's emotional needs.
And so that's kind of like the second point.
In hindsight, I was like, huh,
money is shaping our parental relationships,
like the parent-child bond.
And then the third point,
and this is kind of slightly bit more of a tangent,
is I remember when I was about maybe eight, nine years old,
and I think I shared this
on the What Bitcoin Did podcast previously.
It was when I was about eight, nine years old,
I really wanted this scooter.
And I went into this toy store.
I'd save for like maybe three or four months
for the scooter.
It was incredible.
I went up to the front desk to go buy this scooter with my dad and uh my dad my two brothers and I
went up to this front desk went to go purchase it my dad was like oh man I feel bad that you're
getting a scooter and your other brothers aren't so I'm gonna buy their scooter and you've got to
pay for your own and I was just like what I was like so frustrated I was so frustrated it's a scam
it was absolutely and to be for me in my mind I was like this is the cantilene effect it's those
closest to the monetary spigot benefit disproportionately. Now, what is really
interesting is that I look at how my brothers show up in life and I look at maybe some of my
values and I very much believe in value for value. I'm going to work hard. I'm going to create value
and in return, hopefully that value comes back to me. Then I see my brothers who lean on the system,
take advantage of the system. Many of them have sat on benefits before and such. And I see that
different relationship with my dad, my parents and such. And so I think how we grow up, how we see
our parents interact how we interact with our parents how we interact with society shapes who
we are immeasurably and so i think that when we have a monetary system that has handouts when we
have a monetary system that enables people either to get by on benefits and live averagely but get
by on benefits it doesn't incentivize them to go and create value but then on top of that when you
have a system where by actually trying to create value it makes it unbelievably hard to get by
so you end up having to lean more and more on intervention and subsidies you just create all
of these misaligned incentives and so like one stat that kind of stood out to me in kind of more
recent times is that like in the uk 50 i think it's 52 percent of individuals receive more in
benefits than they're paying sub in taxes and so you're just like how can you have a society
that moves forward and thrives when the majority of people in society are taking as opposed to
giving like to me i'm just like that's just mind-blowing well you clearly can't i don't
think anyone would argue that uk society is moving forward right now but like the the stuff you said
there about the sort of parent child bond is super interesting i i was um it was a bitcoin alive which
is a conference here in in australia in sydney um and there's a guy called pete win another british
bitcoiner who lives out here um he was on stage and he was talking about like what bitcoin did for
him um and the the thing he pulled on was like he picks his kid up from school every day and he's
the only dad at school there with his child at three o'clock or whenever school kicks out like
that's what bitcoin actually did and even just for me personally like i've got a young daughter
um and i get people are struggling like people are being completely screwed by the current system
right now and not everyone is in a position to do this but because of bitcoin like we are like
my wife's not working. She's the full-time carer of my daughter. And like, that gives you something
that like, again, I understand people have to send the kids to daycare and stuff, but if you just,
like, if you're outsourcing parenting, you don't get the same relationship with your kids. You
don't raise the kid in the same way, like things change. And it's a very privileged position to be
in, but I'm only in that position because of Bitcoin. And I feel very, very fortunate.
Well, and as you're saying this, and this is something that I find like it almost,
it kind of grinds my gears is that we almost have to say oh i feel really lucky that i've had the
opportunity to spend time with my kids i feel privileged that i've been able to spend time with
my kids it shouldn't be a privilege like throughout society as far back as we remember we've lived in
these smaller communities where we've spent unbelievable amounts of time in our community
with our family with our kids hunter-gatherer tribes there's a lot of evidence that points
towards the fact that most men in a hunter-gatherer tribe
would be able to work for 10 to 14 hours a week to be able to go and hunt down some big game That alone gives them the nutrition and the food to be able to support the tribe for the week
And so you're talking about 10 to 14 hours of work.
Then you're able to spend time in community and repairing the house and doing other things
to be able to help improve the quality of life.
And of course, it's a different time.
But I think that we're now in this world where we're meant to feel very grateful for all the
things we've got.
And yes, we may have the cell phone.
And yes, we may have the AC in our house.
And yes, we may have, I don't know, the Spotify playing in our car.
But the reality is that we've got all of these external things.
And what we don't have is actually the things that are really important, which is connection
to our community, connection to our family, and the ability to dive into things because
we're passionate about them.
And so that's what I find is really interesting.
We're in this kind of weird, liminal space where we're meant to feel happy and privileged
for just being able to spend time with something that we've been able to do throughout history.
there's actually like a slight little side tangent i listened to um michael malice was on the peter
mcmormack pod when was it maybe maybe about three yeah three weeks ago or so and he recommended a
book on that and the book was um a history of the american people and one of the things he talks
about in this history of the american people each chapter goes through about a 20 year period
and in and around the 16th 17th century it said that an average laborer from the uk would be able
to take a boat for essentially a year's worth of work when he gets there to be able to dedicate his
time to whoever the owner of this boat is or whatever they'd be able to dedicate about a year's
worth of work and then once you've done that you are free to go direct your energy wherever you see
fit and within every week you would earn enough excess capital to go and buy an acre an acre and
a half of some of the most incredible land in the world and so you're talking about 80 acres of land
an individual would be able to accumulate in any given year. And this is an average laborer.
And so I think back then, people were able to contribute back to society. They were able to
build a legacy. They were able to kind of build a community in a way that today is just unheard of.
And I think we've got more disconnection than ever before right now.
Yeah. And the weird thing is, you almost feel a slight guilt for the fact that the fiat system
is so broken. If you went back to the 70s and the 80s, it's not unusual for us to have a single
income supporting a family but now like i almost feel guilt saying that and it's not because i like
i'm very proud of like that i work really fucking hard to make sure we can do this and i spend you
know 40 of the year away traveling to make sure that my wife can spend all the time with our
daughter like it's not that i'm not working hard it's just that like it's like other people who are
like still living completely in like a trapped fiat system i don't think they can see a way out
very easily and there's a really interesting thing happening at the moment that is with especially
amongst the younger generation but i think probably more broadly than that which is this like move to
socialism and there's a very strong push from like more conservative thinking people and like bitcoin
is that like that's just dumb and it is but like i think you have to appreciate why people are moving
in that direction and i i think they're correctly sort of assessing and diagnosing the problem
but then they're coming up with a totally different solution to like buying bitcoin and
opting out like have you been like following this growing trend of socialism absolutely and
i i would say it's interesting actually i went to a a friend's 40th the other night and um
she i was talking to one of her friends her friend has a brother who's british he comes
over from the uk he's over here for a week and i was chatting to him i was like oh what do you do
And he was just like, oh, well, I'm a law consultant on planning.
So basically he consults two lawyers about planning applications for like architectural
builds, things like this.
And one of the things he said is he lives in an area called Cornwall and he's just like,
where I live, I can't continue to live here because it's just too costly.
And so no one can live where they grew up.
And so I was like, well, I'm curious, like, what do you think the issue is there?
And he was just like, well, it's greedy capitalists.
It's wealthy people buying up all the property.
and what i think is really challenging is most people will look at the surface level issue
and then that's as far as they dig because that is like that on the surface that is true like my
sister lives in cornwall and the house prices are insane because everyone who you know makes all their
money in london buys a holiday home down there or whatever it's a beautiful place but that like you
say that's that's the very surface level uh example of that oh absolutely and there's i would
say what opened my eyes to this kind of uh as jeff booth or preston they always talk about this kind
of like first principles thinking or like critical thinking and what opened my eyes to this years ago
was stumbling upon an article by toyota the founder of toyota and what he talks about is this
idea of the five whys and everyone who works in toyota is supposedly taught about the five whys
and it basically the idea is that okay if you've got an issue if you're struggling with something
before you go to manager before you go to someone and try and use up their time to figure out the
answer first ask yourself okay why is this problem happening now you're going to get an answer to
that and then once you've figured out the answer to that you then ask well now why is this happening
you're going to get an answer and the idea is you keep asking why and usually by about the fourth or
fifth why you're going to be getting down to the root of the problem and so when you think about
housing what i kind of ask this guy is just like okay so if that's the issue if it's if it's
individuals that are buying up these houses because they have excess capital now you've
got to ask well why are they buying houses and he was just like well just because they have money
and it's just like that's not necessarily true like they could just keep their money in the money
and he's just like oh i hadn't thought about that why are they not keeping their savings in the money
well it's because their money is losing purchasing power well why is the money losing purchasing
power oh because our money supply is expanding well why is the money supply expanding oh because
we've got a central bank with lax monetary policy and then as you basically just keep asking why you
get down to the root that we have a monetary system that because of its behavior the currency
is losing purchasing power so no one is incentivized to save in the currency anymore everyone is pushed
out into all these various assets and so things like real estate and things like farmland that
were once used for their utility purpose putting a roof over a family's head being able to grow
crops being able to raise animals is now being used instead as a store of value and they're no
longer using them even for their utility purpose. And so where I live in Whistler, 61% of houses are
empty, yet we're facing a housing crisis. And it's because people don't care about them for their
utility purpose. It's simply an investment to them. And that's a byproduct of broken money.
And so at the face of it, they're like, well, now we've got to regulate this. We've got to stop
foreign investors. Okay, no, maybe we've got to stop. People aren't allowed a second home or a
third home, or maybe we've got to increase taxes. And it's like, no, let's just stop printing money
so people can actually just save back in the currency again.
And so it's kind of this constant band-aid solution.
And so kind of going back to your original question,
I would say that a lot of these individuals,
they see the surface level problem.
But the response to that,
if you just take the surface level problem at face value,
is usually the wrong response and will only exacerbate the issue.
It's just like if you go and stimulate the economy with more money
to help people that are struggling,
you're just going to push up prices
that further impedes individuals from kind of getting ahead.
And so it's just like these second order and third order effects
of kind of not necessarily deeply thought out ideas.
But where do you see this going then?
Because like that mindset is clearly winning in a lot of places.
Like I think the most obvious recent example is Mamdani in New York.
Do you think we are going to move more and more
to this kind of socialist government system?
i like unfortunately i tend to think we are and the reason why is because um when when people start
having less and less capacity because unfortunately as their purchasing power is diminishing
the cost of living is rising they're going to have to work more as they've got to work more
what do they do in their spare time because they have less capacity to think about the information
they're consuming they take things a lot more at face value or instead of reading the book they
just read the headline. And so what I'm noticing is people, their attention spans are getting
shorter and shorter and shorter. So we're moving from books to long form blogs, to long form Twitter
posts, to short form Twitter posts, to little tiny meme videos. And everyone, it's just like,
they think they've got this understanding of the world from these tiny, tiny little snippets that
are just there to grab our attention. And perfectly curated for you for whatever you
are desiring at that moment. 100%. And then you've got the algorithms. And then you look at media
And on top of that, media, unfortunately, how do media make money? They make money from eyes. They need eyeballs. So instead of telling a gray story, which isn't engaging, they tell a black and white story. There's usually the oppressed or the oppressor. There's red, there's blue, there's black, there's white.
And so I think that we end up in a society that creates this huge polarization, this whole kind of us versus them society. And so I feel as if, unfortunately, and I don't want it to be the case, but I feel as if we're still swinging in that direction. And as people have less capacity, this continues to get more and more exacerbated.
but i think that where i start to see hope is places like el salvador and places like these
smaller jurisdictions that we have communities that are growing and we have communities where
hopefully as they start to get more capacity because they're adopting a different way of life
they're showing up for their family more they're starting to have more kids they're starting to buy
land live more off the land live more self-resourcefully those it starts to spread people
are always curious about like, huh, I'm struggling and all my other friends are struggling, but I've
got these other couple of friends over there that life seems to be very different for them. And I'm
curious why it's different. And so I think that ultimately it's Bitcoin is playing a long game.
Whereas I think for the average individual, they're playing the short game and they're just
looking for handouts, immediate gratification. And in time, I think that will change because
people change when the pain of staying in the existing system is greater than the pain of
transitioning or thinking about it differently the energy of staying in the existing system
is greater than the energy of transitioning to a new system that's 100 right and the problem
that we have is that if you're looking at this as a you know red versus blue thing and um
fixing the conservative like capital c conservative side of this doesn't really seem like it there's
any chance of that happening like they're not going to become fiscally responsible they're not
going to get the cronyism out of the capitalism and so like bitcoin as like a free market cap like
true capitalist economy like if you don't know about that it's either more cronyism or socialism
seems to be the only options that people are faced with at the moment totally and i think it's also
been like i i think that i lean more right because at least right would say hey let's try and be
fiscally responsible but in general i wouldn't necessarily say that i agree with the system i
think the system itself is very broken but it's also just been hard even seeing like trump get
elected and then trump say okay i'm gonna go and i'm gonna kind of like push my party on peace
we're gonna figure out how to stop all of these wars i'm gonna push my party on fiscal responsibility
i'm gonna push this party on the whole doge initiative and trying to cut government spending
and what have we seen we've seen the antithesis of these things where spending just continues
doge ended up just getting kneecapped and then war is just extended indefinitely and so
unfortunately i think the incentives of these systems and they're so ingrained is that it
actually doesn't matter who's in power the system is going to continue doing what the system is doing
and i think democracy on the face of it sounds great because you've got this the party of people
representing the people but in reality what that means is it's almost impossible it's a tanker ship
you can't necessarily change course or alter course because you've got all of this legislation
in place and all of these senators congressmen and such basically preventing you from changing
course and so that's where i don't know i don't quite know what the answer is outside of i think
we just need to separate money and state and by separating money and state you realign the
incentives towards value creation and i think that even if we separated the money and state in the u.s
if you were to separate money and state yes you've still got all the politicians yes you've still got
all of these legal frameworks. However, what you've got is a system whereby those impositions
of power have to be fiscally responsible, because if you're not fiscally responsible,
you're going to quickly wither away and someone else is going to step up. And so I think that
the first things first is just like, how do we continue to kind of grow Bitcoin to the point
where you're able to separate money and state just to realign those incentives? And that's kind of
the basis of kind of my foundational beliefs, as opposed to we need to do this in this trajectory
and build this type of economy.
It's just like realign incentives
by separating money and state.
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um so you started this by saying everything's downstream of money
do you think it's plebslop to say bitcoin actually fixes this or does it
I think that it's a little hyperbole. I think that at its core, what I think Bitcoin fixes in many
ways is, as I just discussed, a lot of these misaligned incentives in society. And I think
that it incentivizes, whether it is enterprises, businesses, organizations, to create value for
society. Because if the only way for them to receive capital is to create value, well, they've
got to create a good product. They've got to create a good service. And so I would say that
Bitcoin realigns the incentives in that jurisdiction. It realigns a lot of the incentives
from the government jurisdiction as well, because suddenly they have to be fiscally responsible,
which means, okay, if we've got to think about the future, we've got to, and we've got to think
about putting our people first, and we've got to meet the needs of our people and actually create
value, how are we going to do this? And so that kind of realigns those incentives. And then on
the individual level, I think that when you have a monetary system, which limits handouts, when you
have a monetary system that kind of limits intervention from government, I think what it
does is it puts a lot more accountability on the individual to be more conscious about how they're
showing up in life and actually maybe to build some savings, build a bit of a buffer. And so I
think that it realigns a lot of the incentives for people to show up more authentically and with
more accountability. However, I would say the thing that it does not do is as individuals,
most of the time we're looking for connection and we're looking for happiness and connection
and happiness do not come from money i think money can give us capacity that can ease that
but in the end we've still got to put ourselves out there and i think involve ourselves in the
communities and try and create value and we've also got to self-reflect and spend time really
questioning like who am i and how do i actually want to show up and so i think we're not going to
solve the mental health issue but i think we're going to go a long way towards creating a space
where people have more capacity to focus on those things.
I do think there's some degree of it solving happiness
of the mental health issue though,
in the sense that like, in your example,
you wanted to be a mountain bike instructor.
There'd be people in that situation
who realize that this isn't going to be the career
they want it to be.
They're not going to be able to make the money they need.
The money that they make is not going to retain its value.
And so they end up going and sitting in a box
and working at Deloitte or whatever on a grad scheme.
Like if people could do the things
that they truly want to do,
they add value to the world like there is a potential that that completely flips on its head
no and i agree with that absolutely i agree with that and i think it's more from the perspective
there was an interesting post i think someone uh put up on twitter the other day that said
something along the lines of i'm rich and this doesn't happen to me and essentially it was
someone who's done extremely well in their life and they're talking about the fact that
i think going into wealth we tend to assume it's going to fix all our problems
and going into wealth doesn't fix all of our problems.
If we have our own insecurities about who we are,
if we don't think we are worthy,
if we don't think we provide value to society,
no matter how much value we are providing,
that is something that we have to do and work on ourselves.
And that is completely separate to money.
But to your point, I think that what Bitcoin does
is we as individuals are a product of our environment largely.
and so for the average individual who is struggling who wishes they had a little more capacity to
spend time with their kids who wishes they had a little more capacity to spend time in community
or direct their energy towards things they're passionate about i think that bitcoin does give
them that capacity and i'm even noticing in the bitcoin community you come along to these amazing
in-person events and it is a group of individuals that i think are happier that are more grounded
that are more authentic than I've ever met in my whole entire life. Whereas where I live is a very
athletic outdoorsy community. But you go and interact with a lot of these individuals and
you see their social media. Their social media portrays this person who is, I'm an athlete,
I do this, I'm out in the mountains, I'm doing this and life's amazing. And then you meet them
and they're struggling and their mental health is usually in the gutter. And so I think that
Bitcoin definitely supports that, but it still takes self-reflection on the individual's behalf
to actually get to a place where you feel grounded and there is self there and confidence I think the way that Bitcoiners interact on social media is actually a really interesting contrast there because it not like showing off this insanely fancy life
Most of the time, people will be nims, they call themselves plebs, or they just don't
want to be on social media straight up.
It's a very vast contrast between that and the Instagram lifestyle that you see.
Oh, 100%.
Yeah. And it's interesting because like, you know, and I don't want to kind of push shade on the Bitcoin community, but I think the Bitcoin community is this unique mix of people that have spent a lot of time not only digging into the world around them and trying to look at the world objectively.
And how do I create value or how do we move towards a world which there is more hope and there's more prosperity?
I've also found that a lot of Bitcoin is very self-aware.
They've spent a lot of time working on the self.
but what i also notice is there's this group of bitcoiners that have come into this space
and it's the first time in their life they've ever found a community and what ends up happening is
they kind of get almost super hyper aggressive and so anyone that puts any shade on bitcoin
they start attacking that person and those individuals what i'm noticing is they're not
actually responding because they actually deeply believe in bitcoin many times they may not even
understand Bitcoin, but it's the first time they've ever felt a part of a community. So they're
protecting their community. And so it's actually, I think it's a result of trauma and not feeling a
part of community. And that's why so many Bitcoin is actually respond in a very hostile way and
don't necessarily respond calmly when there's any threat or attack on Bitcoin. And so I think that
ultimately, I think what makes Bitcoin more resilient is the more that we as individuals
reflect and the more that we're actually able to like ground a conversation and rather than
respond with hostility and attack the individual and we just focus on the conversation i think
that's productive in the long term yeah i totally agree with that um so this is probably the longest
intro to the piece that i actually wanted to talk about that i've ever done um we're gonna talk
about your article that you wrote um i forget what the actual title is the one i've got in my
head is the map not the territory what was the actual title the actual title oh man i've complete
blank on what it's called it's called uh the curated world i think it is okay so give the
list of some context what's the sort of synopsis of this before we get into it so i i would say
that if i was to summarize the whole article down to like a question the question would be do we see
reality as it is and i think this is a really important question the reason why i think this
is important question is because we move through this world all of us using maps and these maps can
be maps of relationships that we've probably inherited from our parents and seen how our
parents respond with one another it can be maps of money how we think money should be should it
be centralized oh prices always rise oh you need kind of yeah you need that central bank and
deflation is destabilizing um there's maps of food what do we think is healthy what is not healthy
well we also have all of the maps of the various sciences physics biology and chemistry so we
navigate this world using these various maps but what is really important to note and this is kind
of in alignment with um the quote that you just shared it's this idea that the map is not the
territory and for those that aren't familiar with that quote to me i use this quote a lot in the
world of kind of bitcoin and discussing some of these philosophical ideas and it's that a map is
simply a representation of reality and it is not reality if i'm standing at the base of whistler
ski resort and I'm looking up at the resort and in my hands I have a map of the resort and I'm
standing at the base of a ridgeline but I'm looking at this map and it doesn't have the ridgeline
but all of a sudden I realize I'm lost. The map does not represent the territory and what that
means is that if I'm trying to now go and navigate the territory I'm completely lost in the territory
because I'm like this map doesn't track. I'm so confused as to how to navigate this territory.
where do I go next? Well, the reason why I kind of wrote this article is that there's a lot of maps
that we use inherently, whether it is our maps of relationships, whether it is the maps of the
various sciences, whether it is the maps of money. And we unknowingly use these maps, even if they're
not representing the territory, which impacts how we show up as individuals. I don't know if that's
kind of like a very, very high level and I can kind of dive into it a little more. Yeah. So I
want to get into this properly but when i read this piece why did you ever play age of empires
oh absolutely i freaking loved it so what it reminded me of is when you used to play that
and you would start the game and all you could see was like the tiny little circle of your map
and the rest of it was just black until you explored it it almost reminded me of that where
until you go outside your sort of realm of comfortability whatever it is like you don't
know the full picture of what surrounds you um but so let's start with like why you wrote this
piece and was this from Yomi Park? So she was one of like I start the actual article with the story
of Yomi Park and I'll share in a second but I wrote the piece more because I realized that let's
just take money for instance before I got into Bitcoin I just assumed well the money we use
it should be centralized as I mentioned a second ago and prices it's just natural that prices rise
and actually if we have a deflationary shock to the economy oh my god that's unbelievably negative
that's going to destabilize the economy.
And so we need to make sure that we have central planners
who can step in and intervene.
Well, that's just the map that most people are using
to navigate the world we live in.
And it's not until you go down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin
that you realize that map is extraordinarily wrong.
Naturally, as Jeff Booth talks about,
prices should be falling
because people are constantly trying to innovate.
They're constantly trying to improve productivity and efficiency.
And so if we're constantly trying to prove productivity
and efficiency of technology,
and we're trying to get more for less,
prices should be falling.
They shouldn't be rising.
And because of obviously intervention,
and I know I'm preaching to the choir
because most people listen to this Bitcoiners,
because of intervention,
whose values are actually pushing
this interventionistic plan?
Like who is benefiting from the stimulus of money?
Who is benefiting from the cutting
or rising of interest rates and such?
And so it's very hard to remove
the individual and self-interest.
And so how do we actually create a system that is fair?
So everyone is playing by the same rules.
And so that's where obviously Bitcoin steps in.
But because Bitcoin has made me realize,
huh, I've torn up this map of money
that most people are using
and I've redrawn that map
to maybe more accurately represent society.
I wanted to kind of look at
with our map that is money isn't necessarily accurate.
What other maps are we using
and we're navigating this world with
that aren't necessarily supporting us?
And so most Bitcoin has gone down the rabbit hole
of like the educational system and the pharmaceutical system and like the healthcare system and
like diet and nutrition and fitness.
And you realize that actually a lot of these maps we use aren't necessarily accurate.
And I'm sure like you've probably found there's many ways that before you got into Bitcoin,
Danny, that you've completely profoundly shifted your perspective and redrawn that map.
Oh, totally.
In so many very fundamental ways.
Like I'm quite honestly not the same person I was before I found Bitcoin.
I know that sounds really culty, but it is just true.
Totally. And I think that that is a product of when we're curious, we should be constantly redrawing these maps. And I can guarantee you that if I was to talk to myself in 10 years time, my maps are still going to look different from the maps that I'm using today.
Because I think that a curious individual is constantly trying to redraw their maps so that they're as close to reality as possible. And we redraw our maps when we've got new information that gives us more detail about the territory at which we're trying to navigate.
and so i think that ultimately the i think that it's really important to recognize that our maps
are constantly being redrawn and just because we have a map it doesn't necessarily represent the
territory and so the example that i give at the very start of this article is yomi park and for
those that aren't familiar with who yomi park is she used to live in north korea and she escaped
north korea she's got a phenomenal book called in order to live and she talks about how living
underneath the Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, these huge dictators. These dictators believed in
something called the Jiu-chi ideology. And the Jiu-chi ideology at its core is Marxist and it
believes in linguistic control. And so language, again, is just a map. It's a map to our experience.
It's how we describe our experience. And so when these kind of leaders have linguistic control or
control over the language what they've done in north korea is they've removed a lot of words
there's no word for love my family or love my daughter there's only words for i love my leader
there's also no words for stress there's no words for oppression there's no words for liberty and so
if you don't have those words to describe your experience how does that actually shape your
experience and so i think that language because the map of their language is so distorted they're
unable to explore those territories internally of their experience of this world. They can't even
describe what it feels like to be oppressed. But she didn't realize this until she'd left North
Korea and was exposed to a map like English that has a lot more words to accurately describe the
territory, which to me, I'm just like, that's mind blowing. It's hard to wrap your head around
not being able to describe your experience. It's insane. I can't even imagine how
mind-blowing it would to it would be to leave a country like that and just be in the relatively
free world but like the linguistic control thing am i stepping too far here and saying
that the uk government and actually many governments around the world are now trying to do that
i well i would say that all languages to a certain extent do it everything just sits on a spectrum
with some doing it to the extreme case like in in north korea and some doing it in maybe a more
moderate case but i would say that linguistic control in in the uk you may not necessarily
be having the dictionary pruned of certain words but what you do have is everybody has a perception
of what is happening in society they've got this map that okay this is what's happening in society
well if the government is coming out and they are which i believe they are is putting 37 people a
day in prison for speech crimes what ends up happening is you don't hear about people that
are opposing what is going on. And so you have a very skewed map of what's happening in society.
And so when you go and walk through the UK and you speak to an average individual,
most people have no idea that people are being jailed for speech crimes. Most people have no
idea that Keir Starmer, I don't know, used to be a part of like a communist group. No, people are
like, these things just don't exist. And so I think that they've got a very skewed map as to,
it doesn't track reality in the slightest.
so does this kind of lead back to anyone who is in a position of control is going to try and
control the map because that benefits them by doing so it's a challenging one because i think that
you could say that it's not black and white and maybe the analogy i'll give and i don't want to
get into this very deeply because i'm not an expert in this subject but i tend to lean towards
and nots in the nots versus core debate you could say that in the not side of things i believe that
bitcoin should be focused on money and so you could say there's censorship and bitcoin is just
money i don't want it to be jpegs i don't want it to be all of these other things so we i believe
there should be measures in place to try and uh impede transactions that are bloating the network
so you could say that's censorship in a certain way but you could also say well it's rules to
keep its core ethos clear and clean and so i don't necessarily think that the society we live in is
black and white the censorship is always malicious but i also think at the same time that what is
happening on a governmental level i do believe in say free speech and i do believe that people
should be able to voice their opinions and i do believe that people should be able to uh share
what it is that they believe in i think that's absolutely foundational and so the moment you've
got the government coming in and silencing people online silencing kind of dissent that creates a
whole uh swath of i i think distortions in the map that people are using to navigate society
i've promised myself i'm gonna stay away from the nuts core stuff for a little while so i'm just
gonna pretend you never said that honestly i and i should say that it's not my area of expertise i
don't want to talk about it because i don't i have not a fully formed opinion on it because i also
think that it's gray i think that it's very gray and i and and i am i i'm torn i'm very torn but
anyway i think we can tiptoe around that one so we can tiptoe around that one and uh so where i
kind of took this this this discussion in this article is that we have these areas where the map
is very clearly distorted in relation to the territory and that can be things like language
in North Korea but it starts to get a little more skewed when you start thinking about the sciences
so if you start diving into physics there are certain things that we're told we're told that
there's the laws of thermodynamics now a law makes it seem like well that's written in stone that
that's just how it is but what is really interesting is if you go dig into the recesses
of YouTube and some people physicists they're going to listen to this and just be going to be
like Seb you're an idiot and I should claim that I'm not a physicist I can't say for certain that
I'm not wrong about what I'm saying here but I do think it's I'm curious and that is that if you go
dig into the recesses of YouTube you will start to find videos on people that have created something
called a perpetual motion machine now a perpetual motion machine is something whereby you've created
a machine that is able to generate more energy than the input that comes into it well that
completely goes against the laws of thermodynamics because the first law of thermodynamics
is the conservation of energy energy can neither be created nor destroyed so you can't create energy
out of nothing and the second law is entropy every time energy changes from one form to another some
of it is lost and so if you were to create a wheel that spins in motion you've got heat and you've got
friction and that's going to dissipate some of that energy and so what's really interesting is
you start digging into these videos of these perpetual motion machines and those defy the
laws of thermodynamics not only that there's videos of people taking a tube and then applying
a hydrophobic gel to the inside of the tube and then putting that tube underwater well because
it's got a hydrophobic gel what ends up happening it ends up starting to cycle water indefinitely
but there's no energy input going into it so you're cycling water and definitely that goes
against the laws of thermodynamics and there's many more there's another one where a guy has
if you can envision two bicycle rims kind of glued together and he's got a marble sitting on the ridge
in between these two bicycle rims and he puts it on the other side of the bicycle rim they're sitting
kind of on a on a kind of stand they're able to spin freely he puts a magnet and as it pulls that
marble, the rims start to spin indefinitely. And so you start looking into these things and you're
like, this is really interesting. These seem to go against the map that is physics. We're told
that there are these laws in place that basically prevent us from generating perpetual energy.
We're always going to have to go and destroy our environment to get fossil fuels. We're always
going to have to use a whole bunch of energy to be able to convert one form of energy into another
form of energy and that is why that's the world we live in today and so what's just been really
interesting going down these rabbit holes is you start to recognize that huh maybe these maps that
we've been told this is how the world works this is how physics works maybe they're not laws and
maybe they're really just theories and in reality they could be hiding as you're saying like with
age of empires and there's those areas in fog it could be hiding these other areas of society or
these other technologies that could profoundly, profoundly change the world we live in. And so
what comes to mind as I'm saying this is there's a lot of evidence that this is actually taking
place. And that's where it kind of really grabs my attention. And if I'm rambling, feel free to
just like step in and ask a question. No, you're not rambling at all. This is fascinating.
Because I have no idea whether these experiments are scientifically correct. Like if there's a
flaw in them, who knows? But one thing I do know is I listen to a lot of Eric Weinstein. I think
he's amazing um and the thing that he constantly talks about is how physics has basically been just
black box since the i think the 60s and um he thinks that physicists have been pushed down to
um what is it they're pushed towards string theory is it yeah yeah um and like other areas of physics
have basically been ignored and he's essentially saying to put it in your kind of framework that
the map is being distorted to keep people away from one side of the map um and so when you hear
things like that i don't know it make it makes these things seem possible totally and eric weinstein
i think is a really fascinating individual and i would definitely if anyone's listening to this and
hasn't listened to him talk go look up any of his talks he's done a phenomenal ones with joe rogan
over the years i think he's probably been on four or five times um but essentially he coined this
term which is what you're referring to called like DISC this like distributed idea suppression
complex and the way that I kind of interpret this is that there's kind of five layers I didn't
actually go into this in the article but there's essentially five layers of this suppression that
completely decimate our ability to actually see reality as it is kind of going back to that first
question I asked do we see reality as it is is our map in alignment with the territory and so
the first one is kind of government funding that shapes kind of this research map well it's in most
industries 40 to 50 percent of all research is funded by government and so what you start to
recognize is hey if you're if you're a scientific uh researcher you need money to be able to survive
so guess what if the government doesn't approve of something and you're trying to go down a certain
trajectory you're just not going to receive money for that thing and so you're not going to be able
to go and study it and so the first step of kind of kneecapping us looking into the fog of age of
empires is i'm a i'm able to get funding and the government funds most of that so that's the first
step the second step you've got kind of regulatory oversight so you've got all these regulatory
bodies which are basically saying what is allowed in science and what is not allowed and one of the
points that he talks to which he very briefly mentioned was in physics there's after what was
at the manhattan project and kind of the nuclear bomb after the manhattan project supposedly they
put some legislation in place that basically said it is illegal to think about certain types of
physics like if you get caught thinking about it you can potentially go to prison and so there's
certain areas that we can't even try to kind of extend curiosity into through threat of just you're
going to go to prison if you think about those things so we've got the government we've got the
regulatory agencies you've then got the scientific journals and the scientific journals are usually
centralized they're owned by a handful of individuals and they govern what gets seen
for your research papers to actually be seen they have to be put into the scientific journals
and the scientific journals again they're just censoring what goes in and many times they're
paid for and funded by a lot of the big institutions a lot of the big corporations big pharma and so
if you're doing if you're trying to push an idea that goes against mainstream belief or against the
status quo you're just never going to make it into the scientific journals and then the fourth one is
the peer review system we know that science advances on the fringe it doesn't advance in the core and
so if science advances on the fringe and you want to get recognized well your paper has to be peer
reviewed and the problem with being peer reviewed is you being reviewed by your peers that hold a
status quo belief and so it almost impossible to be able to change a belief if they benefiting from that belief structure And so I think that the challenge we face in the peer review system is if you do want to go down and discuss something that maybe infringes upon
someone's bottom line, that's going to be really hard for you to do so. And then that finally brings
us to the fifth one. This is just like cultural and career incentives. And it's just like as an
individual, again, you may have a family. You don't want to rock the boat and you don't want
to be ostracized from society. Like we've even seen it during like the pandemic where certain
individuals didn't agree with what was taking place during the pandemic so they stepped up and
said hey like some of these mandates pushing some of these uh experimental like experimental things
i won't necessarily say the word someone impact youtube but experimental things pushing some of
these things we don't have the data to support this stuff and what happened that the medical
licenses stripped from them and so i think that what's really challenging is we've got government
funding regulatory oversight scientific journals peer review system and cultural and career incentives
that completely impede science from advancing where it wants to go.
And instead, it is a result of a lot of these like financial incentives.
And so that's where I'm just like, man, this is tough.
People want to be curious, but they're not necessarily allowed to be curious.
This is why I think people like Eric are really important, though,
because when Terence Howard came out with his,
I don't even know what you call them, his potential inventions,
like they were going to defy physics.
He came out on Rogan, did this show,
and then he did a show with eric weinstein and i think eric probably thought most of it most of the
stuff he was proposing was just a bit of quackery but like he gave him his juice like he said like
some of the stuff is interesting like you need to learn more but he was in that interview saying
the peer review system is just gatekeeping like it doesn't mean what you're doing isn't interesting
you don't have to have gone through the same five schools as everyone else to do something
interesting in physics like and and i thought that was very cool no i i wholeheartedly agree and
And I think that it's challenging because if you are a curious individual, like to your point, you can go and self-learn.
The amount of information that's out there these days, the amount of books that are out there these days, you're able to go and develop a deep understanding of a topic.
But just because you haven't been to Harvard, just because you haven't been to Oxford, Cambridge, all of these various Ivy League universities, that doesn't mean that you don't have validity.
And that's where it's hard to see these sciences that could potentially profoundly change the world we live in.
It's hard to see no site going into these other areas of the map because of this various gatekeeping.
And so then it kind of brings up the question, okay, but is this gatekeeping actually going on or is this just kind of theory?
And there's a documentary that I kind of stumbled upon a couple of years back and it's called The Lost Century.
and one it's the first time i'd ever heard of this but it was when was it i think it was in 1951
congress passed something called the invention secrecy act and the invention secrecy act basically
says and where is it says it's a law allowing the u.s government to issue a secrecy order on
patent applications for national security reasons effectively preventing inventors from disclosing
selling or commercializing their inventions and so if you try and release any technology
that goes against the government's agenda or impedes on their control structures,
your technology is going to be silenced immediately.
And so you ask, well, how many times has this actually taken place?
As of 2024, there's been 6,741 secrecy orders in effect.
This is from government websites.
They've silenced thousands of technologies that we don't know what the world could look like
because that technology doesn't exist.
And one example of this is, and anyone can go dig into these,
there's a guy called Stanley Meyer.
and Stanley Weyer, he kind of designed the first water-powered car and he was getting 180 kilometers
on four liters of water. Well, he went to go do a deal with some licensees in like a diner
and he stood up and immediately was just like, they've poisoned me. He went and died on the
street and this patent disappeared from the patent office and this technology was never released.
And so this is just kind of like one story, but there's many stories. You go down these rabbit
holes and it's hard to see this technology that could profoundly reshape society just kind of
completely go by the wayside or just kind of disappear into kind of oblivion and so
i think that the world we live in our maps don't necessarily represent the territory
because our maps are being curated to a certain extent i mean that's an insane story um does it
feel to you this could be naive but that these maps are on the brink of being blown wide open
And I say that for like a number of different angles.
Like, obviously, if we're talking about the map of money, like I think Bitcoin is making
a real impact there.
And then when it comes to physics, like I don't know if you've seen this Age of Disclosure
film that's just come out.
It's got a load of top like US government officials coming out and talking about the
whole UAP phenomenon and like saying that science has been hidden since the 60s and
that they've reverse engineered these ships semi-successfully.
There's also the stuff that's happening in Egypt, like new discoveries in Egypt that's
kind of blowing archaeologist theories out of the water? Does it feel like something's coming
to a head right now to you? I believe so. And I think that obviously things take a long time
to surface. And in the age of information, I think it's just becoming easier for that information to
surface. Now, this is also at the same time that we've seen by the Biden administration putting,
I think it was something close to like $300 million into misinformation, disinformation
campaigns, just suppressing anything that takes place on these various social media platforms.
And so I think that we're still facing a lot of suppression for people that are curious
and people that are trying to release information that goes against mainstream belief.
But I do increasingly think that the pandemic, in a way, it opened people's eyes to recognizing
that maybe the government doesn't have my best interests at heart.
And maybe this veil that is the government that says they care about us and they're doing
everything they can in their best interest to put us first isn't necessarily accurate.
and if I peel back the veil what's behind it and I think that that's what we're really starting to
see and so I think that the biggest question that some people are they struggle with is when you
come into this world and you start looking into some of these subjects even if it is just the map
that is money one of the hardest things is well how could the government like I thought the
government cared about us I thought the government really supported us and so I think that one of the
hardest things that people have to get through is actually know these institutions have their own
agenda and many times that agenda is not necessarily in alignment with what you want in the
world and so it kind of brings up this question of just like why would they want to curate these maps
and i think that that's a really important question to answer and in a sense the way that i
see it is that maps are curated because control depends on perception like i think that throughout
history all of these wars have been fought over resources and whoever controls the flow of energy
of money of information effectively governs the people and kind of governs these nations governs
the world and so the system isn't broken by accident it's designed to preserve these control
structures that exist and they've existed for a long time and so if resources are scarce power
stays concentrated and so the maps we're given when it comes to like energy when it comes to
money when it comes to even just like reality itself i don't necessarily think they are
unintentionally wrong. I think they're conveniently incomplete. And I think that it's just really cool
being able to see this group of individuals that are curious and they're starting to redraw these
maps and they're starting to collaborate. And it's almost as if social media, in a sense,
for all of its faults, has brought curious minds together from all over the worlds.
And so we can have friends that live in different countries that we've never met before,
which just didn't happen even 10, 15 years ago. We live in the most interesting times.
like the stuff that's happening at the moment is insane like if you were talking about uaps and
ancient civilizations and like fiat money being a scam like these were very very fringe topics that
made you sound like a nut job not very long ago and they're becoming more and more part of like
normal conversation and it's i don't know are we in like a consciousness awakening right now like i
don't know what's going on or are we just in a simulation we always play this part totally you
know i had a really good conversation a little while back um with a good friend of mine and we
were discussing this idea of like are we in a simulation and this idea that is ai being invented
or is it being rediscovered and so the one of the theories is as humans we want to create value
and we want to give back and we want to create businesses we want to kind of support our community
we want to support our family and so what do we do we start to create technology so we create
technology we create technology we prove our quality of life and then eventually we create AI
and AI starts to take a lot of our jobs from us it starts to take our capacity to feel like we're
valued and actually producing something and as we start to do this what do we need to do as a
society because we're facing massive depression widespread anxiety substance abuse all of these
things so what do technologists do well they start to create uh like augmented reality they
start to create simulations and then all of a sudden you're able to step into these simulations
back to a simpler time where you feel like you're creating value again but then naturally as any
human does we're inside the simulation and then we start to create technology and then the cycle
repeats itself and so you could ask yourself this question are we like in avatar and we could just
be five layers deep in avatar and we're just like oh my god we just created this thing called ai
but in a hundred years time we're just going to step back into another simulation and another
layer deep into the simulation i don't have the answer but i think that it's an interesting
like kind of little thought thought perspective or does ai help us break out of the simulation
um i mean we we probably sound like nutjobs to a lot of people right now but um i find this stuff
fascinating so if we get back to like the map is not the territory if the territory is truth
and the map in some way conceals truth.
How do we break through?
Like people often describe Bitcoin as truth.
Is this a way of getting through this sort of map
of what money has been historically?
I believe so.
And so like, I think Bitcoin at its foundation,
like ignore a lot of the other things,
but let's just focus on scarcity for a second.
I think what Bitcoin's scarcity model, 21 million does,
is it ends up creating
and kind of almost forcing a bit of like a free market.
If you as an individual,
you've got this permissionless,
trustless monetary system
that preserves purchasing power,
what ends up happening is
no longer can a system rely on intervention.
Value flows to where value is being created.
And that is unbelievably important.
If we can force a free market
where capital flows to the individuals
that are creating products and services
that benefit society,
then I think that we start to,
as I discussed previously,
we start to like realign these monetary incentives.
and so if we start to realign these monetary incentives what does that do on the government
side of things if a government has to be fiscally responsible well it's now going to start thinking
long term so it's starting to think long term it's going to look at its balance sheet and be like
where are my current biggest expenses well it's probably in like health care i'm spending so much
on this sick society so maybe we need to actually think about how do we create a healthy society
and then it will look at what other expenditure do i have well we've got a lot of energy expenditure
A lot of money goes into being able to support and fuel this economy.
So how do we actually create a more efficient society?
Well, maybe we need to actually direct more capital, which we do have from saving, not
necessarily from intervention and debasing the currency, but actually towards realigning
the incentives and creating more efficient society.
So if they do direct capital towards research, it is towards actual research that aligns
with the map, sorry, the territory, as opposed to kind of these misaligned structures.
and then you can look at it not just from the government perspective but from the individual's
perspective which is if we as individuals are living in a society where we have a currency
that preserves our purchasing power then as time goes by life starts to get easier as life starts
to get easier we start to have more capacity if we have more capacity we can be more curious about
the world and i think that if we've got more curiosity people are going to be diving into
this stuff at the moment so many people are kneecapped or they're limited in their ability
to dive into this stuff because they're working 50, 60 hour work weeks and they just don't
have the ability in their spare time to go and read a 500 page book, 400 page book on
the science and the laws of thermodynamics and whether or not they're accurate.
And so I think that ultimately Bitcoin realigns a lot of the monetary incentives, not only
for government, but I also think for the individual to just be more curious and to just dive into
a lot of these subjects.
And I think that it is that kind of reality alignment where everybody is constantly striving
to redraw the map as close to the territory as possible,
that I think that that's where we move towards abundance.
That's where we move towards kind of prosperity.
The big question there, though,
is if you have a happy, peaceful society
with free energy and no wars,
then why do you need government?
100%.
And that's the thing.
That's assuming we maintain similar structures today.
But I would also say that when it comes to
like what what model is best for us to be able to have prosperity i think that to be 100 honest i
think that many people will say anarchy many people will say socialism many people will say
capitalism and i think that there are pros and cons nearly all of these systems and it's just
trying to figure out like i don't necessarily have a horse in this race for what i think is best i
think that society is going to do what society is going to do but i think most importantly it's the
separation of money and state. And I think that that just gives people more capacity or at least
realigns our trajectory towards hopefully building a more kind of grounded society.
It's also something that AI is going to accelerate in terms of breakthroughs in physics that allow for
cheaper or free energy and healthcare breakthroughs. There's a potential world in the not
too distant future where people are living to 200 years old or whatever it might be.
I remember speaking to someone who said, just don't die now. I think it was Roman Jampolski.
he was like if you just don't die now you might live forever well so preston and i have been doing
this kind of like book review series and one of the books that we ended up reviewing i think this
came out maybe maybe a month ago three weeks ago it was called longevity and uh this kind of book
on longevity completely blanked on unfortunately the guys the author's name um this kind of guy
talks about like how we're at the age where lifespan is about to extend uh immensely and
And I actually, to be 100% honest, I play the other side of that.
I play the other side of it from two perspectives.
One is from like a personal kind of more spiritual take, and one is from a data-driven take.
And we'll start with the data-driven take, which is, there are studies, there's a really
interesting one from 1994 that looks at the Romans 2,000 years ago, because the Romans
were the first civilization to really start taking records.
And so when they started taking records, we were able to see what was the average age
of these individuals how long did they live how did they die all of these things what did they die
of and when you actually remove out infant mortality and you removed out war because that
would obviously prematurely cut someone's life short and kind of lower the average age when you
removed war infant mortality out you realize the average roman man was living between 75 to 80
2 000 years ago to me i'm just like that is mind-blowing what they realized is that up until
uh kind of when rome was thriving a lot of the citizens were getting really sick and they
realized it was because animals were kind of dropping their feces in the water lines and
people were basically getting sick from bacterial infections e.coli all of these various things
and they realized okay if people are getting sick from these feces i don't know how they're doing it
they don't understand microbiology they ended up basically removing animals from the center of rome
and roman life expectancy skyrocketed well today in the u.s the average male is living to 75
point i think eight years old uh and if you take out infant mortality and war they're living to
like 76.5 or something like that so the average male in the u.s today is living on the low end
range of the average male in rome 2000 years ago so you start to recognize that i think part of the
stories we've been told are misleading and i think a lot of the technology we've seen in the medical
industry isn't necessarily as amazing as we've been told and if we simply have like clean running
water and we have sanitation those go such a long way um and then the other point i'll add from the
spiritual side of things is when we actually look evolutionarily most species like pretty much every
single species doesn't really live much longer after um what's the word after they're able to
give birth and the reason why is because evolutionarily it doesn't make sense if you are to
consume your resources which are for your offspring to be fueled by then you actually risk
the longevity of your species and so if we extend our lifespan immeasurably after we've already
given birth then we are potentially kneecapping humanity not only that but we're preventing our
ability to adapt i think that shorter lifespans allow us to adapt to our changing environment
and then i also just think from a spiritual perspective that death is a part of life i think
that in the eastern approach to medicine was that hey like if you get sick if you get a terminal
illness you're probably going to die within a couple months and so you have these multi-generational
families living together and spending time together and when their grandparents get sick
they spend time they see death and they're accustomed to it and so by the time it happens
to them they're just like i'm not fearful of death it's just a part of life and i almost embrace it
and there's a lot of respect for the elders and then you come over to western culture and you're
just like we're prolonging elderly people's lives but we're not prolonging health we're just
prolonging lifespan and so people are in this suffering state for 5 10 15 plus years and they're
withering away and we see this painful existence and then what it does is i think it instills fear
of death in us and so instead what do we do we put them in homes we put them in homes we push them
out of society and now by the time people start to get sick they've never seen death in their life
and they're so scared of it and so what do we want to do we want to extend life longevity all
of these things i think it's coming from a fear place and not necessarily from like a grounded is
this actually what i really want anyway there was a bit of a ramble there's a very sobering note to
finish the show on there so um so this has been awesome i really really enjoyed this um you're
going to come across to bedford in march is that right i'm hoping to come across yeah if there's a
place for me to talk i will 100 be there i've got something pretty special lined up for you i'm going
to tell you off air um but if you want to see seb speak in the flesh bedford march 27th it's going
to be good thanks a lot danny honestly i again like as i briefly mentioned what you're doing is
phenomenal and the community very much needs it and just bringing together disparate minds with
different opinions and being able to talk about these things and sometimes it's fun to just go on
a bit more of these like philosophical rants and i apologize if people wouldn't fully follow or think
they're kind of going down kind of odd rabbit holes but i think that it's good to just bring
these discussions to the surface. No, I love this. I think we should do it again relatively soon. And
go check out Seb's book, The Hidden Cost of Money. Tell everyone where to go and find you and all your
work. Totally. You can find me just at my website, Seb Bunny. Bunny is B-U-N-N-E-Y.com. I have a
blog, The Cheer of Self-Sovereignty, where I discuss some of these ideas. There's a book,
The Hidden Cost of Money. And more than anything, I never want price to be a barrier to people's
learning. And so if someone ever wants a copy of the book and they can't afford it, feel free to
just reach out and I'll just send you the ebook. Like I think that this community is really
incredible. And so I always encourage people to continue their learning journey.
That's awesome, Seb. Thank you, man. This has been great. I will speak to you very soon.
Thanks, Danny.
Thank you.