on an optimistic path, Bitcoin is like the gas on the fire
in a way that we want it to be,
meaning running in the renewal cycle,
returning back to OG American values,
distribution of power, property rights,
smaller federal government,
less interventionalism abroad.
Bitcoin is money has all those same principles.
And I think we're right for that resurgency.
I'll choose to believe that the fourth American Republic,
the bright orange future, the next first turning,
whatever you want to call it,
will be on a Bitcoin standard.
I would expect us to have some sort of a CBDC attempt globally,
ultimately fall back to Bitcoin.
I would expect equality of opportunity
to supersede equality of outcome.
I would expect more symmetry between state and citizen.
I would hope young people have an optimistic view of the future,
which is certainly not the case today.
I would expect less financialization in our economy.
I would expect pro natalism.
Let's be honest,
the D population is a thousand or 10,000 times bigger risks
than overpopulation.
I cannot believe we are so dense to something like that.
And so the next age is the orange age,
it's not the golden age, and I'm here for it.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker, and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 878540,
and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk,
where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin
and whatever else comes up.
And today, that guest is Brandon Quidham.
Brandon and I dug really deep into the fourth turning today,
where we're at in the cycle, what comes next,
whether it has to end in total war,
what role Bitcoin plays in all of this.
And we also got into general cultural shifts,
anocyclosis, parenting, homeschooling,
and a whole lot more.
This was a great rip with Brandon,
I think you're gonna love this episode.
But before we dive in, do me a favor
and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast,
wherever you're listening or watching,
and make sure to subscribe on YouTube or Rumble as well
by searching at Walker America.
Head to the show notes to grab discount links
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or go directly to bitbox.swiss.walker
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Send an email to hello at bitcoinpodcast.net
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And if you find this show valuable,
consider giving value back by giving it a zap on Noster
or a boost on Fountain, I truly appreciate it.
Without further ado,
let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Brandon Quidham.
Brandon, I'm stoked to have you here.
We were chatting a little bit before this,
and hello to folks on Noster who are here on the livestream.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
But we have a number of things we can get into today.
We're at an interesting time in space and time.
A lot of weird stuff is happening.
Maybe some of it's not so weird when put in context,
but we've got Trump's inauguration coming up.
That itself is not particularly weird.
That seemed like it was fairly inevitable,
given just how ridiculous this past administration has been.
But we've got still smoldering wars around the world.
We've got crazy monetary shenanigans
happening all over the place.
It seems like every week,
there's like a new news alert that like,
new viral outbreak fears in China
spark fresh pandemic concerns.
And I'm like, I feel like it's like Groundhog Day.
This just keeps happening.
It's like, I don't, like nobody's fallen for it this time.
It's like, I don't know.
Do you have the same sense that it's like,
so much of this, these news cycles seem to be just like,
crisis on repeat right now.
I mean, obviously like the wildfires in California,
that is like genuinely a terrible situation,
like very real crisis.
But then you see this like,
these viral outbreak type crisis headlines happening
over and over.
And it's like, I've seen this movie before.
Like, I don't know.
It feels like you're kind of taking crazy pills.
Yeah, I'm of two minds on this one.
So I do see it, it is real.
And my instinct is to just not pay attention really
to any of them and be cynical about the headlines.
And does it affect my day to day life?
And the answer is no.
So I try to distance myself, try not to react.
Specifically around, are we gonna try to run back
COVID lockdowns or whatever,
which it seems like that energy is bubbling up again.
I would like to believe that we learned our lesson
and we wouldn't follow that path again.
However, I don't wanna get caught being wrong again,
because if we go back to 2020,
I like many Bitcoiners panicked early.
It was end of 2019, early 2020.
The videos from China were crazy.
No one's talking about it.
So I panicked, I prepared a little bit.
I also flew my family and everyone I loved to Costa Rica
in February of 2020 and got married
and almost canceled the wedding because I was scared of this.
And I brought it up to my wife and she's like,
what are you talking about?
And so totally, blissfully unaware.
Long story short, wedding went fine.
We got everyone home from Costa Rica.
And about seven days after we got home,
the MBA shut down and the whole world locks down.
And in that moment,
it probably was May or June or something like that
before the fear spell wore off on me.
And I started looking around being like,
there's no way we're gonna go through
with all this crazy stuff, right?
And I go to the co-op and buy some food
with a bear chin, like a psychopath.
And people will look at me like,
I'm actually like a psychopath.
And so I sort of underestimated
how my fellow Americans responded,
how they bent over and grabbed their ankles
for big daddy government.
And I don't know, I guess I thought more people
thought independently and that they wouldn't just
blindfolded do something against their own interests.
And I was totally wrong.
And so when we look ahead,
that's in the back of my mind thing.
I would like to believe we don't do that again.
And I have to imagine it'd be much harder
to convince people to follow in line here.
But at the same time, we are herd animals.
And if I've learned anything,
it's that the cost of going against the social consensus
is high and people will voluntarily give up their values
in order to maintain consensus with the herd.
And so I'm kind of split on the issue.
I think if they try to pull it off now,
it's a little too close,
where I don't think they'll get it through the door,
but there's a lot to lose.
And the powers that be, they see a Trump administration,
they see the rise of Bitcoin,
they see Elon Musk,
who I would probably consider a neutral character
over the long arc,
but generally helping us out right now.
And it seems like the conversation has opened up.
The vibes have indeed shifted.
And so I want to believe you sum all that up
and there's no chance it could happen again,
but we'll see.
It's interesting,
because I would agree that it's gonna be a lot harder
to let's say kind of dupe people into submission again
with regard to, let's say, the viral pandemic side of things.
That said, I think that people are not as,
to borrow a phrase from Immunology,
but they're not as manipulated against propaganda
as they believe.
And they may be somewhat,
it's like the COVID boosters.
It's like, oh yeah, they're safe and effective
and they work and it's like,
people think they've been kind of like boosted
against propaganda, right?
But it just, that doesn't mean another type of propaganda
is not just gonna sneak in there again,
a different red herring that's gonna be thrown up,
a different sort of distraction that's,
look over here, not over here,
and they may still just find themselves
being right into that.
I hope not.
I hope people are,
I think it's a fact that trust in institutions,
trust in media has deteriorated
probably to the point of no return.
Certainly in the media,
probably to a lesser extent in a lot of institutions,
but that's also a factor of who happens
to be in power at the time.
Like Republicans are gonna be more trusting
of institutionals like the federal government right now
because Trump's coming into power, right?
Democrats were more trusting when Biden was in office,
but they'll be less trusting of the federal government
now that Trump is.
So like you have some,
there's some like balance there at least,
but I don't know, I don't know what happens from here.
It's gonna be interesting.
I feel like these next couple of weeks alone,
just like leading up to this inauguration,
it feels like they're gonna try to throw
as many things out there as possible,
so as much kind of chaos and doubt as possible,
and just sort of see what happens.
But I'm, you know, that said,
I'm very hopeful about the, you know,
I'm bullish long-term, I'm on the future.
I'm not so sure short-term,
things could get pretty interesting.
But, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to talk
to you kind of specifically is
because you've done a lot of work,
both, I mean, on Bitcoin obviously,
but then kind of bringing Bitcoin into the context
of these ideas of the fourth turning
and these different kind of societal cycles
that we go through.
And I mean, maybe a good place to start out
for folks who don't know you,
is just kind of like a little bit of a background
of how you started even looking into this idea of, you know,
okay, yeah, we've got this, you know, the fourth turning,
this, you know, the book that was written back in the 90s.
Yeah, a lot of people know of it, have read it,
have referenced it, but then taking that
and applying a Bitcoin lens to it
and kind of like why that, why you decided to do that,
like what snapped for you where you're like, ah, okay,
this makes sense here in this context.
Yeah, absolutely.
So like all Bitcoin think boys,
every content I consume, I plow through the orange filter
and then I just make sure Bitcoin fits in
and fits all the analogies in whatever format I need to
in order to score a think boy points on the internet.
That way.
No, but seriously, this came into my life
at a pretty pivotal point.
I was mid 2020 during COVID.
We kind of touched on this a second ago.
The world's going crazy.
Why are people telling on each other?
I can't possibly believe this.
And I was cooped up inside, trying to make sense of the world.
And for better or for worse, I must feel like I have
some sort of understanding of the world.
And it's mostly an illusion, but it makes me feel good
at least to know that at least I have a framework
that makes sense of the world around me,
whether I'm right or wrong or if it's even possible
to fully understand the system, we'll save that.
And so read the fourth turning, read a bunch of other books.
And I thought the fourth turning thesis made the most sense.
And it put me at ease in a sense that
what we're going through is not unique.
This isn't a one time experience where the world's ending.
It's more like a predictable social cycle
that will have an end and it's not gonna be like this forever.
We're not going to the gulags forever.
So put that out of our mind.
And then we can go forward and say, okay,
if we're in a fourth turning cycle, which we'll get to,
how do I navigate that?
And if I have those tools in my lap,
is this all of a sudden not as scary of a situation?
And I found that to be true.
But let me give you a 30 second background prior.
I'm Bitcoin class 2017, of course, bumped into it prior,
but it didn't make sense.
So I dismissed it like most.
2017 traded all the shitcoins, made a bunch of money,
thought I was a genius.
2018 came, lost a bunch of money,
realized I was in fact not a genius.
And then I spent about six months deep into the research.
Like most people do a total obsession,
beyond obsession, 15 to 20 hours a day for months on end.
And during that period,
I taught myself economics from the ground up.
Had to unlearn all the Keynesian economics
I was filled with in college, throw that away.
And also justify my, at the time,
poor financial decision jumping into something
I didn't actually understand.
So mix all that up.
And I found that I very much resonate
with the underlying value system embedded
or imbued into the Bitcoin thing.
Being, hey, let's create a parallel monetary system
that can't be captured.
Let's bring some symmetry between individuals
in the state through the monetary system,
because it's a large source of power.
And add all that up.
And I'm like, okay, cool.
I'm gonna shift all my energy here,
both financially and my work energy as well.
I had a previous career in enterprise software.
Then I did startups for about five years,
while working remotely and traveling around the world.
So stereotypically, you read four hour work week,
went through yoga teacher training, smoked DMT,
bought a one way ticket to India, sold everything I own.
And then for the next five years,
worked remotely all over the world,
built some nice businesses that kept us traveling forever.
Nothing too crazy.
I learned a lot about digital marketing
and just generally building a business.
And then found Bitcoin, sold those businesses off,
and spent about two years, 2018 and 2019,
I would say career transition mode.
I was writing, I was researching,
I had a consulting firm for a while,
selling really expensive white papers to businesses
that were essentially like,
hey, no, you should not use a blockchain for that.
Like a healthcare consortium would say,
hey, what if we put a blockchain on it?
And here's 80 pages for $80,000
that says, no, you should not put a blockchain on it.
And so instead of them paying $8 million
for a pilot program to blow 800 million on a project,
they could pay me 80 grand to just not do any of that.
So I thought it was a good service.
It's a nice business, honestly.
It was a good business for everyone.
And then found Corey at a Bitcoin conference
in San Francisco, which was a legendary conference,
the first beef steak I went to too,
on CK's roof, shout out CK.
And yeah, Corey and I had a good chat
about his upcoming venture, which ended up being Swan.
So I joined Swan a little over five years ago,
December, 2019.
And yeah, had a good run there,
very proud of what we built.
And the future's bright with Swan.
We're gonna have some big things coming in 2025.
I said it was gonna be 30 seconds
and it was more like three minutes.
So background out of the way.
If you heard that before, I'm sorry.
Okay, let's talk about 4th Turning.
Founded in 2020.
Do you want me to give a high level overview,
a little bit of the thesis?
I kind of already put it in context for me.
I think, yeah, the thesis would be helpful for folks
because I think a lot of people have heard about this
as just kind of maybe a nebulous idea
and haven't actually dug into kind of what this actually means.
So I think an overview is super helpful.
Awesome.
Okay, so written in the 90s by two historians
and demographers think like DC nerds who love history.
They're just doing history research
and writing books about American history.
And they found a pattern,
which they later called the generational theory
or generational cycle theory popularizes the 4th Turning.
So to be clear, they didn't come up with a theory,
they discovered it, and then they found more details
to support it.
And same year as a sovereign individual came out.
And I think stepping back now,
it's a theory of the world, it's a way to view the world.
It's not, it doesn't map one to one.
And it's an emergent bottom-up thesis that says,
huh, it seems like humans in civilization
operate in this pattern.
And if that's true, how can we use that to see the world?
It pairs very nicely with a top-down approach.
Think a long-term debt cycle popularized by Dalio.
If you kind of mishmash those two together,
I think you have a pretty good picture of the world.
And the theory is based on the fact
that generational cohorts are predictable
and they follow a pattern.
So we're millennials, we're born in a certain period of time,
we're all forged by the environment on which we grew up.
So things that would shape us is what's our childhood like
primarily in the 90s?
Okay, we're over-parented, we're all snowflakes,
13th place ribbon, dare program.
Then we have 2001, okay, we didn't really get to experience
that as an adult.
We have 9-11, stock market collapse,
the wars in the Middle East.
Then we have the global financial crisis coming of age,
entering the workforce period.
Then we have COVID, right?
So you add all that up, that's kind of how our group
was forged as how we grew up.
And when we leave the house and we leave our parents
and we go out in the world, we start to bond together.
And that cements our identity as a cohort, as a generation.
And then we become young adults
and we progress through life.
And we have predictable responses to our environment
because we're all forged the same way.
And the generation after us has a different context
in which they're born and they're raised differently.
And so we can predict how they will impact the world
as they get older.
And the author found four different stages of life.
So childhood, young adult, mid-adult, elderly-hood,
each one has very defined roles in society,
which are obvious.
It also follows a spring, summer, winter, fall pattern.
And so that's what they discovered.
And then they also found out that roughly 80 to 90 years
is the full cycle.
So there's four generational archetypes
that repeat and repeat and repeat.
So think 80 to 90 years,
which is roughly one human lifetime, that's important.
And at the end of this cycle, we have this catastrophe,
this crisis, and over the last like four or 500 years,
it's always been a war.
And every fourth turning has had a war.
Every war has been in a fourth turning, every total war.
So they're highly correlated.
Doesn't mean there has to be a war every 80, 90 years,
but it means that we need conditions sufficient enough
to mobilize the people in order to make dramatic changes.
We, you probably know this in your personal life,
it's hard to make a change.
We wait till the last minute.
You got to touch the stove before you realize, right?
And as a society, we're the same way.
So until the pain is upon us, we don't act.
And so right now we're in the middle
of a fourth turning period.
We should expect more volatility.
If you see the world through this lens,
the cancel culture makes sense,
the political division makes sense,
the war drum beating makes sense,
COVID lockdowns make sense,
all this stuff makes sense.
And so that's the end of the cycle is a wartime period.
We reimagine the institutions.
You think politics, education,
the geopolitical alignment, monetary systems,
all that stuff changes.
And it's almost as if over the last 80, 90 years,
entropy has just decayed our systems.
We created them in the 40s-ish
and it suited the world at the time.
Society changed, we corrupted those institutions.
They're not what they once were.
We look around and we say,
uh-oh, our institutions don't serve us.
Collectively, we have this feeling of,
okay, it's time to fix our institutions.
And it's so bad that we as a species
are willing to make massive sacrifice
in order to make a change.
That's an important part.
We're willing to do crazy stuff
because the stakes are so high.
Okay, midway through the cycle is a religious movement.
Also, over the last 400 years, every 80 years,
right at the midpoint of the cycle,
we have one of these.
This would be the civil rights era.
This would be the Protestant Reformation.
This would be the Quakers.
And I think there's one more.
I don't know my history that well back then.
And so, yeah, that's interesting.
That's our inner world, okay?
That's also a response to the kids that grew up prior.
So let me give you the full cycle
in as short as possible to give you an idea
of how this looks.
The previous fourth turning, 1929 to 1945,
starts with a stock market collapse.
Then we have the Great Depression.
FDR takes power eventually World War II.
And then we remake the entire world.
During the 30s, FDR's era,
we were responding to this event, 1929 stock market collapse.
And what do we do?
We created all this crazy stuff
that would have never been possible prior.
FDIC, worried about your bank?
Don't worry, the feds got you.
Lose your job,
don't worry, unemployment insurance has got you.
Worried about retirement, social security,
World Bank, NATO, IMF, Bretton Woods,
all of this stuff was created in that period of time.
If you rewind 10, 20 years,
none of it would have happened.
But again, the pain is there, the stakes are high,
we're willing to reset the game board
and build our institutions anew.
Then we go into the post-war era, okay?
And the post-war era is defined by stability,
boring, white picket fence, woody guffery,
relative stability, relative equality.
But the young people, as they do,
they look around, they go,
you guys are fucking nerds.
What is so boring?
This is so boring.
Like, where's the sex drugs and rock and roll?
So like any good kid does,
they push back on their parents, right?
That pins those two archetypes against each other, okay?
And what does that do?
The kids grow up, they push back,
and they change the interior world,
and they create the psychedelic 60s,
civil rights era, et cetera.
Kids born in that period, they were under-parented.
Now you have the Gen X kids.
So the boomers, they under-parented their kids,
they went from hippies to yuppies,
they don't want responsibility,
do as I say, not as I do, that type of thing.
So then you have this under-parented generation, Gen X.
These are the bad boys, these are the latchkey kids.
This is Elon Musk and Peter Thiel,
and a lot of the Silicon Valley Startup Energy Alliance
with Gen Xers, okay?
And that period of time is defined as the third turning.
So second turning is that religious movement.
Third turning is a period of deregulation,
and it's about individualism, okay?
And that sows the seeds for future problems.
Because as we deregulate,
as we sort of take off the training wheels of society,
it maintains its pace and its momentum for a while,
but eventually those things catch up to us.
And by deregulating all the banks,
it sets the seeds for 2008,
which is also the start of the fourth turning
that we're in now.
So that mirrors 1929, that transitions from third to fourth,
and I'll tie one thing to politics.
And the third turning, the politicians,
they essentially minimize all the bad stuff.
They're like, hey, the getting's good, just vote for me,
it's a 90s baby, Bill Clinton, we're all good.
And they would hide all the bad stuff.
Then you have the fourth turning, what happens?
Hope and change with Obama.
Make America great again, right?
These are clearly just attacking how bad it is
and how we need to change.
So that's harnessing the mood shift from third to fourth,
and I don't think that these politicians,
maybe some of them read this, but it's an intuitive thing.
You get feedback and you end up there.
And so yeah, now we're in the fourth turning again,
I expect a total war or some sort of massive climax
in the next five, 10 years.
Previous fourth turning was World War II,
the Civil War, Revolutionary War, et cetera.
And so those are the periods we can look to
for information or some parallels.
And I think now we're very close to the climax.
I did think COVID could have been the climax,
and then all of a sudden just tourists apart
made it even worse, so that's out.
What we'd be looking for is a unification process,
a process that says, I don't care what your day-to-day
politics are, we got a band together
to get through this really hard thing.
Okay, that could be Ukraine, Russia, nope,
could be Middle Eastern war, probably not.
That feels like proxy war, that feels like us doing bidding
for other countries in the region
that I don't need a name for keeping us on YouTube.
It could be Taiwan and China, it could be something,
it could be just a fiat sovereign debt bubble
for all the governments blowing up at the same time.
I don't know what it will be,
but those are the things I have my eye on.
And then after we have the climax, we sort of rebuild,
we redo the institutions,
think maybe transition to a Bitcoin standard,
maybe realign the geopolitics that we have in the world.
We already saw the parties,
the Dems and Republicans in the US totally realign.
And so we're starting to see, if you squint a little bit,
what the next chapter could be.
And I expect us to enter that maybe 2030,
maybe up to 2035.
The theory does not predict things,
but it does predict the mood.
It predicts how the constellation of the archetypes,
the hero, nomad, prophet, artist,
how those archetypes are and what age they are,
that predicts the mood.
And so one final point here,
otherwise I can run forever on this.
In the third turning,
okay, that period of time would be like 80s to 2008,
in that window.
Then if we had a reason to go to war,
we had a catalyst, we just wouldn't go to war.
We would look around and say, what's the point?
The getting's good, why would we take this big risk?
There's no point.
However, you have a 08, you have COVID stuff, whatever.
You have more impetus to go to war
as things, the stakes are higher.
Actually, a better example is the Germans sank the Lusitania
or whatever that ship's called in the early 1900s,
which was a third turning event.
What did we do?
Yeah, whatever, don't worry about it.
Okay, fast forward a little bit, Pearl Harbor happens.
Then what?
The people the next day are like, yep, total war,
I'm in, and the whole country mobilizes.
So that kind of gives you similar catalysts,
different outcomes because the mood is different.
The constellation of those archetypes changes,
and that's what we can use to predict our outcomes.
If you've accepted that we're living
through the fourth turning,
then it's time to get yourself some Bitcoin
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When you go to bitbox.swiss.walker
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So thank you.
First of all, thank you for the background on this.
And I would be happy to let you just run straight
for three hours on this, but I do have a couple
of questions I wanna pick into a little bit
because one thing is I've been going over this
and you've written a lot about this,
you've done a lot of appearances talked about this.
And one thing that I noticed in just kind of my own research
is it seems like each of the fourth turnings
also have to be kind of the,
right before that fourth turning kicks off,
there appears to be some sort of technological revolution
happening around that same time.
Like, so I mean, if you look at like this,
like before, you know, before the revolutionary war,
you had kind of some of the early scientific revolution
in terms of just like navigation, military,
and even like economic practices.
And by the time of the American Revolution,
it was like, okay, there was the steam engine,
there was like various like mechanization
of textile production, things like that.
The civil war, you kind of have like
that second industrial revolution
kicking off around that same time,
also these revolutions aren't just like purely like nice,
good things for humanity,
it's also tends to be like advances in weaponry, right?
That seems to also come along with it.
And then you've got, okay,
let's fast forward to the next fourth turning,
which is like around the Great Depression and World War II.
Well, you had some very like early computing,
you had nuclear energy, obviously,
you had mass production happening in the early 19th century.
And then you come to where we are now, okay,
right before this fourth turning,
before assuming this kicked off in 2008,
you saw, I mean, the internet era,
like the information age started to kick off.
With that information age, it may, you know,
it may say, well, what's the weapon there?
Well, I think we all clearly now see that very much the,
as much of a tool as our global connectivity is,
and the free flow of information,
that can be weaponized in very physical ways,
i.e. attacking critical infrastructure
tied to the internet,
or it can be mechanized in very, let's say,
in terms of, you know, information warfare, propaganda,
the dissemination thereof.
Would you agree that you sort of, I mean,
and is it, it seems too much of a coincidence to say,
huh, things start to get really kind of chaotic
and hectic and break down,
right after there's a massive shift
from one level of technological information,
where we leapfrog and go above to another level and say,
okay, this is the new normal now,
this is the new paradigm,
like the world has changed forever,
and there's no putting the G back in the bottle.
Is that kind of where you're at as well?
So, okay, I've got a complex view on this one.
It's black and white clear the technology-shaped society
in a way, there's no question that it's true.
However, through this thesis, it wouldn't,
you can't really predict when new technology comes
throughout the thesis.
What you can predict through the fourth turning lens
is that how will we respond to the new technology?
What are the people looking for?
What are they gonna use the technology for?
I do believe that technology inherently has a bias,
so a CBDC versus Bitcoin.
Are they neutral?
People say a tool is neutral.
A knife can cut your apple or it can stab your neighbor, right?
I don't think it's black and white, they're all neutral, right?
A CBDC has tremendous power for abuse,
very little power to empower individuals.
Bitcoin is the complete opposite.
It's very hard to abuse people with Bitcoin.
And so I think technology is biased inherently.
That's point one.
Point two is the mood, the fourth turning mood
would dictate how we use and how we develop that technology.
A good example would be the internet, okay?
The early internet was a cipherpunk thing,
it was a libertarian thing.
The personal computing revolution's gonna empower
the libertarian dream, right?
Then we had the, that was a Gen X idea, of course.
They're the bad boys, they're the no-mads,
they're the individuals.
Then we have the millennials come over, our boy Zuck.
What does Zuck do?
Well, he's trying to get laid and he's struggling,
so he creates face smash for whatever in-cell reasons,
although now he might be based and we might like him,
we'll see.
But point being, Zuck made the thing that millennials want.
Millennials are the hero generation, we're communitarian,
we're not individualistic,
we're gonna flirt with communism and socialism
like we already have.
Unironically, you look around, there's hammer and sickle
and down with capitalism and call each other comrades.
Obviously misplaced energy, but that's what we should expect
right now, the same was true in the 30s,
red scare, communists everywhere,
like that was very real and we're doing it again right now.
We're on the knife's edge between what way do we go
during this period, okay?
So long story short, I think technology plays a role
in society, a massive role, but it does not change
the generational cycle, that's below that,
that's embedded into our biology, it can't go away.
But what technology could do is amplify this period
or decrease that period, it changes the shape of the mood,
but the generations are the generations.
And so, yeah, Facebook is Gen Z or millennial,
sorry, whatever we are millennials
and personal computing, we Gen X,
that's one way to slice that.
And then I guess AI becomes the zoomers,
that's what they get.
Well, I'm curious too, so I mean,
I think that's a fair characterization,
like to simplify it in other ways that culture would be,
is sometimes upstream of technology.
Like granted, they both influence each other
in different ways, like technology can also help
shape culture because its mere existence
is obviously going to change how culture reacts,
but the culture that is present when the technology emerges
also kind of dictates how that technology is used,
for what purposes, as you compared,
Cypherpunk versus Facebook uses of the internet, right?
But I'm curious as well, just because of course,
as Bitcoin think boys, we have to look at things
through orange colored glasses,
where do you see money generally fitting into
this kind of theory?
Because the other, if we're looking through
this fourth turning lens,
in the midst of these fourth turnings,
there also always appears to be some sort of monetary collapse,
inflationary debasement event, right?
Maybe it's not a full out collapse,
but oftentimes it is like civil war era.
Yep, we had collapsing currencies.
I mean, just looking at the US collapsing currencies,
revolutionary era, obviously that was initially driven
by economic concerns, right?
Trying to get out from under the boot of those tea bag and brits.
And then you look at 2008 kicking off this current one,
the most massive debasement event the world has ever seen,
which now seems small in comparison to the COVID print, right?
And each subsequent print will presumably
dwarf the prior one, excuse me.
But is that kind of also just a key fast of that?
Is that just a, is that a natural function of a society
that's beginning to kind of break down?
Or is that something that, you know,
like it's like a chicken and egg type of thing.
Like what comes first, the societal and cultural breakdown,
or the debasement and destruction of the monetary unit?
Yeah, it's a good question.
I think it's the right question, by the way.
And there is no linear causality here.
This is a complex emergent system.
All these variables influence each other
in ways that are unpredictable and chaotic
and really hard to map.
And so I haven't done a long term study
of economic transitions and how they relate to the fourth turning.
I would think that the large ones would most likely line up
their peaks or their troughs,
however you look at it, with fourth turning periods,
because that's the period where we have
the largest societal shift.
But if you ask Bitcoiners what were the big changes,
like the Federal Reserve came in the second or third turning,
Bretton Woods was fourth turning,
but the petrodollar off the gold was in the second turning.
And so if we look over the last 100 years,
the largest one was Bretton Woods by far.
I think we're going through the next largest realignment now,
which would be fourth turning.
So my belief is that we have maybe,
we should assume on average,
minor changes to monetary systems
would occur on the second turning-ish,
and major ones would be on the fourth turning.
That's how I would see it.
So every 40 years, we have a small one,
sorry, every 80 years we have a small one,
and every 80 years we have a big one.
So every 40 it goes, small change, big change,
small change, big change.
That would be where I think the gravity
of these forces would align,
but it would not happen perfectly.
We should expect it to not happen perfectly
because it's complex and there's so many variables.
That's how I'd see it mapping out.
I do have a lot of opinions on where we go
with money in the fourth turning and how Bitcoin fits,
but I wanna get that out of the way
because a lot of people ask good questions like this.
Why doesn't technology drive society
or isn't the fourth turning just horoscopes for intellectuals?
Which is a really good critique.
If you're knee deep into the theory, you're like,
oh, it's another doom porn.
Oh, it's another lame cycle thing
in order to sell your book and scare people.
We always have these, right?
Very, very good place to start.
I started there too,
and I've spent so much time with the material
that I now believe that it's deep, deep, deep biology.
It's as deep as you rebel against your parents.
I think that's really important.
I think the idea that,
like that's actually a self-preservation mechanism
for our genes because you want diversity
and process and opinion in order to have a healthy society.
You need new energy, new ideas.
You need to fight it out every generation
to see and double down on what's good.
And the older you are,
the more rigid your belief system is.
So your role is to say,
hey, that's not how I used to do it.
And the young kids are supposed to say,
you boomers are stupid.
Like, check out this new idea.
And then the old people will say,
yeah, but you don't really have the full context.
Like you don't even know why we chose these things.
And that tension is what creates longevity in our species.
In our civilization,
the exact same tension exists in markets.
Okay, in order to have a healthy restaurant market,
you must have tons of restaurants fail.
Wait a minute, how does that work?
Okay, you need restaurants taking risks
in order to create something new,
change with the adapting tastes and how society moves.
And you need a vibrant energy of risk takers.
And most of them are gonna ultimately fail.
But that's how you keep the restaurant industry happy.
And the exact same thing is true in civilization.
We need new ideas and we need to battle over them.
And so, yeah, so a point being is,
I think this is really deep
and it's embedded in our civilization.
It's not going anywhere.
I think it's also slightly becoming global now.
I think we're syncing up with the rest of the world
for the first time.
I would say 1945, when we ended the last fourth turning,
we had some global forces.
Obviously we're on then to World War II.
But we didn't have a proper globalized economy.
We didn't have global information spread.
We had more siloed liquidity in terms of finance.
And so I think now we're hyper-global.
And I think that what we're seeing now
is similar fourth turning patterns all around the world.
You have extreme left and extreme right
popping up everywhere.
And that would be the same force.
It's the civilization saying we need to make a big change.
And again, on a knife's edge,
you could go left, you could go right there.
Same in the US.
Although I will say that I think Trump winning
gives us the best chance of another century
of American excellence.
We have the things we need here.
We have problems just like everywhere else.
But I think relatively we're in the strongest position today
and it's ours to screw up.
That's how I feel.
If the election went a different way,
I think we would, I would feel the opposite.
I would say we have a huge risk in front of us.
And I would say now we have a moderate risk in front of us.
And I hope we can navigate that.
No, yeah.
It's nice to have a little bit less risk
or perhaps just a different color of risk.
But one thing that I really wanna dig into is this idea,
because you mentioned earlier,
okay, the fourth turning basically always ends with total war.
Now total war, as you correctly pointed out,
in these prior turnings, like if, okay,
I've looked back to the World War II,
if we look back to the Civil War, Revolutionary War,
this was total war, relatively speaking, right?
This was total war for, if we're looking at America,
the Civil War is about as total as you can get
for a war within one nation, right?
The Revolutionary War, I mean, that was literally the,
fighting off the greatest power in the world
by a bunch of, you know, a bunch of hooligans
who decided we didn't wanna pay your t-tax anymore.
World War II, now that was quite a world war.
I mean, that was a, you know,
even just compared to World War I,
they were vastly different in scope and impact.
And now we look at today,
and you mentioned just this globalization
in terms of the interconnectedness of all things, right?
That all of these cycles are sinking up a little more
because we are so connected.
So does, do you think one total war is inevitable
in these turning cycles?
But then the follow-up question to that is,
what does total war look like in this cycle?
Is there a chance for it to be, yeah, it's repeating still,
but our version of what total war is looks somewhat different.
I mean, on the one hand, I could see it being more of a,
you know, an information-based total war.
On the other hand, if it's a hot war, you know,
a kinetic war and it's total war
in a globally connected world,
that's a pretty terrifying thought, right?
And I would hope that nobody really wants that,
but how do you see that?
Is there inevitability?
And then does the shape of what that conflict looks like,
is it drastically different in this cycle?
Yeah, great question.
So I think I touched on it earlier,
but all total wars have happened in 4th turnings
in the US history and all 4th turnings
have had a total war.
So one-to-one correlation,
however, I do not think it's required.
We should not expect it must be required.
What we do need is the forces sufficient enough
to mobilize the entire group in order to do something big.
And in order to create those conditions,
we need it to feel existential, okay?
World War II felt existential.
They bombed Pearl Harbor.
Civil war obviously was existential.
Revolutionary war.
I would say existential for those involved.
That's kind of a hybrid war, internal versus external.
That's another angle to look here.
Obviously World War II's external,
civil war is obviously internal.
Revolutionary war, it was not a black and white situation.
Majority of the fighting was loyalists versus patriots,
Americans on American soil.
Very little of the fighting was actually with the Brits.
And so that's kind of a hybrid situation,
but very existential, huge changes come out of these things.
And so I think another way to look at this,
to pull in William James as any good think boy would,
he has a speech in 1910 I recommend
called the moral equivalent of war.
And he believes that you need to have
a moral equivalent of war in order to maintain society.
You need a credible threat and you need to solve it.
You need to sort of like reaffirm your group.
And he believes or he hopes that in the future
it doesn't need to be a kinetic war.
It just needs to feel like that.
Okay, so it would be my hope that maybe this cycle,
maybe next cycle, we can evolve as a civilization
to get our war energy out without like blowing each other up.
And I don't know what that could look like,
but I'll pontificate a little bit here.
So I do not foresee a global war with tanks
and ships and aircraft carriers and whatever.
I don't foresee a nuclear war either.
That there's a chance,
but I hope we don't go down that path.
What I do expect is something more like a Cold War 2.0,
cyber war and economic war,
blow up your water treatment plant and blame North Korea,
even though we did it and we're China.
I suspect more autonomous drone stuff.
I expect more information warfare,
like try to change the opinions of people,
tell us that the aliens are coming, right?
Like a more sophisticated psychological bouquet of battle.
And then who does the fighting?
The fighting, autonomous drone swarms.
That's number one.
And so you want asymmetric warfare.
Go look at the Red Sea right now.
The might of the US Navy,
which we've been bragging about for a long time,
is getting their ass kicked by a bunch of rebels
with like 200 or $1,000 drones.
And they're just making little bombs and,
you know, a $1,000 drone takes out a $10 million boat
and you're like, okay, this doesn't work.
And so that's the type of fighting I expect.
I expect it to be confusing.
I expect it to be
for a long time and really annoying
and no one's really facing up.
It's kind of like this shadow war.
And it's like behind the scenes jockeying
as the power vacuum opens up globally.
And so what's the global reserve currency?
Does how does the US and China trade relations change?
Does Trump go grab Mexico, Canada, Greenland,
the Panama Canal?
My God, that stuff is so funny to me.
He's so petty and so funny.
We gotta talk about it at some point.
Yeah, let's put a pin in that and come back to it
because it is just wild.
So funny to me.
Okay, so that's the type of battle I see.
And in order to have resolution in the fourth turning,
we need to be done with the fighting
and sort of be exhausted by it and find stability.
I think the two things we wanna see solved here
is the debt problem.
And we need to have strong institutions
that we actually trust.
We're at 100 year low in trusting our institutions.
It's abysmal and you feel it, you know it, it's obvious.
And for good reason, they do not deserve our trust.
They deserve to be mocked
and they deserve all the scorn that they get.
And that's just where we are.
And so what happens with the debt?
All the sovereigns are up to their eyeballs in debt.
All the corporations are, all the people are.
It has to go somewhere.
You referenced this earlier.
2001 bubble, small, kicked the can down the road,
blew up an even bigger 08 housing crisis.
Well, we're not gonna solve that either, kick it down the road.
The only place to go is the sovereigns.
Now the sovereigns have all the debt.
There's nowhere else to go.
So we have to resolve it over the next period of time.
Is it a jubilee?
Is it a decade of financial repression?
And we just inflate it away.
Is it growth plus that?
Can go a couple of different ways.
There's no way we're doing austerity.
That's the other option, throw that out, no will.
Enter Bitcoin, okay?
I think properly understood,
Bitcoin is a new type of institution.
It is a public good.
It is a monetary system owned by the commons.
It serves the purposes of savings and monetary transfer
and all the functions of money.
It also is very reliable.
You don't have to trust the people
that run the Federal Reserve or the big banks.
You can trust this neutral internet protocol
in the same way that we trust our email protocols and HTTPS,
et cetera.
And so I think that actually fulfills an important need.
Each generation has their own way to grasp it.
Gen X, the Elon's of the world.
Yeah, it's libertarian money.
It's go fuck yourself money, great.
Easy.
Millennials, a little harder.
We're collectivists.
It's money for the public good.
It's for the people that need it the most.
It's good for the masses at the expense of the few.
True.
Gen Z, well, they're the artists.
They were born during this chaotic fourth turning.
They're insular.
They're under socialized.
They're very emotional.
They love it because they don't have to go to a bank branch.
You don't have to talk to anyone.
You just send some digits online,
stay in the basement, no problem.
That fits them.
Okay, so the people want it of all generations.
It solves the institutional problem.
And of course it helps on the debt problem
because you can siphon a little value over there,
watch the number go up.
All of a sudden your debt's not as bad.
That's not all we need.
We need major productivity gains.
We need to unleash energy in a way
that we haven't done recently.
We need to do a whole bunch of stuff.
But I see Bitcoin playing the role
and I think its ultimate outcome in a fourth turning
is to decrease the risk, decrease the magnitude of damage
or war or pain can go down now that Bitcoin's here.
We should expect it to be less now that Bitcoin's here.
And the reason is individuals can save themselves
rather than you being backed into a corner financially
because your country blew up the currency
and your savings is gone.
Well, maybe you save a little bit in Bitcoin
so the pain of your currency breaking isn't so great.
Maybe a corporation can do the same.
Maybe a government like El Salvador can do the same.
And so it's sort of a pressure release valve
taking the most volatile energy around the world
and slowly letting it out in certain ways
so that if and when we do have a large crack up boom,
it will be a little bit less violent.
That's how I see that one.
So does that mean that you don't view Bitcoin
as potentially breaking the cycle more so
for those that would choose to accept it
for those who get on the life raft.
It's an option to make the cycle less painful for them.
Whether that be an individual corporation,
nation state, whatever,
Bitcoin's not stopping like what's gonna happen
is gonna happen.
But if you're on board with this,
your forth turning looks a lot less shitty
than other folks.
Is that fair to say?
Exactly right.
And if only 1% of the world owns Bitcoin
and they're insulated,
I don't think it would change the trajectory
of the overall cycle too much.
But if we watch Bitcoin penetrate society
before the sovereign debt bubble blows up,
all of a sudden the pain of that experience
goes down for some percentage,
hopefully a large percentage.
And if that's true,
then we won't have as many people being desperate.
People you have to watch out for
are the people with nothing to lose.
Whether that's a drug addict on the street
waving a bottle in front of you
or that's a government who's desperate
and they wanna raise property taxes,
create unrealized capital gains,
eat the rich, all this kind of stuff.
By the way, eat the rich, soak the rich.
That comes up every fourth turning as well.
So yeah, anyways, save yourself, save your neighbors
and hope Bitcoin adoption.
Yeah, hopefully a lot of people adopt it slowly over time.
We just keep punting on Max Payne
because that's best for the planet.
So yeah, let's hope we can keep that Bitcoin price
achievable and low.
I mean, right now it's looking great.
We're under 0.1 million.
Like that's fantastic.
That is great for us stackers out there in our DCAs.
One thing that I wanted to discuss to you a little bit
is, and we touched on this just before the episode,
was this idea of anicyclosis and this plebius theory.
So he was, for those that don't know,
he was a Greek philosopher, born like 200 BCE.
And he proposed this theory called anicyclosis,
which when I'd only heard about this recently,
like this year, and I thought it was pretty fascinating.
So it's a theory of basically political evolution.
So less so, I think the fourth turning really focuses a lot
on let's say societal, cultural evolution
and how those shifts happen, really paying attention
to the archetypes within them.
Anicyclosis is a little bit of a different,
I would call it maybe, I don't know if it's actually
higher level or lower level theory,
but I think it's a longer timeframe theory,
where you basically go through these six different cycles.
It starts out with a monarch, a rule by one,
that usually arises out of some sort of chaos,
which we'll get to in point number six.
But then that monarchy turns into a tyranny,
a corruption of the monarchy, the ruler becomes oppressive
to their people, which then switches into an aristocracy
being the ruling class.
It's ruled by the few, not by the one,
and they're often the kind of the elites,
the best among society that overthrew the tyrannical monarch
who had become tyrannical after too much time.
Then that aristocracy though also becomes corrupted
and it turns into an oligarchy.
So then basically the elites who were once benevolent
and overthrew the tyranny then become kind of the oppressors
of the masses.
And then that typically shifts back again the other way
towards democracy, right?
Great, democracy ruled by the many,
people are rejecting oligarchic oppression,
but then democracy turns into a oculocracy or mob rule.
And that's basically, okay, democracy was corrupted.
Just like all of the other,
just like the monarch was corrupted to a tyrant,
just like the aristocracy corrupted to an oligarchy,
democracy is corrupted and it turns into mob rule.
And that generally leads to chaos.
And then the cycle repeats itself again
as another strong man and other monarch
emerges to lead the people out of chaos.
And as I was just kind of preparing for our chat here today,
I couldn't help thinking
that we're at this interesting point in history
where it seems that the cycles of anticyclosis
and the fourth turnings line up in a really interesting way.
Cause that's not always the case.
And I haven't gone back far enough to actually chart this
out of when they line up and when they don't.
But in this case, we certainly,
one can make the argument that we're,
I don't think we're in just a,
the beautiful fresh democracy anymore, right?
We've had democracy for a while.
Democracy has become stale.
People are questioning whether or not this works, right?
We've certainly descended into a sort of mob rule,
whether we're at the end game of that, I don't know,
but we're clearly somewhere along that path
at the same time as we're within this fourth turning.
And so what's really interesting to me is,
this will at least be the first time in many generations
where you've had these things line up.
Now, granted, we don't have democracies everywhere
in the world or mob rule ever in the world.
We, you know, we have, there's a mix all over,
but if we're looking at America,
which is by all rights, the most powerful nation
in the world, you and I are both Americans.
So we'll speak to that.
We're seeing these cycles line up.
And I find that to be quite fascinating.
And I'm just wondering what this kind of this,
this confluence of these things coming together,
what that means at the same time as we have,
so we've got these, you know, the anisecloces
and fourth turning cycling together
at this very unique time,
that we also have something that has never happened before,
which is a money that is completely separated from state
and is about as perfect as money can be.
We have Bitcoin.
And so it makes one wonder if the breaking
at the end of these cycles converging
is going to be even more intense
because they're lining up like this.
But at the same time, what emerges after
has the potential to be so much more,
not to sound like floofy,
but so much more beautiful
than anything that has come before.
Like that may actually be able to ultimately,
it won't break the cycles this time,
but it afterwards, when this all starts again
with Bitcoin in existence,
it may have the chance to completely change
the direction of these cycles going forward.
Thoughts, fair, yeah.
Yeah, this is great.
So this is a new theory to me.
We chatted about it a little bit before we recorded.
So I'm fresh on this,
so forgive me for not understanding that material well,
but there's a lot of parallels here.
So I would assume the Greek dude who came up with this
would also say that it's not a perfect system,
it's not a repeatable linear system.
It is a, hey, let's look at incentives,
let's look at history,
let's make a framework in the same way
that the fourth turning is not a perfect mechanistic system.
I would believe the same is here.
If I'm reading the tea leaves here well,
we're sort of post-democracy
and now we're in something closer to an och lacrosse,
like mob, like cancel culture,
woke mob, deep state,
you can kind of say as a mob,
it's definitely like a shadow government, shadow rule.
Everything feels fake,
all the official things sort of feel fake.
So that would make sense to me.
And then if that's true,
we'd be hoping for a renewal in our lifetimes.
Is that how you see us in time?
Yeah, and I would also say
another interesting parallel
between the fourth turning and anocyclosis
is the idea of kind of balance
or of trying to find balance,
where you start, it's,
in the fourth turning,
you have each generation pushing against the one before it
and they're pushing back, right?
Here you have basically each cycle of government.
Monarchy becomes tyranny,
tyranny pushes back against monarchy.
Aristocracy becomes oligarchy,
democracy becomes och lacrosse.
Like you have this same sort of tension
between the immediately adjacent stages.
And that seems to be kind of the common thread here
is that there's always that push back and forth.
And eventually that push reaches a point
where something completely breaks
and people say, we need to,
we gotta start over.
We've gotta do better, we've gotta do this again.
And we need, they also then tend to look for people
who can lead them out of that chaos, right?
Which is another,
that's another interesting point
where maybe that's a,
seg you into Trump, I'm not sure.
But you see the people looking for these kind of leaders.
You see like, I think Bukele is that kind of leader
who led his people, clearly led his people out of chaos.
I mean, that is what they were in.
That was a incredibly dangerous country
that is now has the lowest homicide rate
in the Western hemisphere.
Like that's incredible that he's done that for his people.
And they are happy about it.
But they didn't want a bunch of votes
on how they should get down gang violence.
They wanted somebody who took care of the gangs, right?
People look in times of chaos,
they want somebody to just fix it.
And I think that's kind of where we're at right now.
Your thoughts? Yeah, I think that's right.
Let me run through how I see the fourth turning
interacting with this.
And you can kind of help me course cracked a little bit.
So if you look throughout the fourth turning
in American history, every 80, 90 years,
we go through the big cycle, redo it, right?
When we're redoing the institutional world,
the way that the author likes to phrase this
is like we come up with a new republic each time.
So Neil Howe, one of the authors,
the other one's no longer living,
he would say we're about to enter
the fourth American republic.
And each time we've gone through a fourth turning,
we've slightly shifted away from the OG American values.
And so I would say the original founding of the country
would be, I mean, it's a constitutional republic,
but something more along the lines of a democracy,
is that how you would describe that?
Yeah, absolutely fair.
And I think then maybe what I would say is
since 1776 until now, we've been drifting away
from democracy more towards the mob rule.
And every 80, 90 years,
we take another giant step towards that.
I think that's probably true.
And so some history here, Ben Franklin outside,
I think it was Ben Franklin outside of the
Continental Congress, they come out of there
after they're figuring out,
like trying to figure out the government.
Yeah, it was asked a question,
what kind of government did you guys create?
And Ben Franklin says,
a republic, if we can keep it.
Okay, so he's kind of insinuating about,
maybe he knew this cycle, I assume he did,
as many founding fathers read this stuff.
And so he was keenly aware of their point in cycles,
maybe the cycle, maybe a different cycle.
But he also calmed down, we gotta keep it alive.
We gotta protect it.
And so each time we've gone through this,
we've had to make radical changes
based on the information in front of us.
I think it's clear we've left,
oh gee, American values quite a bit.
We have a stronger federal government than ever intended.
There's many other things like that.
And so I think if we're gonna go into a renewal cycle,
which does pair up nicely with the first turning,
does pair up nicely with Trump as the great champion
for the fourth turning observers out there
who always ask me who the great champion is.
I think it's Trump.
If we go down this route,
then I would say on an optimistic path,
Bitcoin is like the gas on the fire
in a way that we want it to be,
meaning returning in the renewal cycle,
returning back to OG American values,
distribution of power, property rights,
smaller federal government, less interventionalism abroad.
Bitcoin is money has all those same principles.
And I think we're right for that resurgency.
I think Trump's point of view on MAGA
is something more akin to a restoration.
It's not conservatism.
We're not conserving the stuff we've been doing, hopefully.
And so we can restore, right?
Restoration kind of feels right.
And all these things line up.
And if they all do line up,
either we're a pattern recognizing machines
who see patterns that don't exist, possible,
or if multiple patterns or multiple theories,
points of view share the same outcome,
that would lead me to believe
that we have a higher confidence
that that's where we're heading.
And so I would choose to believe that.
And so I'll choose to believe
that the fourth American Republic,
the bright orange future, the next first turning,
whatever you want to call it,
will be on a Bitcoin standard.
I would expect us to have some sort of a CBDC attempt
globally, ultimately fall back to Bitcoin.
I would expect equality of opportunity
to supersede equality of outcome.
I would expect more symmetry between state and citizen.
I would hope young people have an optimistic view
of the future, which is certainly not the case today.
I would expect less financialization in our economy.
I would expect pro-natalism.
Let's be honest,
D-population is a 1,000 or 10,000 times bigger risk
than overpopulation.
I cannot believe.
We are so dense to still think like that.
And so the next stage is the orange age,
it's not the golden age, and I'm here for it.
I mean, speaking of repopulation,
I think Bitcoiners are really doing their best.
Seems like every couple of weeks,
I'm more often than that, honestly.
Bitcoiners were busy during the bear market.
Let's just say that.
And it wasn't just stacking sats.
Sorry, what happens in your personal life every few weeks?
No, no, no, I'm saying,
seeing like new baby announcements
and everything from Bitcoiners, you know.
Oh, right, of course.
Just like, it's impressive.
Love to see a chart of average number of babies
in the normie population versus the laser-eyed population.
I have to imagine the laser-eyed population
is out repopulating the normie population,
but I don't have the hard data to back this up,
unfortunately, just anecdotal.
Sure, feels that way.
It sure does, it sure does.
And I think there's something here
because I think reproducing is a function
of how individuals see the future.
Are you really uncertain about the future?
Does the future look really bad?
Are you economically in bad shape?
Do you not have a support system?
Are you not in sound mental faculties?
Can you not find a partner?
You add all that kind of stuff up,
and at a societal level, of course, you reproduce less.
And then now we have the control population,
or the experimental population,
I should say, that's the Bitcoiners.
We've interacted with a piece of software,
money, whatever social movement,
whatever this religious thing, whatever it is,
it changes individuals, myself included.
Now, is it simply because I have a larger net worth now
than I did pre-Bitcoin,
and that means I'm less uncertain about the future,
which means I want to reproduce?
Could it be that simple?
Or am I absorbing Bitcoin principles in a way
that's deeper than that?
Or is it because I'm exposed to more optimistic people,
and I'm in a new community, let's say,
that is more pro-natalist,
and because I'm a social creature like everyone else,
I am influenced by the people around me,
and it has nothing to do with the money.
I don't know exactly what's going on,
but I definitely observe Bitcoin changing people.
And Bitcoin teaches you self-responsibility
in a way that I think prepares you for raising kids.
And I think, yeah, I think humans are at their best,
especially men, the more responsibility we take on,
the more fulfillment we have in life.
I've never worked harder,
I've never been more tired at the end of the day
in my entire life,
as chasing around a two-year-old
who's just grown out in the kitchen
and pissing off the wife,
while working like a psycho at a startup, right,
and trying to maintain health outside of that.
And I couldn't be more satisfied at the end of the day.
When I was effing off traveling and saying in hammocks
and surfing all the time
and exploring whatever I wanted,
ultimate freedom for years,
I wouldn't go back for a second.
I would rather go play with mag tiles upstairs
with my two-year-olds.
Honestly, amen to that.
It's a beautiful thing.
I think it's because you realize that light switch flips
and you realize, oh, wow,
this is the most fulfilling thing that I could be doing,
like just being here,
and not just being with your kids,
but being able to support them, right,
being able to offer them some stability and a future
that you know that you are working for,
while at the same time being able to mess around with them
and just have a good time,
because it's a good kind of tired.
It's that lower back sore kind of tired
where because you've been bending over and picking stuff up.
But an unintended side effect I realized
of having a young kid is, man,
I think I've gotten more flexible
because it's just like you're just constantly up and down.
It's like you're going with kind of like the Japanese style
of like, you know, you're just always like sitting cross-legged
and then getting back up and down.
Like I think there's like a, there's something to that,
keeps you more limber, although you may be a bit sore,
but that's a, I digress into stretching.
So I, unironically, have had the same thought
where I'm, we're a similar height, we're, you know,
six-three-ish or whatever they say,
taller people have more problems with their backs
or whatever it feels true.
I don't know if it's true, it doesn't matter.
But I hate sitting on the ground.
And I always have, maybe when I was like a kid
and I was like hyper flexible
and having become like a desk jockey body type,
you know, prior to that I could sit on the ground.
But now I sit on the ground, it's like pulling
on my hamstrings, which pulls on my low back.
It doesn't feel like I can do it for very long.
Okay, fast forward.
Now I have a kid for the first six months
or whatever, he's pretty much just stuck on the ground.
And I got to go down there and play with him all the time.
So I spent a crazy amount of time sitting,
two, three weeks max pain.
And then I leveled up my body or something.
My body gave up and it's like, cool, man,
we're sitting on the ground now, no more pain.
Yeah, we're crossed like at people now, got it.
Like I got the memo, you need to do this all the time.
Not sure why, but okay, let's like,
we'll make some room for it.
I had the same experience.
So those first few weeks I was like, oh boy, this is like rough.
And I thought I was like in decent shape and pretty flexible.
And then it was like, not enough to deal with that.
And then ours has started like, he's almost walking now.
And so there's been a lot of walking, you know,
with him and whatnot.
And he's wanted to just like, for whatever reason,
try to walk up and down the stairs,
just repeatedly, like, I mean, literally like 20 times
in a row up and down the stairs.
And I'm like, honestly, not even mad,
this is a killer workout.
Like I'll just, you know, keep going, stabilizing you,
try not to have both us falling our asses
and get a little workout at the same time.
It's great.
Do you think little man is trying to be more like his dad?
Do you think that's what's...
Maybe, it sees me, now it's like,
if I'm going up the stairs, he's like,
he's not happy about it.
He's like, I wanna be doing that too.
Like you better not be going without me.
So it's gonna be wild once he starts talking, you know,
because then I can really start teaching him
Austrian economics, you know,
right now I'm not sure if he gets it when I'm, you know,
reading him Hayek and Rothbard and whatnot.
So, you know, gotta wait for that.
I totally do now.
We were at the grocery store last week
and he put some ice cream in the car
and I'm like, what are you doing, dude?
He's like, what do you mean, dad?
I'm on the margin, I'm pricing it in.
Do you seriously?
No.
Oh, man, I was really hoping so.
I love, one of my favorite tweet formats
is just make up ridiculous things
that obviously a small child didn't say and tweet it.
It's a wonderful format,
but you honestly had me going there.
I was like, okay, two, maybe.
I mean, you're his dad, so perhaps that could happen.
He does talk in full sentences,
but he hasn't picked up much Austrian economics yet.
Okay, give him until he's three
and then start drilling them into the Mises
and everything, that's a good place to start, I think.
Keep it nice and simple.
Yeah, can I selfishly ask you a couple questions?
Sure, man, yeah, this is an open forum.
Related to parenting, so I've got two things in mind.
One, I found out that many of the schools
that we were considering have a two-year wait
to even consider going in.
So I'm like, okay, I gotta pay more attention
to schooling earlier than I was expecting,
so there's some home schooling questions,
but before we get to that, I'm curious about,
actually, let's do home schooling first.
I don't wanna open up two cans of worms.
History for me is that I was,
I've always been a curious person, a self-starter,
never had a problem with initiative
and getting excited and getting obsessed about stuff.
Then I go to school and I find out that,
oh, I guess I hate learning, and I suffered through school,
and I got fine grades, but it was painful,
and I just got the desire to learn beatin' out of me,
and it became like, how do I get good grades
so my parents aren't mad with the least amount of work?
How do I manipulate my teachers so I can do what I want?
How do I chase girls around, play sports?
It was like, honestly, training me to be a good cog
in a corporate machine.
How to do nothing but maintain perception.
How to, yeah, anyways.
And then, okay, I'm 22, 3, 4, 5, somewhere around there,
and I'm just gobsmacked by reality,
which is that all I wanna do is learn.
It's the best thing in the world.
I wanna orient my entire life around learning.
Wait, I just spent 15 years nonstop
in a learning environment, and I hated it.
And so, I've been reflecting on that lately,
like what do we do with kids, and I see my son upstairs,
and the second he wakes up,
it's whatever he's on his mind, he's like,
Dad, I wanna go build porta-potties with Magtile,
which is what we did this morning.
And he's got an insatiable desire to learn.
It's infinite.
And I have this vision where I'm gonna drop him off
at school, and he's gonna come home and be like,
this is stupid, like, anyways.
So that's my background.
I'm trying to think about homeschooling.
You went through this, I've heard your story,
you were like, am I the dumb one,
then you go become valedictorian?
So clearly not.
How do you think about homeschooling?
How do you approach this?
What's your point of view?
So I am very grateful the older I get,
especially that my parents made the sacrifice
to homeschool me, because I think it absolutely
is a sacrifice, like it is much easier
to put your kid on a bus and send them away
for eight hours a day than it is to homeschool them.
That is undeniably true.
So that being said, it's like,
I know that speaking to both of my parents now,
and we talk and hang out quite often,
they're still like no regrets,
very happy with having done it.
In terms of my actual experience with it,
I didn't realize, you know,
you don't know what you got till it's gone.
Like I didn't realize what an incredible experience it was
until I tasted the other side.
When the grass is always greener, right?
Like I, you know, you've know my story,
but I made the decision, I told my parents
when I was in eighth grade, like I wanna go to high school,
like I wanna go try out public school again,
cause I was worried I was a complete moron,
like cause all my friends, like they went to school
for eight hours a day, then they came home and did homework,
and I would just get all my work done
in like two hours in the morning and be done with it,
and then go play outside and, you know,
make campfires and whittle stuff, or, you know,
my mom took me to Prentice with a blacksmith one day,
who taught me about Fibonacci,
and you do random stuff like that, like it's just awesome.
But I was like, wow, I mean,
they're just doing so much more school than me,
they must just be ahead of me.
And then I got to school and I discovered
that was very much not the case.
I had a similar experience as you were like,
I just, I like to just do stuff and learn stuff
and figure stuff out and play around and build stuff.
And there was just, there was no room for that,
there was no time for that in public school.
And I had some really great teachers,
I honestly did, I'm super grateful to them,
like my chemistry teacher, who was, you know,
a bit of a black sheep, really hated administrative
bureaucracy and all this stuff, and was just a, you know,
just a cool dude, had some, and some really great math
teachers as well.
But, and this is not to knock teachers, right?
This is to knock the system.
Cause I think most teachers do get into it
because they genuinely care about and want to help kids.
Like if you're teaching in public school,
you're not, you're not doing it for the money.
Like you're doing it for another reason.
And so my experience was basically this public school system,
and this is with the benefit of retrospect,
because I think I was, I was not aware enough to see it
at the time, you know, you're, you're young, again,
you're worried about other things, chasing girls,
trying to, you know, do just enough to get by with your
teachers, realizing that most of the work that they give you
is complete, pointless busy work.
And I was obviously really good at doing that,
cause I ended up valedictorian, like it was really good
at making sure I got the right grades.
But it beats the creative side of it.
But it beats the creative side out of you, right?
That's what it does.
It's not meant, public school is not meant to cultivate
curious, dissident, questioning, doubtful,
high agency humans.
That's not this purpose.
The purpose of the system is what it does.
And you look at like people like yourself,
I would say you made it through public school.
Like it was, it did not help you.
It, it just, I'm guessing here, it probably own, you know,
maybe you learned a couple of things that you used later
in life, probably not.
If both, most of us look back at school, it's like,
most of it, it's like, oh, you know, like, you know,
they were still teaching kids how to, you know,
balance a checkbook, like, you know, when we were in school
and that is not something any of us have ever had to do
because our world is digital.
Like it's just, it's not even gearing you up for,
for practical skills.
Like I think vocational schools, like in terms of like
college degrees, when you get there, I think those are
fantastic.
Learn how to be a plumber, learn how to do something
that actually requires skill and training in a very
practical way.
That's excellent.
That's not what K through 12 public school does.
It is based on the Prussian system of education,
which was meant to create diligent little cogs,
diligent little workers and diligent little soldiers
who would not question authority.
The Nazis adopted that same model.
Homeschooling is still illegal in Germany today.
From that Nazi era policy, they still have the Nazi era
policy in place in Germany that makes homeschooling
illegal.
You are not allowed to oversee the education of your own
children.
You have to give it over to the state.
And, you know, I was talking with Daniel Prince,
few, I guess this was back in December,
because he's homeschooling their kids,
their world schooling them, homeschooling them.
They've also had a mix of some public school as well
and left that for many of the reasons that we're discussing
now.
And one of the things he said that I thought was really
great was that there is a need to separate education
from state.
Like separating money from state is great,
but that only goes so far if all of our children are still
pushed through the same meat grinder of state sanctioned
public education, because it's not meant to make them
into the greatest entrepreneurs or the greatest scientists
or the greatest artists or the greatest philosophers.
It's meant to make them really good at sitting in a desk
for eight hours a day, which is what they're probably
gonna end up doing for the rest of their lives.
And that's like a really, really sad thing.
Kids are not meant to be sitting only amongst people
of their own age, sitting in a desk, don't move,
don't cause disruptions, don't go pursue this random thing.
No, like your mind is so supple and is expanding
at that time.
The last thing you wanna do with it is put it in a cage
where somebody feeds whatever state sanctioned propaganda
down their throat for eight hours a day
for the majority of the year.
Like that's crazy to me.
So that was a long-winded way of saying,
if you have that feeling that that was your own experience,
you see that same glimmer in your son, then go with that.
Like your gut's gonna tell you what's right.
And if you are able to do that,
you and your wife are able to do that,
the beauty of it now is it's way easier
than when like my mom and dad were doing this.
We didn't have like Khan Academy on YouTube
or any number of these free courses online
that you could do like, it just didn't exist yet.
Now that exists and is available
from so many different sources.
I mean, you could just go to one of Michael Saylor's
many educational websites and probably learn,
more than any public school is ever gonna teach you.
So like that's something I think that is really,
really powerful and that parents who are raising young kids
right now should definitely take advantage of.
Cause those tools are out there,
they're easier to access than ever.
Most of them are free.
Like there has never been a better time
to try and homeschool your kids,
especially because most of us work remote right now.
Like it's all of the pieces are in line
for you to be able to spend more time with your kid,
give them the best education they can possibly get
while still allowing them to pursue who they should be,
which is a free thinking, high agency, gritty,
dissident human being that's gonna ask questions,
give shit and not bend the knee to whatever authority figure
happens to step into their lives simply because
that's how they were primed for eight hours a day
for most of their childhood.
Rant over, thoughts.
Let's go.
I'm gonna send my wife that one.
She's feeling somewhat intimidated that I'm the breadwinner.
She works a little part time online too,
but she thinks it's gonna fall on her
and it's gonna be intimidating.
So I'm gonna share that with her
and maybe nudge that direction.
Is that what you guys are planning by the way?
Yeah, that's what we're planning.
And I mean, another great thing is like,
if first of all I would say to your wife,
it's okay to feel intimidated,
but she can absolutely do it.
Like my mom, it primarily fell on her.
And while she was still like starting a company
and everything else and she,
yeah, it was stressful at times,
but she was an English major.
Like she doesn't have a background in education
or in anything else.
You don't have to worry about like,
oh, well, how will I teach them algebra and stuff?
I just read my algebra textbook and figured it out.
I was shocked when I got to public school
and I found they only did like every other problem,
you know, odds or evens and then skip chapters.
And I didn't even know you could look
in the back of the book for answers.
You know, like that was like news to me.
I was like, oh my God, who's Bob
and why do you guys keep getting answers from Bob?
It's like back a book, dude.
I'm like, what?
Anyway, point being, you could screw up so many things
and still give your kid a way better education
than public school.
But on top of that, they will get something
that they will never get from public school,
which is the undivided attention of a parent
who loves them more than anything in the world.
And I think that is ultimately what's most important.
It's not what they learn, it's how they're learning it.
And the fact that you are able to be there as a parent,
no teacher, no administrator, no bureaucrat
will ever care as much about your kids as you do.
And that is a fact.
That's a really strong point.
Just the self-confidence from saying,
I give a shit enough about you to keep an eye on you
and help you and teach you in the way that works best for you.
And I took time out of my day to be there
instead of ship you off to Mrs. Jones,
who's got 30 not-nose kids and you're smart.
And the other kids on average are less smart.
So she doesn't waste time for you
because you're gonna be fine.
And then, yeah, that reinforces all this weird psychology.
Okay, one more on the same point.
What about coming of age?
So what I see is kids are little Peter Pan's
until they're like 30, 40, they never grow up,
they never become a man,
they never take on responsibility.
We came up with the phrase,
oh, I'm adulting now because I have like
marginal responsibilities.
And we're like crippled by the adulting today, right?
And I find it to be entirely pathetic.
I also identify with some of that myself.
I'm fucking off traveling around the world
and I'm 30 doing whatever I want, whatever.
And so, and then I got radical transition from that to,
all right, let's hurry up and get married, have kids.
Part of that was digesting like a Jordan Peterson perspective
of more responsibility, more fulfillment,
where I was seeking optionality and freedom
versus like actually some discipline
and putting a little box around your freedom
actually makes you more free or your life makes you more free.
I watched my sister have a child,
so I became an uncle for the first time,
came close with this little one
and I had some new feelings where I love to get out
of this little thing.
And I had this very real feeling that if my neighbor,
who I like, looks at my little niece the wrong way,
I will bury him in my backyard.
And I wouldn't even feel bad.
I'd be like, you shouldn't have looked at her like that.
Yeah, it kind of scared me.
I was like, okay, there's some very deep biology going on here
right now. I need to explore that.
And yeah, which led to raising kids.
So, point being, okay, how do we prevent these little ones
from being 30 year old Peter Pan's?
How do we like in many tribes, they'd be like,
dude, you got to go solo now and camp and do a vision quest
and kill a wild boar with a knife.
If you don't come back, you're not part of us.
What's the modern equivalent?
How should we thinking about this?
Have you thought about this?
How do we make fully formed adults at a reasonable age?
I've thought about it a lot actually.
And obviously, I'm not, you know, our son is one.
So I'm not long enough in the parenting journey
to be able to give advice, say, look,
here's what we did and it worked.
The way I've been thinking about it though,
is a lot of it does come down to responsibility.
I think so many of the,
and honestly, bring it back to the fourth turning
where the Gen Xers over-parented
and were helicopter parents
and participation ribbons for everyone
and making sure, you know, like,
you know, you're where you're supposed to be
and there's no unsupervised playtime.
Like people doing that, like, you know,
you need like play dates where we get all the kids together.
And it's like, you mean just like,
you mean just like hanging out with your friends?
Like you don't need to, like, don't make it weird
with this whole like play date thing.
My thoughts is that, look, as difficult as it may be,
especially in this day and age where everything is connected,
giving your kids a chance to disconnect
and actually know that, look, I'm like on my own here.
Like, you know, I am given enough trust by my parents
that they trust me not to be a complete jackass
and, you know, screw something up
or get myself hurt too badly.
Like kids are gonna get hurt, right?
Like, man, I got hurt a lot.
Never broke any bones though, somehow.
So it was never that bad.
Split, I mean, cuts, pretty bad cuts and things.
Fell through the ice like three times.
Never drowned though.
So yeah, I went through the ice like three different times.
Two in one river and then once in a lake
on my buddy's back 40.
It was actually all with the same buddy.
So now I'm wondering if the causation there
was actually the friend that I was with all these times.
But I think like you have to give kids
some measure of independence
because you can't train independence
while not allowing them to be independent.
Like that doesn't work, all right?
Like then it's just this net, like it's just theory then.
Like that you should, you know, think for yourself
and make your own decisions, except I'm still gonna make
every single decision for you.
Like you have to be able to create environments
where they can make their own decisions
that also are gonna have consequences occasionally.
Obviously again, caveat, I'm not at that stage
in parenting yet.
I'm sure much easier said than done.
But one thing that I really appreciate about my own parents
was that yeah, they did give me the freedom to make mistakes.
I think you need that freedom to make mistakes.
Otherwise you are not gonna possibly become independent.
I also think to your other point of like,
there's a different, like you can be just as a man
because I cannot speak for the female perspective.
But as a man, it's like you can think yourself
as fairly independent and you can be independent, right?
You can be taking care of yourself.
You can be living on your own.
You can be not in any way financially supported
by anyone else, taking care of yourself.
But there's a different switch that flips
that is completely different once you have kids.
Like even more so than once you get married.
It's like getting married is one thing,
but even if neither, if you guys don't have kids yet,
it's like, okay, yeah, we can still like,
we can still fuck around, right?
Like there, we can go out and get way too drunk
at the bar and whatever else.
It doesn't, you know, whatever, it doesn't matter.
Like we're only accountable to ourselves and our hangover.
Being accountable to somebody else,
to a little helpless human being
that you brought into this world,
I think that like flips something in your brain
that you can never turn off.
And there's no way, the same way
that you can't teach independence, you have to give it.
I think you can't teach that accountability
to another human being.
You have to, you know, it has to be created.
Like, and then, I mean, some people are obviously
not great parents and maybe don't feel that switch flip,
but I think for you and me and the vast majority of people,
the switch flips, it never goes back
and you are forever changed for the better, I think.
Because there is no kind of responsibility
speaking for myself and probably for you,
no kind of responsibility.
Like there's a little human being here
that can't take care of itself and they need,
you know, they need their parents, they need us.
And there's no shying away from that.
So I don't know if that answers the question,
that's kind of where I'm at.
Yeah, I think two primary reflections.
One is maybe you don't think about it as like,
there's one thing that symbolizes from boy to man.
I think I kind of want that.
I want a challenge.
I think I keep thinking about that, have time for that.
The second thing that I thought about is that
I'm reflecting on my own childhood a little bit.
And I think I for sure took my parents
for granted in the moment.
I for sure took my parents for granted.
Even in the 20s, in my 20s and early 30s
when I realized that I started to learn more
about the world and that, oh, I do have good parents.
Oh, I am lucky.
Now after raising a kid, hopefully more soon,
I'm realizing that my parents did so much for me
that I still couldn't have appreciated
until their grandparents.
And so shout out mom and dad.
But one of those points was independence
versus responsibility.
I always wanted more.
I always thought I was ready and my dad's like,
yeah, you want more freedoms?
Let's see the responsibility.
Remember when I told you to do this and you didn't do it?
Remember this, remember that, remember that?
That's how you get more.
And so yeah, the push and pull between those two
and gradually lengthen the leash, that's amazing.
The other thing around parenting make you a better person.
I saw you wanted to jump in there.
So I'll make this one short.
I was just gonna say quickly, American hodl, hodl,
however he identifies, he said something really great
in one of our last conversations.
He was like, I firmly believe that a boy doesn't become
a man until he has kids.
Like until he has a wife and they make a baby together,
you are not a man.
Until that, you are still a boy.
I agree.
And honestly, I'm on the same page with that.
It's like that is a fundamental shift.
And you can think that you're a man or whatever
if you don't have kids and that's fine.
But like for anyone who has gone through that,
I think anybody who has gone through that and had kids
is now responsible for a little human creature,
they would probably agree with that sentiment
from American hodl, hodl.
So just wanted to throw that in there before I forgot.
Because I thought that was just like, yeah,
if you need a demarcation, that's pretty much it.
Like that's probably as firm a line as you could get.
Yep, I completely agree.
It's true in my life.
It's true with people that I observe.
I would like to believe that theoretically
you can simulate that same step function,
increase some responsibility and have similar outcomes.
But if I'm being honest with myself,
that's me just hedging
because people get super triggered by this.
I think it's absolutely true.
And it's not because you're a superior as a parent
and I feel for the people who want kids and can't have them.
Like honestly, there's nothing worse
that I can possibly imagine.
So I feel for that.
And so what I do believe it's true
is maybe we'll separate you become a man.
I think that triggers people too.
But I think it's like the most human experience
you can possibly have.
It is the peak of what the F we're supposed to be doing here.
Maybe we can call it that instead of the man
because I'm a man, I went to war, right?
Fair enough.
But raising kids, it's embedded in our biology.
I lean to biology a lot.
I think we're under appreciating our biology today
as a 2025 species and we're over appreciating
our neofrontal cortex.
The part of our brain that thinks it's complex.
And it's also no coincidence that our brain
thinks our brain is a really cool feature, right?
Like our body is intelligent.
Typical brain behavior.
Exactly.
Our body is more intelligent than our brain.
It's older than our brain.
Trust your gut.
You said that earlier.
That's absolutely true.
That's not a little thing.
Like literally trust your gut.
Your gut knows.
Your body knows.
And so I think where was I going with that?
Oh, yeah.
If you don't reproduce, okay.
Our whole biological process, everything is forged
around reproducing so your genes go forward.
You hear about women having a biological clock.
Okay, fine.
That's a biological process happening.
But what are you getting?
You're getting warning signs that your fertility
will go down in the future.
And it makes you feel like shit.
Why?
So you reproduce.
So your genes go on.
And so if you voluntarily end your bloodline,
I think that's a tremendous mistake in 99.9% of cases.
And you're gonna pay for it for your entire life
in this void of meaning and purpose.
Maybe it will be a big thing for you.
Maybe it'll be a small thing.
Maybe you'll drown it with alcohol in sports cars.
Maybe you'll be a monk.
Maybe there's other things that are close
or it may be superior.
I don't buy it, but maybe.
But for those of you who are willing and able
and capable but haven't made the plunge,
I would say lean into your biology
and you will be rewarded.
In my personal life, I went from a fear of loss.
In the future, I'm gonna have less freedom
and I'm mourning it before I even lost it
as the child's on its way.
Then a child comes, priorities start to reorder naturally,
subconsciously without my doing.
And all of a sudden the things I thought I would lose
that I was about to lose,
I don't feel like I lost them
because I don't want them anymore.
And all of a sudden the transition is so much easier
and then I'm gobsmacked by the fact that,
okay, Brandon, you weren't even trusting your biology again.
You preached, I trust your biology and you didn't do it.
Of course your biology rewards you and gracefully
allows you to transition
because that's the most effective way for our species.
So again, lean into the biology.
The second point before we talked about you're not a man
unless you have a baby is your kid worships you, okay?
There's nothing more powerful to me to become a better man
than a little two-year-old who does everything I do
and worships me.
That means how do I communicate with my wife when I'm stressed out?
Do I want him to observe that kind of snarky comment?
Do I want my kid to observe someone who's lazy,
who doesn't fix things, who doesn't take responsibility,
who whatever, I'm just coming up with personal examples,
but that makes you want to be a better person
because he wears whatever I'm doing, he tries on that day.
And he's learning how to be a human,
how to be an adult from me and my wife and those around us.
And what a responsibility that is.
And what a beautiful thing, right?
I forgot the exact phrase,
but having a kid is not about making a baby,
it's about making a mother and making a father, right?
So the kid gave us that gift and I do believe it is a gift.
And yeah, it's a virtuous cycle.
And one more on parenting is that
I intellectually thought I was like,
yeah, family's awesome, I like it.
Oh, family.
It was all intellectual, it was all bullshit.
Having a little kid and watching your mom
raise a little her grandson,
and then all the feelings for you and the love.
And she didn't know what the F she was doing
when she raised me.
And now she's got the wisdom and she,
you know, I'm, kid's not that different than me.
And watching her go through that,
watching my parents become healthier,
knowing that they have this purpose to do.
And what a beautiful thing.
And then I get so sad with the boomers
who don't wanna spend time with their grandkids
because they're on a cruise,
or they don't wanna spend time with their grandkids
because they're doing some stupid fucking hobby.
My goodness, we are backwards.
Their role in society is to be elders with wisdom
for us and for the next generation.
And it's amazing how responsive the kids are
to their grandparents.
And how special that relationship is.
And I wish more families did that.
And I wish I had more time with my parents as well
for this exact same reason.
Now, sorry, I frog in the throat there.
It's okay if you're getting emotional.
You wanna...
Apparently choking on water.
Now I was just gonna say,
it is amazing seeing the grandparents.
And then realizing too,
it's like that was one of the other big realizations
where I was like, man,
oh, I was kind of a shit headed times as a kid
to my parents and like,
because I see myself and I'm like,
I'm just trying to do the best I can.
And then seeing them, it's like,
they were just trying to do the best they could.
And everyone is always just trying to do the best
that they can being a parent.
Again, some situations where there are,
that is not the case, but the overwhelming majority.
And it's like, man, I should have cut them some more slack,
but at least now they have a grand kid
who is not a shit head yet.
And that can hopefully make up for some of it.
But, man, it's a wild trip.
It's a beautiful journey though.
Like I wouldn't trade it for anything
despite the fact that at times it is difficult.
It's like, that's what makes it worth something.
They're percent.
Days are long, years are fast or whatever that phrase is.
Feels very real.
And yeah, the amount of BS I put my parents through,
and I wasn't like a bad kid.
I was just stubborn, independent and really obsessive.
So if I wanted to do something, I found a way to get it.
And that served me tremendously as an adult,
but I could not imagine how annoying I was to my parents.
I would play them against each other.
Hey, can I sleep over at Tyler's house?
Now I'll go ask your mom.
Hey, mom, dad and I were talking about me sleeping
over at Tyler's house.
And he was wondering if I should bring a red sleeping bag
or a blue sleeping bag.
And then go back to my, yeah, mom said
I should bring a blue sleeping bag.
And then they find out.
It's horrible.
Yeah, and you realize too, like, you know,
we both have sons and you're looking at them,
you're like, oh man, like we're in for some trouble
because I know how I was.
And I was still by all means a good kid,
but like it doesn't make it always easy for the parents.
So to all the parents out there, thank you guys.
We appreciate you now more than ever.
And, but at least, at least we're giving you grand babies,
right?
So, hey, can't be too mad at us
for being shitheads all those years ago.
So it evens out maybe.
One more grenade to the voluntary no parent people.
Just think back to your great, great, great, great,
great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother.
She had to survive that one harsh winter
where they didn't have any food and barely made it.
Maybe some Vikings came and came through the village.
Maybe there was some rape involved,
maybe some light pillaging, I don't know.
What about the time when the woolly mammoths
population declined and you couldn't get food?
Remember the time when all the infectious disease came
and wiped out 80% of the tribe
and somehow your genetics came through that bottleneck?
And you're like, well, it seems kind of a lot of work.
And I like going to the bar and watching football
and I like traveling.
So I'm gonna just voluntarily end my bloodline.
Madness.
It is wild.
I will say as a caveat, I think there are some people
that are genuinely at peace with like,
like not everybody needs to have kids or should have kids.
Like I'm playing devil's advocate here
because I know there are people out there
and like I know people like this.
It's not that they're like going out and partying.
And maybe there were some circumstances
that led to a place where like,
you know what, kids just like weren't going to happen.
Maybe that was biological.
Maybe that was another reason.
But like, and that's okay too.
And I think you're not speaking to those people.
I think you're speaking to the ones
that are very much making the decision to say like,
well, this, you know, yeah, I'd like kids maybe,
but this is just like, you know, kind of too hard.
And I've got a good thing going right now
and I don't wanna mess it up, right?
Is that a fair characterization?
To be honest, I'm speaking to myself 510.
That's the archetype.
That's where the passion comes from.
It's because I started later
than I would have liked to as what I know now.
And I think that I had really bad reasons
for taking my position of like,
yeah, well maybe sort of later I'll do that.
I don't know.
And so that's what I'm speaking to.
Of course humans are extremely diverse.
There's many reasons, many types of people, blah, blah, blah.
Like yes, we don't need to worry about the people
who is obviously not aimed at.
Do you know Deeter Bob though for sure?
Cause he's really annoying on Twitter about this.
That guy.
But seriously.
I can't remember if I muted him or not.
I don't like to block anyone
because I think that gives somebody too much credit.
But the mute is a great button.
Cause it's like, yeah, don't even see it.
Don't even know it exists.
It's like that scene from Mad Men where, you know,
it's like, I mean, I feel really sorry for you.
And he's like, I don't think about you at all.
Like, it's a great meme.
I think once a week at least.
Dude, same, same.
Oh wait, speaking of memes and just cultural moments.
Quick before we wrap up,
should we just talk about Trump trying to buy everything
right now?
What is your take?
Is he actually serious about Greenland and Canada
and Mexico or is this just like Trump doing his Trump thing?
Or is like, I'm just going to say super outrageous stuff.
I'm going to take over the news cycle with it.
I'm going to let people freak out.
And then I'm going to kind of drop back and say, like, well,
you know, I don't want it anyway.
Like actually Greenland's not as green as I thought.
So I think I'll, I think I'll pass.
Like what's your take on this?
Yeah, a couple of angles.
So one, I believe that this is his,
I'm not paying attention too much.
I'm not thinking about this strategically.
I'm not, I'm not Matt Pines in this.
Okay. This is me scrolling on the toilet and in between.
None of us can Matt Pines it.
He's, he's in a different league.
Also true.
So this is my like a 50 foot view, not trying that hard.
So I think he's negotiating.
He's planning to rethink about geopolitics.
I think he's essentially anchoring to use a sales term.
He's anchoring to an extreme in order to disarm
and bring someone to the table.
And maybe he settles for a little bit less or whatever.
So I think it's opening salvo negotiation tactics.
That's one angle.
The other angle is that his, him stylistically
and what he's saying triggers the libs to use a phrase so hard.
And it makes me laugh so much.
He is an absolute master shit poster.
He is S tier, God tier shit poster.
I don't think there's anyone ever that would be as good as him.
And I find it to be so funny.
If you do have to distance yourself, like he's not going
on a rampage and stealing countries and blah, blah, blah.
Like he's not going to do that.
Look at history.
It's not how he operates,
but he does flagrantly say stuff,
expand the Overton window and he actually does make
relatively good deals.
So I'm in on it.
And I got to pull out one quote.
Forget the politics of this, but he's like mad at Newsom
and he's like taking shots at Newsom over the fires.
And in the middle of his rant, he just sidebars and goes,
he wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish
called a smelt by giving it less water.
It didn't work.
So just, I die, I cannot help it.
He just has to take pod shots at the smelts.
And there's this unlimited examples.
Greenland, yeah, it's not actually that green.
It is, I think he's going to go down as one of the great
comedians or comics of our generation.
Dude has incredible timing.
Like every time he's up on stage, I'm like, this is a bit.
Like you're doing a bit.
I see this and it's like, you know,
what is he saying?
It's the weave.
I'm doing the weave.
You know, it's, I don't know.
I find it hilarious.
And I think we all need reasons to laugh as well.
So let's, you know, if there's any triggered lives out there
who find the idea of Donald Trump buying Greenland
to be too hard to deal with,
just take a step back in a deep breath
and maybe just laugh a little bit.
Yeah, maybe take a cruise through the Gulf of America
and just decompress a little bit.
Gulf of America.
You want to tell him beautiful because it's so petty
and pointless and it's just...
I know.
Oh God.
It is, it really is amazing.
Okay, okay, we've been rolling, man, time flies.
Hour 45.
Bryn, before we close out, anything else you want to leave
with, I'll link you on, I'll link your ex and your no-ster
and I can link your website as well.
Anywhere else you want to send people or anywhere else
or anything else you want to leave people with, perhaps?
Yeah, I would say to leave people with.
So in my view, we have actually a very unique moment
in time here.
I think that Trump comes in, the administration,
the history leading up to this,
a whole bunch of things that were improbable
had to go right in order to produce the moment we're in now.
So I think we should be as a group,
no matter where your politics are,
I think we should take this moment very seriously
and fight for what we believe in.
I do think the next call it decade
is going to define the next 100 years.
And so the stakes are high, pay attention, do your best,
like get involved, really, really get after it.
That's point one.
Point two is that take the white pill for Christ,
be optimistic.
We have a lot to be optimistic about.
Do not let whatever your Twitter feed shows you,
rattle you, do not let it affect your day.
Look around you, build your friends, your family,
your community, get married, have kids,
do the things that are tried and true ways
to have a fulfilling life.
Get your hands dirty, touch the grass, whatever.
Like truly lean into your local life
and what happens?
Your anxiety goes away, do the health fundamentals,
okay, your body feels good, you have more energy.
Absolutely white pill, do that.
It doesn't mean be like lying to the pain in the world.
It means like take it in perspective
and realize that if it's not in my actual reality,
it is a lower priority.
People blowing up in the Middle East is horrible,
but it does not affect me the same way
that something happens in my family.
Okay, so rationally prioritize.
That's probably my two main points.
Yeah, take the moment seriously.
Do the fundamentals of health,
come back to the local environment,
don't let the internet stress you out.
And then, yeah, more, I mean, come say hi on Twitter
for the angry, voluntary, no parent people.
I expect the hate, bring it on.
Zers, no, just kidding, but seriously, what else?
Yeah, I'm at Swam, but at Swam for five years.
You wanna buy some Bitcoin, swam.com.
You can buy in your retirement account.
You can get a financial advisor type
if you're more high net worth
and you want more concierge service.
You can get the app, you can buy it online.
We got a lot of big things coming this year.
If you wanna stack Sats and not spend your dollars,
we have a credit card coming out in a couple months.
So swam.com slash card,
and you can sign up for the credit card.
So no more airline miles, get Sats back in your swam account.
That's gonna be a no-brainer way to stack Sats.
I sadly used BlockFi's card,
gridded my teeth to use that in the moment.
I loved it, I absolutely loved it.
They went out, so see you later.
Yeah, brandingquitem.com has all my essays.
Really enjoyed the chat here and yeah.
Me too, man.
If you had talked about swan any longer,
though I would have had to charge you for it,
but this time I'll let this one slide.
We'll call this a freebie,
but next time it's gonna have to cost you some Sats, man.
There's nothing I can do, it's the free market, you know?
What can I say?
That's right, oh, one more, actually.
Oh.
Minneapolis Meetup.
We have the best meetup location in the country.
We have one of the best meetup groups,
300 plus members, we get 100 there a month,
great speakers, blah, blah, blah.
Walkers on the invite list for a while.
I've been ghosting.
I need to make it.
I'm going to make it.
Publicly put it out there, so it's hard.
A little shame, a little shame on top.
I like it.
Oh, I'm saying?
I would have done the same thing.
No, I'm actually, I've been wanting to get to that meetup
for a while, we're gonna try to make that happen,
because you guys have built a pretty cool little
toxic psychopathic community over there.
Sure, you might.
Even if it is in Minnesota, you know,
we'll let that part slide.
That's the same in the Midwest for a lot of reasons.
Well, I don't know if it can really top Wisconsin,
but no, if we start doing this path,
we'll need to go for another hour.
We don't need to get talking about whose lakes are superior,
or anything like that, or which one has a Richard drinking
culture or anything like that, or better cheese.
We'll save that for another day.
But seriously, Brett, I appreciate you sharing your time
and your knowledge today.
This was a great time catching up,
and looking forward to doing it again soon.
Likewise, much appreciation, man.
Time flew, great chat, happy anytime.
And congrats on the little one.
He's so smiley.
Honestly, Brighton's my day when I see this little smile,
so well done over there.
Well, right back at you, and yeah,
to the Dieter Bob's out there, the smile of your child
will be worth so much more than your snarky posts
on Twitter ever could be.
And with that, we close.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin
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