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Money is a technology for measuring fucks given.

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If I wanted to have a slightly more economy focused and maybe slightly more flippant kind of novel,

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I would have called the unit of currency the fuck.

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Because it measures whether you give a fuck.

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Anyone who claims to give a fuck and they're not spending their money on something

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doesn't actually give a fuck.

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And that's the worst part of government.

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It's not just that it takes a lot of your stuff.

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It's that it takes a lot of your stuff and then it pays smart people to do stupid things

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when they could be doing smart things instead.

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Anytime you subsidize something, by definition, you're artificially influencing people to do

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things that people don't actually give a fuck about.

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Because if they actually gave a fuck, they would pay for it themselves out of their own supply of fucks.

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I'm not with my guest about bitcoin and whatever else comes up.

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Today, that guest is Devin Erickson, a software engineer turned science fiction writer,

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who went viral for absolutely destroying the interim CEO of open AI,

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after he suggested a 100% inheritance tax, and some other fucking stupid ideas.

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I read Devin's first sci-fi novel, Theft of Fire, and I absolutely loved it.

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And I knew I needed to get him on the show.

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Devin and I went deep into a fuckload of topics, from science fiction to culture and law,

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to capitalism versus communism, private property and bitcoin, AI, technology,

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plus a whole lot more.

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If you are a bit coiner who, like me, spends most of your time reading about Austrian economics,

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and of course bitcoin, I highly recommend you take a little break and check out Theft of Fire.

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Plus, bitcoin is mentioned multiple times in the book, so it's basically like reading a bitcoin book,

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but a lot more fun.

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Check the links in the show notes for Devin's website so you can grab a copy of Theft of Fire.

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As always, you can watch the video version of this show on Rumble,

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YouTube or X by searching at Walker America, or listen on fountain.fm,

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or wherever you get your podcasts by searching for the bitcoin podcast.

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And if you do listen to the bitcoin podcast on fountain, which I recommend,

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consider creating a clip of something you found interesting in the show, or giving it a boost.

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And if you're not using fountain yet, what are you doing?

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You can send bitcoin to your favorite podcasters and earn bitcoin just for listening to the show.

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And finally, if you are a bitcoin-only company interested in sponsoring another fucking bitcoin podcast,

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hit me up on social media or through the website, bitcoinpodcast.net.

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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Devin Erickson.

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A lot of things that are very valuable in retrospect,

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usually when they start out, they're just something that somebody thinks will never amount to anything.

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I don't know if you've seen that famous

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Usenet post from Linus Torvalds where he says,

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I'm just working on this little project operating system.

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So sometimes at the beginning of things, you get moments like that.

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So you don't underestimate yourself and you always try to write down your thoughts

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and record what you're saying and capture it all, because you don't know what might be useful later.

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Amen. So much, a lot of brilliance and beauty happens in serendipitous moments that are not planned.

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And to quote you, plan is a list of things that aren't going to happen.

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Yeah, it's like you always have to plan, but you always have to revise the plan.

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And I always planned, for example, to sort of, okay, there's going to be this arc between

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unknown Scribbler on the internet and hopefully A-list novelist,

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but we never thought that path would go through anti-communist rants.

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And you know, that is precisely how I found out about you.

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Was that back and forth that you had, although I don't even know if it's quite

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fair to call it a back and forth with Emma Cheer, because he blocked me fairly quickly.

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Did he really? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Like the second message, basically, I said something,

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he said something, and I said something and he blocked me. So, you know, it's kind of a disappointment

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from sort of his personal growth perspective, because, you know, I'm sure that his feelings were hurt,

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and that's regrettable. But usually in these teachable moments that we're going to learn

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something, usually our feelings are hurt, because it's always more difficult to change your worldview

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to accommodate something than it is to assimilate something into your existing worldview.

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But that's such an important skill. You know, I think maybe there's like a couple of personal

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traits that are key predictors for success in life, and that's high IQ, high agency, and high

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teachability. And this man is sitting here, pontificating on how he would organize society if he

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were king. And he's saying, you know, I think that everyone has potential within them. And I want to

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make a world with equal opportunity for everybody because you're all smart. And therefore, I think

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we should confiscate everybody's inheritance and just redistribute it. And it's like, then,

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when somebody says, that's a terrible idea, you've destroyed all of the legacy and all of the

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multi-generational technical know-how in your culture, and you've forced the sale of every asset,

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and you've made all the wealth flow through the government, which is known to have sticky fingers.

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And then when somebody objects to that, he says, why don't you understand that I'm trying to help

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you because I respect you? No, you don't fucking respect us. You don't fucking respect us. You

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respected us. You'd listen. You know, it's these people who see themselves as these abstract

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philosopher kings because they got slightly fortunate in the market and knew how to do one

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thing well. You know, when I want to make a video game streaming website, I'm going to call them a

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cheer. Well, maybe not now, but abstractly, I would. You know, when I want to make a video game

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streaming website, you know, when I'm going to design a society, you know, I'm not going to say,

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gosh, what does the founder of a video game streaming website think? You know, maybe the one

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is just a little more complicated than the other. You know, maybe the one is this problem

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that we have been trying to solve since human beings first learned to bang the rocks together.

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And I think one of the reasons that this kind of rant sort of resonated is that people see

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this kind of thing and they get they get scared and they're right to get scared because this person

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is an eminent public figure and senators will take his phone calls and then you see this very,

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very simplistic first order thinking coming out of this guy and it's it's scary because it makes

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people start to wake up to the fact that the people in charge aren't any smarter than you.

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They're just meaner and greedier and you know, then when somebody says no, that's that's stupid.

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You're being stupid. Stop using wisdom as a dump stat and start paying attention to

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all of the other people around you who have skin in the game. They're affected by these things.

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They're not just sitting on top of a stack of $500 million pontificating about how we should

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rearrange the universe according to my game theory. Well, and read some fucking history too.

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Like this isn't some theoretical thing. You don't have to look very far to find many examples

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of exactly what he's suggesting throughout history. My wife's family, her dad defected from

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communist Romania. This literally happened to their family. Yeah, well, and they always say, well,

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it's not communism. Well, it's it's the same sort of cluster of things where you're centralizing

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everything in society in order to control it. Because you think that you're so smart that you

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can just sort of tell all of humanity they're marching orders and everything will work out fine.

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And, you know, communism, you know, Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses,

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to which some wag responded that communism is the opiate of the intellectual.

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And the reality is that is that socialism doesn't really it doesn't appeal to the intellect.

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It appeals to the intellectual. Because the intellectual per Thomas soul is someone whose

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work product is ideas. And they like to think, oh, I'm going to sit around and I'm going to think

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of ideas. And then I'm going to fix all the problems in society by thinking of ideas,

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and everybody is going to stand up and clap. And the thing is that when you have an idea,

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you need people to go along with it. And there's two things you can do about that. You can persuade

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them, which is very difficult and takes a long time and requires a lot of effort. Or you can

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centralize all of the power in society. And, you know, you can point guns at people, which you

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don't think of as pointing guns at people, you think of it as making laws. But it really comes

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down to violence, because that's what laws are enforced with. And this centralization of power

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represents this sort of treasure trove of power for for implementing intellectuals ideas, like,

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here's the one ring. And if you have the one ring, you can you can make your ideas into reality.

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And all intellectuals tend to think, well, if all of my ideas were made into reality,

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it would, you know, it would be paradise. And if you crack a history book, that never happens.

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What happens is mountains of skulls. And then they always say, well, that wasn't me. And those

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were the wrong ideas. Well, the truth is that everybody, no matter how smart they are, and I

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include myself in this, 99% of their ideas are rubbish, really, really, really rubbish. And

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what we do in capitalism is everybody just goes out and implements their ideas on their own in

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their own little life or their own little business. And then, you know, every once in a while, somebody

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runs across that 1% idea, like, how about we make the rocket booster reusable? And then it works.

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And everybody goes, we're going to imitate him. And then that idea spreads. So capitalism is

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basically this massive parallel processing of trying to find ideas. And let me tell you,

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nothing will teach you that most of your ideas are rubbish, like writing a novel.

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Seriously, it's a process of about six months to a year, depending on how persnickety you're being

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and how good you are and how fast you are. But when you crack a finished novel, that's good stuff,

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I mean, it's not shovelware, then you always get this phenomenon of, wow, this writer is so brilliant.

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Every page of this is just dripping with good ideas. And you have to understand,

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you know, and people say this to me, and I'm like, well, thank you. But you have to understand that

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you are taking 20 to 24 hours to consume a year's worth of all my smart ideas after I have thrown

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away all the bad ones. So when you write fiction, and when you go over it and over it and over it

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and edit it and edit it and edit it, you realize that, you know, most of the stuff I come up with

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on a daily basis is stupid. You just throw away all the stupid ones. And that's what capitalism

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does. It throws away the stupid ideas by allowing business to fail and keeping the good ones.

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I love that analogy. And you know, I think we are already, I think we're already in it,

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Devin, I think we're already diving in if that's okay with you. Because you are already like inside

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my brain as far as some of the things I wanted to talk about. So this is fantastic. Well, this is

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great. Sorry. No, no, I was just gonna say, before we get going, I want to like just have you kind

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of introduce yourself a little bit, but finish that thought first. Finish the thought first,

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then I'll ask you one simple introductory question, and we'll roll from there.

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That sounds good. I'm afraid I lost it. So I'll introduce myself to you first.

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Okay. Who are you and how did you get here today? I am Devin Erickson. I am a retired engineer who

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just sat down one day and started writing novels. It's like, okay, I'm retired. I can do what I want.

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When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a science fiction writer. And you know, some adults said,

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oh, honey, that's a stupid dream. You should do something else. And you know, now I'm like, hey,

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I'm retired. You can't tell me what to do. Fuck you. I'm gonna do what I want. And so what I wanted

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to do was create books. And this is my debut novel, Theft of Fire, with it is the first of a four

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book series. And we came about out about exactly three months ago, I think. And so far, we're doing

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pretty well, you know, we've hit the top 10 in hard science fiction on a few days. We've had

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some days where we hit the top thousand on Amazon. And that's all of Amazon. So that's like every

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book ever published. And then, okay, well, my agent is is trying to coach me stop that. Shut up.

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And you know, we just had a nice post on Twitter today where John Carmack finished it and endorsed

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me and gave me a nice shout out. So that was fun. Because John Carmack spent a lot of time

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entertaining me when I was young. So I'm happy to be able to a little bit repay the favor.

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Yeah, well, I've got the book. I figured I'd you know, since I have your have to put it

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right behind me as well. So your agent for for, you know, their benefit, there it is.

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I just finished it. I absolutely loved it. I did read about probably the first quarter of it

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out loud to my wife and newborn son. He's like two months old. So I don't think I think a lot of it

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went over his head. I think I didn't I didn't really target the the instilling diapers demographic

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very much. It would have been a very different book. Yeah, well, my I read the rest of it,

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just inside my good old head, because it turns out I wanted to finish it a lot faster and couldn't

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quite put it down. And so went through the rest of it. And I've got to say it was, it's a fantastic,

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fantastic story from the characters, how they developed the fact that you told it in

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first person through Marcus's experience of how he's going through these, you know,

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couple of meaningful, very meaningful relationships for him. Yeah, it made all the difference to me.

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And it felt so much more real. Yeah, that decision was a calculated decision that that presented a

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great deal of difficulty for me, because that was that was a complete showstopper for getting

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published through any traditional publishing house. I had I had various editors and agents

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completely shut down the moment they found out it was written in first person present tense.

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I literally had one guy from a major publishing house at a convention hand me back my sample

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chapters, you know, holding them up with his fingers like this, for those of you who can see the video,

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as if I had handed him a dead spider. And he said, rewrite it in the third person. You do

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know what third person means, don't you? And it's like, okay, I can see that I am going to have to

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publish this myself. Because the whole point of, you know, not the only point, but a major point

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of some of the character arcs is how people misinterpret what they see and misinterpret

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other people through the lens of their own experience. And the story is very much about

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three characters learning to understand each other and learning to work together. And so the

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first person perspective was critical to that. And you know, they're just, well, that's not

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fashionable right now. Well, okay, I'll publish it myself and I'll make it fashionable. Because

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I don't think that the book buying public is subject to silly whims. I think that is something

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that publishers just sort of come up with. So they can fool themselves into thinking they're

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divining the market or something. And you know, they're not, they're not, it's the only thing

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that is really that readers are into is good writing. And I think that all of these things

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that publishers think are trends like, you know, in early 2000s, oh, dark fantasy is really hot

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right now. Well, no, George Martin is really hot right now. You know, and you get all these editors

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telling Brandon Sanderson, can you make it darker? Well, no. And he shouldn't. He's, he's Brandon

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Sanderson. He's not the next George Martin. He's doing his own thing. And every good piece of art

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comes from not that I necessarily include myself. That's, that's other people's decision. Not mine.

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I just make the stuff. I include good fiction in art. You know, that means every, every piece of

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art that is genuinely good. And I include George Martin's work in that, even though he is a fat,

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lazy slob and doesn't finish his work. Every good piece of art proceeds from a singular artistic

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vision. And that can come from one person, or it can be shared between a couple of people who

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communicate really well. But there's always one vision in charge. You can't make good fiction,

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and you can't make inspiring fiction. You can't make fiction that makes people feel something

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by committee. And that's why you have nothing to watch these days.

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Isn't that the truth? I mean, it is, it is kind of absurd that you see, if we talk about, let's say,

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Hollywood as a, as a blanket term, the only science fiction that you see, and it feels dirty,

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even calling it that, is just recycled versions of what was popular 20, 30, 40 years ago, when

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they were actually new and innovative ideas. And now they're just recycling it with new,

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new little tidbits thrown in that are trendy right now. Yeah, yeah. Well, the storytellers who

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knew how to innovate, and we're willing to do so, have largely aged out of the business. So

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the problem is deeper than just this sort of far left, woke, neo Marxist messaging.

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The problem is that the people who have done this their entire career, this kind of messaging,

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and that's really just how they show off for their friends. It has nothing to do with the audience.

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You know, the people who have done that all their careers, they don't know the principles of

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storytelling. They don't understand what makes a story engaging. They don't understand how to

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make characters relatable. And there's lots of people who could tell them, and there's lots of

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books they could read to learn that. But the prerequisite to learning anything is that third

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attribute I talked about that teachable attitude, that willingness to restructure your view of the

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universe to accommodate this new information that you have. And, you know, what we see today in this

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sort of Disney Star Wars, you know, Marvel's designed by committee films full of big CGI fight

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sequences and Joss Whedon style quips is that when audiences say, we don't really like this,

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like this, what they do is they call the fans racist or sexist or somethingist.

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They double down on what they're doing. And they say, you know, no, it's not it's not my artistic

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vision that's wrong in the sense that they have one at all. It's, you know, you guys are wrong

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fans. You're supposed to like it. Well, as an author, you don't get to say that. You are the

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God of your universe, but you are not the God of your audience. They are guests in your universe,

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and it's their decision whether they like it or not. But these people can't accept that,

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because they've based their entire worldview around what's popular in their own social circle,

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and they simply don't have the storytelling skills. You know, they don't know how to do it. And

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that's one of the reasons why I decided to write like I did is that I spent my youth,

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you know, a lot of it in the back of the public library before they all got made into homeless

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shelters with this big stacks of classic science fiction, you know, by people who really knew

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not only how to entertain, but how to fire the imagination. And it's like, okay,

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I want to make a 20th century 21st century version of this. I want to make something that

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captures that same feeling, but is updated a little bit because the technology is updated a little bit.

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Now, I love it. And you know, one of the things that I really enjoyed about Theft of Fire was it,

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first of all, the narrative itself and the story was wonderful. But the fact that, one,

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you clearly did a ton of research and put a lot of energy into making sure it was,

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the science actually worked. Like the science part of the science fiction was actually plausible.

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And that makes a huge difference when it's actually believable. The other thing is just that it felt,

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you know, even though a lot of the subject matter itself is dark at times and you're dealing with

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these, you know, these difficult situations, the overall message felt more hopeful. I mean,

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it is ultimately a story of transformation and of hope and of what is possible.

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And there was also an element of realism, true realism, not just dystopian mumbo jumbo.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for a light to be clearly visible, you have to take it into dark places.

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And one of my inspirations was a very excellent video essay called, Is Superman Still Relevant?

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And there's a lot of people nowadays who think that he isn't. And Superman, you know, once he's

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sort of got going and, you know, people had a clear idea of who he was and he got out of the roots

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of the original storytellers sort of started trying to do FDR worship and this kind of thing.

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Superman was an aspirational character. It's not a story about a man who can punch the giant robot

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harder than the giant robot can punch him. That's not really the core of the story. The story

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is about aspirational morality, about a good example. And, you know, a lot of people, this was

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written in a very hopeful time when America was very ascendant and we had a strong sense of cultural

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unity. And I think the reason that a lot of these corporate writer hacks are now more interested

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in comic book villains is because they have a hard time identifying with that kind of ethos

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because they're busy like, okay, I have enough trouble in my own life. I'm just kind of hanging

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on by my fingernails. I'm not very mentally stable, which you can see if you look at photographs of

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some of these people. And I don't feel like I have the cargo space to help or save anybody else.

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You know, I want to gain power and influence. I want to get my own life in order. And this

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I want impulse tends to make them feel more aligned with the traditional comic book villains

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than with the heroes. And what they tend to say is that the heroes are boring. And of course,

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soon after follows the term unrealistic. And I think the reason that these people think that

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Superman is unrealistic is that they don't see a path between themselves and Superman.

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They don't see a path between where they are, and somebody who is successful and virtuous and

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heroic. And so I wanted to write a story about a bunch of people who kind of start out as crappy

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people. You know, it's there. There have been some some some interesting debates online about

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whether in the beginning of the book, Marcus or Miranda is a worse person with strongly held

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opinions on both sides. And not to give away too much for the trilogy. But the the the plan is here's

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how you go from someone who isn't a good person to someone who actually does the right thing and

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creates something worthwhile or does something worthwhile that is that is good for everyone

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instead of good for themselves at the expense of everyone else. So the the intent for the series

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is to be a story of heroism for the 21st century. I'm I'm already excited for the next one. It's

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as soon as I put it down, I was like, gosh, I cannot wait to pick this up again. And you know,

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something that you've you've talked about, I've seen you tweet about. And I think I heard you

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on a couple other podcasts talk about is the idea of because we're talking about culture here,

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really, right? And and how the culture in storytelling has shifted, both through centralizing

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forces and decisions by committee, but also through just people kind of I mean, you're writing

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what's in you. Right. And we see that a lot of what is in people is pretty dark and does not aspire

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to that heroic role. And you've also talked about the idea that law itself is downstream from that

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culture. Oh, yeah. Can we explore that a little bit? Because I think that's a really important

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not just law, but technology. And really, all of society is downstream from culture. And

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just to give an example of this kind of thinking, you think about all of the things, all of the major

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inventions that were created in the 20th century. Now, try to name five that didn't happen in science

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fiction first. See, I don't think I can name five. And it will take me a little while to probably

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name one. Exactly. Was GPS talked about in sci fi? Yes. There that was going to be my one. So

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there we go. I'm out. Pulsar navigation. Okay, GPS satellites orient themselves.

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So it's based on pulsars that are very distant from the earth, actually. And this was, I can't

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name the science fiction writer offhand. I'm afraid I'm drawing a blank, but it actually was a science

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fiction writer who came up with this idea. So it's, it's debatable. And it probably goes both ways,

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whether science fiction writers come up with something, or whether they just kind of see the

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direction that engineers are going in, whether they see the possibilities. But the fact remains

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that this heavily influences our technological development. And it influences our attitudes

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about technology and technology influences our culture. And fiction in general, not just science

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fiction, influences what we think is culturally acceptable and culturally normal. You know,

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we've been telling each other stories around the campfire since we developed language. And stories

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have always been how we, how we transmit our values, how we talk about what we think is true

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and important. And I think one of the reasons that a very small number of people who are on the far,

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far left have come to have a disproportionate cultural influence to where everyone is sitting

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around on the internet talking about them and censorship and how our society is going to hell,

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you know, due to the influence of like less than 1% of people who are into this madness.

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You know, the reason for this is, is that other cultural forces somehow decided, somehow developed

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this attitude that art was lost, that art was lost territory and we should just surrender it.

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And that's okay because fiction is for babies anyway. Well, even if that were true,

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babies grow up, you know, read me a story, daddy, you know, you can, you can mock stories all you

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want by suggesting that they're first kids who say that. But you know, if you don't do that,

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then somebody else is going to read your kids a story. And then that person is going to be daddy.

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And what is that story going to be about? You're not going to control it. So if your cultural

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viewpoint is not creating art, you know, whether that be movies, television, books, audio books,

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cartoons, you know, comic strips, whatever it is that tells a story, if you're not creating stories,

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then you are dying. You are dying because you might have kids. But your kids will embrace the

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culture of your cultural enemies, and you will be erased from history. So it's time that we stopped

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leaving art in the hands of these utterly selfish, utterly foolish, and utterly irresponsible,

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tiny minorities of the population. You know, you can literally point to a nice round number of city

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blocks in probably the Upper East Side of Manhattan that is controlling the entire United States

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traditional publishing industry. Well, those people live in one place, they all talk to each other,

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they all see the world in one way, and they're making a concerted effort to exclude alternative

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points of view. So it's about time that the rest of us started telling our stories. Because if you

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don't tell your story, no one hears it. I think that that's it's so important for people to realize

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that because I think like you said, I'm somebody who I used to read only fiction. Yeah. And then

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at a certain point, I don't know what switch flipped in me, but I started thinking somehow, you know

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what, I need to, I need to read nonfiction, I need to read, you know, and I genuinely enjoy books

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about monetary theory and, you know, the Austrian economics and all, you know, history. But there

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was something missing. And I have to thank you because Theft of Fire gave me that back a little

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bit. And that felt, it felt really good. But people forget that everything is about all of our

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cultures about stories. All propaganda is stories, all political, political movements are just stories.

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Yeah. And the team that has the best story, the group that has the best story controls the narrative.

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Well, every every vision of the future is a story. And I won't say it's stories that separate us from

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the animals. But it is the same capacity that allows us to tell stories that separates us from the

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animals. Because in order to plan, in order to learn and grow and develop and make things like fire

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and the wheel and technology, what we have to do is we have to tell ourselves a story. So the reason

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that a bird can't make a plan, and you know, maybe an African gray parrot or a raven or some smart

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birds can to some extent, you know, but if you picture something like a bird that can't really

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make plans and carry them out, it's because it can't tell itself a story about the future

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that hasn't happened yet. So every time you make a plan, you're telling yourself a story.

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Every time you decide to create a podcast about Bitcoin, because you hope to affect some sort of

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positive change in the world, then you start and you have to start and you can only start by telling

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yourself a story in your head about how this will be. So if we don't tell stories, we're animals.

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And the stories tell us how to proceed and they tell us about what things might be possible.

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So the reason that this tiny percentage of lunatic neomarksists, and you know, I'm not talking about

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people who vote Democrat, you know, I'm talking about really, really this fringe of lunatic neomarksists.

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You know, the reason they have influence is everyone else was asleep at the wheel

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while they got influence over how our culture told itself stories.

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And the reason that everybody feels despairing about the future, despite the fact that we have

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all this cool shit and we're about to go to Mars, is that they tell stories of despair and we read

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them. And you know, so we're listening to all this dystopian nonsense about windmills and solar

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panels and austerity instead of building nuclear reactors and colonizing Mars.

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It does become absurd at a certain point. Just if you look at, let's say, the stories that we

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tell ourselves around energy, because this is something you brought up, this is a Bitcoin

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podcast, but we talk about whatever comes up here. You know, because there are many things

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downstream from, or I should say, money is upstream. Bitcoin is an element of a plan.

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It's an element of a plan based on a goal that we want to be free. We want to be free to control

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our own destinies and make our own decisions. And one of the ways that people who want to

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centralize power, this gets back to socialists and intellectuals and people with central plans

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that they want the rest of us to be chess pawns and carry out, you know, one of the ways that

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they centralize power is controlling money supplies and printing money and this kind of thing. But

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Bitcoin is not this thing that can succeed or fail on its own, because it's part of a larger,

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not even a movement, but just a goal, a desire to not be moved around like chess pawns, to make

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our own plans and a plan as a story and to carry out those plans and have our destiny be determined

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by our stories that we tell ourselves and not by a story that someone else invented

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to indoctrinate us. If you want to keep your Bitcoin safe from the communists and the totalitarians

348
00:44:35,520 --> 00:44:41,440
of this world, you need to take it off an exchange and into your own custody. Go to

349
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bitbox.swiss slash walker and use the promo code walker for 5% off the Bitcoin only Bitbox O2

350
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hardware wallet. It's fully open source. You can go to their GitHub and verify for yourself. You

351
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don't have to trust me. It's also super easy to set up and it's a great tool for seasoned psychopaths

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and new bit coiners alike. When you go to bitbox.swiss slash walker and use the promo code walker,

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00:45:06,640 --> 00:45:13,120
not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support another fucking Bitcoin podcast. So thank

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00:45:13,120 --> 00:45:20,160
you. You know, my vision for telling my stories was not just to get my vision of the future out

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there to say, Hey, we're going to colonize the solar system and it's going to be cool. And we're

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going to build AI and it's going to be cool. And we're going to tamper with our own genome and it's

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going to be cool. It was also, I told a story. You can tell a story too. There's nothing stopping you.

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You know, I'm, there's no big publishing house behind me. I just, you know, I'm some weirdo

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with his two wives in a little house somewhere in Tennessee and that's, that's it.

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And here I am selling all these books and it's great. And you can do that too. If that's what

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you wanted to vote your time to, you know, or you can make a podcast or you can make some other kind

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of art or you can start a company and train AI entirely on classical Greek literature.

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You just make a plan and, and build something. You don't need permission.

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You know, and I think the beauty of what you said about just like, you're, you're just a guy,

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right? Yeah, who decided to do this and you made that decision. And it was actually possible to

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do that today and to get recognition and be seen at scale because of decentralization.

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Because the tools are there, because the tools are there and the institutions that have been

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captured by proponents of this anti-human, anti-life philosophy, these institutions are

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rotten from the inside. They're weak. I love competing with TradPub because they suck at this.

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50 years ago, they were powerful. 50 years ago, they had mindshare. 50 years ago,

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they knew how to tell a story. Well, now they don't. Now they don't. Now, you know, teenagers

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aren't reading anymore because we haven't given them anything to read. They haven't lost the

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ability. They're not dumber. They're not dumber than previous generations. In fact, in some ways,

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they're smarter because they know how to take something toxic and set it down and not look at

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it again. We just haven't given them anything to, to, to love.

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You know, the beauty of what you just said also is you talk about going up against TradPub, right?

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Yeah. And that you like that fight because they're bad at this and that parallels so well. Yeah.

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I mean, to media and communication in general, look at, look at cable news versus Tucker Carlson,

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who just got however, 120, 30, I don't know what it's up to, millions of views.

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Does anybody watch cable anymore? I think it's only on at airports. I honestly,

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I'm pretty sure that at least 60% of the viewer base of cable news is just forced

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viewership at airports. Yeah, I mean, who reads the newspaper? Like, really?

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It's, it's mind blowing. But you know, they know that they're losing power too,

384
00:48:44,880 --> 00:48:53,200
because they are big and slow and they're the incumbent. Well, they were these news organizations

385
00:48:53,200 --> 00:49:01,920
and Hollywood and so forth were created by the communications technologies of the 20th century.

386
00:49:02,560 --> 00:49:10,560
And those are radio and television. And those are one way communications media that are that

387
00:49:10,560 --> 00:49:22,640
support a one too many model. And they centralize control. And this is why the 20th century was

388
00:49:24,000 --> 00:49:33,360
the century of fascism and communism. Because all of these tin pot dictators,

389
00:49:33,360 --> 00:49:51,280
like Hitler, and Stalin, and Roosevelt, and so forth, could get on the radio and deliver these

390
00:49:51,280 --> 00:50:02,480
spiels to an entirely passive audience who had no way of talking back, and no way of talking to

391
00:50:02,480 --> 00:50:11,360
each other and saying to each other, you know, hey, what do you actually think of this new deal

392
00:50:11,360 --> 00:50:19,840
stuff? You know, some of it sounds a little fishy to me. You know, you have no way of knowing

393
00:50:20,400 --> 00:50:26,960
when you're listening to this one too many communication medium, that you're not the only

394
00:50:26,960 --> 00:50:35,280
one who thinks the emperor has no clothes. Well, with the internet, we have a many to many

395
00:50:35,280 --> 00:50:41,760
communication medium. And you know, in in microcosm, you sometimes have some one way stuff. I mean,

396
00:50:42,320 --> 00:50:49,680
I'm sure that at some moment in the future, there's someone watching this podcast who has

397
00:50:49,680 --> 00:50:54,320
something to say in response to what I said, but obviously I can't hear him.

398
00:50:54,320 --> 00:51:05,520
But there's a whole internet on which he can say what he has to say, and somebody else will hear him.

399
00:51:05,520 --> 00:51:14,960
And it may even end up being me. So there are still these kinds of podcasts and, you know, screens,

400
00:51:14,960 --> 00:51:21,760
and, you know, people making a story where that, you know, it's a mini series or a movie, and it's

401
00:51:21,760 --> 00:51:32,080
one way in the fine grain. But overall, there's a conversation. There's a conversation between

402
00:51:32,080 --> 00:51:40,880
everyone and everyone else who has enough wealth and technological know how to get involved. And

403
00:51:42,480 --> 00:51:48,480
there's no longer this capability for just a handful of people to control the narrative.

404
00:51:48,480 --> 00:51:53,520
And every time they try, you know, because there have been various attempts, I mean,

405
00:51:53,520 --> 00:52:02,560
the Democratic Party basically bought Reddit before the 2016 election. But the thing, and they bought

406
00:52:02,560 --> 00:52:09,920
the onion as well, which used to be, you know, satire news and used to be good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

407
00:52:09,920 --> 00:52:17,280
But, you know, it's all it's all like left wing cuff pieces now. But

408
00:52:17,280 --> 00:52:25,600
every time they do this, the value goes away. And then the audience goes away, because audiences

409
00:52:25,600 --> 00:52:40,480
are no longer captive. They're no longer beholden to everything that you, you say on Channel 7,

410
00:52:40,480 --> 00:52:50,080
you know, we've had we've had three eras of power. And the first one was violence. You had the king.

411
00:52:50,880 --> 00:52:57,920
And the king only had to be supported by a small number of armored knights, because the

412
00:52:57,920 --> 00:53:04,480
panellope of an armored knight is very expensive. And this was the ultimate military technology.

413
00:53:04,480 --> 00:53:12,160
And so the king could force everyone to do his bidding with the voluntary support of only a

414
00:53:12,160 --> 00:53:19,200
small number of armored nights. And then somebody invented not only gunpowder, but rifling,

415
00:53:20,480 --> 00:53:28,240
to where now a peasant with a tube can take out your armored night at 200 yards. Well, okay,

416
00:53:28,240 --> 00:53:36,000
now you enter the second era of power, which is the era of deception. You can no longer force

417
00:53:36,000 --> 00:53:40,720
everybody to do their bidding, especially if you're in America, and they're all armed to the teeth.

418
00:53:42,240 --> 00:53:49,280
So you have to fool them. And to fool them, you have the technology where to get your message out,

419
00:53:49,920 --> 00:53:55,440
you only need the support of a few people, because you have radio and television and radio and

420
00:53:55,440 --> 00:54:03,760
television is very expensive. So now the radio and television are the armored night of the era

421
00:54:03,760 --> 00:54:15,040
of deception. Well, now you have the internet and a peasant with a podcast can take out your armored

422
00:54:15,040 --> 00:54:26,400
story at 200 yards. And so now we are entering the era of persuasion. And I know there's a lot of

423
00:54:26,400 --> 00:54:33,360
people listening to this or at least a few who are thinking, well, you know, that sounds very

424
00:54:33,360 --> 00:54:40,960
naive, because things are awfully dark right now. And all of these deceivers and powers that be are

425
00:54:40,960 --> 00:54:50,320
pulling all of these shenanigans to keep their control. And you know, this seems unduly, you

426
00:54:50,320 --> 00:54:57,520
know, naive. And what you have to understand is that all of these shenanigans they're pulling,

427
00:54:57,520 --> 00:55:07,120
they're pulling because they have to, you know, it used to be that your power brokers just kind

428
00:55:07,120 --> 00:55:18,560
of called up in PC and NBC and NBC also works in that case. Very fitting. Yes, they just called

429
00:55:18,560 --> 00:55:26,400
up NBC and said, you know, here's what here's what we want the news to do today. And that was

430
00:55:26,400 --> 00:55:33,840
sufficient. And now there's all this thrashing around trying to buy social media websites.

431
00:55:33,840 --> 00:55:42,000
And, you know, trying to trying to make deals with Facebook. And you know, when Elon Musk bought

432
00:55:42,000 --> 00:55:48,160
Twitter, it turned out that, you know, the intelligence community was calling up Twitter

433
00:55:48,160 --> 00:55:54,880
and telling them who to censor. And, you know, the reason they're pulling all this bullshit is

434
00:55:54,880 --> 00:56:01,280
because they have to, you know, if you're digging through the couch cushions for loose change,

435
00:56:01,280 --> 00:56:11,600
you're already in trouble. So this kind of thrashing around in desperation shows that on a larger

436
00:56:11,600 --> 00:56:22,080
scale, the tide is turning against people who achieve power by manipulating. And in the future,

437
00:56:22,960 --> 00:56:29,600
leaders are not necessarily really going to be those elected to office at all. And they're not

438
00:56:29,600 --> 00:56:36,880
necessarily going to be those with billions of dollars. They're going to be the people who can

439
00:56:36,880 --> 00:56:45,600
create a compelling meme or a compelling story or a compelling narrative that gets out there. And

440
00:56:45,600 --> 00:56:55,840
has everybody say, yes, yes, I believe what you say this, this stirs something in me. And I'm going

441
00:56:55,840 --> 00:57:03,040
to repost it. And I'm going to copy and paste it. And I'm going to send it to my friends. And I'm

442
00:57:03,040 --> 00:57:11,520
going to spread this message because I voluntarily accept it, because it speaks to what is within me.

443
00:57:12,960 --> 00:57:19,600
So we are entering the era of the ability to persuade as the source of power.

444
00:57:19,600 --> 00:57:28,560
That's a thing that I think is personally very hopeful. And the beauty of this is that the

445
00:57:29,280 --> 00:57:34,000
genie doesn't go back in the bottle when it comes to technology and when it comes to decentralizing

446
00:57:34,000 --> 00:57:40,480
technology. Things can trend towards centralization, but with certain types of technology with the

447
00:57:40,480 --> 00:57:46,000
internet, which one can argue has become, there are various silos and various gatekeepers, right?

448
00:57:46,000 --> 00:57:50,720
But there are also many ways to get around those gatekeepers. Well, there are various silos,

449
00:57:50,720 --> 00:57:58,080
but it's no longer one big silo. Exactly. Where one person or group decides who's allowed to be in

450
00:57:58,080 --> 00:58:08,480
the silo and who is shot. But they are terrified of this. There's a new protocol for publishing,

451
00:58:08,480 --> 00:58:12,880
because that's really all it is. It's called No-ster. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's notes

452
00:58:12,880 --> 00:58:18,720
and other stuff transmitted by relays. I don't think I have. I'll send you some stuff on it

453
00:58:18,720 --> 00:58:24,320
afterwards. The reason I bring it up is it's as simple as possible a protocol as it can be.

454
00:58:24,320 --> 00:58:30,640
Designed by an anonymous guy. If anyone knows, he's from Brazil, and he just built this thing

455
00:58:31,200 --> 00:58:37,280
to be social media as it was meant to be. But the beauty of this is like Bitcoin,

456
00:58:37,280 --> 00:58:41,920
it is just a protocol. It's all open source. So anybody can take it, copy it, create whatever

457
00:58:41,920 --> 00:58:47,760
they want. They tried to ban multiple clients on this protocol in China, and people just use

458
00:58:47,760 --> 00:58:52,720
other clients or built their own, found ways around it. The internet can't stop it. It interprets

459
00:58:52,720 --> 00:58:59,760
censorship as damage and routes around it. Exactly. And this is such a, in my mind,

460
00:58:59,760 --> 00:59:04,320
but yes, there are plenty of reasons to be gloomy, to be worried about the future.

461
00:59:04,320 --> 00:59:15,920
Well, bad things are always going to happen. And it's easy. Looking at the latest bad thing that

462
00:59:15,920 --> 00:59:22,960
happened is a little bit like checking your stock portfolio every day. You're going to get depressed.

463
00:59:23,920 --> 00:59:28,720
You're going to get depressed because the losses are going to weigh more heavily on you than the

464
00:59:28,720 --> 00:59:41,120
gains. But just like the market trends up forever. The arrow of history is technology,

465
00:59:41,920 --> 00:59:47,680
and that moves in one direction. And technology sometimes makes things worse,

466
00:59:48,960 --> 00:59:58,560
but it makes things better more often than it makes things worse. So whenever we lean into

467
00:59:58,560 --> 01:00:08,800
the creation and adaption of new technology, we gain greater control over our lives and our

468
01:00:08,800 --> 01:00:17,200
destinies and our world and eventually the rest of the universe. So because we're not staying here,

469
01:00:18,080 --> 01:00:23,680
we're going places. We're going to colonize the rest of the solar system, and then we're going

470
01:00:23,680 --> 01:00:30,080
to colonize the stars. And we may have to physically remove anyone who tries to stop us,

471
01:00:30,080 --> 01:00:37,360
but we're going to do it. And so when you look at it from that perspective,

472
01:00:38,240 --> 01:00:50,160
when you look at it from the perspective of, would I rather be alive in 1042 or 2024,

473
01:00:50,160 --> 01:01:03,120
or the answer is always very clear. We gain power by understanding the universe and implementing

474
01:01:03,120 --> 01:01:11,920
technology based on it. And gaining power is a good thing, despite what Hollywood movies have

475
01:01:11,920 --> 01:01:18,160
tried to tell you for the past however many years. It's like anyone who wants to gain power is evil.

476
01:01:18,160 --> 01:01:29,440
No, no, you know, gaining power allows you to shape the universe and it's up to you to have a good

477
01:01:29,440 --> 01:01:36,640
vision for shaping the universe. But there are more good people than evil ones. There are more

478
01:01:37,280 --> 01:01:46,160
pro social people who want to get along and cooperate with others and have a culture that helps

479
01:01:46,160 --> 01:01:52,800
all of us. Then there are evil people who just want to rob. And the reason we know that is that we

480
01:01:52,800 --> 01:02:05,600
have a civilization at all. We are a pack animal and we instinctively seek to get along with the pack

481
01:02:05,600 --> 01:02:14,560
and help each other. And those who don't are broken people. And they gravitate towards sources of

482
01:02:14,560 --> 01:02:23,920
centralized power. So we are starting to remove the sources of centralized power. And the broken

483
01:02:23,920 --> 01:02:31,680
sociopathic people are panicking. It's delicious though, isn't it? Yes. To taste the panic a little

484
01:02:31,680 --> 01:02:37,600
bit. Yes. Yes. You know, one thing I want to touch on, because I've seen you, seen you talk about it

485
01:02:37,600 --> 01:02:44,240
a lot, and I think you've brought up some really great points and also explained them in ways that

486
01:02:44,240 --> 01:02:50,880
even a neo-Marxist could probably understand as they relate to private property. Yeah. And because

487
01:02:50,880 --> 01:02:55,760
we, you know, we were talking just in general about centralization. And ultimately, the goal of

488
01:02:55,760 --> 01:03:01,120
centralization is to centralize everything, right? The goal of communism was to, and of course,

489
01:03:01,120 --> 01:03:07,920
by, you know, the goal of centralization is to be the central power and have everyone else be

490
01:03:07,920 --> 01:03:14,640
your slaves. Yep. And we've seen this time and time again. It's not the means of production to the

491
01:03:14,640 --> 01:03:20,960
people. It's a few people in a room deciding what's best for everyone. Who claim to represent the

492
01:03:20,960 --> 01:03:27,760
people. Oh, and they're so gracious. It's always, we represent the people with a big P. And they hate

493
01:03:27,760 --> 01:03:37,360
people. Yeah. And yeah, it's always that. And their argument is always necessity. And their argument

494
01:03:37,360 --> 01:03:45,440
is always, I will be a benevolent master. And of course, the refutation is, well, you know,

495
01:03:45,440 --> 01:03:56,960
that's the evil is being subordinated. It's not having the wrong master. It's being subordinated.

496
01:03:56,960 --> 01:04:02,800
In the first place. And I want to set you up with this if I can. But you were talking about

497
01:04:02,800 --> 01:04:08,480
private property. Yes, yes. But that is exact that it runs right along to it. Because the whole

498
01:04:08,480 --> 01:04:14,240
purpose we let's loop it back to the law as well. Right. The entire purpose of the law is to organize

499
01:04:14,240 --> 01:04:19,360
the collective defense of private property. Yeah, that's really what the core purpose of the law is.

500
01:04:19,360 --> 01:04:27,280
The law has been perverted to what it is now. Is now civilization. Property is civilization. And

501
01:04:27,280 --> 01:04:33,440
this is the critical thing to understand. Because everything that we call civilization

502
01:04:34,720 --> 01:04:45,680
is a piece of the environment, you know, things lying around that we have taken and invested

503
01:04:45,680 --> 01:04:53,680
effort in. And we have made them into something useful. And the reason people are willing to do

504
01:04:53,680 --> 01:05:03,360
that is that people other people can't then come along and take that from them by force.

505
01:05:04,400 --> 01:05:10,400
You know, if someone can come along and take whatever I have built with force,

506
01:05:10,400 --> 01:05:20,240
I'm not going to waste my time building anything. You know, I'm just going to sit around trying to

507
01:05:20,240 --> 01:05:29,120
feed myself day to day and pursuing immediate pleasure. I'm not going to delay gratification to

508
01:05:29,120 --> 01:05:35,120
invest in anything because then that investment will be wasted. And this explains where property

509
01:05:35,120 --> 01:05:42,160
rights come from. You know, this is a debate that has gone on for thousands of years. Where do

510
01:05:42,160 --> 01:05:49,440
rights come from? Are there rights? Are rights given by God? And then somebody comes along and

511
01:05:49,440 --> 01:05:54,640
says, I talked to God and he said, you should do what I say. And other people, which I have

512
01:05:54,640 --> 01:06:01,120
these elaborate intellectual constructs where rights are inherent in a human being and they

513
01:06:01,120 --> 01:06:06,640
write pages and pages and pages of philosophy books to try to rationalize this bullshit. And

514
01:06:06,640 --> 01:06:16,640
here's where rights come from. We made them up. We made them up. They just we just invented this

515
01:06:16,640 --> 01:06:26,880
shit. It has no basis in reality. We just invented it. But we invented it because we needed it.

516
01:06:26,880 --> 01:06:34,320
We needed it. The concept of rights is a piece of technology. It's a piece of technology that

517
01:06:34,320 --> 01:06:43,200
allows civilization. And it all boils down to property rights. It all boils down to this basic

518
01:06:43,200 --> 01:06:54,720
rule that if someone invests and builds something, they own it and they control it and you can't

519
01:06:54,720 --> 01:07:03,120
take it from them. And that is what built not only empires, it's what built our entire technological

520
01:07:03,120 --> 01:07:13,120
stack. It's the reason that we are not living in grass huts in Africa. And that's why property

521
01:07:13,120 --> 01:07:18,800
rights are absolute and absolutely important, despite the fact that we just made them up.

522
01:07:18,800 --> 01:07:26,000
Because without them, nothing works. And we can all go back to banging the rocks together.

523
01:07:28,000 --> 01:07:32,640
And I think it's so fundamentally important that people don't nothing else matters without

524
01:07:32,640 --> 01:07:37,920
that fundamental right to keep what you have made and use your time and energy to create.

525
01:07:38,480 --> 01:07:47,760
Yeah, exactly. And when you have people who are who are in the sorts of government offices and

526
01:07:47,760 --> 01:07:57,600
these kind of positions of power trying to weaken property rights, what you what you have to realize

527
01:07:57,600 --> 01:08:03,040
is that these people are trying to tear down civilization. And the reason they are trying

528
01:08:03,040 --> 01:08:10,080
to weaken property rights is to make it easier for them personally to take your stuff from you.

529
01:08:10,080 --> 01:08:16,880
And they are willing to burn down civilization so that they might be king of the ashes.

530
01:08:20,400 --> 01:08:25,840
It's I mean, that's it's psychopathic parasitic behavior is what it is because these types of

531
01:08:25,840 --> 01:08:34,080
people they're rent seekers worse than psychopathic because most of your smart psychopaths understand

532
01:08:34,080 --> 01:08:42,320
the value in in making a deal with people, you know, you can get along with a large portion of

533
01:08:42,320 --> 01:08:52,320
psychopaths. The problem is these people who who think that they can take and take and take and

534
01:08:52,320 --> 01:09:02,880
take. And no one is ever going to drag them out of their buildings and guillotine them on the front

535
01:09:02,880 --> 01:09:12,160
steps. And that that is what eventually happens when you push people hard enough. You know,

536
01:09:12,160 --> 01:09:19,760
just just saying what you'll find in history books over and over again, you know, when when

537
01:09:19,760 --> 01:09:27,840
people don't care about abstract philosophical concepts like freedom, they care about their

538
01:09:27,840 --> 01:09:38,800
quality of life. And property rights is where abstract concepts like freedom and quality of

539
01:09:38,800 --> 01:09:48,160
life intersect. Because it's an abstract philosophical principle. But you sure as hell don't have any

540
01:09:48,160 --> 01:09:55,120
quality of life without it. I like that framing of bringing the abstract to the very tangible too.

541
01:09:55,120 --> 01:09:59,920
Yeah, because it matters for people. It matters that what's mine is mine. And when I work for

542
01:09:59,920 --> 01:10:04,000
something, I know I can keep it. Yeah. And what I think has gotten really dangerous. I don't owe

543
01:10:04,000 --> 01:10:11,840
it to anyone. Right. And what's I don't get some Barack Obama lecturing me on how you didn't build

544
01:10:11,840 --> 01:10:19,040
that because you drove on a road at some point. Oh, God, somebody else made a flat thing. Well,

545
01:10:19,040 --> 01:10:25,440
fuck you, Barack. I did, in fact, build that. Yeah, also, the words are one of the dumbest

546
01:10:25,440 --> 01:10:30,480
take that shit from everyone. I always say whenever someone brings up the Rhodes argument,

547
01:10:30,480 --> 01:10:35,040
I just say please come to Chicago, where we pay some of the highest taxes in the country at multiple

548
01:10:35,040 --> 01:10:40,960
levels and spend a lot of roads and pay money to drive in those roads, tools, and they are still

549
01:10:40,960 --> 01:10:46,560
the shittiest pothole ridden pieces of garbage you have ever seen. Somebody's stealing all the money

550
01:10:46,560 --> 01:10:55,360
that you pay. Yep. You know, we had Rhodes millennia before we had an income tax. Yeah.

551
01:10:56,720 --> 01:11:01,120
And that's it doesn't really take that much to make a flat thing.

552
01:11:03,200 --> 01:11:08,000
In Chicago, apparently it does. And in Chicago, it's really complicated, I guess.

553
01:11:08,000 --> 01:11:17,360
Roads weren't even invented. They evolved. You walk the same way enough times. And you know,

554
01:11:17,360 --> 01:11:23,520
by you, I mean, you could be like a grazing animal and do this. And you have the beginnings of a road.

555
01:11:24,320 --> 01:11:29,360
You know, you've stomped down the ground, you've cleared all the plant cover, you've made it flat,

556
01:11:29,360 --> 01:11:34,240
you've got a road, okay, you want to drive a car, you have to pay that. Okay, let's pour some asphalt.

557
01:11:34,240 --> 01:11:41,920
It's not difficult. I mean, we've, you know, we've had some technological advances that are cool.

558
01:11:42,480 --> 01:11:51,600
But the basic concept is not difficult. You know, there are a lot of things that people think, oh,

559
01:11:52,160 --> 01:11:57,040
we can't have this without the government because the government currently does it.

560
01:11:57,040 --> 01:12:03,280
It's like, without the federal Department of Nutrition, who would synthesize the soylent green?

561
01:12:04,320 --> 01:12:07,280
Well, let me introduce you to the concept of grocery store.

562
01:12:08,880 --> 01:12:18,000
Wow. It is so funny to this tendency for some to just assume that the government,

563
01:12:18,000 --> 01:12:22,480
things will get better if we just give the government more power. If we just let them

564
01:12:22,480 --> 01:12:27,440
tax us a little more for the greater good, then they'll have the money they need. But

565
01:12:27,440 --> 01:12:32,640
all that that does is expand the bureaucratic state. It makes them less efficient.

566
01:12:32,640 --> 01:12:40,240
I personally think the phrase, the greater good is fighting words. And we need to normalize kicking

567
01:12:40,240 --> 01:12:47,440
the ass of anyone who says that, like just a punch in the mouth right there. Who decides the

568
01:12:47,440 --> 01:12:53,040
greater good? Who decides what is the greater good? And that's what it comes down to, right?

569
01:12:53,040 --> 01:12:59,840
Does the free market decide it? The people who talk to God always get told exactly what they

570
01:12:59,840 --> 01:13:07,200
want to hear. The people talking about the greater good always coincidentally seem to benefit

571
01:13:08,080 --> 01:13:16,960
from whatever they say the greater good is. The greater good and safety also typically go

572
01:13:16,960 --> 01:13:26,560
hand in hand. Just to keep you safe. This is for your safety. Safety means that things don't fail.

573
01:13:28,000 --> 01:13:35,760
And the basic model by which capitalism advances civilization is that you allow bad ideas to fail.

574
01:13:37,040 --> 01:13:45,120
Safety means not taking risks. And the basic way by which civilization advances is taking risks.

575
01:13:45,120 --> 01:14:02,320
One thing that I learned at a very young age from, I had a friend in college. She was like 20

576
01:14:02,320 --> 01:14:07,520
years old or something. And she was dating this 45 year old entrepreneur. And so I was having

577
01:14:07,520 --> 01:14:12,480
lunch with him. And he said something very surprising to me that I've taken with me for

578
01:14:12,480 --> 01:14:27,360
the rest of my life. He said, I hope she fails a lot. And he said, because failure is what you get

579
01:14:27,360 --> 01:14:36,800
before you get success. You try things and you fail. And you learn things. And then you try

580
01:14:36,800 --> 01:14:47,360
something else and it works. When someone tries to make you safe, tries to protect you from

581
01:14:47,360 --> 01:14:58,320
downside risk, tries to suppress economic instability or AI technology that might make you lose your

582
01:14:58,320 --> 01:15:08,880
job. What they're really doing is they're preventing the risk taking behaviors that advance

583
01:15:08,880 --> 01:15:20,160
civilization. You know, I took a crazy risk writing theft of fire. Because, you know, I was

584
01:15:20,160 --> 01:15:29,360
working as an engineer and making six figures. And the first of those figures wasn't one. And

585
01:15:29,360 --> 01:15:38,240
I'm like, no, I'm going to retire and I'm going to write a book. It's like, you're nuts. You know,

586
01:15:38,240 --> 01:15:47,120
you're retiring five, six years early and you're going to try to sell stories to people in a book

587
01:15:47,120 --> 01:15:57,520
market that's shrinking. And it's like, okay, well, if people didn't take crazy risks like that, we

588
01:15:57,520 --> 01:16:05,200
wouldn't have new things. You know, because I could sit around writing like industrial automation

589
01:16:05,200 --> 01:16:11,520
controls and getting paid lots of money for it. And that's nice and all. But lots of people can do

590
01:16:11,520 --> 01:16:18,880
that. You know, when you tell a story, you're the only one who could tell that story. So you try

591
01:16:18,880 --> 01:16:26,400
stuff and you know, maybe my writing isn't as good as I think it is and it's all going to fail

592
01:16:26,400 --> 01:16:32,800
and I have to go back to engineering and yeah, but that's okay. That's okay because

593
01:16:32,800 --> 01:16:40,400
somebody is going to take a risk and it's going to pay off and we're all going to benefit from that.

594
01:16:42,240 --> 01:16:50,480
So we all have to get out there and try stuff. And that means we have to push through the fear.

595
01:16:51,520 --> 01:16:59,120
And you know, producing creative work is terrifying. It is because at some point,

596
01:16:59,120 --> 01:17:05,120
this thing exists only in your mind, which means you're investing years of your time into making

597
01:17:05,120 --> 01:17:11,840
something that nobody asked for. And nobody believes in it and accept you. And that is terrifying.

598
01:17:13,280 --> 01:17:22,960
And so when we make generations of people who are risk averse, we don't get great technology

599
01:17:22,960 --> 01:17:31,920
and we don't get great art. And a lot of this is based on government schools.

600
01:17:32,800 --> 01:17:42,080
What do government schools teach you? Stay in your seat, wait in line, wait your turn,

601
01:17:42,720 --> 01:17:50,960
raise your hand before speaking, agree with teacher, get an A on the test by avoiding mistakes.

602
01:17:50,960 --> 01:18:04,000
It teaches children to be risk averse. And then you come along 20 years later and you tell these

603
01:18:04,000 --> 01:18:12,800
children, well, you know, you can start a business or you can go to college and get a degree in

604
01:18:12,800 --> 01:18:21,280
sociology. Well, I'm going to go get a degree in sociology, because, you know, I don't think I can

605
01:18:21,280 --> 01:18:29,440
survive on my own and I need to work for somebody. They're risk averse. Their model of success has

606
01:18:29,440 --> 01:18:34,640
been avoiding mistakes. Well, in the real world, nobody cares how many times you screwed up.

607
01:18:34,640 --> 01:18:43,280
You know, people who like my writing, they absolutely do not care how much shit I deleted on my own

608
01:18:43,280 --> 01:18:50,640
computer before I put together what I put together. You know, people don't care how many times you

609
01:18:50,640 --> 01:18:55,680
failed. They don't care about your failures. They care about the magnitude of your eventual success.

610
01:18:55,680 --> 01:19:05,600
It's for what it's worth. I was homeschooled up until high school and then went to high school.

611
01:19:05,600 --> 01:19:12,240
I envy you, sir. The older I get, the more grateful I am to my parents. I will say that,

612
01:19:13,280 --> 01:19:20,160
because homeschooling is also a labor of love. Yes, it's an investment in your children.

613
01:19:20,160 --> 01:19:26,080
Yeah. And, you know, so, mom and dad, if you are listening to this, thank you yet again. But, you

614
01:19:26,080 --> 01:19:33,920
know, it's so funny. I found some of the spark that they gave me when I was homeschooled and,

615
01:19:33,920 --> 01:19:40,000
you know, got my work done in two hours a day by reading my textbook front to back. Yeah. And then

616
01:19:40,000 --> 01:19:44,080
got to school and realized, oh, wow, I thought I was going to be behind. I thought, what if I'm an

617
01:19:44,080 --> 01:19:50,000
idiot? What if I'm just a big dummy and my parents screwed it up? You know, they were English majors

618
01:19:50,000 --> 01:19:54,960
I thought I was pretty good at math and science, but I don't know. And then I got to school and

619
01:19:54,960 --> 01:20:01,040
I realized, oh my God, this is so painfully slow and we are catering to the lowest common denominator.

620
01:20:01,040 --> 01:20:08,160
Yeah. And there is no creativity and courage. Yeah. And we waste so much time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A lot

621
01:20:08,160 --> 01:20:17,200
of people, they don't strike out on their own because they are intimidated. I spent almost a year

622
01:20:17,200 --> 01:20:26,800
trying to find agents and publishers for a theft of fire. And, you know, everybody was not interested

623
01:20:26,800 --> 01:20:31,760
and they were very interested in telling us about how they were very expert professionals and we

624
01:20:31,760 --> 01:20:41,360
couldn't succeed without them. And then, you know, my agent is one of my wives and the other one

625
01:20:41,360 --> 01:20:50,480
sort of runs the business end of things. And we've, now we have professionals like authors and agents

626
01:20:50,480 --> 01:20:56,400
and stuff coming into us and saying, what's your secret? Well, our secret is that we finally figured

627
01:20:56,400 --> 01:21:02,960
out if you want something done right, do it yourself and care about it and do your homework and try.

628
01:21:02,960 --> 01:21:11,120
You know, it's like the people have been conditioned to think that there's this huge

629
01:21:11,120 --> 01:21:18,400
gulf between themselves and the very expert professionals and we're helpless without them.

630
01:21:19,360 --> 01:21:24,160
And then when you actually get inside the factory and you see how the sausage is made, it's like,

631
01:21:25,920 --> 01:21:30,800
you know, you guys are just barely competent and you have institutional support

632
01:21:30,800 --> 01:21:39,600
and someone with intelligence and ambition and energy can very easily beat you.

633
01:21:42,320 --> 01:21:51,840
You know, back to the theme of hopefulness, you know, I found myself in this Bitcoin

634
01:21:51,840 --> 01:21:57,920
space community, whatever you would like to call it. Over these last couple of years,

635
01:21:57,920 --> 01:22:06,880
I'm not one of those OG whales. I got in in 2020 when I found out that we were just printing money

636
01:22:06,880 --> 01:22:12,080
out of thin air and sending checks to people and I thought, well, that doesn't make any sense at all.

637
01:22:12,800 --> 01:22:19,760
Where does that money come from? What is money after all? We invent dollars out of nothing.

638
01:22:19,760 --> 01:22:27,280
We have an institution that just says, I have X dollars and now I'm going to lend them to you.

639
01:22:28,560 --> 01:22:34,640
Well, you just made them up. You just made up something entirely imaginary and then you're

640
01:22:34,640 --> 01:22:41,840
going to lend it to me. It doesn't exist. Central bankers in my humble opinion are

641
01:22:41,840 --> 01:22:47,600
probably the ultimate rent seekers because they they truly just create something.

642
01:22:47,600 --> 01:22:51,360
They're more rent seekers than the actual rent seekers. Yeah.

643
01:22:51,360 --> 01:22:56,000
Because the guys who develop properties, it's like, you know, the reason they're charging

644
01:22:56,000 --> 01:23:02,960
your rent is they took a burned out dilapidated factory and they turned it into an actual building

645
01:23:02,960 --> 01:23:09,280
you can use. Yeah, they actually provided that. Yeah, they provided they might need to rebrand

646
01:23:09,280 --> 01:23:17,360
that actually, the actual renters. Yeah, well, you know, I was on a podcast with a real estate guy

647
01:23:17,360 --> 01:23:23,440
and I was talking about how stories are upstream of culture and I introduced this concept of

648
01:23:23,440 --> 01:23:30,240
you guys let this term rent seeker enter the culture because you're not getting in the stories

649
01:23:30,240 --> 01:23:36,880
and he's like rent seeker. What do you mean by that? And this guy literally has no idea

650
01:23:37,440 --> 01:23:44,400
that the term and he's a real estate developer and he literally has no idea that the term rent

651
01:23:44,400 --> 01:23:54,000
seeker is being used to mean parasite. I actually watched that interview and I saw that reaction

652
01:23:54,000 --> 01:23:59,280
from him and I was like, because to me, that term means that means a parasite who provides no value

653
01:23:59,280 --> 01:24:03,280
and only extracts it. Yeah, that's that's what it means. Yeah. And when he didn't know that,

654
01:24:03,280 --> 01:24:09,440
I was like, oh, you got to be kidding me. Yeah, this is it's like you are roadkill in the culture

655
01:24:09,440 --> 01:24:15,040
war, my friend. And it's like, you know, no, he's a great dude. Yeah, I had a lot of fun talking

656
01:24:15,040 --> 01:24:24,240
to him. He's very smart. But he just, you know, he he's he's been on the sidelines of the culture

657
01:24:24,240 --> 01:24:34,720
war while his destiny is decided. And hopefully that will change now. You know, that really was

658
01:24:34,720 --> 01:24:41,760
a pretty incredible interaction. But it's illustrative of the fact that people who are engrossed in a

659
01:24:41,760 --> 01:24:48,800
particular industry in a particular space, sub genre, whatever it might be, they often, you

660
01:24:48,800 --> 01:24:52,400
know, it's a it's a fish in water, right? You can ask what water is, but it doesn't have a

661
01:24:52,400 --> 01:24:59,280
fucking clue. It just swims in the stuff. Yeah. But and and I will hear I'll slightly bring it to

662
01:24:59,280 --> 01:25:05,120
Bitcoin just just a little bit. But because talking about central banks being those the way sorry.

663
01:25:05,760 --> 01:25:11,040
Well, I like Bitcoin. That's great to talk about. I can and I actually want to talk about it. A

664
01:25:11,040 --> 01:25:14,880
couple of things you mentioned about in your book right after this because of course I perked up

665
01:25:14,880 --> 01:25:20,080
when I read that. But central bankers is the ultimate rent seekers. And then you also mentioned

666
01:25:20,080 --> 01:25:27,440
earlier, you know, that one guy who makes a really great meme can influence so many people.

667
01:25:27,440 --> 01:25:33,680
Yeah. And this is that we're seeing a great example of this culture war of this war of stories

668
01:25:34,560 --> 01:25:40,400
play out around Bitcoin. I love to see it because you have central bankers now who are actually

669
01:25:40,400 --> 01:25:45,280
referring to the money that they make up out of thin air as fiat currency. They're actually calling

670
01:25:45,280 --> 01:25:50,720
it fiat. Yeah, which they were not doing a number of years ago in normal dialogue. Now,

671
01:25:51,280 --> 01:25:56,400
because a bunch of Bitcoiners and Austrian economists and and gold bugs to let's get the

672
01:25:56,400 --> 01:26:02,080
gold bugs and credit have hammered that term in so much 15 years ago, they started 15 years ago,

673
01:26:02,080 --> 01:26:07,920
people thought fiat was just a shitty car made by Ford. Right. Just just a tiny little car. Yeah.

674
01:26:07,920 --> 01:26:13,680
Yeah. That you don't really want. Yeah. Well, you know, in the in the book, which I will hold up again

675
01:26:13,680 --> 01:26:27,440
to make my agent stop me to me to evening over there. I I envisioned a future where Bitcoin was

676
01:26:28,400 --> 01:26:38,000
one of a large number of competing cryptocurrency technologies. And one of the ways that

677
01:26:38,000 --> 01:26:46,800
cryptocurrency works in a lot of in a lot of this orbital space universe is that a lot of it is

678
01:26:46,800 --> 01:26:57,680
backed by stock. So this is essentially a decentralized stock exchange, where you have this

679
01:26:57,680 --> 01:27:04,880
cryptocurrency asset, which represents the stock in a corporation. And you know, I know a lot of

680
01:27:04,880 --> 01:27:11,440
people who are into Bitcoin think of every other cryptocurrency in the world as a scam. And maybe

681
01:27:11,440 --> 01:27:23,200
a lot of them are. But I think that in in any endeavor of of the human condition in any area

682
01:27:23,200 --> 01:27:31,200
of human technology, anywhere where you don't have competing alternatives that people can choose

683
01:27:31,200 --> 01:27:42,400
between, you effectively have a lack of innovation. You effectively have a lack of pressure to provide

684
01:27:42,400 --> 01:27:51,280
good service. So I didn't want to while Bitcoin is a good thing. I didn't want to create a future

685
01:27:51,280 --> 01:28:00,160
where there is only Bitcoin. I wanted to create a future where you're walking through, you know,

686
01:28:00,160 --> 01:28:08,160
the public area in so much as anything is public in this world. And you know, there's the display

687
01:28:09,120 --> 01:28:16,960
showing the current exchange rates between Bitcoin and all these other competing currencies.

688
01:28:18,480 --> 01:28:23,840
It's people's choice how they want to store their wealth. Well, and right. And well, and that's the

689
01:28:23,840 --> 01:28:30,000
whole thing with all of it, right, is voluntary choice, freedom to opt in. One of the things I

690
01:28:30,000 --> 01:28:33,920
love that you snuck into the book a couple of times was in for a mill in for a Bitcoin.

691
01:28:34,720 --> 01:28:40,000
Harkening back to the in for a penny in for a pound or you know, or or mills on the Bitcoin was

692
01:28:40,000 --> 01:28:45,120
another one, which was just kind of a hint to say like whatever the mills is representing,

693
01:28:45,120 --> 01:28:50,880
you leave it up to the reader, maybe it's some sort of futuristic left that day. Exactly. But in my

694
01:28:50,880 --> 01:28:55,120
mind, of course, I'm like, you know, going to dollars and thinking, yep. Well, okay, the year is

695
01:28:55,120 --> 01:28:59,600
this, I'm trying to calculate. Yeah, boy, okay, that's that'll be after the last Bitcoin was mined.

696
01:28:59,600 --> 01:29:04,960
Should be pretty interesting then. But yeah, well, I had I had this idea that a single Bitcoin was

697
01:29:04,960 --> 01:29:17,120
worth an awful lot. Right. Because there's a limited amount of it representing the size of a

698
01:29:17,120 --> 01:29:26,240
a sizable portion, like say 20% or so, of the entire orbital economy. And these people have been

699
01:29:26,240 --> 01:29:37,920
mining asteroids for 75 years. So that's a lot of stuff. And I love again, that was one of the

700
01:29:37,920 --> 01:29:43,440
things that I mentioned earlier that I loved about the book was it yes, it's set in the future.

701
01:29:43,440 --> 01:29:49,280
Yes, it's science fiction. But there's always these ties to the present that make it all the more

702
01:29:49,280 --> 01:29:58,800
real. And, you know, thinking to take it slightly back to Bitcoin, and then I want to go in a little

703
01:29:58,800 --> 01:30:02,960
bit of a different direction because this is a Bitcoin podcast. But yeah, they my audience will

704
01:30:02,960 --> 01:30:08,080
also hear plenty of about Bitcoin on every other show. So I wanted this one to be a little different.

705
01:30:09,360 --> 01:30:14,240
One of the things that I think is important about Bitcoin tying it back to property rights that you

706
01:30:14,240 --> 01:30:20,480
mentioned is the ability to have that property to preserve your own private property and to have

707
01:30:20,480 --> 01:30:26,800
that be free of confiscation or rent seeking behavior, which is what we see from these central

708
01:30:26,800 --> 01:30:32,720
banks and Bitcoin emerge and all Bitcoin is is it's a it's a monetary technology. All money is

709
01:30:32,720 --> 01:30:38,400
technology, right? Yeah. And the best technology you said is going to win money is absolute scarcity.

710
01:30:38,400 --> 01:30:46,320
Yes, money is a technology for measuring fucks given. You went exactly where I was hoping that

711
01:30:46,320 --> 01:30:54,880
you would go with that. I saw you say that that money is a tool to measure how many fucks you

712
01:30:54,880 --> 01:31:01,920
give essentially. And I was thinking that is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, seriously, if I wanted

713
01:31:01,920 --> 01:31:08,720
to have a slightly more economy focused and maybe slightly more flippant kind of novel,

714
01:31:08,720 --> 01:31:16,000
I would have called the unit of currency the fuck because it measures whether you give a fuck.

715
01:31:16,560 --> 01:31:22,480
Yeah. You know, anyone who claims to give a fuck and they're not spending their money on something

716
01:31:22,480 --> 01:31:28,560
doesn't actually give a fuck. Yeah. That's why the expression put your money where your mouth is

717
01:31:28,560 --> 01:31:34,560
exists. Yeah. I mean, the market all that all that price is is a signal, right? Yeah. It's a signal

718
01:31:34,560 --> 01:31:39,680
that the free market provides. Yeah. And it's letting you know how many people care about this

719
01:31:39,680 --> 01:31:48,320
thing. And what that helps us do is it helps us prioritize. Like here I am, you know, I'm going

720
01:31:48,320 --> 01:31:56,880
to retire from engineering. And I'm going to write science fiction novels. Well, how do I know

721
01:31:56,880 --> 01:32:05,920
whether the aggregate of all the other people values me more as a science fiction writer

722
01:32:07,040 --> 01:32:18,480
than as a software engineer writing, you know, like aircraft maneuvering controls and credit card

723
01:32:18,480 --> 01:32:28,320
processing stuff. And, you know, I worked for Oculus for a while. How do I know? Well, there's

724
01:32:28,320 --> 01:32:34,080
a concrete measure of fucks given. And in our current environment, it's not totally reliable

725
01:32:34,080 --> 01:32:39,840
because it's been sort of heavily regulated and manipulated and so forth. But there's still a

726
01:32:39,840 --> 01:32:51,040
percentage of signal there. And it's like, okay, I can make like, you know, this sort of six figure

727
01:32:51,040 --> 01:33:00,000
salary forever, or I can try to do something that's a little bit crazy and swing for the fences.

728
01:33:00,720 --> 01:33:05,360
And so, you know, one of the reasons I want to make a lot of money as a writer is that I want a

729
01:33:05,360 --> 01:33:15,200
lot of money. But I also want to know that I'm doing something that people care about.

730
01:33:16,800 --> 01:33:26,160
That that what I am doing has resonated with them. And, you know, that's been that's been sort of an

731
01:33:26,160 --> 01:33:32,400
interesting part of this journey is, you know, I spent many, many years as a software engineer,

732
01:33:32,400 --> 01:33:37,760
and I built some cool stuff. But you know, nobody ever came to me and said, you know,

733
01:33:37,760 --> 01:33:42,320
none of the customers ever came to me and said, thank you for doing this. Because I've always

734
01:33:42,320 --> 01:33:50,880
sort of immersed in the sea of this big number of people working together on a product. And then

735
01:33:51,680 --> 01:33:58,640
when you go out and you build something yourself, and people appreciate it, that becomes personal.

736
01:33:58,640 --> 01:34:08,560
So, you know, that's that's a very special kind of thing. But ultimately, what measures how many

737
01:34:08,560 --> 01:34:16,960
people you're impacting like that is the the fuck's given. And and that's how we help people decide

738
01:34:19,440 --> 01:34:26,960
what to do. That's actually going to help other people and be what they want. Instead of this

739
01:34:26,960 --> 01:34:33,280
sort of Keynesian digging big holes in the desert and filling them up again. And that's the worst

740
01:34:33,280 --> 01:34:41,040
part of government. It's not just that it takes a lot of your stuff. It's that it takes a lot of

741
01:34:41,040 --> 01:34:50,560
your stuff. And then it pays smart people to do stupid things when they could be doing smart things

742
01:34:50,560 --> 01:34:59,440
instead. It's it's something that I don't think people realize how destructive government subsidies

743
01:34:59,440 --> 01:35:08,000
are across so many industries. Because all it is is plain and simple manipulation of free market

744
01:35:08,000 --> 01:35:13,600
signals. Yeah, it is. And especially when you're printing that money, you're running an ever growing

745
01:35:13,600 --> 01:35:19,520
deficit where we have a trillion a year just in the interest of any time you subsidize something

746
01:35:19,520 --> 01:35:27,440
by definition, you're artificially influencing people to do things that people don't actually

747
01:35:27,440 --> 01:35:32,800
give a fuck about. Because if they actually gave a fuck, they would pay for it themselves

748
01:35:33,520 --> 01:35:39,200
out of their own supply of fucks. And people think, Oh, maybe it's not so bad. I mean, come on,

749
01:35:39,200 --> 01:35:42,960
what what could really what could be the worst thing. But then like you want a very tangible

750
01:35:42,960 --> 01:35:50,000
example, look at Nixon in the 70s, look at all the stimulation to grow as much corn as possible.

751
01:35:50,000 --> 01:35:55,120
Corn and soybeans. Yep. And then and now every what did we do with all those corn and soybeans?

752
01:35:57,360 --> 01:36:07,520
You know, it's like literally, you know, I I'm 50 years old. I grew up in the 80s. And let me tell

753
01:36:07,520 --> 01:36:13,440
you, you know, people think that what we see around us every day is natural. It is not.

754
01:36:14,880 --> 01:36:21,120
You know, the average person today, we would have called them fat in 1980.

755
01:36:22,160 --> 01:36:29,040
The you know, the people who we call fat today, we would have been horrified. We would have never

756
01:36:29,040 --> 01:36:38,720
seen anything like that. And you think about how many people are walking around living lives of

757
01:36:38,720 --> 01:36:47,680
absolute despair, because they can't stand to look at themselves in the mirror. And they don't realize

758
01:36:47,680 --> 01:36:59,200
that the government has literally paid people to poison them and propagandized them to eat the

759
01:36:59,200 --> 01:37:10,400
poison. You know, they're not fat because they're lazy and lack character. They're victims.

760
01:37:10,400 --> 01:37:22,320
Victims. They have been practiced upon. You know, and just because it was convenient because all

761
01:37:22,320 --> 01:37:29,200
this power was concentrated in one place. And because a few of the smartest guys in the room

762
01:37:29,200 --> 01:37:34,320
decided that certain industries need to get subsidies. Smartest guys in the room. They

763
01:37:34,320 --> 01:37:39,680
thought they were the smartest guys in the room. This whole this whole trend in the 80s towards

764
01:37:39,680 --> 01:37:47,600
getting rid of fat was based on one series of studies by one guy who there's something in

765
01:37:47,600 --> 01:37:58,480
statistics called an ANOVA analysis of variance. And he didn't do it both ways. He didn't he didn't

766
01:37:58,480 --> 01:38:04,720
you know, oh, here prove that fat consumption is correlated to heart disease prove that the

767
01:38:04,720 --> 01:38:10,800
heart disease is correlated to fat consumption. He didn't do it both ways. You know, they just

768
01:38:10,800 --> 01:38:16,560
decided that saturated fat caused heart disease, despite the fact that people had been eating

769
01:38:16,560 --> 01:38:25,360
saturated fat diets high and saturated fat for thousands of years. I mean, why were the French

770
01:38:25,360 --> 01:38:34,640
not dropping dead of heart disease? Well, maybe it's because fat consumption doesn't cause heart

771
01:38:34,640 --> 01:38:46,640
disease. Maybe it's the sugar which they didn't have. Maybe it's the fact that in 1970 something,

772
01:38:46,640 --> 01:38:52,560
you know, the women decided we're not going to cook anymore. We want to be liberated. So,

773
01:38:52,560 --> 01:38:59,360
you know, a bunch of companies step in to to fill this gap and it's like they're going to sell you

774
01:38:59,360 --> 01:39:07,680
what you buy. And so, oh, well, we've got all this sugar that we get from processing this subsidized

775
01:39:07,680 --> 01:39:16,640
corn. And you know, if we put it in everything, people buy more because it's addictive. And now

776
01:39:16,640 --> 01:39:23,520
everybody's fat and sick and they're saying we need to stop being fat phobic. Well, no, we need to

777
01:39:23,520 --> 01:39:31,520
lynch all the Pepsi executives. And well, at least we have Osempic now that, you know, they've created

778
01:39:31,520 --> 01:39:36,080
one of the other industries that the government loves, Big Pharma, now gets their piece of the pie

779
01:39:36,080 --> 01:39:42,640
to be able to treat the diseases. Oh, well, I don't say cure. I say treat the diseases. Yeah,

780
01:39:42,640 --> 01:39:50,320
the diseases. Yeah, it's more profitable. It's more profitable in this kind of subsidized environment

781
01:39:50,320 --> 01:39:56,080
where you're going to keep all the consumers low information. It's more profitable to treat sick

782
01:39:56,080 --> 01:40:03,520
people forever than it is to cure them. And this is, you know, I lied, I'm going to mention Bitcoin

783
01:40:03,520 --> 01:40:08,400
and Bitcoiners once more. But in the context of this, okay, because one of the things that

784
01:40:08,400 --> 01:40:16,160
a lot of us in this space talk about quite a bit is the fact that money is not just, you know,

785
01:40:16,160 --> 01:40:20,800
it is a tool, but it's also the base layer of society. It's the base layer of civilization.

786
01:40:20,800 --> 01:40:26,880
It is how we exchange value and how we are also with good money able to store our value into the

787
01:40:26,880 --> 01:40:33,360
future. It's how we work together. Yeah, it's cooperation versus coercion. And it's, it's always

788
01:40:33,360 --> 01:40:39,520
going to be more efficient. But you need a good measuring stick for that, for that cooperation

789
01:40:39,520 --> 01:40:43,360
for those signals to be accurate, as you mentioned earlier, signals are a little distorted, but

790
01:40:43,360 --> 01:40:48,320
there's still signals, right? It's not quite as bad as you know, like the Turkish lira is a worse

791
01:40:48,320 --> 01:40:58,640
signal than the US dollar. Money started out as a as a ledger. It started out as a mental ledger

792
01:40:58,640 --> 01:41:07,600
ledger, kept between members of a tribe with a population less than Dunbar's number of who

793
01:41:07,600 --> 01:41:14,960
contributed. Well, you know, this guy didn't hunt any mammoth, because he spends all his

794
01:41:14,960 --> 01:41:21,920
time sitting by the fire, banging the rocks together. But you know, we couldn't have hunted

795
01:41:21,920 --> 01:41:30,240
that mammoth without the spear points. So he did he did something we give a fuck about.

796
01:41:30,880 --> 01:41:37,520
And we can keep track of that mentally, because there's only a few of us. So you know, here's

797
01:41:37,520 --> 01:41:52,080
the mammoth liver. There you go. And we started using tokens, because the ledger became too big

798
01:41:53,520 --> 01:42:02,080
for us to to keep in our heads. And it became too widely distributed for us to write on a piece

799
01:42:02,080 --> 01:42:08,320
of paper. So we started using gold and stuff. Well, gold is just another technology that

800
01:42:08,320 --> 01:42:17,520
substitutes for what was originally a spreadsheet. And now the blockchain, which I think is a stupid

801
01:42:17,520 --> 01:42:27,520
name, because it it says how it works, not what it does. What it does is it's a big,

802
01:42:27,520 --> 01:42:37,760
non centralized spreadsheet. That's all it is. It's a spreadsheet. It just keeps track of

803
01:42:38,960 --> 01:42:48,720
who has what in a ledger. And so you're moving back to the origins of how money originally

804
01:42:48,720 --> 01:42:55,840
worked. It's the chalkboard, you know, so and so contributed this, so and so owns that. And now we

805
01:42:55,840 --> 01:43:04,960
found a way to have a ledger again. And one that is not subject to the the whims of a small group of

806
01:43:04,960 --> 01:43:11,200
let's call them tribal elders, yeah, who get to decide that's not corruptible. Right. And the

807
01:43:11,200 --> 01:43:16,240
original ledger wasn't corruptible either, because everyone had their own version in their hands.

808
01:43:16,800 --> 01:43:21,040
And they could decide for themselves whether they had whether somebody had done something

809
01:43:21,040 --> 01:43:31,840
worth giving a fuck about. And once you moved away from tokens like gold, where the the earth

810
01:43:31,840 --> 01:43:36,960
and the mining industry is the issuing authority and you can't really fake it,

811
01:43:38,240 --> 01:43:44,880
then then you started having issuing authorities that were corruptible. And I think people need

812
01:43:44,880 --> 01:43:56,000
to understand that corruption, it doesn't function as a moral failing on a global level, on a

813
01:43:56,000 --> 01:44:06,880
distributed level. It functions more as a response to incentives. When you are the trusted guardian

814
01:44:06,880 --> 01:44:21,920
of a storehouse that is filled with value, the more value there is, and the more people own that value,

815
01:44:23,840 --> 01:44:32,080
the greater the incentive to steal from the storehouse. And you can shake your tiny fist

816
01:44:32,080 --> 01:44:39,360
and say he shouldn't have done that. But what you're essentially saying is that

817
01:44:41,360 --> 01:44:48,240
you know, some people should be morally perfect, and that will fix all our problems. Well, if

818
01:44:48,240 --> 01:44:54,560
people were morally perfect, we wouldn't have a lot of these problems that technologies are

819
01:44:54,560 --> 01:45:02,560
designed to fix. So, you know, the problem is not Joe Biden and his 10% for the big guy.

820
01:45:03,280 --> 01:45:10,720
The problem is that you have this massive, robable store of value that

821
01:45:13,120 --> 01:45:23,840
sits there luring corrupt weasels like Joe Biden. So what you need to do is find

822
01:45:23,840 --> 01:45:32,080
better technologies for storing your value. It's extremely well said. And I think the part that

823
01:45:32,080 --> 01:45:37,520
most people miss is the incentives. Yeah, they look at things and they say, well, this is just,

824
01:45:38,560 --> 01:45:43,680
this is bad for some reason, because people are bad. And it's, yeah, there are, there are some

825
01:45:43,680 --> 01:45:48,000
shitty people out there. Yeah. But there are also good people who do shitty things because the

826
01:45:48,000 --> 01:45:54,800
incentives are structured in such a way to make them do good people vastly outnumber the bad people.

827
01:45:55,520 --> 01:46:03,840
Because if that were not true, there would not be a civilization, we would still be hitting

828
01:46:03,840 --> 01:46:13,200
each other with rocks. Yeah. And this is I think the, the point that also, again, to bring it back

829
01:46:13,200 --> 01:46:19,920
to hopefulness, because the fiat currencies that these central bankers have brilliantly engineered

830
01:46:19,920 --> 01:46:25,120
with their perfect 2% arbitrary inflation per year, which is just the right amount. So you don't

831
01:46:25,120 --> 01:46:29,760
realize they're stealing from you, stealing your, your purchasing power, stealing your wealth.

832
01:46:31,040 --> 01:46:35,920
People are starting to see through this also the deception is starting to fail. The veil is

833
01:46:35,920 --> 01:46:40,880
coming down because no matter how much you lie to somebody and say, look, everything's great.

834
01:46:40,880 --> 01:46:46,800
Look, in flint inflation year over year is coming down. It doesn't matter because when they fill up

835
01:46:46,800 --> 01:46:52,720
their gas tank and go to the grocery store and buy their meat and eggs and milk, they say, this is

836
01:46:52,720 --> 01:46:57,120
more expensive and I can't afford it. Yeah. So people start saying, I don't believe you're

837
01:46:57,120 --> 01:47:04,160
bullshit. And I want the truth. And they start searching for truth. And once they start that

838
01:47:04,160 --> 01:47:09,360
process of looking for what is the real story here versus the one I'm being fed,

839
01:47:09,360 --> 01:47:16,080
they start to find that there are some alternatives out there that these guys don't control that I can

840
01:47:16,080 --> 01:47:22,640
freely opt into again, back to voluntary cooperation. And it's going to take a long time.

841
01:47:23,360 --> 01:47:31,600
It is going to take a long time because despite what some over enthusiastic people in the Bitcoin

842
01:47:31,600 --> 01:47:42,480
community say, there is no such thing as real absolute value. It's all a measure of how many

843
01:47:42,480 --> 01:47:50,320
fucks people give. And they say, well, the value of Bitcoin fluctuates wildly. Well, that's because

844
01:47:50,320 --> 01:48:01,520
people's confidence in Bitcoin fluctuates wildly. And the goal for that is for confidence in crypto

845
01:48:01,520 --> 01:48:14,800
currencies to eventually grow and the value to eventually level out. And people say, they pretend

846
01:48:14,800 --> 01:48:22,480
it's this big successful dunk on the idea of cryptocurrency. Well, people are investing in it

847
01:48:22,480 --> 01:48:29,760
like it's a growth asset. And it shouldn't be that it should have stable value. Well,

848
01:48:29,760 --> 01:48:41,520
okay, that's nice. But that's the measure of the difference between a good idea and a bad idea is

849
01:48:41,520 --> 01:48:47,280
when you invest in a bad idea, you lose money. And when you invest in a good idea, you gain money.

850
01:48:47,920 --> 01:48:55,280
And eventually, when you have a fixed amount of any given cryptocurrency,

851
01:48:55,280 --> 01:49:02,240
and when the last Bitcoin has been mined, and there's no more because that is that is a thing.

852
01:49:02,240 --> 01:49:10,160
2140 there is to make it clear that is a thing that will happen. When the last one has been mined,

853
01:49:10,160 --> 01:49:17,440
you will have whatever percentage of market penetration Bitcoin represents like say it

854
01:49:17,440 --> 01:49:26,080
represents 20% of the economy. Then as the economy continues to grow, you will have this fixed amount

855
01:49:26,080 --> 01:49:34,640
of Bitcoin representing that 20% of the economy. So they don't think people understand scarcity

856
01:49:34,640 --> 01:49:45,120
inflationary currency, where your money gradually buys more and more, and things gradually get cheaper

857
01:49:45,120 --> 01:49:55,840
and cheaper. Because now, all of the value of people discovering cheaper and cheaper ways to do things

858
01:49:57,600 --> 01:50:06,000
is returned to the holders of currency, rather than being absorbed by the issuers of currency.

859
01:50:07,600 --> 01:50:12,480
That is extremely well put, because I think what people fail to realize and to bring it all back

860
01:50:12,480 --> 01:50:19,920
to technology is technology is naturally deflationary. Things should get cheaper because when you have

861
01:50:19,920 --> 01:50:24,960
something, they're getting easier to make. Yeah, look at making something by hand versus an assembly

862
01:50:24,960 --> 01:50:31,120
line as a really basic example, or an assembly line versus an automated assembly line. Every good

863
01:50:31,120 --> 01:50:39,200
thing that we makes starts out as a luxury. And people do not understand that they're like,

864
01:50:39,200 --> 01:50:46,400
you know, oh, how can we, why are you selling these luxury goods to the rich? Well, that's a

865
01:50:46,400 --> 01:50:53,600
stage in the life cycle of a product. And Elon Musk, for example, was very smart about this,

866
01:50:54,240 --> 01:50:58,320
like I'm going to make an electric car, people actually want to drive. Okay, I'm going to start

867
01:50:58,320 --> 01:51:07,680
out by making a rich guy's toy for going, we around the track, because I can't afford to sell it

868
01:51:07,680 --> 01:51:17,280
for less than $130,000 because I've got all this production shit to work out. You know, I need to

869
01:51:17,280 --> 01:51:23,360
sell expensive cars, and then I'll figure out ways to make them cheaper. And people don't

870
01:51:23,360 --> 01:51:29,120
historically understand very frequently that everything started out like this, running water,

871
01:51:29,120 --> 01:51:37,040
in home electricity, plumbing, flush toilets, all luxuries, you know, things we take for granted

872
01:51:37,040 --> 01:51:46,880
today, iron, steel, you know, cloth, poor people used to wear leather, because cloth was expensive,

873
01:51:46,880 --> 01:51:54,480
you had to weave it by hand. And that's, it's something that's difficult for people to grasp.

874
01:51:54,480 --> 01:52:00,160
And I liked how you made the point in the book as well about that as part of an argument, you know,

875
01:52:00,160 --> 01:52:07,920
but it was really well put there. And I want to shift a little bit away from money, but toward

876
01:52:07,920 --> 01:52:13,040
more the technology side, because it still has to do with money, because it all does, right? And

877
01:52:13,040 --> 01:52:20,000
talking about incredibly deflationary forces of technology. AI is something that plays

878
01:52:20,000 --> 01:52:25,440
without going into too much detail for, because I encourage everybody to read Theft of Fire. I

879
01:52:25,440 --> 01:52:29,920
enjoyed the living hell out of it. And I think you will too. Yeah, well, you don't need to worry

880
01:52:29,920 --> 01:52:35,920
too much about spoilers that there's an AI character. There is an AI character. She's on the cover.

881
01:52:35,920 --> 01:52:41,920
Yes. Yes. She doesn't show up for a while, but she's on the cover. You will run into her eventually.

882
01:52:41,920 --> 01:52:51,040
But I love the way you approached AI, because I think you very, if I may, what it, and I don't

883
01:52:51,040 --> 01:52:56,000
ever like to infer what an author meant to do. So I'll just say what it meant to me. It felt like

884
01:52:56,000 --> 01:53:05,280
it was a very poignant rebuke, both of the people who say that AI is not going to be what people

885
01:53:05,280 --> 01:53:09,120
think it is. And it's going to be kind of just, it's all kind of crap, and it's not really going

886
01:53:09,120 --> 01:53:15,440
to go anywhere. But it's also a stinging rebuke of those who say that AGI is going to be here next

887
01:53:15,440 --> 01:53:22,320
year. And it's going to turn us all into paperclips. Yep. And you managed to kind of dance on that

888
01:53:22,320 --> 01:53:26,560
line a little bit. Yeah. And that's how it felt to me anyway. Can you talk about that a little bit

889
01:53:26,560 --> 01:53:36,480
and what your thoughts were on AI? There is no message. The purpose of Theft of Fire isn't to

890
01:53:36,480 --> 01:53:46,000
convince you of anything. It's to give you some things to think about. And a story to enjoy. So

891
01:53:46,880 --> 01:53:54,240
orbital space, the universe doesn't have opinions. Characters within it have opinions. But I'll tell

892
01:53:54,240 --> 01:54:04,160
you something I wanted to do with that story. And that it's, there's a thing in science fiction

893
01:54:04,160 --> 01:54:14,240
where almost every AI character falls into one of two tropes. They're either the Terminator

894
01:54:14,240 --> 01:54:23,680
or their Pinocchio. They either want to wipe out humanity or they want to be a real boy.

895
01:54:23,680 --> 01:54:37,200
And I wanted to create an AI character that was neither. And I think that

896
01:54:40,480 --> 01:54:47,440
talking now about the state of technology and how I projected it, I think that we,

897
01:54:47,440 --> 01:55:00,240
we approach AI technology not by recreating a living organism in the sense that it makes

898
01:55:00,240 --> 01:55:09,440
plans and has volition and so forth. What we do is we pick off the heap, little tasks that human

899
01:55:09,440 --> 01:55:22,320
beings can do, like drive a car or play chess or use language or do art. And we throw a whole

900
01:55:22,320 --> 01:55:32,240
bunch of clock cycles at finding a way to do that. And every time we do a task better than a human being

901
01:55:32,240 --> 01:55:40,080
or better than the average human being, everybody runs around waving their hands and says,

902
01:55:40,080 --> 01:55:45,600
we're going to create, you know, an artificial human being next year. The problem has been solved.

903
01:55:46,480 --> 01:55:57,040
No, no, no, no, no, no. You just made, you, you looked at a human being, which is the machine

904
01:55:57,040 --> 01:56:07,840
that has the capacity to learn tasks and can do things. And you replicated one capability that

905
01:56:07,840 --> 01:56:13,360
a human being can learn. And you said, Oh, now we have a human being. Well, no, you don't.

906
01:56:14,160 --> 01:56:23,600
You have a really awesome tool. But you haven't even started on the problem of making something

907
01:56:23,600 --> 01:56:33,120
that can generally act and learn and grow the way human beings can act and plan and learn and grow.

908
01:56:34,320 --> 01:56:43,920
And what I did here was I wanted to take the slice of the very moment that artificial human beings

909
01:56:43,920 --> 01:56:52,160
entered reality. So it's like there's only a handful of them in the solar system,

910
01:56:52,160 --> 01:56:57,520
because they're really expensive and risky to produce, you know, expensive and risky. That's

911
01:56:57,520 --> 01:57:04,080
how everything starts out. Tens of thousands of Bitcoin, if I remember, just for one. Yeah.

912
01:57:04,080 --> 01:57:09,120
Yeah. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't use the term billions because we're no longer thinking in dollars.

913
01:57:09,120 --> 01:57:15,040
Exactly. It would have been trillions if that was the case probably or God. Yes, yes. Yes.

914
01:57:15,040 --> 01:57:20,960
Yes, I had I had a sort of a figure in mind for how much a Bitcoin is worth in this future in

915
01:57:20,960 --> 01:57:30,080
modern dollars. And it's a it's a pretty high one. So I wanted to enter just at the cusp and I made

916
01:57:30,080 --> 01:57:35,360
the guess that when we crack this problem, it's probably going to be by copying evolution's

917
01:57:35,360 --> 01:57:43,520
homework. You know, it may not be through like plugging a human being in and literally copying

918
01:57:43,520 --> 01:57:51,360
them the way it happens in the book. But it's probably going to be through looking at and

919
01:57:51,360 --> 01:57:59,600
trying to imitate some of the deep structure of the brain. I liked the way you you woven in with

920
01:57:59,600 --> 01:58:05,600
the now that you've said it, I feel comfortable saying it, you know, the copying of a human

921
01:58:05,600 --> 01:58:10,640
because it was yes, basically, you know, implying that look, we couldn't figure it out the way we

922
01:58:10,640 --> 01:58:17,200
thought we were going to figure it out. It didn't. The artificial AGI did not work like that. Yeah,

923
01:58:17,200 --> 01:58:22,560
we had to basically if we wanted to create something that was like us, we had to copy us. And I

924
01:58:22,560 --> 01:58:28,240
thought that that was very interesting and also came with its own set of baggage, which added

925
01:58:28,240 --> 01:58:35,440
added a nice touch there. Yeah, yeah, it's it's that it's very much a story about some of the human

926
01:58:35,440 --> 01:58:44,480
consequences of technology. And some of the post human consequences of technology, because, you

927
01:58:44,480 --> 01:58:50,880
know, without saying too much, only one of the characters on the cover is actually a human being.

928
01:58:50,880 --> 01:58:57,360
Okay. Oh, if well, yeah, I don't want to don't want to give anything away because I do really

929
01:58:57,360 --> 01:59:03,360
recommend that people that people read theft of fire. Because it was I recommend it as well.

930
01:59:03,360 --> 01:59:11,120
That would not be you don't say. May I ask, because you came out with theft of fire. Was that just in

931
01:59:11,120 --> 01:59:18,320
November? Was it that was November 11th was our publication date. And that was November 11th.

932
01:59:18,320 --> 01:59:23,600
Was our publication date. And and I understand from seeing some of your posts, you were planning

933
01:59:23,600 --> 01:59:29,280
on doing three initially, but now it may be four. It's going to be four. It's going does that mean

934
01:59:29,280 --> 01:59:35,440
four may turn to five? Or are we don't thinks I think I have a better handle on it now. Okay,

935
01:59:35,440 --> 01:59:43,760
because I am very much an architect type writer. I plan everything. And in fact, the last scene of

936
01:59:43,760 --> 01:59:50,240
the last book is actually written. Really? Yes. Yes, I know what the last sentence of the whole

937
01:59:50,240 --> 01:59:58,080
series is. So, and I know exactly where it's going. There's a there's a there is a master plan.

938
01:59:58,640 --> 02:00:07,280
Okay. And the thing that happened to me was that between the end of the first book,

939
02:00:07,280 --> 02:00:16,560
where where an important thing happens, an important piece of progress is made. And the

940
02:00:17,440 --> 02:00:22,720
beginning of the fourth book, where we're pretty far in the future, and there are some

941
02:00:22,720 --> 02:00:32,400
significant consequences. The things that had to happen between X and Y would become very,

942
02:00:32,400 --> 02:00:41,840
very sketchy and more like a summary. If they were to fit into one novel. And I spent a couple of

943
02:00:41,840 --> 02:00:48,400
months after I published theft of fire, sort of trying to stuff all of this in a suitcase and

944
02:00:48,960 --> 02:00:57,120
jumping up and down on the lid trying to get it closed. And it just wasn't working. So like in

945
02:00:57,120 --> 02:01:06,960
late December, I realized this. And I said, Okay, I'm going to spend the first couple of weeks of

946
02:01:06,960 --> 02:01:20,160
January just taking everything I have. And I typically write about 25 to 40,000 words that

947
02:01:20,160 --> 02:01:27,600
readers will never see. Just in summaries and structure and notes and so forth. I'm going

948
02:01:27,600 --> 02:01:33,600
to take what I have. And I'm going to spend a couple of weeks splitting this into two books.

949
02:01:34,240 --> 02:01:39,680
And that's not just a matter of chopping it in the middle, because every book has to have a

950
02:01:39,680 --> 02:01:46,400
satisfying narrative arc. So there has to be an intermediate conclusion between these two books,

951
02:01:46,400 --> 02:01:52,480
which I've got to find to go somewhere in the middle. And now I've kind of got a handle on that.

952
02:01:53,360 --> 02:02:02,480
And I'm starting to make progress on the second book, which adds an additional viewpoint character.

953
02:02:02,480 --> 02:02:10,320
So that's, that's a little bit of a new complication. But I'm just starting to like, Okay,

954
02:02:10,320 --> 02:02:16,000
I lost some progress there because it got moved to the third book, and it'll help me eventually.

955
02:02:16,000 --> 02:02:22,960
But it's like, Okay, now I've got the, I've got the task sort of cut down to a manageable portion.

956
02:02:22,960 --> 02:02:28,880
And I'm starting to churn on that and get things going. When do you think I don't know,

957
02:02:28,880 --> 02:02:36,000
it may ask when you are aiming to try and get out the second book then in the case? Well,

958
02:02:36,000 --> 02:02:43,600
I don't want to be George Martin. Fair enough, fair enough. And, you know, George Martin

959
02:02:43,600 --> 02:02:51,520
committed two sins. The first sin he committed was not finishing for 13 years and counting.

960
02:02:52,320 --> 02:02:56,240
I think it's 13 years. This is something like that some outrageous amount of time.

961
02:02:57,280 --> 02:03:04,080
But the second sin that George Martin committed, which was far more egregious, was lying to people.

962
02:03:04,080 --> 02:03:14,320
So I want to be completely transparent and honest and say, number one, I'm not a fast writer,

963
02:03:15,120 --> 02:03:21,760
because I am very perfectionist. And I hope that that came through in the novel.

964
02:03:21,760 --> 02:03:28,560
It did. And, you know, number two, I'm new at this. This is my second novel.

965
02:03:28,560 --> 02:03:36,560
So my ability to estimate is not very good. So when I say I hope to publish next November 11th,

966
02:03:37,360 --> 02:03:44,960
that is a hope. That is not a promise. So I promise I'm not going to be George Martin. Fair enough.

967
02:03:44,960 --> 02:03:52,960
Well, as I say, I hope I can get it out by the end of this year. It may stretch to a little later

968
02:03:52,960 --> 02:03:57,760
than that. You've got to forgive my eagerness. I'm just looking forward to the next part of the story.

969
02:03:57,760 --> 02:04:06,560
I completely understand. I completely understand. I, you know, I've had people mention George Martin

970
02:04:06,560 --> 02:04:13,040
and Patrick Roffus in my timeline like two weeks after I published. I'm like, okay, chill.

971
02:04:14,400 --> 02:04:22,320
Seriously, chill. I will reach through the screen and smack you. But I understand the anxiety.

972
02:04:22,320 --> 02:04:31,760
And I understand that often these expressions of eagerness for a sequel, you know, precisely because

973
02:04:31,760 --> 02:04:37,600
there are so few good stories out there now, it's like, it's, I take it as a compliment,

974
02:04:37,600 --> 02:04:44,160
but at the same time, I do need people to be understanding that this is difficult. This is

975
02:04:44,160 --> 02:04:50,560
not easy. You know, the, the bonuses, it gives me time to read it again and read digest. So that,

976
02:04:50,560 --> 02:04:55,600
that's a good thing. And, you know, as you say in the book, plans are a list of things that

977
02:04:55,600 --> 02:05:00,880
will never happen. So one of the things that I hope to do is inspire other people to,

978
02:05:01,760 --> 02:05:13,920
to get on their own writing process because I can't, shut up, because I can't single-handedly

979
02:05:13,920 --> 02:05:26,160
resuscitate science fiction. You know, Trad Pub has, has been ideologically captured and

980
02:05:26,800 --> 02:05:34,400
burned down, fell over and sank into the swamp. I can't replace that all by myself. And with the

981
02:05:34,400 --> 02:05:41,280
few other writers there are out there who got their careers launched before Trad Pub burned down,

982
02:05:41,280 --> 02:05:47,840
fell over and sank into the swamp. So, you know, I can produce maybe one novel a year once I hit

983
02:05:47,840 --> 02:05:55,040
my stride. You know, unless you read one novel a year, I'm not enough. There have to be more

984
02:05:55,040 --> 02:06:02,080
people doing this. I'm just trying to be part of the solution. Well, I would highly recommend,

985
02:06:02,080 --> 02:06:06,480
I know we're, we're hitting time here and time is scarce, much like Bitcoin. So I want to be

986
02:06:06,480 --> 02:06:11,360
conscious of yours. Yes, we've been going for like two hours, haven't we? It flew right by and I've

987
02:06:11,360 --> 02:06:17,360
got to say I enjoyed the hell out of this. This has been a fun conversation. I feel like we could,

988
02:06:17,360 --> 02:06:23,760
we could probably go a lot longer. But again, my voice would completely get out. Which just means

989
02:06:23,760 --> 02:06:27,200
we'll have to have a, have to have a check-in again in the future if you're game for it. I would

990
02:06:27,200 --> 02:06:34,720
love to. But I will make your, your agent happy. So, you know, read Theft of Fire. I really and

991
02:06:34,720 --> 02:06:40,560
truly enjoyed it. If you are a Bitcoiner who has probably not read anything but Austrian economics

992
02:06:40,560 --> 02:06:46,960
and various short form articles on Bitcoin in the last couple of years, give yourself

993
02:06:47,840 --> 02:06:53,040
the permission to read some really great science fiction and you will enjoy it. And yes,

994
02:06:53,040 --> 02:06:57,520
Bitcoin is even mentioned multiple times. So it's like you're reading something about Bitcoin

995
02:06:57,520 --> 02:07:06,240
too. You don't have to feel guilty. It's a vision of the kind of future that the people who are

996
02:07:06,240 --> 02:07:14,960
into Bitcoin want to see. It's a vision of the kind of future where we've stopped sitting around

997
02:07:16,480 --> 02:07:25,760
whining about carbon emissions and economic inequality and actually decided to build something

998
02:07:25,760 --> 02:07:35,040
again. I think a lot of Bitcoiners are going to very much identify with that message. And you

999
02:07:35,040 --> 02:07:39,360
know, I just realized, Devin, I need to talk to you again because there was a whole other thread I

1000
02:07:39,360 --> 02:07:44,240
wanted to pick on about something you said recently about science fiction, real science fiction,

1001
02:07:44,240 --> 02:07:49,120
being essentially libertarian. Oh yeah. Which I thought was really interesting. But we'll just

1002
02:07:49,120 --> 02:07:53,360
have to keep that for next. We'll have to save that for the sequel. So, you know,

1003
02:07:53,360 --> 02:08:00,800
before we cut out then, DevinEriksing.com, I will include links in the show notes. You can find the

1004
02:08:00,800 --> 02:08:07,360
book Theft of Fire on Amazon. It's where I bought mine. Anywhere else you would like to send people?

1005
02:08:07,360 --> 02:08:15,360
I'll include your Twitter as well. No, pretty much Twitter is really the place to engage with me.

1006
02:08:15,360 --> 02:08:24,880
And you know, where to buy is pretty much wherever you prefer to buy because I tried to be as widely

1007
02:08:24,880 --> 02:08:32,880
available as possible. I don't like to dictate to people the format or the platform that they purchase

1008
02:08:32,880 --> 02:08:41,360
on. So, my agent is making desperate gestures over here so I will indulge her for two seconds,

1009
02:08:41,360 --> 02:08:48,560
but she needs to do point for these two who prefer things that are without DRM. Yeah, we have we

1010
02:08:48,560 --> 02:08:55,760
have DRM free platforms. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are there are I think a few others as well, but

1011
02:08:55,760 --> 02:09:03,840
there are DRM free platforms for people who are into that particular crusade. Okay, okay. Well,

1012
02:09:03,840 --> 02:09:11,760
I'll include the links in the website, your Twitter as well. And I'll send you a quick note on

1013
02:09:11,760 --> 02:09:16,400
Noster as well because I think it might be something that you would find very interesting

1014
02:09:16,400 --> 02:09:22,800
for censorship resistant social media. Yeah, but that's a topic for the sequel conversation as well.

1015
02:09:22,800 --> 02:09:28,160
Yeah, yeah, I would definitely love to come back. This has been tremendous fun and I hope that it

1016
02:09:28,160 --> 02:09:34,400
is as fun for your listeners as it was for us. Well, you know what, honestly, fuck them. But

1017
02:09:35,520 --> 02:09:39,120
I think they'll enjoy it. And you know, I like to I like to end this by saying

1018
02:09:39,120 --> 02:09:43,920
Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are quite abundant. So thank you again for sharing

1019
02:09:43,920 --> 02:09:49,920
your scarce time for another fucking Bitcoin podcast. And I look forward to doing this again.

1020
02:09:49,920 --> 02:09:59,440
Look forward to reading the next one in your series. And until then, I'll see you on the internet.

1021
02:10:01,280 --> 02:10:08,320
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. If you are a Bitcoin only

1022
02:10:08,320 --> 02:10:14,000
company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, head to Bitcoin podcast.net or

1023
02:10:14,000 --> 02:10:20,240
hit me up on social media on Noster. Head to primal.net slash Walker and on Twitter,

1024
02:10:20,240 --> 02:10:26,960
search for at Walker America or at Bitcoin podcast. You can also watch the video version of this show

1025
02:10:26,960 --> 02:10:34,240
on X or on YouTube by going to YouTube.com slash Walker America or rumble by searching for at Walker

1026
02:10:34,240 --> 02:10:42,160
America. Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million. But Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.

1027
02:10:42,160 --> 02:10:47,520
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.

1028
02:10:47,520 --> 02:11:13,520
Until next time, stay free.