Money is a technology for measuring fucks given.
If I wanted to have a slightly more economy focused and maybe slightly more flippant kind of novel,
I would have called the unit of currency the fuck.
Because it measures whether you give a fuck.
Anyone who claims to give a fuck and they're not spending their money on something
doesn't actually give a fuck.
And that's the worst part of government.
It's not just that it takes a lot of your stuff.
It's that it takes a lot of your stuff and then it pays smart people to do stupid things
when they could be doing smart things instead.
Anytime you subsidize something, by definition, you're artificially influencing people to do
things that people don't actually give a fuck about.
Because if they actually gave a fuck, they would pay for it themselves out of their own supply of fucks.
I'm not with my guest about bitcoin and whatever else comes up.
Today, that guest is Devin Erickson, a software engineer turned science fiction writer,
who went viral for absolutely destroying the interim CEO of open AI,
after he suggested a 100% inheritance tax, and some other fucking stupid ideas.
I read Devin's first sci-fi novel, Theft of Fire, and I absolutely loved it.
And I knew I needed to get him on the show.
Devin and I went deep into a fuckload of topics, from science fiction to culture and law,
to capitalism versus communism, private property and bitcoin, AI, technology,
plus a whole lot more.
If you are a bit coiner who, like me, spends most of your time reading about Austrian economics,
and of course bitcoin, I highly recommend you take a little break and check out Theft of Fire.
Plus, bitcoin is mentioned multiple times in the book, so it's basically like reading a bitcoin book,
but a lot more fun.
Check the links in the show notes for Devin's website so you can grab a copy of Theft of Fire.
As always, you can watch the video version of this show on Rumble,
YouTube or X by searching at Walker America, or listen on fountain.fm,
or wherever you get your podcasts by searching for the bitcoin podcast.
And if you do listen to the bitcoin podcast on fountain, which I recommend,
consider creating a clip of something you found interesting in the show, or giving it a boost.
And if you're not using fountain yet, what are you doing?
You can send bitcoin to your favorite podcasters and earn bitcoin just for listening to the show.
And finally, if you are a bitcoin-only company interested in sponsoring another fucking bitcoin podcast,
hit me up on social media or through the website, bitcoinpodcast.net.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Devin Erickson.
A lot of things that are very valuable in retrospect,
usually when they start out, they're just something that somebody thinks will never amount to anything.
I don't know if you've seen that famous
Usenet post from Linus Torvalds where he says,
I'm just working on this little project operating system.
So sometimes at the beginning of things, you get moments like that.
So you don't underestimate yourself and you always try to write down your thoughts
and record what you're saying and capture it all, because you don't know what might be useful later.
Amen. So much, a lot of brilliance and beauty happens in serendipitous moments that are not planned.
And to quote you, plan is a list of things that aren't going to happen.
Yeah, it's like you always have to plan, but you always have to revise the plan.
And I always planned, for example, to sort of, okay, there's going to be this arc between
unknown Scribbler on the internet and hopefully A-list novelist,
but we never thought that path would go through anti-communist rants.
And you know, that is precisely how I found out about you.
Was that back and forth that you had, although I don't even know if it's quite
fair to call it a back and forth with Emma Cheer, because he blocked me fairly quickly.
Did he really? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Like the second message, basically, I said something,
he said something, and I said something and he blocked me. So, you know, it's kind of a disappointment
from sort of his personal growth perspective, because, you know, I'm sure that his feelings were hurt,
and that's regrettable. But usually in these teachable moments that we're going to learn
something, usually our feelings are hurt, because it's always more difficult to change your worldview
to accommodate something than it is to assimilate something into your existing worldview.
But that's such an important skill. You know, I think maybe there's like a couple of personal
traits that are key predictors for success in life, and that's high IQ, high agency, and high
teachability. And this man is sitting here, pontificating on how he would organize society if he
were king. And he's saying, you know, I think that everyone has potential within them. And I want to
make a world with equal opportunity for everybody because you're all smart. And therefore, I think
we should confiscate everybody's inheritance and just redistribute it. And it's like, then,
when somebody says, that's a terrible idea, you've destroyed all of the legacy and all of the
multi-generational technical know-how in your culture, and you've forced the sale of every asset,
and you've made all the wealth flow through the government, which is known to have sticky fingers.
And then when somebody objects to that, he says, why don't you understand that I'm trying to help
you because I respect you? No, you don't fucking respect us. You don't fucking respect us. You
respected us. You'd listen. You know, it's these people who see themselves as these abstract
philosopher kings because they got slightly fortunate in the market and knew how to do one
thing well. You know, when I want to make a video game streaming website, I'm going to call them a
cheer. Well, maybe not now, but abstractly, I would. You know, when I want to make a video game
streaming website, you know, when I'm going to design a society, you know, I'm not going to say,
gosh, what does the founder of a video game streaming website think? You know, maybe the one
is just a little more complicated than the other. You know, maybe the one is this problem
that we have been trying to solve since human beings first learned to bang the rocks together.
And I think one of the reasons that this kind of rant sort of resonated is that people see
this kind of thing and they get they get scared and they're right to get scared because this person
is an eminent public figure and senators will take his phone calls and then you see this very,
very simplistic first order thinking coming out of this guy and it's it's scary because it makes
people start to wake up to the fact that the people in charge aren't any smarter than you.
They're just meaner and greedier and you know, then when somebody says no, that's that's stupid.
You're being stupid. Stop using wisdom as a dump stat and start paying attention to
all of the other people around you who have skin in the game. They're affected by these things.
They're not just sitting on top of a stack of $500 million pontificating about how we should
rearrange the universe according to my game theory. Well, and read some fucking history too.
Like this isn't some theoretical thing. You don't have to look very far to find many examples
of exactly what he's suggesting throughout history. My wife's family, her dad defected from
communist Romania. This literally happened to their family. Yeah, well, and they always say, well,
it's not communism. Well, it's it's the same sort of cluster of things where you're centralizing
everything in society in order to control it. Because you think that you're so smart that you
can just sort of tell all of humanity they're marching orders and everything will work out fine.
And, you know, communism, you know, Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses,
to which some wag responded that communism is the opiate of the intellectual.
And the reality is that is that socialism doesn't really it doesn't appeal to the intellect.
It appeals to the intellectual. Because the intellectual per Thomas soul is someone whose
work product is ideas. And they like to think, oh, I'm going to sit around and I'm going to think
of ideas. And then I'm going to fix all the problems in society by thinking of ideas,
and everybody is going to stand up and clap. And the thing is that when you have an idea,
you need people to go along with it. And there's two things you can do about that. You can persuade
them, which is very difficult and takes a long time and requires a lot of effort. Or you can
centralize all of the power in society. And, you know, you can point guns at people, which you
don't think of as pointing guns at people, you think of it as making laws. But it really comes
down to violence, because that's what laws are enforced with. And this centralization of power
represents this sort of treasure trove of power for for implementing intellectuals ideas, like,
here's the one ring. And if you have the one ring, you can you can make your ideas into reality.
And all intellectuals tend to think, well, if all of my ideas were made into reality,
it would, you know, it would be paradise. And if you crack a history book, that never happens.
What happens is mountains of skulls. And then they always say, well, that wasn't me. And those
were the wrong ideas. Well, the truth is that everybody, no matter how smart they are, and I
include myself in this, 99% of their ideas are rubbish, really, really, really rubbish. And
what we do in capitalism is everybody just goes out and implements their ideas on their own in
their own little life or their own little business. And then, you know, every once in a while, somebody
runs across that 1% idea, like, how about we make the rocket booster reusable? And then it works.
And everybody goes, we're going to imitate him. And then that idea spreads. So capitalism is
basically this massive parallel processing of trying to find ideas. And let me tell you,
nothing will teach you that most of your ideas are rubbish, like writing a novel.
Seriously, it's a process of about six months to a year, depending on how persnickety you're being
and how good you are and how fast you are. But when you crack a finished novel, that's good stuff,
I mean, it's not shovelware, then you always get this phenomenon of, wow, this writer is so brilliant.
Every page of this is just dripping with good ideas. And you have to understand,
you know, and people say this to me, and I'm like, well, thank you. But you have to understand that
you are taking 20 to 24 hours to consume a year's worth of all my smart ideas after I have thrown
away all the bad ones. So when you write fiction, and when you go over it and over it and over it
and edit it and edit it and edit it, you realize that, you know, most of the stuff I come up with
on a daily basis is stupid. You just throw away all the stupid ones. And that's what capitalism
does. It throws away the stupid ideas by allowing business to fail and keeping the good ones.
I love that analogy. And you know, I think we are already, I think we're already in it,
Devin, I think we're already diving in if that's okay with you. Because you are already like inside
my brain as far as some of the things I wanted to talk about. So this is fantastic. Well, this is
great. Sorry. No, no, I was just gonna say, before we get going, I want to like just have you kind
of introduce yourself a little bit, but finish that thought first. Finish the thought first,
then I'll ask you one simple introductory question, and we'll roll from there.
That sounds good. I'm afraid I lost it. So I'll introduce myself to you first.
Okay. Who are you and how did you get here today? I am Devin Erickson. I am a retired engineer who
just sat down one day and started writing novels. It's like, okay, I'm retired. I can do what I want.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a science fiction writer. And you know, some adults said,
oh, honey, that's a stupid dream. You should do something else. And you know, now I'm like, hey,
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
to do was create books. And this is my debut novel, Theft of Fire, with it is the first of a four
book series. And we came about out about exactly three months ago, I think. And so far, we're doing
pretty well, you know, we've hit the top 10 in hard science fiction on a few days. We've had
some days where we hit the top thousand on Amazon. And that's all of Amazon. So that's like every
book ever published. And then, okay, well, my agent is is trying to coach me stop that. Shut up.
And you know, we just had a nice post on Twitter today where John Carmack finished it and endorsed
me and gave me a nice shout out. So that was fun. Because John Carmack spent a lot of time
entertaining me when I was young. So I'm happy to be able to a little bit repay the favor.
Yeah, well, I've got the book. I figured I'd you know, since I have your have to put it
right behind me as well. So your agent for for, you know, their benefit, there it is.
I just finished it. I absolutely loved it. I did read about probably the first quarter of it
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
went over his head. I think I didn't I didn't really target the the instilling diapers demographic
very much. It would have been a very different book. Yeah, well, my I read the rest of it,
just inside my good old head, because it turns out I wanted to finish it a lot faster and couldn't
quite put it down. And so went through the rest of it. And I've got to say it was, it's a fantastic,
fantastic story from the characters, how they developed the fact that you told it in
first person through Marcus's experience of how he's going through these, you know,
couple of meaningful, very meaningful relationships for him. Yeah, it made all the difference to me.
And it felt so much more real. Yeah, that decision was a calculated decision that that presented a
great deal of difficulty for me, because that was that was a complete showstopper for getting
published through any traditional publishing house. I had I had various editors and agents
completely shut down the moment they found out it was written in first person present tense.
I literally had one guy from a major publishing house at a convention hand me back my sample
chapters, you know, holding them up with his fingers like this, for those of you who can see the video,
as if I had handed him a dead spider. And he said, rewrite it in the third person. You do
know what third person means, don't you? And it's like, okay, I can see that I am going to have to
publish this myself. Because the whole point of, you know, not the only point, but a major point
of some of the character arcs is how people misinterpret what they see and misinterpret
other people through the lens of their own experience. And the story is very much about
three characters learning to understand each other and learning to work together. And so the
first person perspective was critical to that. And you know, they're just, well, that's not
fashionable right now. Well, okay, I'll publish it myself and I'll make it fashionable. Because
I don't think that the book buying public is subject to silly whims. I think that is something
that publishers just sort of come up with. So they can fool themselves into thinking they're
divining the market or something. And you know, they're not, they're not, it's the only thing
that is really that readers are into is good writing. And I think that all of these things
that publishers think are trends like, you know, in early 2000s, oh, dark fantasy is really hot
right now. Well, no, George Martin is really hot right now. You know, and you get all these editors
telling Brandon Sanderson, can you make it darker? Well, no. And he shouldn't. He's, he's Brandon
Sanderson. He's not the next George Martin. He's doing his own thing. And every good piece of art
comes from not that I necessarily include myself. That's, that's other people's decision. Not mine.
I just make the stuff. I include good fiction in art. You know, that means every, every piece of
art that is genuinely good. And I include George Martin's work in that, even though he is a fat,
lazy slob and doesn't finish his work. Every good piece of art proceeds from a singular artistic
vision. And that can come from one person, or it can be shared between a couple of people who
communicate really well. But there's always one vision in charge. You can't make good fiction,
and you can't make inspiring fiction. You can't make fiction that makes people feel something
by committee. And that's why you have nothing to watch these days.
Isn't that the truth? I mean, it is, it is kind of absurd that you see, if we talk about, let's say,
Hollywood as a, as a blanket term, the only science fiction that you see, and it feels dirty,
even calling it that, is just recycled versions of what was popular 20, 30, 40 years ago, when
they were actually new and innovative ideas. And now they're just recycling it with new,
new little tidbits thrown in that are trendy right now. Yeah, yeah. Well, the storytellers who
knew how to innovate, and we're willing to do so, have largely aged out of the business. So
the problem is deeper than just this sort of far left, woke, neo Marxist messaging.
The problem is that the people who have done this their entire career, this kind of messaging,
and that's really just how they show off for their friends. It has nothing to do with the audience.
You know, the people who have done that all their careers, they don't know the principles of
storytelling. They don't understand what makes a story engaging. They don't understand how to
make characters relatable. And there's lots of people who could tell them, and there's lots of
books they could read to learn that. But the prerequisite to learning anything is that third
attribute I talked about that teachable attitude, that willingness to restructure your view of the
universe to accommodate this new information that you have. And, you know, what we see today in this
sort of Disney Star Wars, you know, Marvel's designed by committee films full of big CGI fight
sequences and Joss Whedon style quips is that when audiences say, we don't really like this,
like this, what they do is they call the fans racist or sexist or somethingist.
They double down on what they're doing. And they say, you know, no, it's not it's not my artistic
vision that's wrong in the sense that they have one at all. It's, you know, you guys are wrong
fans. You're supposed to like it. Well, as an author, you don't get to say that. You are the
God of your universe, but you are not the God of your audience. They are guests in your universe,
and it's their decision whether they like it or not. But these people can't accept that,
because they've based their entire worldview around what's popular in their own social circle,
and they simply don't have the storytelling skills. You know, they don't know how to do it. And
that's one of the reasons why I decided to write like I did is that I spent my youth,
you know, a lot of it in the back of the public library before they all got made into homeless
shelters with this big stacks of classic science fiction, you know, by people who really knew
not only how to entertain, but how to fire the imagination. And it's like, okay,
I want to make a 20th century 21st century version of this. I want to make something that
captures that same feeling, but is updated a little bit because the technology is updated a little bit.
Now, I love it. And you know, one of the things that I really enjoyed about Theft of Fire was it,
first of all, the narrative itself and the story was wonderful. But the fact that, one,
you clearly did a ton of research and put a lot of energy into making sure it was,
the science actually worked. Like the science part of the science fiction was actually plausible.
And that makes a huge difference when it's actually believable. The other thing is just that it felt,
you know, even though a lot of the subject matter itself is dark at times and you're dealing with
these, you know, these difficult situations, the overall message felt more hopeful. I mean,
it is ultimately a story of transformation and of hope and of what is possible.
And there was also an element of realism, true realism, not just dystopian mumbo jumbo.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for a light to be clearly visible, you have to take it into dark places.
And one of my inspirations was a very excellent video essay called, Is Superman Still Relevant?
And there's a lot of people nowadays who think that he isn't. And Superman, you know, once he's
sort of got going and, you know, people had a clear idea of who he was and he got out of the roots
of the original storytellers sort of started trying to do FDR worship and this kind of thing.
Superman was an aspirational character. It's not a story about a man who can punch the giant robot
harder than the giant robot can punch him. That's not really the core of the story. The story
is about aspirational morality, about a good example. And, you know, a lot of people, this was
written in a very hopeful time when America was very ascendant and we had a strong sense of cultural
unity. And I think the reason that a lot of these corporate writer hacks are now more interested
in comic book villains is because they have a hard time identifying with that kind of ethos
because they're busy like, okay, I have enough trouble in my own life. I'm just kind of hanging
on by my fingernails. I'm not very mentally stable, which you can see if you look at photographs of
some of these people. And I don't feel like I have the cargo space to help or save anybody else.
You know, I want to gain power and influence. I want to get my own life in order. And this
I want impulse tends to make them feel more aligned with the traditional comic book villains
than with the heroes. And what they tend to say is that the heroes are boring. And of course,
soon after follows the term unrealistic. And I think the reason that these people think that
Superman is unrealistic is that they don't see a path between themselves and Superman.
They don't see a path between where they are, and somebody who is successful and virtuous and
heroic. And so I wanted to write a story about a bunch of people who kind of start out as crappy
people. You know, it's there. There have been some some some interesting debates online about
whether in the beginning of the book, Marcus or Miranda is a worse person with strongly held
opinions on both sides. And not to give away too much for the trilogy. But the the the plan is here's
how you go from someone who isn't a good person to someone who actually does the right thing and
creates something worthwhile or does something worthwhile that is that is good for everyone
instead of good for themselves at the expense of everyone else. So the the intent for the series
is to be a story of heroism for the 21st century. I'm I'm already excited for the next one. It's
as soon as I put it down, I was like, gosh, I cannot wait to pick this up again. And you know,
something that you've you've talked about, I've seen you tweet about. And I think I heard you
on a couple other podcasts talk about is the idea of because we're talking about culture here,
really, right? And and how the culture in storytelling has shifted, both through centralizing
forces and decisions by committee, but also through just people kind of I mean, you're writing
what's in you. Right. And we see that a lot of what is in people is pretty dark and does not aspire
to that heroic role. And you've also talked about the idea that law itself is downstream from that
culture. Oh, yeah. Can we explore that a little bit? Because I think that's a really important
not just law, but technology. And really, all of society is downstream from culture. And
just to give an example of this kind of thinking, you think about all of the things, all of the major
inventions that were created in the 20th century. Now, try to name five that didn't happen in science
fiction first. See, I don't think I can name five. And it will take me a little while to probably
name one. Exactly. Was GPS talked about in sci fi? Yes. There that was going to be my one. So
there we go. I'm out. Pulsar navigation. Okay, GPS satellites orient themselves.
So it's based on pulsars that are very distant from the earth, actually. And this was, I can't
name the science fiction writer offhand. I'm afraid I'm drawing a blank, but it actually was a science
fiction writer who came up with this idea. So it's, it's debatable. And it probably goes both ways,
whether science fiction writers come up with something, or whether they just kind of see the
direction that engineers are going in, whether they see the possibilities. But the fact remains
that this heavily influences our technological development. And it influences our attitudes
about technology and technology influences our culture. And fiction in general, not just science
fiction, influences what we think is culturally acceptable and culturally normal. You know,
we've been telling each other stories around the campfire since we developed language. And stories
have always been how we, how we transmit our values, how we talk about what we think is true
and important. And I think one of the reasons that a very small number of people who are on the far,
far left have come to have a disproportionate cultural influence to where everyone is sitting
around on the internet talking about them and censorship and how our society is going to hell,
you know, due to the influence of like less than 1% of people who are into this madness.
You know, the reason for this is, is that other cultural forces somehow decided, somehow developed
this attitude that art was lost, that art was lost territory and we should just surrender it.
And that's okay because fiction is for babies anyway. Well, even if that were true,
babies grow up, you know, read me a story, daddy, you know, you can, you can mock stories all you
want by suggesting that they're first kids who say that. But you know, if you don't do that,
then somebody else is going to read your kids a story. And then that person is going to be daddy.
And what is that story going to be about? You're not going to control it. So if your cultural
viewpoint is not creating art, you know, whether that be movies, television, books, audio books,
cartoons, you know, comic strips, whatever it is that tells a story, if you're not creating stories,
then you are dying. You are dying because you might have kids. But your kids will embrace the
culture of your cultural enemies, and you will be erased from history. So it's time that we stopped
leaving art in the hands of these utterly selfish, utterly foolish, and utterly irresponsible,
tiny minorities of the population. You know, you can literally point to a nice round number of city
blocks in probably the Upper East Side of Manhattan that is controlling the entire United States
traditional publishing industry. Well, those people live in one place, they all talk to each other,
they all see the world in one way, and they're making a concerted effort to exclude alternative
points of view. So it's about time that the rest of us started telling our stories. Because if you
don't tell your story, no one hears it. I think that that's it's so important for people to realize
that because I think like you said, I'm somebody who I used to read only fiction. Yeah. And then
at a certain point, I don't know what switch flipped in me, but I started thinking somehow, you know
what, I need to, I need to read nonfiction, I need to read, you know, and I genuinely enjoy books
about monetary theory and, you know, the Austrian economics and all, you know, history. But there
was something missing. And I have to thank you because Theft of Fire gave me that back a little
bit. And that felt, it felt really good. But people forget that everything is about all of our
cultures about stories. All propaganda is stories, all political, political movements are just stories.
Yeah. And the team that has the best story, the group that has the best story controls the narrative.
Well, every every vision of the future is a story. And I won't say it's stories that separate us from
the animals. But it is the same capacity that allows us to tell stories that separates us from the
animals. Because in order to plan, in order to learn and grow and develop and make things like fire
and the wheel and technology, what we have to do is we have to tell ourselves a story. So the reason
that a bird can't make a plan, and you know, maybe an African gray parrot or a raven or some smart
birds can to some extent, you know, but if you picture something like a bird that can't really
make plans and carry them out, it's because it can't tell itself a story about the future
that hasn't happened yet. So every time you make a plan, you're telling yourself a story.
Every time you decide to create a podcast about Bitcoin, because you hope to affect some sort of
positive change in the world, then you start and you have to start and you can only start by telling
yourself a story in your head about how this will be. So if we don't tell stories, we're animals.
And the stories tell us how to proceed and they tell us about what things might be possible.
So the reason that this tiny percentage of lunatic neomarksists, and you know, I'm not talking about
people who vote Democrat, you know, I'm talking about really, really this fringe of lunatic neomarksists.
You know, the reason they have influence is everyone else was asleep at the wheel
while they got influence over how our culture told itself stories.
And the reason that everybody feels despairing about the future, despite the fact that we have
all this cool shit and we're about to go to Mars, is that they tell stories of despair and we read
them. And you know, so we're listening to all this dystopian nonsense about windmills and solar
panels and austerity instead of building nuclear reactors and colonizing Mars.
It does become absurd at a certain point. Just if you look at, let's say, the stories that we
tell ourselves around energy, because this is something you brought up, this is a Bitcoin
podcast, but we talk about whatever comes up here. You know, because there are many things
downstream from, or I should say, money is upstream. Bitcoin is an element of a plan.
It's an element of a plan based on a goal that we want to be free. We want to be free to control
our own destinies and make our own decisions. And one of the ways that people who want to
centralize power, this gets back to socialists and intellectuals and people with central plans
that they want the rest of us to be chess pawns and carry out, you know, one of the ways that
they centralize power is controlling money supplies and printing money and this kind of thing. But
Bitcoin is not this thing that can succeed or fail on its own, because it's part of a larger,
not even a movement, but just a goal, a desire to not be moved around like chess pawns, to make
our own plans and a plan as a story and to carry out those plans and have our destiny be determined
by our stories that we tell ourselves and not by a story that someone else invented
to indoctrinate us. If you want to keep your Bitcoin safe from the communists and the totalitarians
of this world, you need to take it off an exchange and into your own custody. Go to
bitbox.swiss slash walker and use the promo code walker for 5% off the Bitcoin only Bitbox O2
hardware wallet. It's fully open source. You can go to their GitHub and verify for yourself. You
don't have to trust me. It's also super easy to set up and it's a great tool for seasoned psychopaths
and new bit coiners alike. When you go to bitbox.swiss slash walker and use the promo code walker,
not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support another fucking Bitcoin podcast. So thank
you. You know, my vision for telling my stories was not just to get my vision of the future out
there to say, Hey, we're going to colonize the solar system and it's going to be cool. And we're
going to build AI and it's going to be cool. And we're going to tamper with our own genome and it's
going to be cool. It was also, I told a story. You can tell a story too. There's nothing stopping you.
You know, I'm, there's no big publishing house behind me. I just, you know, I'm some weirdo
with his two wives in a little house somewhere in Tennessee and that's, that's it.
And here I am selling all these books and it's great. And you can do that too. If that's what
you wanted to vote your time to, you know, or you can make a podcast or you can make some other kind
of art or you can start a company and train AI entirely on classical Greek literature.
You just make a plan and, and build something. You don't need permission.
You know, and I think the beauty of what you said about just like, you're, you're just a guy,
right? Yeah, who decided to do this and you made that decision. And it was actually possible to
do that today and to get recognition and be seen at scale because of decentralization.
Because the tools are there, because the tools are there and the institutions that have been
captured by proponents of this anti-human, anti-life philosophy, these institutions are
rotten from the inside. They're weak. I love competing with TradPub because they suck at this.
50 years ago, they were powerful. 50 years ago, they had mindshare. 50 years ago,
they knew how to tell a story. Well, now they don't. Now they don't. Now, you know, teenagers
aren't reading anymore because we haven't given them anything to read. They haven't lost the
ability. They're not dumber. They're not dumber than previous generations. In fact, in some ways,
they're smarter because they know how to take something toxic and set it down and not look at
it again. We just haven't given them anything to, to, to love.
You know, the beauty of what you just said also is you talk about going up against TradPub, right?
Yeah. And that you like that fight because they're bad at this and that parallels so well. Yeah.
I mean, to media and communication in general, look at, look at cable news versus Tucker Carlson,
who just got however, 120, 30, I don't know what it's up to, millions of views.
Does anybody watch cable anymore? I think it's only on at airports. I honestly,
I'm pretty sure that at least 60% of the viewer base of cable news is just forced
viewership at airports. Yeah, I mean, who reads the newspaper? Like, really?
It's, it's mind blowing. But you know, they know that they're losing power too,
because they are big and slow and they're the incumbent. Well, they were these news organizations
and Hollywood and so forth were created by the communications technologies of the 20th century.
And those are radio and television. And those are one way communications media that are that
support a one too many model. And they centralize control. And this is why the 20th century was
the century of fascism and communism. Because all of these tin pot dictators,
like Hitler, and Stalin, and Roosevelt, and so forth, could get on the radio and deliver these
spiels to an entirely passive audience who had no way of talking back, and no way of talking to
each other and saying to each other, you know, hey, what do you actually think of this new deal
stuff? You know, some of it sounds a little fishy to me. You know, you have no way of knowing
when you're listening to this one too many communication medium, that you're not the only
one who thinks the emperor has no clothes. Well, with the internet, we have a many to many
communication medium. And you know, in in microcosm, you sometimes have some one way stuff. I mean,
I'm sure that at some moment in the future, there's someone watching this podcast who has
something to say in response to what I said, but obviously I can't hear him.
But there's a whole internet on which he can say what he has to say, and somebody else will hear him.
And it may even end up being me. So there are still these kinds of podcasts and, you know, screens,
and, you know, people making a story where that, you know, it's a mini series or a movie, and it's
one way in the fine grain. But overall, there's a conversation. There's a conversation between
everyone and everyone else who has enough wealth and technological know how to get involved. And
there's no longer this capability for just a handful of people to control the narrative.
And every time they try, you know, because there have been various attempts, I mean,
the Democratic Party basically bought Reddit before the 2016 election. But the thing, and they bought
the onion as well, which used to be, you know, satire news and used to be good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But, you know, it's all it's all like left wing cuff pieces now. But
every time they do this, the value goes away. And then the audience goes away, because audiences
are no longer captive. They're no longer beholden to everything that you, you say on Channel 7,
you know, we've had we've had three eras of power. And the first one was violence. You had the king.
And the king only had to be supported by a small number of armored knights, because the
panellope of an armored knight is very expensive. And this was the ultimate military technology.
And so the king could force everyone to do his bidding with the voluntary support of only a
small number of armored nights. And then somebody invented not only gunpowder, but rifling,
to where now a peasant with a tube can take out your armored night at 200 yards. Well, okay,
now you enter the second era of power, which is the era of deception. You can no longer force
everybody to do their bidding, especially if you're in America, and they're all armed to the teeth.
So you have to fool them. And to fool them, you have the technology where to get your message out,
you only need the support of a few people, because you have radio and television and radio and
television is very expensive. So now the radio and television are the armored night of the era
of deception. Well, now you have the internet and a peasant with a podcast can take out your armored
story at 200 yards. And so now we are entering the era of persuasion. And I know there's a lot of
people listening to this or at least a few who are thinking, well, you know, that sounds very
naive, because things are awfully dark right now. And all of these deceivers and powers that be are
pulling all of these shenanigans to keep their control. And you know, this seems unduly, you
know, naive. And what you have to understand is that all of these shenanigans they're pulling,
they're pulling because they have to, you know, it used to be that your power brokers just kind
of called up in PC and NBC and NBC also works in that case. Very fitting. Yes, they just called
up NBC and said, you know, here's what here's what we want the news to do today. And that was
sufficient. And now there's all this thrashing around trying to buy social media websites.
And, you know, trying to trying to make deals with Facebook. And you know, when Elon Musk bought
Twitter, it turned out that, you know, the intelligence community was calling up Twitter
and telling them who to censor. And, you know, the reason they're pulling all this bullshit is
because they have to, you know, if you're digging through the couch cushions for loose change,
you're already in trouble. So this kind of thrashing around in desperation shows that on a larger
scale, the tide is turning against people who achieve power by manipulating. And in the future,
leaders are not necessarily really going to be those elected to office at all. And they're not
necessarily going to be those with billions of dollars. They're going to be the people who can
create a compelling meme or a compelling story or a compelling narrative that gets out there. And
has everybody say, yes, yes, I believe what you say this, this stirs something in me. And I'm going
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
going to spread this message because I voluntarily accept it, because it speaks to what is within me.
So we are entering the era of the ability to persuade as the source of power.
That's a thing that I think is personally very hopeful. And the beauty of this is that the
genie doesn't go back in the bottle when it comes to technology and when it comes to decentralizing
technology. Things can trend towards centralization, but with certain types of technology with the
internet, which one can argue has become, there are various silos and various gatekeepers, right?
But there are also many ways to get around those gatekeepers. Well, there are various silos,
but it's no longer one big silo. Exactly. Where one person or group decides who's allowed to be in
the silo and who is shot. But they are terrified of this. There's a new protocol for publishing,
because that's really all it is. It's called No-ster. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's notes
and other stuff transmitted by relays. I don't think I have. I'll send you some stuff on it
afterwards. The reason I bring it up is it's as simple as possible a protocol as it can be.
Designed by an anonymous guy. If anyone knows, he's from Brazil, and he just built this thing
to be social media as it was meant to be. But the beauty of this is like Bitcoin,
it is just a protocol. It's all open source. So anybody can take it, copy it, create whatever
they want. They tried to ban multiple clients on this protocol in China, and people just use
other clients or built their own, found ways around it. The internet can't stop it. It interprets
censorship as damage and routes around it. Exactly. And this is such a, in my mind,
but yes, there are plenty of reasons to be gloomy, to be worried about the future.
Well, bad things are always going to happen. And it's easy. Looking at the latest bad thing that
happened is a little bit like checking your stock portfolio every day. You're going to get depressed.
You're going to get depressed because the losses are going to weigh more heavily on you than the
gains. But just like the market trends up forever. The arrow of history is technology,
and that moves in one direction. And technology sometimes makes things worse,
but it makes things better more often than it makes things worse. So whenever we lean into
the creation and adaption of new technology, we gain greater control over our lives and our
destinies and our world and eventually the rest of the universe. So because we're not staying here,
we're going places. We're going to colonize the rest of the solar system, and then we're going
to colonize the stars. And we may have to physically remove anyone who tries to stop us,
but we're going to do it. And so when you look at it from that perspective,
when you look at it from the perspective of, would I rather be alive in 1042 or 2024,
or the answer is always very clear. We gain power by understanding the universe and implementing
technology based on it. And gaining power is a good thing, despite what Hollywood movies have
tried to tell you for the past however many years. It's like anyone who wants to gain power is evil.
No, no, you know, gaining power allows you to shape the universe and it's up to you to have a good
vision for shaping the universe. But there are more good people than evil ones. There are more
pro social people who want to get along and cooperate with others and have a culture that helps
all of us. Then there are evil people who just want to rob. And the reason we know that is that we
have a civilization at all. We are a pack animal and we instinctively seek to get along with the pack
and help each other. And those who don't are broken people. And they gravitate towards sources of
centralized power. So we are starting to remove the sources of centralized power. And the broken
sociopathic people are panicking. It's delicious though, isn't it? Yes. To taste the panic a little
bit. Yes. Yes. You know, one thing I want to touch on, because I've seen you, seen you talk about it
a lot, and I think you've brought up some really great points and also explained them in ways that
even a neo-Marxist could probably understand as they relate to private property. Yeah. And because
we, you know, we were talking just in general about centralization. And ultimately, the goal of
centralization is to centralize everything, right? The goal of communism was to, and of course,
by, you know, the goal of centralization is to be the central power and have everyone else be
your slaves. Yep. And we've seen this time and time again. It's not the means of production to the
people. It's a few people in a room deciding what's best for everyone. Who claim to represent the
people. Oh, and they're so gracious. It's always, we represent the people with a big P. And they hate
people. Yeah. And yeah, it's always that. And their argument is always necessity. And their argument
is always, I will be a benevolent master. And of course, the refutation is, well, you know,
that's the evil is being subordinated. It's not having the wrong master. It's being subordinated.
In the first place. And I want to set you up with this if I can. But you were talking about
private property. Yes, yes. But that is exact that it runs right along to it. Because the whole
purpose we let's loop it back to the law as well. Right. The entire purpose of the law is to organize
the collective defense of private property. Yeah, that's really what the core purpose of the law is.
The law has been perverted to what it is now. Is now civilization. Property is civilization. And
this is the critical thing to understand. Because everything that we call civilization
is a piece of the environment, you know, things lying around that we have taken and invested
effort in. And we have made them into something useful. And the reason people are willing to do
that is that people other people can't then come along and take that from them by force.
You know, if someone can come along and take whatever I have built with force,
I'm not going to waste my time building anything. You know, I'm just going to sit around trying to
feed myself day to day and pursuing immediate pleasure. I'm not going to delay gratification to
invest in anything because then that investment will be wasted. And this explains where property
rights come from. You know, this is a debate that has gone on for thousands of years. Where do
rights come from? Are there rights? Are rights given by God? And then somebody comes along and
says, I talked to God and he said, you should do what I say. And other people, which I have
these elaborate intellectual constructs where rights are inherent in a human being and they
write pages and pages and pages of philosophy books to try to rationalize this bullshit. And
here's where rights come from. We made them up. We made them up. They just we just invented this
shit. It has no basis in reality. We just invented it. But we invented it because we needed it.
We needed it. The concept of rights is a piece of technology. It's a piece of technology that
allows civilization. And it all boils down to property rights. It all boils down to this basic
rule that if someone invests and builds something, they own it and they control it and you can't
take it from them. And that is what built not only empires, it's what built our entire technological
stack. It's the reason that we are not living in grass huts in Africa. And that's why property
rights are absolute and absolutely important, despite the fact that we just made them up.
Because without them, nothing works. And we can all go back to banging the rocks together.
And I think it's so fundamentally important that people don't nothing else matters without
that fundamental right to keep what you have made and use your time and energy to create.
Yeah, exactly. And when you have people who are who are in the sorts of government offices and
these kind of positions of power trying to weaken property rights, what you what you have to realize
is that these people are trying to tear down civilization. And the reason they are trying
to weaken property rights is to make it easier for them personally to take your stuff from you.
And they are willing to burn down civilization so that they might be king of the ashes.
It's I mean, that's it's psychopathic parasitic behavior is what it is because these types of
people they're rent seekers worse than psychopathic because most of your smart psychopaths understand
the value in in making a deal with people, you know, you can get along with a large portion of
psychopaths. The problem is these people who who think that they can take and take and take and
take. And no one is ever going to drag them out of their buildings and guillotine them on the front
steps. And that that is what eventually happens when you push people hard enough. You know,
just just saying what you'll find in history books over and over again, you know, when when
people don't care about abstract philosophical concepts like freedom, they care about their
quality of life. And property rights is where abstract concepts like freedom and quality of
life intersect. Because it's an abstract philosophical principle. But you sure as hell don't have any
quality of life without it. I like that framing of bringing the abstract to the very tangible too.
Yeah, because it matters for people. It matters that what's mine is mine. And when I work for
something, I know I can keep it. Yeah. And what I think has gotten really dangerous. I don't owe
it to anyone. Right. And what's I don't get some Barack Obama lecturing me on how you didn't build
that because you drove on a road at some point. Oh, God, somebody else made a flat thing. Well,
fuck you, Barack. I did, in fact, build that. Yeah, also, the words are one of the dumbest
take that shit from everyone. I always say whenever someone brings up the Rhodes argument,
I just say please come to Chicago, where we pay some of the highest taxes in the country at multiple
levels and spend a lot of roads and pay money to drive in those roads, tools, and they are still
the shittiest pothole ridden pieces of garbage you have ever seen. Somebody's stealing all the money
that you pay. Yep. You know, we had Rhodes millennia before we had an income tax. Yeah.
And that's it doesn't really take that much to make a flat thing.
In Chicago, apparently it does. And in Chicago, it's really complicated, I guess.
Roads weren't even invented. They evolved. You walk the same way enough times. And you know,
by you, I mean, you could be like a grazing animal and do this. And you have the beginnings of a road.
You know, you've stomped down the ground, you've cleared all the plant cover, you've made it flat,
you've got a road, okay, you want to drive a car, you have to pay that. Okay, let's pour some asphalt.
It's not difficult. I mean, we've, you know, we've had some technological advances that are cool.
But the basic concept is not difficult. You know, there are a lot of things that people think, oh,
we can't have this without the government because the government currently does it.
It's like, without the federal Department of Nutrition, who would synthesize the soylent green?
Well, let me introduce you to the concept of grocery store.
Wow. It is so funny to this tendency for some to just assume that the government,
things will get better if we just give the government more power. If we just let them
tax us a little more for the greater good, then they'll have the money they need. But
all that that does is expand the bureaucratic state. It makes them less efficient.
I personally think the phrase, the greater good is fighting words. And we need to normalize kicking
the ass of anyone who says that, like just a punch in the mouth right there. Who decides the
greater good? Who decides what is the greater good? And that's what it comes down to, right?
Does the free market decide it? The people who talk to God always get told exactly what they
want to hear. The people talking about the greater good always coincidentally seem to benefit
from whatever they say the greater good is. The greater good and safety also typically go
hand in hand. Just to keep you safe. This is for your safety. Safety means that things don't fail.
And the basic model by which capitalism advances civilization is that you allow bad ideas to fail.
Safety means not taking risks. And the basic way by which civilization advances is taking risks.
One thing that I learned at a very young age from, I had a friend in college. She was like 20
years old or something. And she was dating this 45 year old entrepreneur. And so I was having
lunch with him. And he said something very surprising to me that I've taken with me for
the rest of my life. He said, I hope she fails a lot. And he said, because failure is what you get
before you get success. You try things and you fail. And you learn things. And then you try
something else and it works. When someone tries to make you safe, tries to protect you from
downside risk, tries to suppress economic instability or AI technology that might make you lose your
job. What they're really doing is they're preventing the risk taking behaviors that advance
civilization. You know, I took a crazy risk writing theft of fire. Because, you know, I was
working as an engineer and making six figures. And the first of those figures wasn't one. And
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,
you're retiring five, six years early and you're going to try to sell stories to people in a book
market that's shrinking. And it's like, okay, well, if people didn't take crazy risks like that, we
wouldn't have new things. You know, because I could sit around writing like industrial automation
controls and getting paid lots of money for it. And that's nice and all. But lots of people can do
that. You know, when you tell a story, you're the only one who could tell that story. So you try
stuff and you know, maybe my writing isn't as good as I think it is and it's all going to fail
and I have to go back to engineering and yeah, but that's okay. That's okay because
somebody is going to take a risk and it's going to pay off and we're all going to benefit from that.
So we all have to get out there and try stuff. And that means we have to push through the fear.
And you know, producing creative work is terrifying. It is because at some point,
this thing exists only in your mind, which means you're investing years of your time into making
something that nobody asked for. And nobody believes in it and accept you. And that is terrifying.
And so when we make generations of people who are risk averse, we don't get great technology
and we don't get great art. And a lot of this is based on government schools.
What do government schools teach you? Stay in your seat, wait in line, wait your turn,
raise your hand before speaking, agree with teacher, get an A on the test by avoiding mistakes.
It teaches children to be risk averse. And then you come along 20 years later and you tell these
children, well, you know, you can start a business or you can go to college and get a degree in
sociology. Well, I'm going to go get a degree in sociology, because, you know, I don't think I can
survive on my own and I need to work for somebody. They're risk averse. Their model of success has
been avoiding mistakes. Well, in the real world, nobody cares how many times you screwed up.
You know, people who like my writing, they absolutely do not care how much shit I deleted on my own
computer before I put together what I put together. You know, people don't care how many times you
failed. They don't care about your failures. They care about the magnitude of your eventual success.
It's for what it's worth. I was homeschooled up until high school and then went to high school.
I envy you, sir. The older I get, the more grateful I am to my parents. I will say that,
because homeschooling is also a labor of love. Yes, it's an investment in your children.
Yeah. And, you know, so, mom and dad, if you are listening to this, thank you yet again. But, you
know, it's so funny. I found some of the spark that they gave me when I was homeschooled and,
you know, got my work done in two hours a day by reading my textbook front to back. Yeah. And then
got to school and realized, oh, wow, I thought I was going to be behind. I thought, what if I'm an
idiot? What if I'm just a big dummy and my parents screwed it up? You know, they were English majors
I thought I was pretty good at math and science, but I don't know. And then I got to school and
I realized, oh my God, this is so painfully slow and we are catering to the lowest common denominator.
Yeah. And there is no creativity and courage. Yeah. And we waste so much time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A lot
of people, they don't strike out on their own because they are intimidated. I spent almost a year
trying to find agents and publishers for a theft of fire. And, you know, everybody was not interested
and they were very interested in telling us about how they were very expert professionals and we
couldn't succeed without them. And then, you know, my agent is one of my wives and the other one
sort of runs the business end of things. And we've, now we have professionals like authors and agents
and stuff coming into us and saying, what's your secret? Well, our secret is that we finally figured
out if you want something done right, do it yourself and care about it and do your homework and try.
You know, it's like the people have been conditioned to think that there's this huge
gulf between themselves and the very expert professionals and we're helpless without them.
And then when you actually get inside the factory and you see how the sausage is made, it's like,
you know, you guys are just barely competent and you have institutional support
and someone with intelligence and ambition and energy can very easily beat you.
You know, back to the theme of hopefulness, you know, I found myself in this Bitcoin
space community, whatever you would like to call it. Over these last couple of years,
I'm not one of those OG whales. I got in in 2020 when I found out that we were just printing money
out of thin air and sending checks to people and I thought, well, that doesn't make any sense at all.
Where does that money come from? What is money after all? We invent dollars out of nothing.
We have an institution that just says, I have X dollars and now I'm going to lend them to you.
Well, you just made them up. You just made up something entirely imaginary and then you're
going to lend it to me. It doesn't exist. Central bankers in my humble opinion are
probably the ultimate rent seekers because they they truly just create something.
They're more rent seekers than the actual rent seekers. Yeah.
Because the guys who develop properties, it's like, you know, the reason they're charging
your rent is they took a burned out dilapidated factory and they turned it into an actual building
you can use. Yeah, they actually provided that. Yeah, they provided they might need to rebrand
that actually, the actual renters. Yeah, well, you know, I was on a podcast with a real estate guy
and I was talking about how stories are upstream of culture and I introduced this concept of
you guys let this term rent seeker enter the culture because you're not getting in the stories
and he's like rent seeker. What do you mean by that? And this guy literally has no idea
that the term and he's a real estate developer and he literally has no idea that the term rent
seeker is being used to mean parasite. I actually watched that interview and I saw that reaction
from him and I was like, because to me, that term means that means a parasite who provides no value
and only extracts it. Yeah, that's that's what it means. Yeah. And when he didn't know that,
I was like, oh, you got to be kidding me. Yeah, this is it's like you are roadkill in the culture
war, my friend. And it's like, you know, no, he's a great dude. Yeah, I had a lot of fun talking
to him. He's very smart. But he just, you know, he he's he's been on the sidelines of the culture
war while his destiny is decided. And hopefully that will change now. You know, that really was
a pretty incredible interaction. But it's illustrative of the fact that people who are engrossed in a
particular industry in a particular space, sub genre, whatever it might be, they often, you
know, it's a it's a fish in water, right? You can ask what water is, but it doesn't have a
fucking clue. It just swims in the stuff. Yeah. But and and I will hear I'll slightly bring it to
Bitcoin just just a little bit. But because talking about central banks being those the way sorry.
Well, I like Bitcoin. That's great to talk about. I can and I actually want to talk about it. A
couple of things you mentioned about in your book right after this because of course I perked up
when I read that. But central bankers is the ultimate rent seekers. And then you also mentioned
earlier, you know, that one guy who makes a really great meme can influence so many people.
Yeah. And this is that we're seeing a great example of this culture war of this war of stories
play out around Bitcoin. I love to see it because you have central bankers now who are actually
referring to the money that they make up out of thin air as fiat currency. They're actually calling
it fiat. Yeah, which they were not doing a number of years ago in normal dialogue. Now,
because a bunch of Bitcoiners and Austrian economists and and gold bugs to let's get the
gold bugs and credit have hammered that term in so much 15 years ago, they started 15 years ago,
people thought fiat was just a shitty car made by Ford. Right. Just just a tiny little car. Yeah.
Yeah. That you don't really want. Yeah. Well, you know, in the in the book, which I will hold up again
to make my agent stop me to me to evening over there. I I envisioned a future where Bitcoin was
one of a large number of competing cryptocurrency technologies. And one of the ways that
cryptocurrency works in a lot of in a lot of this orbital space universe is that a lot of it is
backed by stock. So this is essentially a decentralized stock exchange, where you have this
cryptocurrency asset, which represents the stock in a corporation. And you know, I know a lot of
people who are into Bitcoin think of every other cryptocurrency in the world as a scam. And maybe
a lot of them are. But I think that in in any endeavor of of the human condition in any area
of human technology, anywhere where you don't have competing alternatives that people can choose
between, you effectively have a lack of innovation. You effectively have a lack of pressure to provide
good service. So I didn't want to while Bitcoin is a good thing. I didn't want to create a future
where there is only Bitcoin. I wanted to create a future where you're walking through, you know,
the public area in so much as anything is public in this world. And you know, there's the display
showing the current exchange rates between Bitcoin and all these other competing currencies.
It's people's choice how they want to store their wealth. Well, and right. And well, and that's the
whole thing with all of it, right, is voluntary choice, freedom to opt in. One of the things I
love that you snuck into the book a couple of times was in for a mill in for a Bitcoin.
Harkening back to the in for a penny in for a pound or you know, or or mills on the Bitcoin was
another one, which was just kind of a hint to say like whatever the mills is representing,
you leave it up to the reader, maybe it's some sort of futuristic left that day. Exactly. But in my
mind, of course, I'm like, you know, going to dollars and thinking, yep. Well, okay, the year is
this, I'm trying to calculate. Yeah, boy, okay, that's that'll be after the last Bitcoin was mined.
Should be pretty interesting then. But yeah, well, I had I had this idea that a single Bitcoin was
worth an awful lot. Right. Because there's a limited amount of it representing the size of a
a sizable portion, like say 20% or so, of the entire orbital economy. And these people have been
mining asteroids for 75 years. So that's a lot of stuff. And I love again, that was one of the
things that I mentioned earlier that I loved about the book was it yes, it's set in the future.
Yes, it's science fiction. But there's always these ties to the present that make it all the more
real. And, you know, thinking to take it slightly back to Bitcoin, and then I want to go in a little
bit of a different direction because this is a Bitcoin podcast. But yeah, they my audience will
also hear plenty of about Bitcoin on every other show. So I wanted this one to be a little different.
One of the things that I think is important about Bitcoin tying it back to property rights that you
mentioned is the ability to have that property to preserve your own private property and to have
that be free of confiscation or rent seeking behavior, which is what we see from these central
banks and Bitcoin emerge and all Bitcoin is is it's a it's a monetary technology. All money is
technology, right? Yeah. And the best technology you said is going to win money is absolute scarcity.
Yes, money is a technology for measuring fucks given. You went exactly where I was hoping that
you would go with that. I saw you say that that money is a tool to measure how many fucks you
give essentially. And I was thinking that is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, seriously, if I wanted
to have a slightly more economy focused and maybe slightly more flippant kind of novel,
I would have called the unit of currency the fuck because it measures whether you give a fuck.
Yeah. You know, anyone who claims to give a fuck and they're not spending their money on something
doesn't actually give a fuck. Yeah. That's why the expression put your money where your mouth is
exists. Yeah. I mean, the market all that all that price is is a signal, right? Yeah. It's a signal
that the free market provides. Yeah. And it's letting you know how many people care about this
thing. And what that helps us do is it helps us prioritize. Like here I am, you know, I'm going
to retire from engineering. And I'm going to write science fiction novels. Well, how do I know
whether the aggregate of all the other people values me more as a science fiction writer
than as a software engineer writing, you know, like aircraft maneuvering controls and credit card
processing stuff. And, you know, I worked for Oculus for a while. How do I know? Well, there's
a concrete measure of fucks given. And in our current environment, it's not totally reliable
because it's been sort of heavily regulated and manipulated and so forth. But there's still a
percentage of signal there. And it's like, okay, I can make like, you know, this sort of six figure
salary forever, or I can try to do something that's a little bit crazy and swing for the fences.
And so, you know, one of the reasons I want to make a lot of money as a writer is that I want a
lot of money. But I also want to know that I'm doing something that people care about.
That that what I am doing has resonated with them. And, you know, that's been that's been sort of an
interesting part of this journey is, you know, I spent many, many years as a software engineer,
and I built some cool stuff. But you know, nobody ever came to me and said, you know,
none of the customers ever came to me and said, thank you for doing this. Because I've always
sort of immersed in the sea of this big number of people working together on a product. And then
when you go out and you build something yourself, and people appreciate it, that becomes personal.
So, you know, that's that's a very special kind of thing. But ultimately, what measures how many
people you're impacting like that is the the fuck's given. And and that's how we help people decide
what to do. That's actually going to help other people and be what they want. Instead of this
sort of Keynesian digging big holes in the desert and filling them up again. And that's the worst
part of government. It's not just that it takes a lot of your stuff. It's that it takes a lot of
your stuff. And then it pays smart people to do stupid things when they could be doing smart things
instead. It's it's something that I don't think people realize how destructive government subsidies
are across so many industries. Because all it is is plain and simple manipulation of free market
signals. Yeah, it is. And especially when you're printing that money, you're running an ever growing
deficit where we have a trillion a year just in the interest of any time you subsidize something
by definition, you're artificially influencing people to do things that people don't actually
give a fuck about. Because if they actually gave a fuck, they would pay for it themselves
out of their own supply of fucks. And people think, Oh, maybe it's not so bad. I mean, come on,
what what could really what could be the worst thing. But then like you want a very tangible
example, look at Nixon in the 70s, look at all the stimulation to grow as much corn as possible.
Corn and soybeans. Yep. And then and now every what did we do with all those corn and soybeans?
You know, it's like literally, you know, I I'm 50 years old. I grew up in the 80s. And let me tell
you, you know, people think that what we see around us every day is natural. It is not.
You know, the average person today, we would have called them fat in 1980.
The you know, the people who we call fat today, we would have been horrified. We would have never
seen anything like that. And you think about how many people are walking around living lives of
absolute despair, because they can't stand to look at themselves in the mirror. And they don't realize
that the government has literally paid people to poison them and propagandized them to eat the
poison. You know, they're not fat because they're lazy and lack character. They're victims.
Victims. They have been practiced upon. You know, and just because it was convenient because all
this power was concentrated in one place. And because a few of the smartest guys in the room
decided that certain industries need to get subsidies. Smartest guys in the room. They
thought they were the smartest guys in the room. This whole this whole trend in the 80s towards
getting rid of fat was based on one series of studies by one guy who there's something in
statistics called an ANOVA analysis of variance. And he didn't do it both ways. He didn't he didn't
you know, oh, here prove that fat consumption is correlated to heart disease prove that the
heart disease is correlated to fat consumption. He didn't do it both ways. You know, they just
decided that saturated fat caused heart disease, despite the fact that people had been eating
saturated fat diets high and saturated fat for thousands of years. I mean, why were the French
not dropping dead of heart disease? Well, maybe it's because fat consumption doesn't cause heart
disease. Maybe it's the sugar which they didn't have. Maybe it's the fact that in 1970 something,
you know, the women decided we're not going to cook anymore. We want to be liberated. So,
you know, a bunch of companies step in to to fill this gap and it's like they're going to sell you
what you buy. And so, oh, well, we've got all this sugar that we get from processing this subsidized
corn. And you know, if we put it in everything, people buy more because it's addictive. And now
everybody's fat and sick and they're saying we need to stop being fat phobic. Well, no, we need to
lynch all the Pepsi executives. And well, at least we have Osempic now that, you know, they've created
one of the other industries that the government loves, Big Pharma, now gets their piece of the pie
to be able to treat the diseases. Oh, well, I don't say cure. I say treat the diseases. Yeah,
the diseases. Yeah, it's more profitable. It's more profitable in this kind of subsidized environment
where you're going to keep all the consumers low information. It's more profitable to treat sick
people forever than it is to cure them. And this is, you know, I lied, I'm going to mention Bitcoin
and Bitcoiners once more. But in the context of this, okay, because one of the things that
a lot of us in this space talk about quite a bit is the fact that money is not just, you know,
it is a tool, but it's also the base layer of society. It's the base layer of civilization.
It is how we exchange value and how we are also with good money able to store our value into the
future. It's how we work together. Yeah, it's cooperation versus coercion. And it's, it's always
going to be more efficient. But you need a good measuring stick for that, for that cooperation
for those signals to be accurate, as you mentioned earlier, signals are a little distorted, but
there's still signals, right? It's not quite as bad as you know, like the Turkish lira is a worse
signal than the US dollar. Money started out as a as a ledger. It started out as a mental ledger
ledger, kept between members of a tribe with a population less than Dunbar's number of who
contributed. Well, you know, this guy didn't hunt any mammoth, because he spends all his
time sitting by the fire, banging the rocks together. But you know, we couldn't have hunted
that mammoth without the spear points. So he did he did something we give a fuck about.
And we can keep track of that mentally, because there's only a few of us. So you know, here's
the mammoth liver. There you go. And we started using tokens, because the ledger became too big
for us to to keep in our heads. And it became too widely distributed for us to write on a piece
of paper. So we started using gold and stuff. Well, gold is just another technology that
substitutes for what was originally a spreadsheet. And now the blockchain, which I think is a stupid
name, because it it says how it works, not what it does. What it does is it's a big,
non centralized spreadsheet. That's all it is. It's a spreadsheet. It just keeps track of
who has what in a ledger. And so you're moving back to the origins of how money originally
worked. It's the chalkboard, you know, so and so contributed this, so and so owns that. And now we
found a way to have a ledger again. And one that is not subject to the the whims of a small group of
let's call them tribal elders, yeah, who get to decide that's not corruptible. Right. And the
original ledger wasn't corruptible either, because everyone had their own version in their hands.
And they could decide for themselves whether they had whether somebody had done something
worth giving a fuck about. And once you moved away from tokens like gold, where the the earth
and the mining industry is the issuing authority and you can't really fake it,
then then you started having issuing authorities that were corruptible. And I think people need
to understand that corruption, it doesn't function as a moral failing on a global level, on a
distributed level. It functions more as a response to incentives. When you are the trusted guardian
of a storehouse that is filled with value, the more value there is, and the more people own that value,
the greater the incentive to steal from the storehouse. And you can shake your tiny fist
and say he shouldn't have done that. But what you're essentially saying is that
you know, some people should be morally perfect, and that will fix all our problems. Well, if
people were morally perfect, we wouldn't have a lot of these problems that technologies are
designed to fix. So, you know, the problem is not Joe Biden and his 10% for the big guy.
The problem is that you have this massive, robable store of value that
sits there luring corrupt weasels like Joe Biden. So what you need to do is find
better technologies for storing your value. It's extremely well said. And I think the part that
most people miss is the incentives. Yeah, they look at things and they say, well, this is just,
this is bad for some reason, because people are bad. And it's, yeah, there are, there are some
shitty people out there. Yeah. But there are also good people who do shitty things because the
incentives are structured in such a way to make them do good people vastly outnumber the bad people.
Because if that were not true, there would not be a civilization, we would still be hitting
each other with rocks. Yeah. And this is I think the, the point that also, again, to bring it back
to hopefulness, because the fiat currencies that these central bankers have brilliantly engineered
with their perfect 2% arbitrary inflation per year, which is just the right amount. So you don't
realize they're stealing from you, stealing your, your purchasing power, stealing your wealth.
People are starting to see through this also the deception is starting to fail. The veil is
coming down because no matter how much you lie to somebody and say, look, everything's great.
Look, in flint inflation year over year is coming down. It doesn't matter because when they fill up
their gas tank and go to the grocery store and buy their meat and eggs and milk, they say, this is
more expensive and I can't afford it. Yeah. So people start saying, I don't believe you're
bullshit. And I want the truth. And they start searching for truth. And once they start that
process of looking for what is the real story here versus the one I'm being fed,
they start to find that there are some alternatives out there that these guys don't control that I can
freely opt into again, back to voluntary cooperation. And it's going to take a long time.
It is going to take a long time because despite what some over enthusiastic people in the Bitcoin
community say, there is no such thing as real absolute value. It's all a measure of how many
fucks people give. And they say, well, the value of Bitcoin fluctuates wildly. Well, that's because
people's confidence in Bitcoin fluctuates wildly. And the goal for that is for confidence in crypto
currencies to eventually grow and the value to eventually level out. And people say, they pretend
it's this big successful dunk on the idea of cryptocurrency. Well, people are investing in it
like it's a growth asset. And it shouldn't be that it should have stable value. Well,
okay, that's nice. But that's the measure of the difference between a good idea and a bad idea is
when you invest in a bad idea, you lose money. And when you invest in a good idea, you gain money.
And eventually, when you have a fixed amount of any given cryptocurrency,
and when the last Bitcoin has been mined, and there's no more because that is that is a thing.
2140 there is to make it clear that is a thing that will happen. When the last one has been mined,
you will have whatever percentage of market penetration Bitcoin represents like say it
represents 20% of the economy. Then as the economy continues to grow, you will have this fixed amount
of Bitcoin representing that 20% of the economy. So they don't think people understand scarcity
inflationary currency, where your money gradually buys more and more, and things gradually get cheaper
and cheaper. Because now, all of the value of people discovering cheaper and cheaper ways to do things
is returned to the holders of currency, rather than being absorbed by the issuers of currency.
That is extremely well put, because I think what people fail to realize and to bring it all back
to technology is technology is naturally deflationary. Things should get cheaper because when you have
something, they're getting easier to make. Yeah, look at making something by hand versus an assembly
line as a really basic example, or an assembly line versus an automated assembly line. Every good
thing that we makes starts out as a luxury. And people do not understand that they're like,
you know, oh, how can we, why are you selling these luxury goods to the rich? Well, that's a
stage in the life cycle of a product. And Elon Musk, for example, was very smart about this,
like I'm going to make an electric car, people actually want to drive. Okay, I'm going to start
out by making a rich guy's toy for going, we around the track, because I can't afford to sell it
for less than $130,000 because I've got all this production shit to work out. You know, I need to
sell expensive cars, and then I'll figure out ways to make them cheaper. And people don't
historically understand very frequently that everything started out like this, running water,
in home electricity, plumbing, flush toilets, all luxuries, you know, things we take for granted
today, iron, steel, you know, cloth, poor people used to wear leather, because cloth was expensive,
you had to weave it by hand. And that's, it's something that's difficult for people to grasp.
And I liked how you made the point in the book as well about that as part of an argument, you know,
but it was really well put there. And I want to shift a little bit away from money, but toward
more the technology side, because it still has to do with money, because it all does, right? And
talking about incredibly deflationary forces of technology. AI is something that plays
without going into too much detail for, because I encourage everybody to read Theft of Fire. I
enjoyed the living hell out of it. And I think you will too. Yeah, well, you don't need to worry
too much about spoilers that there's an AI character. There is an AI character. She's on the cover.
Yes. Yes. She doesn't show up for a while, but she's on the cover. You will run into her eventually.
But I love the way you approached AI, because I think you very, if I may, what it, and I don't
ever like to infer what an author meant to do. So I'll just say what it meant to me. It felt like
it was a very poignant rebuke, both of the people who say that AI is not going to be what people
think it is. And it's going to be kind of just, it's all kind of crap, and it's not really going
to go anywhere. But it's also a stinging rebuke of those who say that AGI is going to be here next
year. And it's going to turn us all into paperclips. Yep. And you managed to kind of dance on that
line a little bit. Yeah. And that's how it felt to me anyway. Can you talk about that a little bit
and what your thoughts were on AI? There is no message. The purpose of Theft of Fire isn't to
convince you of anything. It's to give you some things to think about. And a story to enjoy. So
orbital space, the universe doesn't have opinions. Characters within it have opinions. But I'll tell
you something I wanted to do with that story. And that it's, there's a thing in science fiction
where almost every AI character falls into one of two tropes. They're either the Terminator
or their Pinocchio. They either want to wipe out humanity or they want to be a real boy.
And I wanted to create an AI character that was neither. And I think that
talking now about the state of technology and how I projected it, I think that we,
we approach AI technology not by recreating a living organism in the sense that it makes
plans and has volition and so forth. What we do is we pick off the heap, little tasks that human
beings can do, like drive a car or play chess or use language or do art. And we throw a whole
bunch of clock cycles at finding a way to do that. And every time we do a task better than a human being
or better than the average human being, everybody runs around waving their hands and says,
we're going to create, you know, an artificial human being next year. The problem has been solved.
No, no, no, no, no, no. You just made, you, you looked at a human being, which is the machine
that has the capacity to learn tasks and can do things. And you replicated one capability that
a human being can learn. And you said, Oh, now we have a human being. Well, no, you don't.
You have a really awesome tool. But you haven't even started on the problem of making something
that can generally act and learn and grow the way human beings can act and plan and learn and grow.
And what I did here was I wanted to take the slice of the very moment that artificial human beings
entered reality. So it's like there's only a handful of them in the solar system,
because they're really expensive and risky to produce, you know, expensive and risky. That's
how everything starts out. Tens of thousands of Bitcoin, if I remember, just for one. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't use the term billions because we're no longer thinking in dollars.
Exactly. It would have been trillions if that was the case probably or God. Yes, yes. Yes.
Yes, I had I had a sort of a figure in mind for how much a Bitcoin is worth in this future in
modern dollars. And it's a it's a pretty high one. So I wanted to enter just at the cusp and I made
the guess that when we crack this problem, it's probably going to be by copying evolution's
homework. You know, it may not be through like plugging a human being in and literally copying
them the way it happens in the book. But it's probably going to be through looking at and
trying to imitate some of the deep structure of the brain. I liked the way you you woven in with
the now that you've said it, I feel comfortable saying it, you know, the copying of a human
because it was yes, basically, you know, implying that look, we couldn't figure it out the way we
thought we were going to figure it out. It didn't. The artificial AGI did not work like that. Yeah,
we had to basically if we wanted to create something that was like us, we had to copy us. And I
thought that that was very interesting and also came with its own set of baggage, which added
added a nice touch there. Yeah, yeah, it's it's that it's very much a story about some of the human
consequences of technology. And some of the post human consequences of technology, because, you
know, without saying too much, only one of the characters on the cover is actually a human being.
Okay. Oh, if well, yeah, I don't want to don't want to give anything away because I do really
recommend that people that people read theft of fire. Because it was I recommend it as well.
That would not be you don't say. May I ask, because you came out with theft of fire. Was that just in
November? Was it that was November 11th was our publication date. And that was November 11th.
Was our publication date. And and I understand from seeing some of your posts, you were planning
on doing three initially, but now it may be four. It's going to be four. It's going does that mean
four may turn to five? Or are we don't thinks I think I have a better handle on it now. Okay,
because I am very much an architect type writer. I plan everything. And in fact, the last scene of
the last book is actually written. Really? Yes. Yes, I know what the last sentence of the whole
series is. So, and I know exactly where it's going. There's a there's a there is a master plan.
Okay. And the thing that happened to me was that between the end of the first book,
where where an important thing happens, an important piece of progress is made. And the
beginning of the fourth book, where we're pretty far in the future, and there are some
significant consequences. The things that had to happen between X and Y would become very,
very sketchy and more like a summary. If they were to fit into one novel. And I spent a couple of
months after I published theft of fire, sort of trying to stuff all of this in a suitcase and
jumping up and down on the lid trying to get it closed. And it just wasn't working. So like in
late December, I realized this. And I said, Okay, I'm going to spend the first couple of weeks of
January just taking everything I have. And I typically write about 25 to 40,000 words that
readers will never see. Just in summaries and structure and notes and so forth. I'm going
to take what I have. And I'm going to spend a couple of weeks splitting this into two books.
And that's not just a matter of chopping it in the middle, because every book has to have a
satisfying narrative arc. So there has to be an intermediate conclusion between these two books,
which I've got to find to go somewhere in the middle. And now I've kind of got a handle on that.
And I'm starting to make progress on the second book, which adds an additional viewpoint character.
So that's, that's a little bit of a new complication. But I'm just starting to like, Okay,
I lost some progress there because it got moved to the third book, and it'll help me eventually.
But it's like, Okay, now I've got the, I've got the task sort of cut down to a manageable portion.
And I'm starting to churn on that and get things going. When do you think I don't know,
it may ask when you are aiming to try and get out the second book then in the case? Well,
I don't want to be George Martin. Fair enough, fair enough. And, you know, George Martin
committed two sins. The first sin he committed was not finishing for 13 years and counting.
I think it's 13 years. This is something like that some outrageous amount of time.
But the second sin that George Martin committed, which was far more egregious, was lying to people.
So I want to be completely transparent and honest and say, number one, I'm not a fast writer,
because I am very perfectionist. And I hope that that came through in the novel.
It did. And, you know, number two, I'm new at this. This is my second novel.
So my ability to estimate is not very good. So when I say I hope to publish next November 11th,
that is a hope. That is not a promise. So I promise I'm not going to be George Martin. Fair enough.
Well, as I say, I hope I can get it out by the end of this year. It may stretch to a little later
than that. You've got to forgive my eagerness. I'm just looking forward to the next part of the story.
I completely understand. I completely understand. I, you know, I've had people mention George Martin
and Patrick Roffus in my timeline like two weeks after I published. I'm like, okay, chill.
Seriously, chill. I will reach through the screen and smack you. But I understand the anxiety.
And I understand that often these expressions of eagerness for a sequel, you know, precisely because
there are so few good stories out there now, it's like, it's, I take it as a compliment,
but at the same time, I do need people to be understanding that this is difficult. This is
not easy. You know, the, the bonuses, it gives me time to read it again and read digest. So that,
that's a good thing. And, you know, as you say in the book, plans are a list of things that
will never happen. So one of the things that I hope to do is inspire other people to,
to get on their own writing process because I can't, shut up, because I can't single-handedly
resuscitate science fiction. You know, Trad Pub has, has been ideologically captured and
burned down, fell over and sank into the swamp. I can't replace that all by myself. And with the
few other writers there are out there who got their careers launched before Trad Pub burned down,
fell over and sank into the swamp. So, you know, I can produce maybe one novel a year once I hit
my stride. You know, unless you read one novel a year, I'm not enough. There have to be more
people doing this. I'm just trying to be part of the solution. Well, I would highly recommend,
I know we're, we're hitting time here and time is scarce, much like Bitcoin. So I want to be
conscious of yours. Yes, we've been going for like two hours, haven't we? It flew right by and I've
got to say I enjoyed the hell out of this. This has been a fun conversation. I feel like we could,
we could probably go a lot longer. But again, my voice would completely get out. Which just means
we'll have to have a, have to have a check-in again in the future if you're game for it. I would
love to. But I will make your, your agent happy. So, you know, read Theft of Fire. I really and
truly enjoyed it. If you are a Bitcoiner who has probably not read anything but Austrian economics
and various short form articles on Bitcoin in the last couple of years, give yourself
the permission to read some really great science fiction and you will enjoy it. And yes,
Bitcoin is even mentioned multiple times. So it's like you're reading something about Bitcoin
too. You don't have to feel guilty. It's a vision of the kind of future that the people who are
into Bitcoin want to see. It's a vision of the kind of future where we've stopped sitting around
whining about carbon emissions and economic inequality and actually decided to build something
again. I think a lot of Bitcoiners are going to very much identify with that message. And you
know, I just realized, Devin, I need to talk to you again because there was a whole other thread I
wanted to pick on about something you said recently about science fiction, real science fiction,
being essentially libertarian. Oh yeah. Which I thought was really interesting. But we'll just
have to keep that for next. We'll have to save that for the sequel. So, you know,
before we cut out then, DevinEriksing.com, I will include links in the show notes. You can find the
book Theft of Fire on Amazon. It's where I bought mine. Anywhere else you would like to send people?
I'll include your Twitter as well. No, pretty much Twitter is really the place to engage with me.
And you know, where to buy is pretty much wherever you prefer to buy because I tried to be as widely
available as possible. I don't like to dictate to people the format or the platform that they purchase
on. So, my agent is making desperate gestures over here so I will indulge her for two seconds,
but she needs to do point for these two who prefer things that are without DRM. Yeah, we have we
have DRM free platforms. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are there are I think a few others as well, but
there are DRM free platforms for people who are into that particular crusade. Okay, okay. Well,
I'll include the links in the website, your Twitter as well. And I'll send you a quick note on
Noster as well because I think it might be something that you would find very interesting
for censorship resistant social media. Yeah, but that's a topic for the sequel conversation as well.
Yeah, yeah, I would definitely love to come back. This has been tremendous fun and I hope that it
is as fun for your listeners as it was for us. Well, you know what, honestly, fuck them. But
I think they'll enjoy it. And you know, I like to I like to end this by saying
Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are quite abundant. So thank you again for sharing
your scarce time for another fucking Bitcoin podcast. And I look forward to doing this again.
Look forward to reading the next one in your series. And until then, I'll see you on the internet.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. If you are a Bitcoin only
company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, head to Bitcoin podcast.net or
hit me up on social media on Noster. Head to primal.net slash Walker and on Twitter,
search for at Walker America or at Bitcoin podcast. You can also watch the video version of this show
on X or on YouTube by going to YouTube.com slash Walker America or rumble by searching for at Walker
America. Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million. But Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.