Wait a second. This is really scary that the U.S. government thinks it can reach all the way down to
we need to KYCAMLU in order to perform effectively a Google search. Imagine if you could just have
access to the internet turned off arbitrarily anywhere you are in the world. If we muddle
through the next decade, it is very unclear what will remain of what we currently think of as
modern society around the world. You may not take an interest in politics, but politics will
certainly take an interest in you. We need to really relight the cypherpunk fire and remind
people what this is really about. Bitcoin does not exist because of permission from the United
States government, right? Bitcoin is an emergent phenomenon that comes from the people. This is a
fight for human freedom, a fight for liberty and justice all around the world, for equal access to
money.
Kyle, welcome to the show.
I've had you on my streams on Rocks a couple of times now.
Glad we are finally doing it here on the Bitcoin podcast.
Welcome.
Thank you.
Great to be here on the Bitcoin podcast.
Got to be the, you know, I had to really make it tongue in cheek, right?
Nobody had taken the name.
So I was like, well, you know, this is shocking to me.
I guess I'll just make it my own as much as anything with Bitcoin in the name can never be someone's own.
But Kyle, stoked to have you here.
A number of things I want to get into with you here today.
I think we're going to start out on the clarity side of things.
And just for people to know, maybe you can just kind of brief background on yourself.
You work with BPI.
You guys do incredible work, the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
Is anything else people should know just relevant, you know, without doxing things too much,
relevant to the conversation as far as who you are?
Yeah, I mean, I guess just as a quick background, I'm a repeat entrepreneur,
start-upper out here in Silicon Valley, been building companies for the last 15 plus years.
Prior to that was, you know, a management consultant and actually got my start in Bitcoin
as a bank regulator during the financial crisis,
which is a very weird, unique background
that led me down the rabbit hole, let's say.
And then, yeah, of late, the last couple of years,
as I felt the sort of policy winds shifting in Washington, D.C.,
and kind of the need for articulate, well-informed
sort of policy leadership in Washington, D.C.
around things like Bitcoin and kind of other frontier technologies and freedom technologies,
moved over into the policy space.
And yeah, I co-founded Saber Wallets, you know, a year and a half ago after the Trump
administration came in and it became clear we were going to get these market structure
bills.
And then, as you mentioned, I'm a senior advisor at Bitcoin Policy Institute.
I'm really just trying to, you know, be a good citizen in the arena, fighting on behalf
of freedom and liberty for those of us who are technologists and understand the direction
that the world is heading.
So I guess that would probably be my nutshell background.
It's a perfect nutshell background.
You kept it more concise than I would have.
So let's start out here on the Clarity Act.
This has obviously been a huge topic of conversation, I mean, especially this year, but even going
back further. Most of this bill has nothing at all to do with Bitcoin. Like it's not, it's not
a Bitcoin bill. Like there's literally like, there's literally nothing about Bitcoin in this
bill, save for the BRCA, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, a portion that was added in there.
The BRCA was going to be kind of a standalone thing. It was lumped in with Clarity Act. That
specifically for those who aren't aware, it offers open source developer protections. You know,
Think of the Tornado Cash, think of the Samurai Wallet developers.
People have been federally prosecuted and persecuted in this case, both words very apt.
And that was added in there.
That's really the only thing.
Everything else is stable coins.
Hey, which jurisdiction do these various shit coins fall under, blah, blah, blah.
But that part is the part that's concerning for Bitcoiners, concerning for you and I.
Can you give us sort of the current lay of the land as far as where this is at?
We're getting close to summer recess.
There's also midterms coming up this year.
It's kind of like a, you know, do or die type of moment, it seems.
Where are we at right now?
How are you feeling about it?
Well, I'm glad you asked.
This is a complex area of policy debate in Washington, and it has been for basically the entire time.
that the Trump administration has been seated.
So, you know, we are, I guess, maybe 15 months, 16 months into the Trump administration.
And, you know, the Clarity Act, the, you know, global market structure rules for the crypto industry.
Sorry to use the crypto industry, but it is for the crypto industry, you know, have been being debated.
And as you mentioned, as Bitcoiners, about 95% of this bill is kind of meaningless to us.
A lot of this is about how to normalize and harmonize the SEC, the CFTC, what qualifies as a decentralized project versus a centralized project, what qualifies as an unregistered securities offering versus, you know, something that you're allowed to do.
There are a lot of, I'll say, consequential things that are in this larger bill, but they largely relate to the non-Bitcoin universe.
As you mentioned, the BRCA, or what I'll refer to as the developer protections piece of the bill, is really what we care about as Bitcoiners.
because, you know, as we've seen over the last two years with the prosecutions of the Samurai developers and the Tornado Cash developers,
you know, we really needed to create this safe harbor for open source software developers in the United States
to understand that they could safely exercise their free speech rights by writing software code,
as has been held by the Supreme Court
in U.S. versus Bernstein
back to the original crypto wars.
And as was understood as recently as 2019 by FinCEN,
which is one of the financial regulators
here in the United States,
when they issued their guidance
that said that if you never take possession
of customer funds
and you are not a controlling entity,
that you do not need to be registered
as a money transmitter or, you know, KYC, AML, the users of your software.
And so, you know, the BRCA was originally a standalone bill
that was folded into this larger market structure package.
And for the majority of the legislative process with clarity, it was great.
Nobody was really bothered by it.
It passed, you know, overwhelmingly out of the House on a bipartisan basis.
I think it was three to one was the vote in total, you know, that it passed through the House.
And then it came to the Senate.
But as we've seen over the last, you know, sort of nine months or so, as, you know, the legislative process just ground into, you know, the mud and effectively stopped moving, you know, the debates.
around developer protections has now become more politically charged for some reason.
And you see kind of the law and order, you know, surveillance interests in Washington,
D.C. really going to the mat, pushing back and fighting against the idea that this full
safe harbor for open source software developers would be able to exist in this bill and be
something that they would tolerate. And so what we saw in the most recent fighting to get the bill
from out of the finance committee onto the full floor of the Senate was the insertion of this
clause, subsection D, in Title 604, or that's basically says here, I got the language for you,
Any person that acts with a specific intent to transfer on behalf of another person funds that are known by the initial person to be either derived from a criminal offense or intended to be used to promote or support unlawful activity would fall outside of the safe harbor.
and you know there's debate about inside the bitcoin community about whether this is actually
you know good or bad language in the sense that you know the legal standard for proving intent
is typically quite high but you know kind of the the broadness of the phrasing here right
specific intent, how do you ascertain specific intent necessarily? How do you know whether
you intended to be used to promote unlawful activity, right? Again, the sort of
way that we came to have this clause inserted into the bill was that the state district attorneys
And, you know, again, the more law and order members of the Senate felt that we couldn't, quote, lose the ability to charge the samurai developers and tornado cache developers that we just saw happen because the, you know, powers that be feel that those were constructive and useful prosecutions.
and they don't want to lose that ability.
And so, you know, I think where we are now
with the language in the bill is that the whole industry
or the trades in Washington, D.C.,
all the trade organizations,
all of the, you know, kind of crypto lobbyists
have communicated that the BRCA is a red line.
If they water down the BRCA or remove it
to the point where, you know,
U.S. developers need to be fearful
that they will be prosecuted and thrown in jail
the way that the samurai developers have been, that this industry will move offshore.
And, you know, it's kind of set us up in this, what would seem to be an existential battle now,
where, you know, at least Bitcoiners have walked all the way to the edge
of what is tolerable and permissible for us in a broader market structure bill.
And now it would seem that we're going to get pulled across the line
and that they're going to further dilute this language
in order to be able to get seven or eight Democratic votes on the floor,
which are necessary to pass the overall market structure bill.
Yeah, this language in there, which feels just kind of like a loophole, right?
It feels like something that is, it's like, well, why does it need to be in there
if it's not going to be used?
And I know, like, Zach Shapiro from BPI has,
and I don't know if his thinking has changed in this a little bit,
from at least what I read initially, his reactions on this, he was saying, look, you know, from,
and he's a lawyer, like, so he knows what he's talking about, right? He's a very good one. He's
also a hardcore Bitcoiner, does great work with BPI as well. He was basically saying, look, I'm not
too concerned about this. As you said, you know, burden of proof to be able to show that there was
specific intent like that from a legal perspective, that's very high. That being said, and the fact
of these states' attorneys general want this provision in there just makes like the red flag
kind of go off and say, well, why have it in there if you're not going to use it? And we know
specifically from, to take the Samurai case, we know that they were, one of the things in the DOJ's
indictment was they were showing, you know, like just like tweets that Samurai had put out saying
like, you know, like, oh, look, or not even oligarchs welcome.
It was like, welcome to all the new Russian oligarchs after the, some of the
sanctions and stuff, which is obviously like a joke.
Like they don't, they have no idea if Russian oligarchs are using their service.
They don't, they don't, okay, why I see their customers, they have no clue.
But that was used as an example that was used as one of the key examples in there And there were a couple others that I forgetting all of which were incredibly loose like either were very obvious jokes or even if they weren jokes there was no way for them to know that anyone like what anyone is using their service for
That's like the whole point of their service is preserving privacy, right?
And not knowing your customer and not holding their funds, not, for instance, you know, like JPMorgan Chase actually custodying, you know, Jeffrey Epstein's funds to, you know.
launder all that money.
Then, you know, they paid fines in the Virgin Islands for that.
But we don't need to talk about Jeffrey Epstein's banker right now.
We'll save that for another day.
But that's what's troubling to me is that, okay,
if they're going to use under the existing statute,
they're going to, again, go against what FinCEN,
because FinCEN, as you pointed out, said, look, you know,
the Samurai Wallet developers, they're not custodying the funds at any point.
They don't meet our bar for what constitutes a money transmitter.
Therefore, of course, they logically cannot be an unlicensed money transmitter because they're not a money transmitter.
If you're going to use things like loose tweets to say, look, they knew Russian oligarchs were using their platform.
That to me just seems like under this new provision, they would do the exact same thing.
oh, look, you know, of course, you know, bad actors are going to use your platform
because it allows people to, you know, launder money.
Therefore, you know that people are laundering money.
Therefore, you know that people have the specific intent to launder money.
It just seems like this is just, like, this isn't going to protect developers at all, in my mind.
And, again, the fact that Zach is less concerned about this makes me feel a little bit better
because I respect him.
You know, he is far more knowledgeable than I am on this.
But as an outsider looking in without the legal expertise, I see what already happened.
And then I see this provision.
And I think this almost feels like it makes it easier to go after developers.
Unless I'm just really missing something, which is very probable.
But that's just my gut reaction to this is like, this does not smell good to me.
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Yeah, yeah, it's definitely smelly in here at the moment.
I don't know if that's because DC is a swamp, but yeah, it is definitely, it raises questions, right, at the very least.
And yeah, I mean, again, I think this is a place where, you know, serious people can disagree in about the interpretation to be charitable and to steal man.
You know what I would say, you know, the lawyers, you know, broadly feel about this issue.
It would be that anchoring this language into statutory law, which, you know, it doesn't currently exist in statutory law.
this was just kind of an understanding that most of us had that, you know, this is a free country,
code of speech, you know, I'm not actually taking anybody's funds. Like, presumably,
I am not a money transmitter. And literally, Finzen even told me that I'm not a money transmitter. So,
like, how did I end up in jail? You know, this is, you know, I think a logical conclusion that
most of us would reach. But, you know, from the legal perspective, I think the lawyers are thinking
this covers about 95 to 98% of the cases where, you know, you would remain protected and you would be fine, you know, to build most software that you would want to build touching a blockchain and you'd be okay.
Right. But again, I think for those of us who are actual builders trying to push the frontier, right, and create new products and, you know, provide valuable, unexisting services to people in the economy and around the world.
the point of the statute or the point of having this anchored in law and having the safe harbor
wouldn't be for the 90 percent that is obviously not nefarious and not dangerous and you know all
the other things that you would say about it it is for precisely the edge cases that are going to
be gray and would allow for prosecutorial discretion to overreach and infringe on the
civil liberties of the builders of those underlying technologies, right? It's very similar to the idea
of, you know, the free speech debate, right? Well, what do you have to hide if you're not doing
anything wrong? Or, you know, what do you need free speech for if you don't have anything to say,
right? That's not what these protections are for, right? These protections are for loathsome speech,
right? Like the reason that you have the right to free speech and that we must all defend free
speech vociferously is not for, you know, the innocuous day-to-day conversation, you know,
the banter at, you know, the water cooler in the office. It's so that, you know, when you want to
speak truth to power or express a loathsome opinion to the majority of the world, you are protected
from doing or for your ability to do that. And so, you know, again, here, I would say that
as a product builder myself, in my own personal estimation, right, I'm not speaking on behalf of
any organization or anything when I say this, this does not convince me that I would be safe
to build a piece of privacy technology or, you know, freedom technology in the United States,
you know, because we don't know what the interpretation would be by a subsequent
administration or a subsequent prosecutor's office who might go rogue, right? I mean,
this is literally what happened in the last administration under the Biden administration,
right? Like nobody was expecting, you know, what we ended up getting in terms of adversarial
hostility from, you know, the administration and, you know, kind of the charging authorities.
And that's why we have open source software developers sitting in jail today.
So, you know, whether we can take at face value what, you know, Todd Blanche and the current DOJ says that they will do by way of charging requirements, even with this safe harbor and kind of the addition of this carve out in the Clarity Act that we're discussing.
that doesn't give me confidence that the next administration isn't going to just completely
change their mind uh especially after seeing that uh you know you can literally go to the
relevant regulator ask them for a formal opinion be told that you're okay and then have them renege
on it after the fact so you know again i i don't want to um paint this more
fatalistically than, you know, I need to or than it needs to be for most people. But,
you know, I think that if we're going to the trouble of spending 18 months fighting tooth
and nail to anchor in, you know, a safe harbor in U.S. federal law that would keep the objective
purpose is to keep the crypto industry in the United States, this would seem to totally miss
the mark, in my opinion. And I think that it'll have, if language any worse than what we currently
have proposed, were to make it through, I think, frankly, you're going to see an exodus of people
who are building, you know, freedom technologies and privacy-preserving technologies from the
United States, which would be a real shame because this is the exact moment that we need these
technologies more than ever, as AI becomes ubiquitous and surveillance in our society has
become ubiquitous. You see the push to CDBCs and the tracking of every cent that gets spent in the
economy. You know, we just saw, you know, the government, you know, completely revoke access to,
you know, an AI model in the last couple weeks, which, you know, effectively is just banning
free speech and statistics, you know, this is the exact moment that we really deserve as Americans,
the safe harbors around building freedom technology and privacy preserving technology.
And it gives me great concern to see what's going on right now in Washington. And I hope that,
you know, calmer heads prevail. But at the moment, you know, I think we're on the ropes.
and, you know, it's either going to require that we, you know, come out of the corner with
a haymaker and really reestablish to, you know, our representatives in Washington that it is not
acceptable to, you know, tread on our rights and liberties so flagrantly, or, you know, we're going
to be in for, you know, a long hard slog, whether it's in, you know, keeping the industry in the
United States or whether it's in the ability to freely build the technologies that we ought to be
able to build and enjoy here as freedom-loving Americans. And I mean, there's a, I want to get
into the AI side of that with you because you mentioned that as well. But just before we kind
of move on to that I do you know you mentioned okay if anything worse than what in there right now ends up passing like we in for a that a not good situation Would you be happy with it if it passed as is like as it stands right now even with that loophole
Or is that even a bridge too far for you?
It's very, it's a very hard call, right?
I mean, this is one of the, you know, truisms of politics is that, you know, they always say that, you know, you did your job when nobody's happy.
Right. Because the compromise required that everybody give up something that they cared about.
And you're just kind of grudgingly accepting that this, you know, ratchet has moved one click in the right direction.
And I think from that perspective, I would say that it is a better universe for us to be in where 95 to 98% of the developer activity would be safe and not eligible to be charged compared to where we are today.
because, again, you know, where we are today is the whims and fancies of whoever sits at the DOJ
or, you know, the SDNY determines whether or not you have these rights.
Not, you know, anything else, just, you know, kind of the whims and fancies of whoever happens to be sitting in the seat.
So anchoring into U.S. federal law the idea that there is a safe harbor,
that it exists that would cover 95 or more percent of permissible activity,
that is inarguably a win, right?
Like that is a win.
And I think, again, that, you know,
kind of the conservative bias of most lawyers,
you know, leans in the direction of saying,
this is an enormous win, right?
Like this is a huge win for 95% of people.
But again, as somebody who's lived my life
mostly on the frontier
and, you know, kind of in the gray zones
of, you know, what is coming
or, you know, what the future is going to look like,
this concerns me greatly. And I think that it's going to have a pretty profound chilling effect.
And, you know, it kind of borders on prior restraint, right, which is something that we
try to avoid in, you know, US federal law for good reason. And so, yeah, like, I think that,
you know, the short answer to your question is, if we could take the exact language as it exists
today, I think we probably want to take that beachhead and then expand out from there, right?
Continue doing the hard work to convince, you know, very old members of Congress who may not
understand the technology, why it is important that we expand the envelope of possibility rather
than contract it, you know, both in the United States generally, but in this moment in particular.
but you know again that is not without cost because the other thing that this bill does
is it pretty substantially expands the surveillance state and it basically obliges
anyone who formally does business in the United States touching a blockchain
to implement BSA surveillance on all of their users and customers and all of the money flows
And so if you are, you know, a Bitcoiner who believes that, you know, your personal financial transactions in the broad economy ought to remain private and not be, you know, in clear text visible to, you know, an unofficial, you know, or an unnamed bureaucrat who might come in and use that against you, as, you know, we've seen in France with the wrench attacks on all of the, you know, kind of crypto founders and the increase in violence that's happened from the world.
you know, creating that honeypot of centralized data, I think that, you know, we need to be
concerned. And this is a moment, I would say, to double down our conviction on the need for
preserving our privacy rights and making sure that we are not, you know, just thrust into
a surveillance panopticon. On that, two things. I'll start out with,
okay you'd be okay with it passing as is goes through okay what do you think the realistic
chances of that are you know versus either more things are chopped and you know diced out of the
brca more things are added in on the banks you see like where are you kind of putting the the
probabilities there in terms of hey it ends as it is today ends up making it through gets passed or
like no chance, you know, very slim chance that happens. There's going to be need to be serious
other compromises or it probably won't make it through. Like clarity won't make it through at all.
Yeah. This is hard because it's not just this issue that's complicating the Clarity Act,
right? There are other issues like the Jamie Dimon, Brian Anderson spat over stable yields,
which I would say in most normal circumstances, you would look at something like that and say,
well, this bill's not going to pass, right? It's like the most, you know, sort of lofty banker on
Wall Street and all of, you know, his resources are being allied against it. And then there's
also the elements of the ethics concerns around this bill that, you know, it's very unclear whether
the Republican Party or Donald Trump will accept strong ethics provisions that would prevent,
you know, his continued or the family's continued involvement in, you know, their various crypto
dealings. So as far as like, raw probabilities, you know, if I was a bookie in Vegas,
at this point, my odds on this passing, I would probably peg below 30%. At this point,
just because the legislative calendar has gotten so deep. I mean, we're like days away from,
you know, being done with business until, you know, we come back on the far side of summer.
and, you know, Labor Day, and that'll be full on campaign season at that point. And it's not
obvious why anybody would, you know, want to disrupt the apple cart and, you know, hand the
alternative party a victory, you know, at the 11th hour that might change the trajectory of the
election that we're on. So yeah, my sense is that this is going to be an uphill fight no matter what
to try to get even the current language through. And then if you take it face value,
all of the trade associations in DC who have said that, you know, the BRCA is the red line.
And that, you know, if they cross that red line, the industry will flip against the bill.
You know, I don't know how you square the circle of, you know, watering it down or creating more
carve outs from here, keeping the industry trade groups on page and, you know, convincing everybody
that, you know, the give-get is worth it,
in addition to those other issues around, you know,
is Wall Street going to come along and play ball?
You know, or is Jamie Dimon just going to, you know,
go down with the ship fighting this one and go all in?
And then the Donald Trump thing.
So, you know, yeah, if I was a betting man,
I would say that, you know, it's not looking good at the moment,
which, you know, again, if you're a Bitcoin-er,
Like we don't really, you know, Bitcoin does not exist because of permission from the United States government. Right. You know, Bitcoin is an emergent phenomenon that comes from the people and it utilizes, again, open source software, free speech, you know, and math and physics, you know, in order to have come to the state that it is currently in.
none of those things will change.
Regardless of the opinion of the U.S. government,
what will change is the game theory
of where the energy and the economic value
gets created in Bitcoin.
And, you know, that, you know,
I would be very sad to see that move offshore
and outside of the United States.
It would seem to be a catastrophic policy error
to end up in that universe.
But, you know, if that's where we end up,
um you know i don't know that uh you can change that outcome because bitcoin is going to keep
being bitcoin it's going to keep doing what it's doing tick tock next block for now until you know
infinity at least there's that you know at least at least there's that bitcoin uh still does not
care but it's a you know ideally you would want to be in a jurisdiction that is more friendly to
bitcoin you know so this to you know i've said this to zach before at bpi you know i'd rather
have a government full of lummuses than warrens right like just you'd rather have a government
that's not actively trying to screw you uh you know seven ways till sunday like that that would
be ideal but even in absence of that bitcoin persists you know they still can't stop it still
doesn't need permission but it's you know you would uh you would rather that your country
especially as a freedom loving country that's supposed to respect individual liberties and
property rights and crazy things like free speech you would want that to be reflected in the new
laws that are written as well call it crazy like that's doesn't seem to be asking too much but
apparently for some for some it is uh i don't know it's it's it's wild to me it's wild yeah it is and
frankly they're on the wrong side of history right everybody who believes that is is both on the wrong
side of history uh and i would say they're on the wrong side of uh i'm gonna use the term physics
broadly here, but, you know, they're on the wrong side of internet physics, right? You can't fight
against something when the universe tilts against you, you know, structurally, or at least not
indefinitely. You can't. You can in the short term, right? But if, you know, you're fighting
against gravity, it's a losing battle, right? And I think that that's kind of what, you know,
we're going to see happening here across all of the policy debates in Washington as it relates to technology over the next, I'm thinking, two to five years,
because you see the, you know, same sort of faulty logic that has led to wanting to, you know, try to clamp down on, you know, Bitcoin and, you know, over legislate, over regulate, you know,
something that is kind of inherently unregulatable at a certain level.
I mean, clearly you can create rules of the road and, you know,
the businesses need to follow and basic things of this nature,
but you can't change the actual existence of the product
or its propagation through the universe.
You know, we're seeing this now with AI, right?
This is happening acutely in this moment.
After, you know, two weeks ago, we saw, you know,
anthropic release uh fable which is their you know latest mythos class model which is the you know
kind of scary one that they needed to restrict from everybody because it was so powerful and
uh you know it is legitimately a an immense uh you know powerful model but um the idea that you
know you're going to be able to slap export controls uh on this technology and pull it back
from the market and that this is somehow indefinitely going to keep other people from
accessing the power or the capability in this model when, you know, open source labs all around
the world, but primarily in China, are only 30 to 90 days behind the frontier labs and they're
racing ahead. You're just you can't stop the propagation of information, right? You can't
stop speech from moving around the world without implementing something like the Great Firewall
in China, right? And so, you know, in a very weird twist of, you know, fate, the U.S. government here
is basically trying to implement the Great Firewall on AI in the United States and then
somehow thinking that that is either beneficial to, you know, U.S. geostrategic interests vis-a-vis
China and our other competitors, or that this is somehow a durable move on the board, right? As
though it won't just be, you know, weeks to months before somebody outside of your reach,
outside of your control has access to this same model. If anything, frankly, I think that it just
kind of had the reverse intent that they wanted, which is it created this massive Streisand effect,
right and now everybody is searching every other model in the market trying to figure out if they can get the same jailbreak that you know they were able to get out of Fable from an open source model
And so, frankly, they've actually drawn more attention to the problem than taking it away.
So, again, I think that, like, we're really confronting some severe policy challenges, I think, in the United States right now because the average age of Congress is like 78 years old.
And, you know, the people who are building this technology and the world that we're moving into is not a world that is, frankly, built for people that are 80 years old.
And, you know, that's just kind of a reality of where we're at.
I mean, I don't say that to be ageist, you know, but it is just a reality that the world continues to move and evolve and it's getting faster.
and those of us who are you know digital native digitally native or crypto native like we're even
struggling to keep up with the pace and speed at which the world is moving and trying to figure out
how we navigate those challenges and and yeah I think we just need a complete change of perspective
in Washington on on how we deal with these things and and dealing with them a little bit more
rationally let's okay multiple things that go into there let's talk a little bit more about the
anthropic thing because i think that that's it's really interesting and what you pointed out as
well about just kind of funny that it's like the u.s is cracking down and china's dropping all the
open source models presumably to shrink the the moat of these big u.s based players like that would
be the you know seemingly the the geopolitical angle there right it's like hey let's let's push
to let's push to just make it so that these guys have a vanishingly small moat. And yet, you know,
so it's going to be harder for them to raise money. It's gonna be harder for them to justify
those valuations. Because so much of this is open source, like they don't have the monopoly on this,
or, you know, a small monopoly on this. So but can we can we can you talk a little bit more
in depth about what kind of happened there? Basically, we're at this point where it seems
the government was like, hey, shut off access to this to foreign nationals, right? But then it was
just like but it's like well you know how do you determine who's a foreign national well it's the
same with the uk's under 16 laws like how do you determine who's under 16 well you id everyone and
so like we're what we're talking about now and obviously like anthropic already had a certain
amount all these companies like if you pay for their services they have a certain amount of
information on you right but we're talking about something different here it's like a requirement
of entry to be doxxed at a national identification level versus just, hey, here's your credit card
or however you don't want it to pay. All that stuff can be linked back, but still, it feels
like this is something different. Can you explore that a little bit? Yeah. So I think you got most
of it right. The sensible reason that the model was pulled back was that the administration said
that they wanted to implement export controls and keep foreign nationals from having access to,
you know, this powerful capability that might be used nefariously against the U.S. government.
And obviously the challenge, as you just alluded to, is that how does one, you know,
prevent the access to information on a nationalism basis, right?
Like based on your citizenship.
like again that's kind of like saying like here's the library um everyone can have access to this
unless it's you know this person and this uh you know kind of nationality or something and then we
need you to pull those books off the shelf but they can still access the library but they can't
see those specific books it's like this is unworkable you can't have a library and operate
it in this way if that's what you're going to try to do uh and so yeah i think that this is uh again
And from a civil liberties and like a freedom tech or, you know, cyperpunk perspective, this is really scary.
I mean, this is like really concerning that the U.S. government thinks it can reach all the way down to we need to KYCAML you in order to perform effectively a Google search.
Right. Like to ask a question. Right.
We need to know your identity to know, you know, why you're asking that question.
Right. And that you can be tracked everywhere.
And so, yeah, I think that, you know, this was an enormous wake up call for everybody in Silicon Valley over the last couple of weeks.
I mean, it's really interesting.
I've been kind of an outspoken, you know, sort of open source and cypherpunk believer, you know, for a long time out here.
maybe obviously because I'm a Bitcoiner, but, you know, for a long time, I got almost no purchase
on that argument in Silicon Valley. There was a really old generation of, you know, kind of the
original dot-com guys who, you know, grew up and they were, you know, the Linux generation and,
you know, the original cryptography wars, like those guys were hardcore. They got it. They
understood the value of open source, but like kind of in the last 10 or so, maybe 15 years,
Like a lot of the second or third wave of Silicon Valley were too young to understand where we came from and the importance of this fight and what was going on.
And it really was like this last week where tons of, you know, open claw operators and, you know, kind of otherwise unopinionated software people woke up and were like, wait a second.
like the government can just come in and take this away with you know no recourse no clear guidance
and framework like and i might have been running my business on this model right like i like may
literally rely upon access to this new tool in order to operate my business and get my income
and pay my rent and feed my family and you know have a a life you know and so for the government
to reach all the way down in and just turn that off, right,
I think was an enormous wake-up call to people to say,
oh, wow, like it finally touched them, right?
The lack of open source options finally became real
to people in a way that it hadn't before.
And so, man, there was just a flurry of people
trying to figure out, okay,
how do I move on to open source models?
I can't countenance a world where I can just be,
You know, I mean, imagine if you could just have the internet, access to the internet turned off arbitrarily anywhere you are in the world, right?
Like at a moment's notice and you just couldn't access the internet.
Well, what if you're in the middle of a journey where you're relying on, you know, the map that requires internet access?
What if you're, I mean, again, these are very like, you know, first world problems today, but people have learned to live in this way, right?
Like what if you're relying on a live translation, right?
A thing that is required and you're in a foreign country, you don't speak the language.
and like, you know, now what, right?
It's kind of equivalent to the idea that, you know,
a kill switch in the car, you know, it's like,
well, what happens if you're, you know,
trying to get out of your farm and get away from,
you know, a tornado that's ripping across, you know,
and the kill switch just activates in your car.
I mean, these are very profound,
consequential changes in what it means
to live in a free country, you know,
that it really, I think, just came out of nowhere.
It came out of left field and really like slammed into a bunch of people
in Silicon Valley in the last week.
So, yeah, I think the reality that people are coming to is like,
there is a real imperative for open source,
open source weights and models and, you know,
kind of the sort of access to intelligence,
universal access to intelligence.
We are going to need to have an enormous debate about this in this country.
And frankly, it's going to have to happen a lot faster than it's taken for the crypto or the Bitcoin debate to percolate in Washington.
And if, you know, past history of, you know, waiting 15 years to get to the tortured, you know, kind of suboptimal conclusion that we seem to have arrived at in Bitcoin legislation or crypto legislation were to be mapped onto the AI debate.
man, we are in for a lot of pain and trouble moving forward.
And again, frankly, I would say the biggest concern there is that by doing so and doing so slowly and poorly,
negotiating our way through the policy implications and what needs to happen,
we're really kind of handing the game to China because China is not slowing down, right?
They're not stopping and they've taken an open source approach to the market and the distribution.
So at the exact moment that the U.S. government is pulling back, you know, access to the leading American frontier model from everyone, not just Americans, but literally everyone, China is charging full steam ahead.
And they're going to push even harder and they're going to, you know, distribute their models and try to make them the standard.
So I just don't see this as being effective for the U.S. geostrategic interests. And it's certainly not in the interests of, you know, individual free Americans who just want to access knowledge and technology and to do so, you know, in the way that we would expect to be able to as Americans.
It's interesting to the analogy to to Bitcoin because you know Bitcoin is really ultimately
so much more anti-fragile in this case right like it because there is it's not like there
was I mean I guess you could make the argument there were some companies early on that did
a lot of development around Bitcoin you know like through the like Blockstream as an example
right but it wasn't like they were running a frontier model of Bitcoin it was like it
no it's all bitcoin bitcoin's totally open source anyone can can you know view that code can use that
however uh you know obviously the the uh you know the core maintenance is a different like a different
thing but bitcoin is more anti-fragile i think in that sense you take that then and you contrast
that with the ai side of things like bitcoin could handle all the you know shitty regulation
and all that kind of stuff like it can handle it better because there's not like a kill switch for
it. There's no kill switch for Bitcoin. There's a kill switch for these frontier models. Clearly,
we just saw it get used. We know there's a kill switch. Like there are throats to choke when it
comes to these frontier models. There's pressure that can be applied to specific CEOs, like all of
whom also are trying to go public in the very near term. So there's a lot like, you know, you don't
want to get on the wrong side of the government and leading up to your IPO, right? Like, I mean,
pretty obviously. And so I think it's interesting because it's like, I wonder too, though, that like
the beauty of open source is that it like it will make every like open source in any in any domain
is going to make everything better, right? Because you don't just have people working in a silo in
Silicon Valley. Now, if there's anything wrong with that, Silicon Valley has done great things,
but you're also exposing it to the developer, you know, who's in the brilliant, you know,
young Einstein in Kenya or in Eastern Europe somewhere or wherever it might be that would
never have had access to this, but now has access to it and happens to have this really
brilliant idea, which makes it that much better.
And people build on that.
Like, that's the beauty of open source, right?
It's that wisdom of the crowd being able to work on a problem completely unfettered.
I'm curious how quickly the moats for these big companies, the open AIs, the anthropics,
how quickly they actually disappear.
Because this is the other thing,
you know that they actually,
the Sam Altman's of the world,
they want the regulation.
They go and they beg for it.
They're like the, you know,
the analogy in the Bitcoin crypto space
is the Brian Armstrong,
or, you know, like that.
Look, we want responsible,
please like regulate us.
Please just tell us the rules of the road.
Like we want the regulation.
Fear not.
We've got compliance teams
with super overpriced lawyers
that'll make sure.
And once the regulatory mode is large enough,
we'll make sure that no upstart
can ever possibly compete with us because you won't be able to afford the cost of compliance.
But I feel like in this AI race, again, there's a, in the AI side, as much as Bitcoin is more
anti-fragile on this area for AI, it's like, ah, it's going to be like the destruction of those
moats seems like it could be achieved more quickly. Do you know what I'm getting at there?
Like just because the nature and because of the competitive,
naturally competitive nature of this.
Am I on the right track there?
Absolutely. Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I mean, again, I think like the, the, you know, kind of, um, I
Another way to frame the necessity of open source, right, is that it's actually pro-consumer, right, because it is maximally competitive, right?
Like if something is open for anyone else to build on and create a new implementation, you're going to get that radical competition between everybody around the world competing to be the best implementation, right?
And so at the moment, you know, there are so many issues with AI, actually, right?
Because one, I mean, the thing that you alluded to around, you know, the frontier model company is like, they don't actually generate cash flow right now, right?
I mean, they have cash flow, I should say.
They don't generate profits.
They're nowhere near generating profits.
So as like a saleable business concern right now, no one has an answer for how these are long-term durable, right?
At best, the idea is that the next model will pay off your last model.
But that's kind of just a like doubling down game at the poker table.
It's like, yeah, well, I'm not losing this poker game yet as long as I can keep going back to the ATM and doubling up every time, right?
Like, so that's one problem, right?
And I would say that, again, the approach of relying on these giant capital intensive frontier model companies and, you know, all the private credit placements that are required in order to finance the construction of the data centers and just kind of a leverage that's built into the system predicated on the idea that eventually we will come to a point where we can monetize the technology fully and, you know, kind of recoup the inbound expenses.
like that's all a lot of question marks, really.
Like, you know, there's a lot of hand waviness on that.
And that's without even getting into the circular financing
and like, you know, the true price of tokens, right?
Rather than the highly subsidized price of tokens
that most of us have experienced up until, you know, the last couple weeks.
So there are many conflicting challenges
that are intersecting on just the execution of the plan in a vacuum, right?
Like if we were just going to like let the U.S. companies go crazy and, you know, this is the future, it still is kind of hard to squint and see how that all actually, you know, works out where the plane lands safely on the tarmac.
um but yeah i think that you know in particular the uh you know sort of challenge of open sources
like or or you know as it relates to the model companies here is like you know we want to have
a world where um i mean ostensibly i would think we would want to have a world where american-made
models are the baseline or the platform that everybody wants to build on right and that's
just going to be not possible in a universe where you need to afford a 250 or a 2000 or a $10,000
monthly subscription to a frontier company. Uh, right. Like, I just don't see how that works.
Like to your point, uh, you know, the, you know, people in the global South, South America, Africa,
wherever, South Asia, you know, these people need access to intelligence as well. Uh, and to pretend
that they're going to, you know, just not access it in a universe where it's a requirement to,
you know, kind of engage in civil society moving forward, like the Internet, is, I think, to just
pretend that you're living in a different world than the one that really exists. So, yeah, I mean,
at all levels of the AI debate, I would say that the policy is super challenging right now. And
And we're really, as I said, struggling, I think even in Silicon Valley, to navigate like, what does this actually mean?
Right?
Like, what does it actually mean for us to reinvent our entire company around the idea that this tool exists and then to have the U.S. government revoke access to that tool?
Right?
What does it mean for us to say that like, okay, this technology is really powerful and meaningful, but maybe we shouldn't rely on just Anthropic or OpenAI when one person can turn that off.
right and we don't understand the weights and models that they're or the weights i should say
that they're using you know behind the scenes right like it's equally as large a problem for
there to be one man or woman or you know private person uh company that controls and gates everyone's
else's access to the underlying technology right and that was actually the case you know with uh
mythos and fable for you know mythos for a couple months but fable for you know uh you know the first
week or two too is like okay well you know there's a special class of people who get the best you know
the good intelligence right like you know if you're if you're on the inside track you know like i i
got it for you bro like i got the real good tokens in here right but if you're just a normal pleb on
the street uh you know well you know this is a little dangerous kid uh we don't want you to have
access to the good intelligence because you know we don't know how what you do with that uh you know
So I think it's forcing us to ask some very challenging questions about, you know, the moment that we're in with both technology, civil society, you know, the state of our current politics in this country.
I mean, again, I think that a lot of this, I would connect back to the idea that like, you know, our kind of social fabric has become very frayed at the edges and, you know, kind of the operating system, let's call it, that we've been operating on for the last 80 years or so in the post-war era.
I mean, the wheels are getting real shaky on the cart now.
yeah and and just kind of going off of that a little bit you mentioned this idea earlier of this
this geriatric society right specifically as it relates to policymakers and i think that that's
that's kind of really important like the you know just to lump it in like the boomers essentially
have been have been in charge for a while right and like even you know the older boomers like
people are starting to age out but still we have the average age of congress is very old
very old and this idea that like we're talking about all of these really like revolutionary
technological moves right whether whether it be whether it be bitcoin whether it be ai
what you know what new frontiers of uh of encryption and new protocol i mean like whatever
it is like they have no idea like they're relying on their aids for stuff right and their aids who
are like fresh out of college nothing wrong with that again not being ageist uh but like fresh out
they have no idea either doesn't like sure they're younger but they have not like nobody that's
actually making policy really has any clue what they're talking about is what like and from my
very limited time that i spent at uh on the on the hill uh in dc during the bitcoin policy summit
that was like my biggest takeaway was and not that like i met some really well meaning people
too and some people that were really curious and actually asked great questions things like that
But then you just realize like, oh, there's like a, there's a huge disconnect.
Like there is a massive disconnect.
And I'm just curious, like, is this something that just will naturally right itself as people, you know, continue aging?
And we know what happens when you age long enough, right?
Like happens to all of us.
But, or, or is this something that, that is, will we see sort of a turning over sooner?
We are in like a fourth turning right now.
Some would argue we're already in the first.
I don't know about that yet.
I think the first turning is here.
It's just not evenly distributed yet, I think.
I think El Salvador has already hit its first turning.
They've already gone through the cycles there.
But the rest of the world, like, I don't know.
The U.K. feels really deep in the crisis period.
U.S. feels like it's there too.
Maybe it's starting to emerge on the other side.
I don't know.
But I guess my question is like, does this only resolve?
Like, does this incongruity in terms of the people in charge being so disconnected from what's actually happening?
Does that only resolve as they age out?
Or do we start to see them being replaced more proactively by a younger generation that sort of had enough?
Well, let's hope it's the latter just as a starting point.
Right.
I mean, I think this is, and there's so many things to say about this.
So I think like for one, you know, to just to be a bit pithy, you may be aware or maybe
new to your listeners, at least that there's a saying that in academics, progress is measured
in gravestones, right?
As the academy is notoriously conservative and slow to adapt and evolve.
And there are natural reasons for this.
people who have spent their entire career, their entire identity, creating an academic construct that then is proven to be false.
You know, they're, you know, unwilling, let's say, to engage with the reality of the world.
And it's only after they die that, you know, the next generation can come in and say, yeah, well, actually, the world works this way instead.
Right And you know it would have been great if we could have done that 25 years ago But you know here we are now and that fine for most cases But again the kind of unique moment that we in historically not only from the technology perspective which like clearly we are in an era of radical acceleration in capabilities
Right. But from the perspective of just like literally raw demographics.
Right. This is an unparalleled moment in human history.
We have never in human history had so many people over the age of 50, let alone people over the age of 70 living on this planet. Right. And as we know, like the just natural consequence of politics is that older people tend to be more engaged. They have more resources. They vote more. And so at the moment, my sort of assessment as a systems engineer of American politics is that we have become captured.
Like, you know, at this stage of the game, like you have a lot of senior and retired people who are living better than any generation of people their age in human history who are, you know, continuing to, you know, enjoy the benefits of the system that has been constructed for their interests for the last 30 or 40 years.
at the expense of the younger generations
who are going to be tasked with living on this planet
for the next 40 to 50 years, right?
And you would think from first principles
that we ought to be designing policy
and the objectives that we're striving for as a society
in the interest of those who are young and vigorous
and will be, you know, the active participants
in that society moving forward for, you know, the next few decades.
But on issue after issue after issue, we see that, you know, the millennials and people, I'm just going to broadly say people under the age of about 40, you know, like this society does not work for us kind of at all.
right? Like if you're under the age of 40, and you can afford a house and healthcare,
and you have a stable job, and you have like a line of sight to any kind of retirement savings,
you're kind of like in I don't know if I would say that like the 1%, but like you're certainly
in like the top 5 to 10% of everyone, your age demographic and down. Right. And that's kind of,
I mean, well, it is profoundly sad, but it's kind of scary to think that we've gotten that extreme.
in society where, you know, we're kind of eating the young, right? It's like, you know, I often
think of like the, you know, Saturn eating his son piece of art, if you're familiar with that,
like that's kind of how it feels if you're under the age of 40 in the United States today.
And, you know, so I think that, and the other thing that I'll say there is that like
the contrast or the, you know, sort of discrepancy between that enforced reality
that most of us who are younger are experiencing today
versus the sort of objective assessment
that there are really no limits anymore
to what we could accomplish as a human society, right?
I mean, we literally live in an era where,
you know, and I'm gonna paint with a broad brush here.
Clearly there are problems.
Clearly we haven't solved everything.
But like we can literally send rockets into space
and land them on a floating barge
in the middle of the ocean and radically collapse the cost of having a fully space-born economy,
we're probably talking about at least going to the moon and having a colony, if not Mars,
becoming, you know, multi-planetary. We've surmounted almost all of the biological
challenges that had existed. I mean, clearly we need to like extend lifespans, you know,
if we're going to be capable of doing that. But like, you know, you don't die from like trivial
diseases in childhood anymore for the most part. And, you know, if you have a catastrophic
healthcare situation that happens to befall you that would have certainly taken you out of the
game in any other era of human history, you can miraculously survive and thrive on the far side
of that today. So like, you know, it's not that we can't build housing in America. Like we know
how to build houses, right? Like this, it literally is not rocket science. And by the way, we're doing
the rocket science really well at this point. But like all of these compounding problems, right?
they're all choices. They're willful choices that we have made about what we are willing to tolerate
in our society. And I think that that is just, we're reaching the breaking point of where that
system, like, as you said, I believe that we are deep in the fourth turning, right? Like, I think
10 years from now, we're going to look back and it probably will be marked to the start of the
Trump administration, the first Trump administration. And, you know, I hope that we're able to navigate
this crisis successfully. But, you know, it is very clear that the system that we are operating
in is no longer fit for purpose, and it is no longer achieving what it ought to or needs to
achieve on behalf of the people for whom it is ostensibly operating. And so I think that, you
know, again, whether it's on Bitcoin policy, you know, or whether it's on AI policy, or I mean,
I can pull another one out. I used to work at Uber. I used to work on the self-driving unit at Uber.
And like we've had the capability to have self-driving trucks on the road for 10 years, like literally 10 years.
We could have done this in 2017 if we had wanted to.
But there's just complete gridlock around the idea that we would do that because of the impact that it might have on the labor economy.
right because truck driving is the biggest it's the number one job around the United States most
people don't know that it's like the number one job in like 32 of the 50 states or something last
time I checked there's literally millions of people who have these jobs and this isn't to
minimize the impact that it would have to those people if we did automate most of those jobs with
you know self-driving trucks but you know again you can't sort of like hold back the tide of
history indefinitely, you know, for the sake of, you know, short term interests. You know, we need
to like accept that new technologies come along, integrate them, incorporate them, make thoughtful
and intelligent policy that allows us to multiply the output that we can achieve as society based on
that and then harvest the deflationary gains that should come from that improvement in the quality
of life and recycle it into finding newer and better and more wealth generating activities.
right and there needs to be some social safety net and how you get from here to there but like
all the things that i just described right for the last 10 years we've seen almost no progress on
and it's because of the uh conservative bias of aged people who hold the levers of policy
in our country at least that would be my contention uh and again unlike any other time in human history
you have never seen a society that was operated by of and for people above the age of 65
it just hasn't existed because we've never been faced with this scenario and so this is literally
in pretty much every way a historic moment for humanity and an unparalleled moment of both
opportunity and risk for the human species because it in the past may have been the case that we could
muddle our way through and like, you know, the course of history was moving slow enough that
like muddling for 20 or 30 years had no meaningful consequence. If we muddle through the next decade,
it is very unclear what will remain of what we currently think of as modern society around the
world, whether it's, you know, on climate change or becoming multi-planetary, resource depletion,
AI, Bitcoin, like free money, surveillance, like all of these sorts of things. Like we are just in
the meta crisis now. And I think we really need to both acknowledge that in order to start really
addressing it and solving it. And then what we really need is a generation of young, vibrant,
visionary leaders to step up and help chart the course from where we are to where we need to be.
I think that's the moment that we're in. And I really think that, you know, the time is now, if not us, who, if not now, when?
Do you in terms of that generation of young visionary leaders, do you foresee that?
Are you describing engagement at the political level or also that that extends to, you know, the technological level as well?
Because we're arguably seeing it a good amount of it at the technological level, right?
Like that, you know, it's oftentimes younger people who are driving the technology yet are not as, you know, they're driving humanity forward, but then are handicapped because they're also not engaging politically in the same ways.
Is that kind of what you're getting at?
It's like we need more of the political engagement.
And I'm not talking about like holding up signs and marching.
Like we're talking about like actual things that move the needle, right?
Yeah, I mean, I would say it's all of the above, right?
I mean certainly in politics I think where we are most deficient is that there are no you know 40 in Washington who are really fighting for these things that we talking about right
Like there aren't, you know, as you mentioned, there kind of is a weird barbell of like there's really old members of Congress and then there's really young staffers who are basically running the place.
And there's kind of this giant gap in the middle because of both demographic reasons and then just kind of the way that the industry works.
But yeah, in my mind, I would say that it's a multifold problem.
We both need people in the private sector innovating without permission to push the boundary forward, which is why things like open source, developer protections, things of this nature are so important, right?
Like you wouldn't be able to move the world forward if you didn't have people who were doing crazy things that are socially unacceptable, air quotes, right, at the edges of society, pushing us forward, right?
These people are always viewed as heretics.
They are always viewed as threatening to established interests.
Like that's never going to change, right?
And for the last, you know, whatever, 40 years or so, the best way to influence the trajectory of the world in my assessment has been to build something in the private sector and then dare, you know, the political, you know, universe to come after you.
Right.
I mean, again, like without getting too deeply into it, like if it were up to regulators, Uber would not exist.
Right.
Like we wouldn't have Uber.
And, you know, that was to me a very illustrative example of like the people wanted this product.
Were there problems with how it came to market and the impact and dislocation?
Yes, of course.
You know, and we should have dealt with those issues in a more serious and deeper way than
I think that we have.
But like, nonetheless, very clearly and obviously people wanted Uber.
And so Uber was going to continue to exist.
And the sort of policy apparatus needed to adapt to that after the fact.
So like, that's one track.
But the other track is in actual politics, like the actual on the ground, doing the work politics.
And I think there we need really an army of new generation, new blood to get in the game and help push this in the direction that we all know it needs to go.
Right. I mean, again, the whole world can be different tomorrow if we all just got up and decided that it was going to be different tomorrow.
right like if we wanted to get up and change anything about our society the physical constraints
really no longer apply right we can create anything that we can imagine in software uh you know and
there should be no barrier to what we can all accomplish it's all a consensus problem
right uh which we should understand quite well as bitcoiners right if you can get everybody to agree
on what the forward trajectory should look like,
everything can be different tomorrow.
So I think to me, yeah, yeah,
there's like this element of like,
if you're a builder and that's where you're better served
and your time and energy, you know,
could be maximally, you know, beneficial
in, you know, building something new and powerful
and like world changing, you should do that, right?
But don't forget that you need to also support the people
who on the policy side are going to help you accomplish
lasting and durable change, right?
And then conversely, I think on the other side,
we need people who are capable
of clearly articulating the vision
and the importance and the thoughtful articulation
of how we lay out policy
to unlock wealth and abundance in our society.
But you can't just be myopic about the idea
that it's all going to be coming
from permissioned rails, right?
And, you know, we're not fighting an uphill battle on that front.
And you need to, if you're a policy person, engage with the industry and the technologies
and, you know, the innovators who are at the bleeding edge.
So, yeah, I think to me that this is an all of the above equation, right?
Like we are, you know, kind of standing on the precipice of, you know, this truly unique
moment in human history.
And we have two options ahead of us, right?
It's radical self-sovereignty and global emancipation of free peoples with untold capabilities that our ancestors would just, I mean, literally their eyes would fall out of their head if you showed any other generation of humans what we have access to now and what we could accomplish together if we wanted to do it.
Again, Elon and the spacefaring stuff is just one of many examples.
Or the other alternative would seem to be techno-feudalism.
Right. It's we're all going to be serfs, you know, who, you know, get to access technology, intelligence, whatever, only at the permission of some centralized authority that grants us that authority.
Right. And, you know, I know which world I want to live in. So, you know, I'm trying to do my best to live in both worlds and try to, you know, push the envelope on both sides of the equation.
but um you know it is a little lonely out here uh and we could use you we could use more good
soldiers yeah and so it's a great call to action honestly and i want to be conscious of time here
because we're we're running a little bit up on it uh you you kind of hinted at this already maybe
it's worth just saying a couple words on it but sort of this this need for this cypherpunk revival
as you and I had discussed.
I think that's kind of what you're getting at
at the end here is that,
yeah, like there's the,
there is the political path, right?
And that political path is very much needed.
At the same time,
like, yes, there should be engagement at that level.
Yes, you should also just build things without permission.
But also like, you know,
changing our mindset, I think,
is one of the hardest things.
Like you mentioned that in Silicon Valley specifically,
that sort of interim generations of,
yeah, there were the hardcore cypherpunks
were around, you know, in these early days in the dot-com era.
And then there's kind of this, like, larger gap.
And maybe we're seeing a resurgence of that cypherpunk ethos now
because, you know, government overreaches a forcing function on it, right?
Like, you're seeing people, I think, and you mentioned this earlier,
but, you know, the U.K., Australia, Canada soon
implementing these under-16 social media bans,
which is just doxing everyone.
So it's like, huh, boy, we kind of need some, like, you know,
better anonymous uh you know or or pseudonymous uh access to public communication networks right
like you need things like noster and different things but boy they're going to make encrypted
chats decrypt they're going to give the governments are going to beg for back doors and if you
companies that produce them don't give back doors you know there's again there's a throat to choke
there they're going to become after and so it's like oh well maybe we need actually some like this
all comes back to open source too right it all comes back to you need to be able to have open
source and also interoperability between things, right? Building on protocols versus building on
these proprietary stacks where they're, you know, building in the open field instead of the walled
garden, I think is kind of where we're at right now. And people are starting to, I think more
people, this is the optimist in me. I think more people are starting to wake up if they haven't
already, simply because some of the things governments around the world are doing are so
egregious, like are just so over the top where it's like, well, hang on a second. Like that's,
that's just insane. Why, why on earth are you doing that? And maybe they, you know, they didn't
wake up during, you know, COVID and a lot of times they didn't wait, you know, they haven't woken up
until now, but Hey, at least they're waking up now. I don't know. A lot of people I think are
going to stay asleep for a while, but maybe just some kind of final thought. We probably just need
to do another whole rip specifically on this, but maybe just some final, some final thoughts on that
in terms of like, are you optimistic about people's mentality around all of this changing?
Yeah, I am, is the short story, right?
I mean, I am optimistic because I am in the dirt doing the work on the front lines.
And the other people who are out here doing that work are exceptional human beings.
And we're all fighting for something that's bigger than us.
it's more important than any individual, right?
You know, I often say this about Bitcoin,
but like Bitcoin is not a project that I,
at least I think most of us,
would expect to be accomplished in our lifetime, right?
I mean, it is a multi-generational,
historic, world historic project, right?
It is bigger than any individual
and it is going to outlive all of us, hopefully, right?
And so, you know, to that end, we need something to believe in if you're going to be engaged in a lifelong struggle, you know, for righteousness, right?
Or for you know principles that are bigger and larger than you know any one of us And so you know what I kind of always fall back to you and well again maybe aging me a little bit it hilarious the kids don know this uh these sorts of references anymore but uh simon
sinek why how what right i'm sure you saw that video right people you know that's how you have to
build the structure of motivation and the goal orientation for any group of people that you're
you're working with in order to accomplish something together why how what you have to
start with the why right and if people can't connect to the why they are not going to have
the stamina the energy the durability the lasting conviction to fight through the how and the what
right and so you know we talk about this a lot in the bitcoin community uh you know being invaded by
suit coiners and you know oh it's you know just all you know wall streeters now and you know people
who just care about number go up and like you know this is a real phenomenon right like in the early
days of bitcoin everyone was a cyberpunk right like everyone was a radical heretic uh money autist
right like everybody had this view that like the principles were why they were working on the
project. And as we've added, and it's great that we've added all kinds of new people in,
that we've had new adherents. We've got, you know, millions of converts now who have come to see the
wisdom of what it is that we were doing here in, you know, over the last 15 years. But I would say
that, you know, what worries me and is both the current composition and then even more so the
future composition, next generations of Bitcoiners or people who are, you know, coming to this
technology, not understanding the why. Like, why are we actually here, right? You need to give
people something to believe in and only then can you tell them how and have them care, right? And
so I would say, you know, both in the case of Bitcoin locally, where I think we need to really
relight the cypherpunk fire and remind people what this is really about, right? Like it's
chancellor on the brink. It's, you know, the Wall Street criminality. It's Satoshi and the
Immaculate Conception. It's the block size wars. It's the Cyprus bail. And like everything that I
just mentioned happened pre 2016. And overwhelmingly, all of the people that I meet these days in the
industry, you know, they don't really know that history, right? They didn't live it. They weren't
around for it. And so it's hard to connect with it. And I think that it's really incumbent upon us
to communicate that oral history and center the why are we engaged in this fight.
This is a fight for human freedom, right?
This is a fight for liberty and justice all around the world,
for equal access to money and the accumulation of capital, right?
To free markets and all the other things that Bitcoin represents.
And we need people to really connect with that first if we want it to be durable and lasting.
And then I would say that we should take that same lesson and apply it to our modern politics in America.
Right. Like what is the social contract supposed to be in this country?
And what is it today? Right. Like what are we all fighting for?
Do we have a shared mission, vision and objective in the United States today?
You know, like I would argue no. Right.
I would argue that we have, you know, kind of gotten so lost in the woods, you know, over however, you know, what period of time you want to market at.
But, you know, certainly in recent decades, like we're deeply lost and there's no clear objective that we're driving toward as a people in this country that unites us as Americans at this point in kind of our history.
And so, you know, I think on both counts, we really need to go back to the why and really start with, you know, what it is that's animating and motivating us.
And that is how we're going to attract the, you know, the next hundred million people to come in and participate and really be active in enforcing, you know, society to move in the direction that, you know, hopefully we all collectively share a vision of.
I mean, I think it probably would surprise people if you went out and sampled the general population, how much we actually agree on.
The differences that we have among one another are very marginal in the grand scheme of things.
And the idea that we would just drive our society into the ditch, you know, over trivial differences that, you know, we are incapable of working through, you know, when, you know, the amazing future that awaits us could be ours tomorrow.
That is the thing that, you know, again, gets me out of bed in the morning and like, you know, makes me want to be engaged in this fight.
So. It's a, it's a great note to end on. I think I kept you a little bit long,
Kyle, so apologies there, but thank you so much for sharing your time.
Love the chance to pick your brain and just get your insights on this.
And I think there's a couple of really good call to actions there is to make
people, make people think about these things a little bit,
a little bit deeper and, you know, pay attention.
There are not everybody is, is cut out for certain paths, right?
But there's, if they're, Quinn's taught me one thing,
that there's always something you can do.
Maybe it's just start a podcast.
You know, you never know.
Maybe it's just another Bitcoin podcast.
You never know.
But, you know, if you feel compelled to do something, do it.
You can just do things.
That's the beauty of it.
Where would you like to send people so they can find you?
And then anything, you know, you're working on with BPI
that you want to share or anything like that,
feel free to lay it out there.
Yeah, well, I'm just Kyle Olney.
that's my name at on Twitter at Kyle only on Twitter if anybody wants to find me there I think
you retweeted my my end pub on Noster earlier at the beginning of this I'll drop it in the
show description as well great yeah that's that's another good place to find me it's very hard to
get people to notice you on Noster but yeah those are probably two the two best places to follow me
And then, yeah, I would just encourage everybody to get actively involved in pushing public policy in the direction that, you know, you think that it needs to go and that we collectively in the Bitcoin community really need.
Right. You know, again, it's sometimes challenging to get Bitcoiners to believe that engaging with the government and politics is a worthwhile endeavor.
But as we've said many times in the past, you may not take an interest in politics, but politics will certainly take an interest in you.
So, you know, to heed the, you know, the caution of I think it was Socrates or Plato, right?
It's like your refusal to participate in politics resigns you to being governed by your inferiors.
right and I would hope that everybody listening to this would understand that we would rather not
be governed by you know the people among us who know the least about the issues that we're
confronting as a society but you know that we ought to be governed by you know the people who
are actively engaged and thoughtful and visionary about how much better the world that could be
and figure out how we get from here to there.
So yeah, get off the couch, get engaged,
meet your local Bitcoiners,
find some real life thing that you can do
to help push the ball forward.
And I look forward to seeing you out on the field.
Love it.
Thanks so much, Kyle.
Appreciate your time.
Everybody go give Kyle a follow
and thank you to everybody who tuned in on Noster.
Kyle, cheers, man.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
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