the only way that I think you can effectively police that and reach a kind of almost equilibrium of
who's happy with what credible threats of violence that incentivize, you know, what you're, what
accords with your ethical theory is not resorting to ever more escalating violence, you know, in
pursuit of ultimate victory and the monopoly, but rather shame, basically, or other more socially
enforced means of punishment and reward. So that's where I kind of land on this, that that's
actually more important. It's basically, it's a very, very pretentious way of describing politics
as downstream of culture, but not just describing it, but encouraging you to take it very, very
seriously because, you know, if you put the requisite time and energy into creating a culture that
self enforces ethics, you don't need violence in the first place and you can escape that loop,
in theory, at least. That's my, that's my hot take.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 843281 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. Today's episode
is Bitcoin talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else comes up. Today,
that guest is Alan Farrington. Alan is a general partner at Axiom Venture Partners and the co-author
of the quite famous book, Bitcoin is Venice. He also identifies as a layer two and that's all
I'm going to say about that. Alan and I had a great conversation that meanders all over the
place from Apple to light beer to MMT to capitalism to the proper role of the state
and a whole lot more. Alan is a hilarious and incredibly knowledgeable dude, so I know you're
going to enjoy the heck out of this one. Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the
Bitcoin podcast wherever you are listening and give this show a five star rating. Or don't,
Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure would appreciate it. Also just a heads up that you can find links
in the show notes to get discounts on the Bitcoin only Bitbox 02 hardware wallet from Bitbox Swiss
and on 5G SIM card service from Cloaked Wireless. They protect you from SIM swap attacks and the
promo code for both is Walker. If you'd rather watch this show than listen, head to the show notes
for links to watch on YouTube, Rumble and now on Noster via highlighter. But if you're like me and
you prefer to just listen to your podcasts, I highly recommend you check out fountain.fm. Not
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Alan Farrington.
You're good intro. This is exactly where you should start.
Well, it does. You know, I mean, so I interviewed Jeff Booth is one of the first people I had on
here. And at one point, you know, Jeff, he's so even keeled. He's he's and he's so just like,
I love the way he speaks. He's this beautiful calming presence that brings brings him down.
So he is he is. And it's hard to argue with that where as the rest of us get a bit firebrandish
at times. But at one point, he's telling the story of how he kind of like, got around to writing
the book, the price tomorrow. And he's like, Walker, the people in charge of the rules have no
fucking clue. And then and I was like, I don't think I've ever heard Jeff say fuck before.
And then later he texts me is like, Hey, I really like the interview. But is it possible to just
to cut out my curse word? Because I usually don't swear. I don't want to, you know, give that.
And I was like, you know, Jeff, for you, for you anything. So, you know, just cut it out.
So it just sounds like the people in charge of the rules have no pause clue. But
I have no ad break. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, have you heard of the
Bitbox O2 Bitcoin only hardware wallet? But yeah, so that sweet, sweet, sweet Jeff Booth.
If only there were more of him, like I wish we, you know, but
Have you kept the recording though? Because you can now you can blackmail him potentially.
You've got his reputation hostage. Yeah, I've got the recording. You know,
honestly, I was of the opinion. I was like, you know, thinking like, Jeff, you're just
you're just showing some great emotion here. Like Pete, if you swear, like I say fuck all the time,
it starts to lose a little bit of its meaning, you know, like, fuck, fuck, fuck, could he fuck.
Sorry if there's any kids listening to this later. But, you know, you say it enough times,
and it's just kind of part of the general vernacular. But Jeff, it's like,
that's not a word that he uses often. So if he busts it out, you know that it was for
a serious reason, you know, it's, it was a very meaningful, meaningful fuck. So yeah.
Yeah. But man, how's it how's it going? How's life? I loved I was listening to the cheat code,
the cheat code sessions, those were awesome. I wish that was that just a great time. Had you
been to bed for before? No, no, I never had. I yeah, I loved that. That was that was first
conference I've been doing quite a while as well. And so it was super nice. It's in the UK. I think
that's that that was the main thing, which is a bit of a shame because that isn't really giving
Peter any credit. Like he obviously can't really control that. So I have other nice things to
say about it, obviously. But from my point of view, oh, my God, such a relief. Because it's just
not that I'm mind obviously, because it is, you know, just conferences in general are fun.
They're useful for work now for me as well. But you know, if I if I had the choice between,
do I want to fly to Miami? Or do I want to fly to Dubai? That was what I went to before Bedford.
Or do I just want to sit on a train going through the British countryside for a couple of hours and
read a book? And you know, I know more importantly, actually, get the train like walk 10 minutes to
the train. No security. No. So that was that was lovely from my point of view. But very good
conference. So yeah, it's I'm sure they're going to do it again, given how successful that one was.
Yeah. And I'd never been to Bedford. No. So that was also a very good excuse to go lovely place.
Oh, yeah, I was we were planning on trying to go to it. And then the whole had a had a baby thing.
And so he's a little too young to travel right now. But but yeah, I'm definitely going to try to go
next year. It just looked like all the programming that Danny and Peter were posting on the What
Bitcoin did channel afterwards was just great. Like I went through all that felt like I was there.
And just awesome conversations. And I I'd like the fact that it seemed there were a ton of people
for whom it was their first Bitcoin conference, which is cool. Yeah. Like that. I think that's
a neat that's a neat thing. Like it's not always the case at depending on the the type or the scale
of a conference. It's like cost as well. I would have thought that's actually it's really interesting.
You mentioned that I probably want to thought of this myself that that tends to be quite well
correlated with how much I enjoy it on the basis that, you know, obviously, you can always just
watch the talks afterwards, right? It's never this is kind of cliche, right? For anyone who's
been to probably more than two or three that you don't go to see the talks. Maybe to some extent,
you go to see your Twitter friends who otherwise, you know, you don't really have an excuse to see
in real life. But I think the the main thing, at least for me, what I always find by far the most
enjoyable is just meeting new people who aren't my Twitter friends. And, you know, this is their
only real excuse to get involved in this kind of thing. And I do tend to find that now that I've
been involved for long enough and, you know, beaten to enough of them that the bigger the
conferences tends to be very closely connected with how commercial it is, which tends to be connected
with how expensive it is. And it just ends up drawing a different kind of a crowd, whereas this
one was very purposefully, you know, very accessible, basically. And so, yeah, by far, my
favorite part was just hanging out with plebs. That was that was great. It was the first time I
done that in a while, too. Yeah, that's nice. Also, quick pause. I think your mic is picking up some
tapping on your desk. It's just a hoax up. I think that's me. I'm just doing that instinctal.
No, no, no, no, it's okay. And I like the instinct. Don't don't throttle your instincts. Let them
let them run wild. I was on my standing desk. So I'm kind of like, I did it a bit.
No, no, no, no, you're good. You're good to go. I honestly, the most that I sit down during the
day is usually for if I'm interviewing somebody, I've got my very nice fiat chair, you know, that
was like built in China, ordered on Amazon. But I fucking love my standing desk. I started, I put
a little, a little walking pad, like one of those like treadmills that only goes like a few miles
an hour. And they're like, again, made in China and on Amazon. That's cool. But I put it, it's
honestly nice because it's like, I've got a lot of fiat work meetings during the day where I need
to, I need to still be at my computer. But I don't want to just be static standing the whole time.
And I definitely don't want to be sitting the whole time. So I'm like, Oh, well, you know, I'll
just start walking. And I find myself it's like a couple hours of meetings and you've walked miles,
miles, which is kind of like, it's kind of cool. It's not quite as based as the Steven Lubca,
walking outside for every meeting. But also I don't live in Florida. So I don't have that,
you know, beautiful weather 365 by the window, surely, or even just in the garden, just set up
the desk in the garden. Honestly, I hadn't thought about bringing the, bringing the pad outside.
There's, there's something like a little bit sad though, about like being like walking outside
on a treadmill. It's somehow, I don't know, I don't know why it just feels like it'd be a little bit
wrong. I can't quite, I can't put my finger on why it's wrong, but it just feels wrong.
I'm sure there's, we'll ask Steven about this because he'll definitely have looked into it.
There must be a kind of an equivalent to a standing desk, but where it attaches to you.
So it's like, it like latches onto your hips or something. And then you can actually just walk
around. I think it was Steven, who was actually telling me about some guy who did this and he
like did it as part of like a fairly, you know, scientific study about productivity and had,
had basically made like a harness that he could put his laptop on, but that he could walk outside
with that harness, you know, tapping away. But that also, that just seems like, that seems so
cumbersome. Like if you just got the phone, great. If you just need to have some air pods in and
you're walking around talking, fantastic. But having like the, you look like this kind of like
a guy who's like trying to live in the future. If you've got your laptop like strapped to you,
it's like, Oh no, this is the future baby. You know, but you're, but you're not like quite there.
You're not fully, you're only like partially on the way to being a biotic man. It's like,
I think you need, you need like AR goggles to complete that look. Yeah. Yeah. As ridiculous as
possible to anyone who happens to see you, assuming you're not just in your own garden.
Yeah. And you know, speaking of AR goggles, there's been so much
flak against Apple lately that I've seen. Like I saw, you know, they launched their new commercial
or just, yeah, I think just in general, because the, the vision pro, I think, I mean, the fact that
it's so expensive and I'm, you know, I don't know what their sales numbers are on it. I hadn't looked
into it that deeply, but I'm sure they probably still sold out of it like everywhere because
it's still Apple and people will buy their products no matter what, because the legacy of Steve Jobs
still lives on. Like I feel like there's still like coasting on, on the coattails of, of Steve Jobs
to a certain extent, but, but it's funny, like how long you can do that. And like the difference in,
in sort of management styles from like a Steve Jobs to a Tim Cook, who Tim Cook is very much,
I think maybe more like your typical kind of MBA CEO, like coming in and I'm just not going to rock
the boat too much. If, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, which is, you know, still,
obviously they're an incredibly valuable company still. They're not going anywhere for some time.
Probably won't be around forever, but none of us will. But I don't know, it's, it's interesting to
think about like, once you become, once you're no longer the upstart and you become the, the
institutional option, how that kind of changes you as an organization. And if you can ever really,
if it's even possible to retain that kind of upstart outsider mentality that they got you to
where you are in the first place, because, you know, like think different, that was their whole
thing. And now it's kind of like, doesn't seem to have been a ton of different thinking recently
there. I don't know if you've tried the Vision, Vision Pro. I mean, they, it's weird to me,
they need to be like plugged in most of the time. Like the, we got an Oculus Quest, like a couple
years ago, like beginning of the pandemic fairly soon after they came out and pretty much like
used it for like, like Carla did a lot of beat saber on it as like an exercise, which is just
like hilarious to watch, you know, you walk into a room and somebody's swinging around. But it didn't
seem like what they did was a huge like 10X on top of that. You know, I don't know, maybe again,
maybe again, just biased and I'm like, I don't want to spend four or five grand or whatever it
was on this thing to have me strapped into VR world. But maybe I'm just a boomer.
I'm actually kind of, I'm relatively militant in my, that's the best way of putting this,
being opposed to certainly not all, but a lot, maybe most of the, the norm, certainly the,
whatever the trend is and let's say consumer tech, that's probably the best way of putting it,
that I'm kind of, to be honest, a lot of it is, is sort of ironic hipstery approach of like,
well, which is very Bitcoinery thing to, you know, attitude to adult. I think, well, this is very,
this is norm-ish. This is, therefore it's fiat. Therefore I have to, I have to ignore it at least
for now, but no, I mean, I'd like to think there is a semi-serious undertone to it that I don't
like getting so, especially with, with like VR and AR, I just, I find it honestly kind of creepy.
I don't want to be that disconnected from reality. I want actual reality, right? I don't want
virtual reality, which is in, that's a very hipster thing to say, obviously. There's nothing
insightful here. There's nothing, there's nothing novel. I didn't come up with any of these thoughts
of my own, but I do, I do get kind of creeped out by, by a lot of it. And it's interesting too,
because that's back to your, your original question about Apple, that as far as I'm aware, that is
pretty much the only new, you know, or like, meaningfully new, as opposed to just an iteration,
you know, product that they've had in a long time. And then, well, what I alluded to though,
because I don't know if your audience will know this yet, that, do you want to describe the commercial
that just came out, which I only saw like a few hours ago. I think it was yesterday. I don't know
when you were going to release this, but yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe I should, okay. So, you know,
I could probably just play the video, but again, you know, better, it's like always better to
describe why a joke is funny to tell it. So I'll just describe it. Basically, they've got all of
these different, they've got a piano and video cameras and all paint buckets and, and easels
with art on them and all sorts of little odds and ends inside this giant hydraulic hydraulic press,
like really large hydraulic press room sized, and it just starts slowly going down and crushing
absolutely everything. And lo and behold, at the end, you know, paint squirts out,
oh, very beautiful, a little bit of paint spatter on the camera. Wow. And then, and then what's
underneath, but it's, it's the new iPad pro and it's the thinnest iPad they've ever made,
but also the most powerful because it has the new M2 chip in it. And imagine what people are
going to create with this new iPad. And it's like, okay, like it's not a, not a horrible ad.
I mean, I don't know, I think it's horrible ad. Like, I thought it was, well, no, but I thought it
was visually, I thought it was visually at least kind of interesting. I don't think that the ad
itself was like, like it wasn't incredibly creative. It's like, okay, we get it, you're pressing it all
down into one thing and it's a, it's hydraulic press and they can compact anything down and,
you know, like, yes, I, like, I get it. I get, I get what you're going for. I, I, I don't,
I didn't hate it simply because I thought, again, like visually, like it's cool to watch stuff get
crushed. Like there's something that was, it's like, that's neat. Like I like watching, you know,
hydraulic presses, try to like crush different things and seeing how they react. Like, that's
cool, except they probably didn't actually have a hydraulic press.
What do you do on a M2 when you're in a fiat work meeting, you're not really paying attention to it?
Yeah, it's, it's like, what's going to happen in that coke can? Like, well, how flat is it going to get?
Or like you see with, depending on the, the density of the metal that the press is using and
the density of the object, like you can use certain, like, tungsten and titanium balls or
whatever that will like break the press itself, which is even more satisfying. But I mean, it
wasn't, it wasn't great. It was a pretty predictable, like predictable ad, but why did you hate it?
I'm curious. Okay, so I think, keep in mind, this is only like a few hours old for me.
Yeah. So, and again, I think there's only a day or two old, as of when we're recording this.
Even more layers may dawn on me at some point or I may read even more criticism of it. Because
that's another interesting thing that I, I saw it in, or I kind of consumed it in an odd way,
because I had seen so many tweets dunking on it before I actually watched it. And
I guess I just thought like there's no way, they all just seemed so extreme in their disparagement,
all these tweets that I thought, they must be exaggerations, right? It can't possibly be that
bad. And then I eventually did watch it. It's like, oh no, it is actually that bad. It's so,
so, okay, but why is it bad? So I think it, I definitely, there's more than one reason why
it's bad. This, I'm not even sure where to start. So on the surface, they, it seems like they clearly
didn't recognize what the alternative interpretations of this were going to be. So I agree with your
description as to like, that's what they were probably going for. And, and crushing stuff is
kind of cool, you know? Yeah, it's kind of cool. But they didn't, there's so many things that they
seemingly nobody picked up on. Like everything they're destroying is not only a creative tool,
but a physical creative tool. It's, it's something that you manipulate in the real world and you
have real control over as an artist, say. Whereas what they're, so they're destroying that in order
to create this basically read only like slab of metal that this trillion dollar corporation
can cut off your access to at any moment. They, they, they, they seemingly didn't pick up that
that would be, I would actually argue a more obvious interpretation than the literal one that
you gave. But then that lends itself to, so this is what I mean when there's like layers to how
bad it is that Apple is a huge or it's like one of the biggest companies in the world. I don't
know who, I don't really know anything about how these ads get made, but I'm sure that it was an
ad agency that did it and, but basically how many people didn't sign, like sign or sorry,
did sign off, didn't object. How many people had the opportunity to say what I just said?
And I don't know, we're just like scare chitless of their boss or, you know, didn't want to go,
I, we're aware of how much money had been spent on this already. I don't, like, again, I don't
know what the process is of making these things, but I think that reflects even more poorly on
Apple than how bad the commercial is. Like how it's made is worse than how bad it is. And there's
again, there's probably more layers that I haven't had time to think of yet, but it's so bad. It's
so, so bad. You know, that is a really interesting point just about like kind of the, like, viewed
through another lens, like, wow, it's kind of like dark and tragic. It's like we are literally,
we are literally crushing all of these physical, creative tools. Like we are, we are destroying
them. One of the tweets I wanted to just like recite all of them, but there's one of them that
I think in hindsight, I agreed with the most, even though I read it first, that it's a good bookend to,
they use that exact expression. It's a good bookend to the 1984 one, which I'm sure, you know, I'm sure
most of the audience knows. Yeah. Just in terms of the, how would you put it, I forget how the tweet
put it, the themes, I guess, or like the imagery that in the 1984 one, and I think it goes back to
your point about, you know, they used to be the upstart and now they're the monolith and there's
no, there's no kind of, I don't know, upstarting left to do. Oh, do you want to play it?
Yeah, yeah. We can offer live commentary now. It's like, oh, it's, you know, it starts out kind of
nice. And then here's the fucking hydraulic press. Trumpets first to go. Actually, yeah,
if I, if I comment over this, this will probably make the point. In the 1984 one, the
everything that is being destroyed is kind of the, the tone of the hero, I guess, you know,
what Apple is supposed to represent, right? They embody that kind of color and vibrancy and
creativity and blah, blah, blah. And what they're opposing is, I think, well, it's not exact, it
does map perfectly, but it's the eyeballs. The eyeballs. Yeah. What they're opposing is very
nicely characterized by this hydraulic press. And it's just gray, dull, but also ominous and
powerful. And they've just completely reversed what Apple is representing in all of this. It
would seem and it's almost like, okay, well, that, you know, that chapter is over. And in a sense,
we're over. It's like, Apple's done now. Apple's something else. It's not, it's not Steve Jobs'
anymore. Yeah. And just in case like you wanted to know, like literally the eyeballs popping out
at the end, it's like, you're dead. Like that, that, that, that's kind of, that's, it's just like,
that's death. It's a surprised face and then dead. Like, you know, I'm glad we were able to offer some,
some color commentary over this, this colorful video. And you know, I, you know what, I, I, I
miss the old, I miss the Apple dunking days, just like dunking on Microsoft. Oh, the one with the
two guys with the name of Justin Mac. Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant concept. Worked well. Stuck with people,
stuck with me to today. It's like, I'm not, I'm not that fucking nerd. Like no way. Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly. I mean, not just in long either. Remember, remember that one. Exactly. But yeah. Well,
I mean, maybe this is just, maybe this is a, a symptom of, of just the,
the, some of you talk about, about a lot of just like misallocation of capital. Like, I wonder how
much, I wonder how much that costs them to make presumably a shitload of money. Cause everything
I didn't set this up.
Really, it's, it is. Well, I think, I think that's kind of, I think this is torturing that point
a little bit. This is just wasting money. It's not exactly the same thing. I don't think.
Yeah. You know, but you, you could have, you could have made that same, you could have probably
made a stronger impression that wasn't vilified as much by those watching it and didn't potentially
make such like a weirdly negative implied cultural statement by going back to something
really simple. Like, I think, I think a lot of, a lot of brands that have done that, like,
I'll take for example, my good old fashioned Miller light, my, my favorite perfectly balanced
light beer. I'm from Wisconsin and the United States. So I, it's, you know, grew up with this
stuff, but they went back to their like original design can a number of years ago and, and just
kept that they'd gone to some, you know, new, like fancy silvery kind of.
Oh yeah. And they just say, well, the logo as well.
Yeah. That's something that's going around.
But then they were like, the number of years ago, they're like, what if we just went back and did
the really cool old original design? We don't have, we don't have to hire a team for this.
Holy shit.
Yeah. Like we don't have to do anything new for this. We just go back to what it was. And people
are like, Oh yeah, cool. Like this is the Miller, my dad would drink. This is, I like this. This
resonates with me. And yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting to see like,
like, there seems to be this urge for companies to try and like reinvent or to, to change themselves
without actually doing any meaningful change. Like this is Apple trying to show that like,
Oh, look, look at, look at how new this is. But like, there's no reinvention here. There's no,
there's nothing entirely creative here. Like it's cool that you were able to compress all this
stuff down into a super thin tablet. Awesome. But like, this isn't like earth shattering. This
isn't a 10 X from any of their previous tablets. Like they're all pretty darn good. I've got an
older Apple tablet here. And it isn't definitely not as powerful as the new one, but like it
fucking works. I don't know. Like, like, where do you think this like is again, this just like a
symptom of late stage fiat, where it's like, we're, we're out of all the, the, these companies are
out of all the good innovative ideas. And it's just like, well, let's just kind of cosmetically
change things and pretend like we're super innovative, but without actually doing anything
innovative at all. Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. To be honest, it doesn't strike me
as that much of a fiat thing. It might be. Maybe if I thought about it for longer, I could come up
with a good article on it. I think it might be actually, I think it might be more linked to
social media and would you call it like a news cycle, something like that? And just in terms of
how companies feel they need to advertise, there might be something there. I'm just, this is just
coming to me right now. I don't have a, like a grand theory around this or anything, but
not yet. The way you described the thing with Miller Lite, that got me thinking that,
you know, a lot of the same principles you would think ought to apply to Apple, probably ought to
apply to any large, like very large company with a distinctive brand that at the end of the day,
well, maybe this doesn't quite work for Apple because they are a bit more kind of tech oriented,
but certainly for some of like Miller Lite, where the product is basically commoditized,
right? There's, there's not like a secret sauce or anything in it. Their, their value at as a
company really just is in the brand itself. You would think that protecting the brand ought to be
a focus and almost like there should be a bit of a Lindy effect. I would imagine, you know,
the longer that it's been around, the more powerful the brand becomes. Whereas it seemed, and I
think correct me if I'm wrong, because I, you know, I only just learned this example from you now that
maybe Miller went through, or whoever owns Miller, I don't know, I'm sure there's like a multinational
conglomerate parent company or something. But they maybe went through this before and then realized
how bad an idea it was that they feel pressured to constantly remake the brand just to keep up with,
I don't even know, just because I kind of think it's fake in the first place. So I'm not really
sure what to link it to, but shorter and shorter attention spans, let's say, you know, the, the
their, their presumption, because I don't even know if it's true. I hope it's not true, but
their presumption that their audience, that they're advertising to is itself constantly
changing and constantly looking for a new thing, because there's finally coming full circle to
where this, where this idea came from, because the way it's presented on social media, you know,
like the doom scrolling and the, the algorithm and all that makes it seem that way, when in fact,
it's just beer, it is the beer your dad drank, right? Like, why do you need anything more than
that? Why do you need to, why do you need to change everything and confuse everybody? No, I think
I'll tell my head that's my best idea. No, no, I would agree with that. And I think that there's
generally like this appetite to like that companies assume that people always want the new, like
that something has to be new and be fresh. And, and, and it always has, you know, to make a big
splash in, you know, and like, you know, you, you go to the other extreme of that, which is like
the, you know, Bud Light just self-immolating. Like, like, like they really, really were trying
to push that like really trying to lean into, you know, like I support the current thing versus
like, you know what, maybe people just said that logo. That would have been a great, like,
honestly, really great campaign. Like, like Bud Light, I support the current thing,
especially if it was a little tongue in cheek. It would have been amazing. Actually,
I'm surprised nobody thought of this if whoever, but I mean, maybe Miller Light, I don't know,
but whoever Bud Light's most obvious competitor is had immediately come out with an I support the
current thing campaign. That would have been hilarious. I'm disappointed that whoever didn't,
that nobody did that as far as I'm aware. Well, right. And I think it's because most
marketing agencies, whether they be in-house or external are not very based. I think that would
be, I think that'd be a fair generalization. That suggests that it's just even more of an
opportunity though. Right. I don't know. And I said a couple of answers ago. I don't know how that
industry works. Yeah. Well, you know, I could pontificate about Miller Light's branding and
Bud Light's self-immolation all day, but I also, I want to dig into a little more.
It's the Miller Light episode. Yeah, this is a...
It's deemed highly knowledgeable guest. Maybe they will...
...has come on to ignorantly opine.
I love it. And you know, maybe Miller Light will sponsor another fucking Bitcoin podcast
after this. That'll be when I know I've made it, when I'm just getting pallets of Miller Light
to learn as part of a sponsorship gig. That'd be just sweet.
I'd like to take a quick break from Miller Light to remind you to get your Bitcoin off exchanges.
Head to bitbox.swiss.com, slash Walker, and use promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source
Bitcoin only, Bitbox O2 hardware wallet. Then again, get your Bitcoin off the exchanges and
into your own self-custody. The Bitbox O2 is truly easy as hell to use, whether you are brand new
to Bitcoin just starting out or you are a well-seasoned psychopath, and this is like your
12th hardware wallet. Again, it is Bitcoin only. And again, it is fully open source. You can head
to their GitHub and you can verify that for yourself. There is no need to trust me. Plus,
when you go to bitbox.swiss.com, slash Walker, and use promo code Walker, not only do you get 5%
off the Bitbox O2, but you also help support this fucking podcast. So thank you. I'll take it back a
step because I like to ask this question in a very general open-ended way and you can take it
any way you want because that is the nature of this question, which is just who are you and how
did you get here today? And again, any way you want to take that, any link that you want to, I
know. Yeah, you can get as literal or figurative as you want with that. I could give as stupid and
annoying an answer to this as I want. Absolutely. Okay, I'll give a more straightforward answer.
And if it's not entertaining enough, you can chastise me and we can come back and I can
get something more out there. Who am I? So I...
Okay, here's a fun way of putting it. It is literally true, but it gives you avenues to poke.
I'm a mole or maybe even a plant from TradFi and I've kind of fallen into Bitcoin and they just
stayed. So yeah, so I worked in TradFi. I worked for a big asset management firm for a very long
time. It's the only adult job I've ever had in the sense of like I got it straight after I graduated
from college from undergrad. And while I was in college, I had like minimum wage gigs, flipping
burgers and parking cars and that kind of thing. But this is like real job. And yeah, over the course
of me being there, got more and more... I knew about Bitcoin when I joined actually, just wasn't at all
relevant to my job and got more and more into it while it got closer and closer to becoming
relevant to my job. And when it finally did, everything basically happened very quickly
in the sense that as soon as I had exposure to it professionally, which was many, many years
after I'd had pretty significant exposure, well I say exposure. I don't mean financial exposure,
I mean more like time dedicated to thinking about it seriously. And yeah, as soon as I had that on
the job, I basically realized like this is way more fun than my real job. I want to do this all
the time. And so I don't know if your audience may or may not actually know this because most of what
I do on Twitter is just kind of generic shitposting rather than any meaningful promotion. But about
two, almost exactly two years ago actually, I left to set up a company that is basically just a VC
firm. I mean, we have ambitions to do other more exciting finance stuff with Bitcoin. But
the VC component is sort of how we pay the bills for now.
Now, I love it. I like the idea of you as a plant. You know, you're like a recovering,
recovering, trad-fi holic. You go to a trad-fi anonymous. Yeah, exactly. I am Alan. I was a
trad-fi for seven years, been clean for two. I love it. And I think that that's, you see a good amount
of that in Bitcoin. And I think that the number of recovering trad-fi addicts will only increase.
Like that is NGU technology as well. But I think perhaps like there's a, I'm curious,
did you see a, when you were still at your old firm, did you have other colleagues who were
as open to Bitcoin as you were? Definitely. Yeah. There's quite a few things I could say there. So
one is that the co-author of Bitcoin is Venice when we turned into a book, Sasha. He's, I mean,
he's just one of my best friends anyway. He was a groomsman at my wedding. We met because we joined
that job at the same time. We were part of the same intake in 2015. So it was quite a while ago.
He's obviously always been very open to it. He's just, he's nowhere near, I guess it's just
a bit more kind of private and shy than me. So he's never really found it appealing to,
you know, shitpost as much as I do. I mean, he has Twitter and he's, he sends some bangers
every now and then. I do my best to reach with him, but he just doesn't really care. Like he
doesn't have any interest in trying to self promote, I guess. But yeah, I mean, he was interested in it
clearly, you know, enough to want to co-write a book. So, so that was good. I mean, the other
point worth making, I've said this before, I'm not trying to be, you know, secretive about it in
any way either. It's just that I really like my former employer. I didn't, I didn't rage quite.
It wasn't like, ah, finally I can, well, it was a little bit of finally I can now do Bitcoin stuff.
But everybody understood that they're far too big for it to make sense to do it there. So that was
kind of the, the rationale for leaving. And I don't think anyone was really that surprised.
They were just happy for me, very, very supportive. But what, so this is a super interesting thing.
I get, I've mentioned this a little bit in, in kind of in public before. But I think you'll
enjoy diving into this that they, they just, they as a company, not so much any individuals,
but their investment philosophy is very, I wouldn't say it's pro Bitcoin. It's not that
strong, but it's, it aligns very nicely with Bitcoin, which helped in a bunch of ways. I mean,
I actually think it helped me appreciate Bitcoin more, to be honest. It wasn't the biggest influence
on me, but it was more, it was a bit more circuitous than that maybe in that their investment philosophy,
which I, I don't want to say I just swallowed it without, you know, without any critical analysis
of my part, but I believed in it for the most part, like I appreciated it. And that was the lens
through which I learned finance at large, both in theory and, you know, the kind of more practically,
like how the industry works. And then that lent itself to Bitcoin very nicely. So that's, that's
one component. I think just an obvious manifestation of that though, is that at the level of individuals
rather than the company as a whole, yeah, there's, there's plenty of people who are, who are totally
open to it, which was really nice. I mean, they, there was no one who's anywhere near as involved
as me, probably unsurprisingly. So typically they would kind of defer to me on anything more
in depth, but yeah, there's a good, there's a good cohort of people. And yeah, I'm still,
I'm still in touch with most of them actually. And it's quite funny because it's, you know, the whole,
the whole premise in some sense, like definitely part of our thesis, let's say at Axiom is just
that it's going to become more and more normalized, right? It's obviously very niche now, but if we're
even vaguely right, it's going to get, but not just in price, but in terms of, I'd say more
interesting angles of like how it gets embedded in other technology, how it becomes socially
normalized and so on and so forth. But that, to the extent that's true, it has an obvious consequence
in terms of what they see as investable opportunities. So every now and then, they, you know, someone
there will reach out just to see what I think about something because it's, it's come across their desk
for the first time. So yeah, there's a short answer. Yes, many people were interested and it was very,
it's very, very healthy environment to discuss these things and helpful for me as well.
That's, I mean, it's good to hear. I'm sure that's probably the case at a lot of these types of firms,
certainly maybe not a majority of them, but I don't disagree, but I think it's probably
rarer than you would think. And this all, this ties together a few things. I said just a moment
ago actually in kind of an amusing way that one of the parts of their, I wouldn't even say their
investment philosophy, it's not so much to do with, you know, rationale for choosing investments. If
anything, it's a bit more kind of marketing oriented than that. It's like their propaganda in a way
that, you know, how they, how they conceive of themselves, which I think is for the most part
true. And it's also something, you know, as I mentioned before, it resonated with me and influenced
how I came to think about the financial industry or the traditional financial industry. Without,
I'll keep it kind of high level for now. We can go into more detail if you want, but without those
details, one way you can think about that propaganda is that they set themselves up as very opposed to
like almost the entire rest of the industry in a way that just be clear has nothing whatsoever
to do with Bitcoin. It's just, well, okay, no, sorry, that's not quite right. It's nothing explicit
to do with Bitcoin, but the, the tenets on which it is based are shockingly aligned with Bitcoin. So
it's that, I mean, this isn't official just to be clear. This is just like kind of marketing.
They don't write this down anywhere, but the, the rest of the industry is alarmingly short termist,
right? And as their contrast is that, you know, they're very long term, they think over very long.
They don't use the word or the expression time preference, but frankly, they may as well.
They're focused on metrics that don't really matter because they're too reflexive. And hence
they're, they're ultimately, when you unwind them, they're really just pointing at speculation
rather than actual investment. So in the sense of gauging the viability of the investments in ways
that if you kind of push to an extreme, almost have nothing to do with the actual company that
you're talking about, it's like just the price. And, and actually now I'm thinking, I've never,
I've never made exactly this point before, but now I'm thinking about a lot of these criticisms
or a lot of the, what is being criticized kind of in, you'd have to caricature it a little bit,
but it would certainly apply to shitcoins as well. Like the entire, the entire attitude and kind of
almost disgust and resentment is, it was very similar to, you know, I think also rubbed off
on me and probably made it easier for me to cut through the noise there and, and, and, and, you
know, expect going crypto to be clear and realize that, yeah, the people who are talking about this
stuff don't actually care. Like you can tease out from the way they're talking about it. They don't
care about the, the underlying alleged cause of this value, right? It's just, it's like a common
dump or whatever changes from one circumstance to the next. But anyway, sorry, yeah, where, what made
me think of all of this is that the fact that they set themselves up that way, and you know,
I jokingly refer to it as propaganda, I guess culture would be maybe like a nicer way of putting
it. That's probably what they call it. First of all, I know for sure is quite unusual, but also
I think I completely coincidentally, because obviously none of this is about Bitcoin,
rubbed off on me in a very helpful way given the path I've now gone down. But I, I really can't
imagine being the case or, or anything like it being the case at that many other institutions,
at least of comparable size, because it's quite a big company. It's not huge, but it's, it's up there
in terms of the, the amount of assets that they, they manage, you know, like in dollar terms. So
I don't think that many people will have had a similar experience. I would imagine, and actually
I have heard this from, from quite a few people. I wouldn't like dox anybody on the show, but
quite a few people have reached out to me over the years basically saying, you know, who also work
in TradFi. And I was just like, I just, I just hate it. Like everyone's, well, but they probably
wouldn't say everyone's an idiot, but more along the lines of the culture is so
contrary to what they have now come to value because of Bitcoin.
Is that a, I mean, really it seems that what you're, what you're kind of picking at there is a,
is a question of ultimately morality in many ways. Is that fair to say? Because I mean,
when you talk about things like short-term, like really short-term, true speculation,
now we can, we can debate whether, you know, everything is speculation in some way, right?
If you're trying to pursue a, a profit in an uncertain environment, like, yeah,
there's a certain amount of speculation involved in everything. But when we're talking about just
like people who are knowingly promoting, propagating, creating various vehicles, whether
this is in the TradFi world or the shit coin world, that, yeah, as you said, you can tell,
by the way that they talk about them, that they don't actually believe their own bullshit.
They're saying what, they're saying what they think you need to hear. And, and, but you also,
if you are mildly intelligent, know that they're kind of full of shit, but you're like, well,
I'm going to kind of go along with this because I know that I'm going to at least
make some money off of this because the next round of people that comes along, they're,
they're going to have no idea. Like, I'm, you know, there's still dumb money that I can dump this on.
Like, versus this kind of longer term thinking, I'm not just trying to,
not just trying to flip things. I'm not just trying to figure out what's the next,
the next scheme or the next idea that I can use to make a quick buck and then turn that into
something else. I'm trying to think about the long haul and what are actually productive,
valuable, valuable, meaningful investments. Like to me, a lot of that comes back to, and maybe
morality is too general of a term to use, but that kind of seems to be what it, what it hints at.
And maybe that seems too like, oh, you know, we're more moral in our investing.
But, but I think that there's, I think there's something there. I mean, is that,
is that kind of the sense that you have or, or is it just purely from a pragmatism standpoint?
Not exactly, but I think there's a lot of really good material here to draw. So one thing that
is quite funny. I'll just mention this in passing is that again, back to the, the propaganda around
the, around the firm, they did enjoy somewhat tongue-in-cheek playing this up in the sense that,
you know, oh, well, we're doing is actually good. I don't think they'd ever go as far as say, oh,
everyone else is bad, but it's, it's implied, right? Right. That is, that is kind of funny.
I think it's actually, it's, it's a little bit more complicated than just whether or not it's
good or, you know, contrasting good and bad, ethically good and bad approaches.
For one reason that's, that's actually quite important even before getting into
my explanation of like my fuller explanation of it. So if you were to think that, I know you're
not putting this forward, but just, you know, hypothetically, probably some people do think
that's actually that. We can pretend that I put it forward. Yeah. If you were to think that you, you
know, your, your choices, your choices to how you're going to invest is, you know, there's a
single dimension of is this good or is this bad? I don't think, I'm struggling to think how exactly
to articulate this. You, it's very, it's very risky lens to take right from the start because
even if you don't mean it, I think it quite strongly suggests and certainly will be interpreted by
others as suggesting that the good or bad dimension, you're, you're choosing to value that more than
the, you know, good or bad as an investment, like financially rewarding or not. So you're deliberately
making not bad investments, but relatively worse investments because you're opting for, you know,
you have like a, an ethical filter, say something like that. So, which I don't think is relevant
at all to this. I think it's, you desperately want to avoid that trap and I won't go too far down this,
this particular rabbit hole, but you, you could also imagine how that very easily leads to ESG
as well because that's right. A bit more blatantly, you know, that is what they're putting forward,
except they're, they're then going the other way where they are in fact making that distinction,
but then they claim they're not. And it, in my opinion, just becomes fraud quite quickly. But
I'll leave that for now. We can go back to whining about ESG if you like. What I think is more important
than just on the face of it is this good or bad is incentives. I think that's the cleanest way of
capturing it. So I do agree that the approach that I described and that is very obviously very
nicely aligned with Bitcoin is more ethically good. I don't think the reason the majority doesn't do
it is that they are ethically bad. It's that the incentives in the industry are such that even if
they are ethically good, you know, whether it's people or they're trying to be ethically good in
their process, whatever that even really means, the incentives they face are such that it's not
impossible to, you know, take this approach, but it's very, very difficult. And hence it doesn't
happen very often at all. And so I think that's a far more interesting place to kind of chip away
at intellectually in terms of wondering, you know, why do we get the outcomes that we do? And
I'll stop here because I'm sure you'll find this funny anyway, but it'll potentially open up many,
many more rabbit holes so you can choose which one you want to go down. But that is very fiat,
right? I have no qualms. You know, before, I was like Apple and Miller and stuff, I was a bit like,
I don't know, that's exactly what he felt like. This is fiat. This is the most fiat thing that
we have talked about so far. And probably that I've ever, you know, ranted about, because I ran
about this particular topic quite a bit. A lot of Treadfy is very, very fiat, but in particular,
this point about what are the incentives as to how you ought to deploy capital.
And maybe, you know, it's a, again, this is a safe space for rants. So never,
never feel that you cannot continue or explore a certain ranting tangent. But maybe this is a good
place to just like as a primer for folks who are either not, perhaps are fairly new to Bitcoin and
maybe kind of new to the rabbit hole of tangential rabbit hole of Austrian economics and, you know,
what many would call like real economics versus this kind of Keynesian fiat economics. Maybe it's
a good idea to just, I would love in your own words, explain it to me like I'm Elizabeth Warren,
for example. This is also my new ELI five. It's just like, explain it like I'm Elizabeth Warren,
because I think it teases out some nice responses. But like, what is capital and what is capitalism?
That's a heavy one. I know. Can I take a break to go and think about it? So, okay, I,
um, I have a, I have a sneaky answer, which is to tell people to go read something.
So I do, first of all, it's a totally unfair question. Like this is really mean. I know,
I know, this way. One of the more recent things that I have written,
um, uh, actually it might be the most recent thing I've written now that I think about it,
because everything else I've just helped edit. But for, for axiom, since axiom has started
putting out material, uh, is an essay called, uh, capital in the 21st century. So we won't go find
that if they're interested. You don't have to go read it, but it, it is probably the best answer to
this. And it's not too long. I think it's maybe like five, six pages, something like that. Um,
it's like short, short for you. Now that I've committed to it. Um, but it starts off with
exploring exactly this question and then linking it to, you know, having established what I think
is a reasonable answer, like a good working answer, linking it to money and then linking it to Bitcoin.
And so I'll try to give a, a summary of that argument in answer to, to your question. So
I think then the nicest way that I have come across to describe capital, uh, was provided by an
economist called Hernando de Soto, who interestingly is not an Austrian. I think he'd probably call
himself like a neoclassical economist. Um, but he wrote a book which I highly, highly recommend.
It's probably one of the, one of the economics books I recommend the most. And it's probably one of the
only like explicitly non Austrian ones. Uh, the book's called the mystery of capital, uh, which is
where I got this, um, definition, I guess it's kind of more of a, it's not really very rigorous.
It's more almost romantic in a way. It's kind of an image. Like this is exactly what I say at the
start of the, the start of the essay, but he, uh, he, he refers to capital as economic potential
energy, which I really, really like as an, as an image. I think it, it obviously it's not, you
know, I'm interested in it. It's not rigorous at all. It doesn't really, you, I think you do have
to have a little bit of understanding already to, to apply this. Um, but it lends itself very nicely
to more involved thoughts about, you know, things like capital misallocation. And again, exactly as
I do in the essay, how it then links to, to money and so on, but to just, to tease it out a little
bit further, it's time that you have decided to put into producing rather than consuming,
but which you have, you know, the product of which has not itself been fully consumed yet. So
it's like you're storing up the time, uh, in, in potential to then be really, there's a couple
of things I like about it is it partly the, you know, how it forces you to think about time.
It's very Austrian thing, right? Um, also, I think if you push it a bit further, how it forces you
to think about human action and, and, you know, the role of, of acting minds, because it's not just
that, oh, it gets stored up and then it starts like decaying or something. I know this is all a
metaphor anyway, but you know, that's not part of how you're supposed to understand the metaphor.
Yeah. You store it up such that you can then purposefully release it when you choose in the
future. Um, and so yeah, I really like how I don't know that really answers the question at all.
No, no, no, it doesn't. I think that's actually, I think that that's a useful lens and I know that
people get really hung up sometimes on like even described like when, when, uh, somebody, you know,
like Sailor system, like Bitcoin is digital energy and people are like, well, no, it's not.
Um, and it's like, yes, correct. It's, it's, it's not, this is, this is a way of, this is a lens
through which to think it because none of us really fucking understands every single aspect of Bitcoin
and what it is and what it can be. Uh, and at the same time we need, we are, you know, mildly
intelligent apes and we need a way to figure out how to a lens through which to look at the world,
which is useful for us to kind of paint a picture and people, you know, learn to understand things
in different ways. And so I think these metaphors like, like is capital just potential energy,
literally like Alan, you know, and it's like, well, no, but this is a way to think about it.
Right. So I think that that is useful and to speak to the time, the time component, which I
is a really necessary piece here. I think that that's also that obviously perfectly
bleeds into okay, well, if you are saving this potential energy, this, uh, time that can be
basically deployed at a later, at a later stage, well, you want the, uh, the time decay to be as
minimal as possible. Or is your ideally, you'd want that, you'd want it to be negative, right?
You'd want, you'd want it to grow, uh, to, uh, to have the ability to purchase more time in this
way with that potential energy in the future. And that's why fiat is such a destructive tool,
because it's actively, it has this massive time decay function, which is saying that the longer
you are holding on to that potential energy, the more it decays, the less power it has when you
go to deploy it in the future. And actually, no, I tweaked that slightly just to, to emphasize
the human component, the less ability you have to wield it the way you want to.
Okay. Cause that actually, that's interesting. Cause that, that can potentially bleed into a
couple other effects of just like one can even think of the, the custody aspect of fiat and
fact that, you know, you can't self custody fiat unless it's literally under your mattress.
Like you can't digitally self custody fiat. It's not possible. It's always,
it's always controlled by someone else. I don't mean to move too far away from the,
the capital point, but this seems like a natural enough segue that one of my favorite tricks for,
I would say orange pilling people. Like no one's convinced just by having this pointed out, but
confusing normies, let's say it like, you hope that you say this and then five years later,
they do actually get orange pill. But this was the start of it, but really drilling down on
what fiat money even is, because most people have no idea. And I think part of the problem is that
I'm not part of the problem. Part of the issue that you then untangle when you do this. And
like if you, if you have this conversation with people is that what I mean in answer to that,
I think is that kind of a more philosophical level than they've probably ever thought about it. So,
so my answer is it's a commercial bank liability. That's what fiat money is. And it's, it's purely
conceptual. It has no physical existence. To some extent, it's like an entry in a ledger,
but even that is like the actual ledger's digital. So it doesn't, it's not super helpful, but
so that's, it's, it's a bit, yeah, it's a bit kind of conceptual. It's a bit, it's a bit abstract.
In part, the problem I think is that, you know, people don't tend to think about
really anything that way. Nevermind, nevermind money. So that's a bit of a leap to like nudge them
in this like, oh, but what is it really kind of thing. But once they get over that, once they sort
of accept the framing I'm going for, it's really interesting just just sort of seeing them realize
that they've never thought about this, that they, they didn't actually have any idea. And obviously
there's loads of great like directions you can go in. There's loads of cool ways you can tease that
out. Like, you know, oh, you have, this was the point that you made that made me think of it,
you know, you don't actually have any control, right? You think you do, but there's, it's kind
of even weirder than that. It's not even really equivalent, I don't think to, I don't know,
like a custodial lightning wallet or something, or just like, you know, Bitcoin and Coinbase.
It's not like they have control, not you. You actually, when you insist on being as philosophical
as possible, you're like, there isn't even a thing to control. It's not that they don't have
control is that like barely exists. Like it's just a promise from them, you know.
Yeah, it's, it's so interesting. And you know, maybe this is a, we're just, we're just going to
top a cop here today because I, you know, you say things and they make me think of other things.
And again, this is an open space for Rantz. This, this makes me think of all the, I notice MMT has
come up very much in the, in the public discourse of late because Stephanie Kelton is releasing,
released her new movie and you can buy it for $12.99 on various platforms. And, and so, you know,
that video that was circulating that went super viral. There's a clip from the movie.
You have to pull that up and show it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. If I'm going to
show one, but, but I think in, and while I'm, while I'm pulling this up, maybe what I would ask you is
like, MMT and Bitcoiners in a way kind of have like, like we agree up to a point.
Except, except, except it is, except Bitcoiners look at it as like this absurd thing. Like,
well, why do we pay taxes? We just print, we can just print money and MMT are like, exactly.
Just print the money, you know, like really earnest and then Bitcoiners, it's like, oh Jesus,
you guys are being serious here. Can you talk about how you like, because MMT seems like,
like the pinnacle of fiat, like it's just finally saying out loud, all of the things that have been
true. But instead of saying like, look at how terrible this is, they're like, look at how
wonderful this is for issuers of the currency. I mean, I don't think I can put it much better than
that. That's more or less exactly what I, what I would have said that the reason we agree is because
they give a more or less accurate description of how fiat actually works, which no other
mainstream school of economics dares to do. I guess, and again, you know, I was saying before,
I don't really know anything about advertising. I don't really know anything about academic
economics in terms of the politics of it. I mean, I know the, the, how stupid the material is,
but I don't know how it works on a more of a social level. But I would assume that the reason
it ends up having to be M.M. Tears who do this is probably a combination of most, most people just
don't know, like they've just generally never thought about it. They probably just assume some
kind of vague things about money that they, they think are well defined, but they've never been
pressed on them and realized that they don't actually make any sense. And then maybe there are
a few who do know, but don't dare talk about it because you kind of realized how bad it is. Whereas
M.M. Tears give an accurate description. So Bitcoin are celebrate that they're like, oh my
God, finally someone's actually saying it the way it is. And you know, without all these
nonsensical contortions, but then yeah, you're right at the end of that description, once it
becomes normative, they're like, and this is great. No, did you hear your own description?
What are you talking about? Oh, wait, okay. So I've got this, I've got this pulled up now.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because this is, I mean, it's really amazing. Like I do want to see this
doc. Maybe I'll even give Stephanie Kelton $12.99 for it. Okay, okay, here we go.
The US government can't go bankrupt because we can print our own money.
It obviously begs the question, why exactly are we borrowing in a currency that we print
ourselves? I'm waiting for someone to stand up and say, why do we borrow our own currency in the
first place? Like you said, they print the dollar. So why, why does the government even borrow?
Well, the, so the, I mean, again, some of this stuff gets, some of the language that the MN,
some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money,
and it definitely lends that money, which is why the government definitely prints money,
and then it lends that money by selling bonds. Is that what they do? They, they,
yeah, they, they, they sell bonds. Yeah, they sell bonds, right? Since they sell bonds and people
buy the bonds and lend them the money. Yeah, so a lot of times, a lot of times, at least to my
year with MMT, the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing, but there is no
question that the government prints money, and then it uses that money to, so, yeah, I guess I'm
just, I don't, I can't really talk, I don't, I don't get it. I don't know what they're talking
about, like, because it's like, the government clearly prints money, it does it all the time,
and it clearly borrows, otherwise we wouldn't be having this debt and deficit conversation, so
I don't think there's anything confusing there. Nothing confusing there, except this guy is clearly
so confused. Like, that's the wild thing about this is it's like, this is, this guy is literally
like Biden's, you know, like one of his, what is, is chief economic advisor? Yeah, something like that.
Like, this is just insane. I think it's the end of the caption. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just go back 10 seconds. Yeah, and so, I mean, this is, this is the, this is the wild thing here,
it's like, I saw some people being like, like some Bitcoiners being like, just so you know,
this is an MMT person sharing this video, like we shouldn't be, if you're a great, it's like, no,
no, no, no, it is good that this, like, this is a good thing, this documentary is coming out,
because it sheds light on the absurdity of all this and how even the people in charge of it,
clearly don't, I mean, like, I don't, I don't know, he has no business being,
having economic or advisor anywhere in his title for one thing. And for another, it's just like,
the absurdity of it. Like, if you, I don't know, have you read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton?
No. I have only, I honestly, I feel like I've been bribed enough of this from Twitter. I don't
need to waste any, you know, tie, we know time is scarce. Yeah. I, you know, I have not, I have not
read her book, but I have read many quotes from it. I have also, I have also asked ChatGPT to
summarize it in various ways and to write arguments from an MMT perspectives that I can better understand
that thought process. But like, one of their big things is, is a public sector deficit equals
private sector surplus. So, and their whole thing is, it's this, I mean, it all comes down to hubris
really, because they're like, well, okay, yes, deficits can be good or bad. And she has this one
quote in this TED talk she gave, she's like, a six can become a nine when viewed from a different
angle. And I'm like, are you making a 69 joke? But, but like, it's like, okay, sure, but a six is
still a six and a nine is still not, but anyway, okay, fine, you can have your little, your little,
you know, metaphor. But it's, it's this insane hubris in my opinion, that basically says, well,
yes, you know, the government prints money and it for issue, issuers of the currency, again,
very clear there, you need to be, you know, the United States or the United Kingdom or another
currency issuer for this to work. You just, you don't need to tax more, you just print money to
fund whatever you want. And as long as we put it into the right stuff, then it won't be inflationary,
we just have to pick the right things to invest the money in. And this comes down to the hubris
of central planners. And at a deeper level, I think just like central planning and its failure
and a misunderstanding of subjective value and the fact that all value is subjective.
And this idea that, well, yeah, this group of a few economists and politicians in a back room
can certainly figure out how to, how to perfectly allocate the resources to make the economy just
run, you know, perfect. And like, this is, it's just on its head absurd and, and dripping in hubris.
But I mean, I don't know, do you think this comes down to just like, at this point, they're just
looking for reasons to justify behavior that already exists in the system? Or do these people
genuinely think like, no, this is the answer, we're smart enough, we can figure it out. Like,
we'll just allocate the capital correctly, we just print it out of thin air and that'll create
more value. I don't know. I mean, I think I, I think this ties with the way you introduced the whole
topic in kind of an amusing way that it is interesting that their description is purely the
description is more or less right without whether it's a good idea or not. Right. But well, the
description of how the purely how the process of money creation works, let's say, certainly not
what the consequences are for capital misal... capital misallocation, right? And inflation and,
you know, you said capital misallocation. Yeah, I have to. I can't go on a podcast and not say that.
What I think is really funny though, is that
how can I even put this? Because again, there is a bit of a, like, I'm just guessing at what the,
you know, the politics of the song in terms of the like the social component of these people
as academics. But it does strike me as quite amusing that the fact their description is correct
and that nobody, I mean, other than Bitcoin or two may as well not exist as far as their
concern, that certainly isn't any presence within academic economics for them to compete with.
The fact their description is the only correct one. But that basically what it is correctly
describing is that the monetary system has been more or less communist since at least 1971.
You know, obviously we don't really go through the whole history here, but you could pick other
dates at which it was kind of nudging in that direction, right? It's almost like their argument
is, okay, you know, we have now finally correctly identified how this communist monetary system works.
So can we please just be communist? Like, why are we still arguing about this? I think there's a,
they obviously can't, they can't phrase it that way. Like, they never get away with that. But I
think that is the gist of their argument, which is pretty funny. That's what I appreciate. Like,
you said before, right? Like, people should watch this. It's, you shouldn't try to,
not that any, you know, Bitcoin, Twitter can get it censored or anything, but you shouldn't discourage
people from just letting them talk, right? Just listen to how insane they sound when they talk.
No, I, you know, I have a, I have another question for you. Has real capitalism ever been tried?
We always, you know, all the communes always say, well, real communism's never been tried. Has real
capitalism ever been tried? Yeah, I think so. But my, well, I kind of want to just say that I want
to reject the question more than fair. I go back to like, attempting to answer it honestly.
And the reason I kind of don't want to at all though is that this is probably one of my biggest
bugbears with, certainly not within Bitcoin to be clear, but just like wider public discourse,
if you want to call it that, that almost everybody seems to mean something different by capitalism.
Like they, even a lot of people who allegedly support it, they're, when they say, when they use
the word, they're describing something that I wouldn't call it that. And, but every, but then
everyone has their own thing. I think more so on the side of people who are really just status and
they're, they kind of, it's, it's been like, you know, like how, if you, if you don't like something
more politically, you just call it fascist, especially if you're more kind of lefty, you
just call everything fascist. It doesn't matter whether it is or not, or what it is in particular,
it's really more of a slur. It's like repainting it as untouchable. And therefore people don't
even need to think about it at all. I think a lot of status, again, I don't really feel they
need to be much more precise than that. Do something or, or, or, you know, Keynesians, let's say,
do that with capitalism. And it's, it's almost like it stays in their own mind what they even
mean by it. So that's my non-answer. I just, I just reject the question because it's too confusing.
It'll lead people down completely unhelpful paths. So we, well, we, you defined earlier for us
capital, but what is your like ignoring everyone else's misconceptions about what capitalism is?
How, how do you define it? When you use the word, what do you mean by it?
Well, so I actually don't think I use the word capitalism very often.
Okay.
Ever. So I'm going to keep giving you annoying evasive.
No, no.
I use the word capital all the time. But so I have a problem with it, right? That
tie a few of these things together. The reason I don't use it, the reason other people use it
confusingly, I think, or part of the reason that that seems to be the case is that to my mind,
capital is just a pretty straight for, well, no, sorry, it's not straight forward at all. It's a,
it's a complicated concept, but it's a, it's an economic concept. It, when you tease it out and
when you apply it in the context of some other problem, maybe it takes on political components
or legal component or whatever, like it obviously bleeds into other fields. But the way the word
capitalism tends to be used is almost never with reference to economics as far as I can tell,
right? People will, I mean, we've already done it on the show, right? You'll talk about like
neoclassical economics or Keynesian or Austrian or modern monetary theory or whatever, right? No,
no one says capitalism as if it's a school of economics, even though
capital is an economic concept. And so I think that confusion, they use it predominantly politically
as far as I can tell, but then, you know, even that, I'm not sure if that's entirely true because
the more confusing usages of it that then rile me up are maybe in part political, but they
kind of mean something cultural or they kind of mean something legal. And the fact that this is,
this is why I object to it and kind of somewhat jokingly just gave you a complete non-answer that
you're very evasive. I don't want to give you a definition because I'm not sure what anyone
else means by it either. Like I don't, I'm not sure why I would even want to define it. So there
you go. That's as unhelpful as I can possibly be. I appreciate it. Or even our words, man.
Do words even exist, man? Well, okay, perhaps a different way of framing this.
Just because you touched on stateism in general, do you have an opinion of what the proper role
of the state is in the modern era? Yeah, kind of. This is interesting. I started talking about this
with a couple of people just in a, I think it was a Twitter group actually, just the other day. So
this is kind of fresh, but in this somewhat jokey context of like, I'm going to write a book on this
in 30 years or something. So give me your ideas now and then I'll steal them and not credit you.
I think, this is very loose, but this is like an answer really again. It's more helpful.
Another non-answer. Or just like a train of thought. Yeah. And I think when most people
approach this, and in particular, people who I would be inclined to agree with certainly,
no, no, no, no, that they're Bitcoiners necessarily, but maybe more like they might be coincidentally
Bitcoiners, but in terms of the way they're framing their answer, they're, you know, anarcho-capitalists,
say, or libertarians, or there's a bunch of ways you could describe yourself if you're vaguely,
vaguely in that camp, which I probably would as well. And I probably agree with most of what they
say. But I think a lot of arguments from that point of view suffer from a pretty serious
is-ought problem in that I agree with them ethically, but that doesn't necessarily translate
to reality in any helpful way. So you can say state, you know, the role of the state is either
ought to be, you know, very, you'd be like, I think it's called minarchism, right? You could be a
minarchist where it's basically just to, it's police and courts, essentially. It's enforcing
contracts. That's the role. Or just that there's no role, right? Even that can be done privately.
And then obviously there's a spectrum of like what you're tacking onto it after that. And then
communism, I suppose, is completely the other, completely the other end. But when you're,
all of those answers, at least in terms of the way I phrase the original question,
I think are really about ethics in that you're framing the state as an actor. But ultimately,
there is no state. There's just other people, right? So what you're really saying, you're
communicating it in a more helpful way to aid the obviously political discussion. But what you're
really saying is like how ought individuals behave. It's a question about ethics and journey and come
up with your own ethical theory. That doesn't mean anyone will behave that way. So this is,
this is kind of, this is like the wedge into what I want my book to be about when I write it in 30
years that you should, there's like a weird reflexivity here obviously, because that's,
that's a normative claim, but you should have a, have an ethical theory and try to,
you know, live according to it. And I mean, again, I would probably argue for something,
at least Minarchist, if not just, you know, you should never be violent, right? You should adopt
the non-aggression principle. That's, that's fine. But your expectations of others' behavior
should be realistic. So you're, so to qualify that in like a really clean way, your own behavior
should adhere to this ethical standard, but you should not necessarily assume other people's
will. You should assume that they will behave according to whatever their incentives are.
And so that's, that's kind of what I think is super interesting to drive at that.
I also think a lot of people who, you know, maybe sentimentally, I guess, are very much in my camp,
but I, I do honestly think they shy away from this and a lot of their argumentation just
collapses into like, well, that's wrong, right? Like these people are bad, whatever,
which is just like, okay, cool, like, like they're still going to do it, whatever the thing is that
you disapprove of all, like you're not actually solving, stopping them doing that. And then also
if you really push people in this, you can also get into this weird, like they feel like they're in a
sort of a, I don't know if a contradiction or paradox is exactly the way of putting it, where
you're kind of backed into saying that, well, you know, some, because it's whatever the behavior is,
somebody is so bad, somebody needs to stop it. But then you're basically just describing the state
and you're like, okay, no, but it's not the state. It's somebody else going around in circles like
that. So again, this is like a complete non-answer. Sorry, I'm just like thinking out loud. But I
love thinking out loud. I think the way that you resolve this though, or the way that you should
at least attempt to resolve it is to focus on culture. This, I think this is, this is interesting,
right? This is like an actual, at least attempt to an answer that's vaguely original. I think the
only way you can police every component of this effectively is not by one upping the violence
with, you know, even more scary violence. And then eventually you end up in a place where it's like,
well, okay, you've just recreated the state, you didn't want to call it the state, but you are
functionally the state. The only way that I think you can effectively police that and reach a kind
of almost equilibrium of who's happy with what credible threats of violence that incentivize,
you know, what you're, what accords with your ethical theory is not resorting to ever more
escalating violence, you know, in pursuit of ultimate victory and the monopoly, but rather
shame, basically, or other more socially enforced means of punishment and reward. So that's,
that's where I kind of land on this, that that's actually more important. It's basically, it's a
very, very pretentious way of describing politics as downstream of culture, but, but not just
describing it, but encouraging you to take it very, very seriously, because if you have, you know,
if you put the requisite time and energy into creating a culture that self enforces ethics,
you don't need violence in the first place and you can escape that loop in theory, at least.
That's my, that's my hot take. And now I think that that's an important point for people to grasp
that, that politics is downstream of culture. And maybe I can ask to bring this back to Bitcoin,
do you think that the incentives around Bitcoin are such that it has the ability to
actually influence like technology influencing culture, influencing politics because it's able
to change that incentive structure and, and then, and takes away the, the ability for the monopoly
on violence to be effective, basically, is that, is that a fair statement? I think so. Yeah, I'm
not sure I'd even add anything to that, at least nothing, nothing original that, you know,
your audience wouldn't have heard a thousand times. I mean, it's a sovereign individual thesis,
basically. It's not my thesis. It's that not just Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is probably the best example,
maybe ever of something that fits this, but a technology that shifts the balance of returns
to violence, anything that, that fits that. I mean, I think you can maybe even, you could talk
about things like various other applications of cryptography, maybe do the same thing, not to
say that Bitcoin is like a subset of that strictly or anything, but the point I make is more, it's
not just Bitcoin that fulfills this, but I think Bitcoin is, that's, that's a good way of putting
why a lot of people are as excited about it as they are, that they, you know, they recognize that
it's, I saw, I saw somebody say more or less, I won't get the quote exactly right, but more or
less this on Twitter, addressing a lot of these same points that Bitcoin is basically what allows
libertarians to stop larking, right? Like this might, this might actually work, rather than just,
it was back to my, you know, somewhat facetious previous answer of like, oh no, but that's wrong,
like, okay, great. So what, are you going to do anything about it? No.
Yeah, I honestly, it's a, it's a hilarious and a great point. And this,
it's interesting to just think about like, in general, the, you see so much nihilism and pessimism
throughout so much of the world. And then you see folks, like, you know, you were talking
earlier about being at cheat code and just hanging out with, with plebs and, and you see so much hope
and optimism amongst people from a truly diverse set of backgrounds and like actually diverse,
not contrived, you know, diversity. And you see all of this just kind of unbridled optimism. And
yeah, realism too, and acknowledgement of the fact that, yeah, like things are, things are
pretty fucked up in a lot of ways. But finally, there's a glimmer of hope. There's a glimmer of
like, ah, this is something we that might actually have a chance at changing things. So as you said,
you know, we can stop, stop larking as libertarians. Like this is, this is something that actually
makes sense and has a chance at working and also happens to appeal to people who are not just
self identified as libertarians, but who identify as progressives or conservatives or whatever. And
that's like the beauty of it, that it completely brings, it brings so many ideologies into the
fold because everybody can interpret it through their own lens. But the incentives are structured
as such that it, it, it works like it works because it works for people and it allows them to work in
their own self interest and to apply it to their own ideology in such a way that it can in their
minds further that ideology. And I think that that's kind of a really unique, a unique thing.
I'm curious, you know, are you, would you consider yourself an, an optimistic person,
an optimistic realist perhaps? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
If anything, I probably lean into that for comic effect a lot of the time. I try to, I try to
be mindful of where, you know, my somewhat ridiculous Twitter persona ends and reality
begins, but it's, it's fuzzy. Yeah. What do you, what do you say, like,
what do you say to the nihilists out there or to the, to the pessimists, to the people who are
like, it's, it's just going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. There's no bright spot on
the horizon. Like, is this like the, you know, Bitcoin fixes this or is that a bridge too far
for too many people and there's a different approach to you that you take? How do you address
nihilism that you see? I mean, yeah, I, I really like Bitcoin fixes this as a meme, but
only when applied appropriately, I think it can definitely be unhelpful if you're, if you're not
not mindful of the context in which you're bringing it up. I think basically the person you're saying
it to needs to already understand quite a lot of what you would like them to understand. It's
not going to convince anyone who is genuinely nihilistic, right? Your question is, yeah, what,
what would I say to someone who's, who's genuinely nihilistic? I'm not sure that I'd even link that
to Bitcoin so much. I can, I can make what's maybe kind of an interesting point here just about how
I think about all of this to be honest, kind of what we get like unhelpfully, I don't know,
deeper, almost hippiest or something, but like what, what motivates me in the first place and what
I kind of what I assume motivates other people to some extent that I, I try quite hard to
stay cognizant of Bitcoin being a tool as in being a, being a means to an end rather than
an end in itself. And I think that, that can be for me, at least it can be quite hard again,
just going back to, you know, my, my ridiculous Twitter persona and trying to remember where
that ends, like where, where reality actually begins because you do have to play that up,
I think, but you know, I mean, no one has to do anything, but it's fun to play that up
in a more Twitter centric context or even in, you know, like going on Bitcoin podcast,
being a Bitcoin conferences, obviously that's what people want to focus on. It's a, it's an
amazing shelling point for, for talking about these ideas at all. But I think it's healthy and I
guess I, maybe I just encourage other people to, or at least to, to try it if they haven't
considered this perspective that it's very much a no end in itself. And if anything, I, I feel like
that probably nobody does take that too seriously, but for the sake of argument, if you were to,
that would be quite nihilistic, I think, like, or it would lead you to quite a nihilistic place
because it's almost like, well, okay, then, then what do you do? Like, why did you bother
doing any of this really? So where I'm going with this in terms of the, how I'd address someone
who's genuinely nihilistic, I guess probably first and foremost, I wouldn't, I wouldn't assume that I
have the skill, I guess, I don't know, or, or ability to reach absolutely anybody in, in that
position. And like, I have some kind of silver bullet that's, that's going to work for them. But
to the extent I was, you know, making any effort, probably just encouraging them that
there are these tools, like maybe they're not as aware as they, as they could be as they, as they
should be that it's, it's not that they're wrong, that things are really, really bad, because I do
kind of agree with that. And, you know, if you, if you contextualize it appropriately, it's that
yes, things are bad, but you don't need to, there's, there's nothing that necessarily
follows about what you should do or what your attitude should be. And hence, you know, again,
if they, I think this is the way you set up the question, right, that they, if they don't know
about Bitcoin, maybe they should look into it for that reason that this could be a tool that will,
you know, not change how you, not change your assessment of how, if anything,
you'll probably make your assessment even worse once you, once you actually grasp it to begin with,
but, but we'll give you a real reason to be hopeful rather than, well, presumably they, you
know, given the way you set it up, presumably they, they have none or maybe they're, maybe they're
kind of, what would be the best way of putting it? There's a, one of the,
Malays escaping me, I'm just blanking on, maybe they've become cynical by, you know, bad or cheap
explanations as to, as to why they ought not be nihilistic and they're, they're, you know, that's
kind of, that's pushed them even deeper. So yeah, maybe that would, you know, chip away at the margin.
I like that. And now this is a, a slight departure, but still on the topic of Bitcoin,
but getting more into your Twitter personality or your Nestor personality.
What is the dumbest debate in Bitcoin right now? What's, what's, what's, what's the, what is the
dumbest one? I don't know. Cause I, uh, hmm, I honestly, nothing's even really coming to mind
for me because for one thing I've muted a lot of words on Twitter. I maybe missed some of the
dumber ones. I'm, I'm muted a lot of people. I'm muted a lot of words. I, I honestly, I, I tend to
get involved in deliberately really silly debates and issues just because I find that and like that,
that's kind of what it just, in case anyone of the audience doesn't know that is kind of my
Twitter, at least this is what I try to make my Twitter. You can tell me if I'm, if it actually
is coming off in some completely different way, but what I tried out my Twitter personality to be
is just very silly and trolley and, but, but like well intentioned.
You identify as a layer too on Twitter. Like relatively lighthearted about everything. Um,
so yeah. So the kind of things that I get, well, I basically, actually to be more specific about
my, my Twitter MO, I find completely serious debates and then just reply guy with nonsense.
That's, that's mostly how I go about it. It's a, it's a good strategy. And I always get a
chuckle from both your, your Twitter and your Noster, but there's that I, somehow there's
more humorous reactions to your trolling on Twitter, I think still probably just because
it's more, it's more people there. I mean, you had, you had some great ones. I, I like the way
you think about things. And, and again, trying to like just to dissect them because it's very easy to
get, we're all subject to knee jerk reactions, right? Like when it comes to like the ordinals
and inscriptions debate versus like, oh, we should filter all this out and all these things.
And like, you know, our, our, is all of this a scam and does any of this have any value in,
you had one, you know, tweet that's basically like, uh, about like, I think it was like ordinals
are retarded, but like, that, that doesn't mean that you have to enhance that with caveats that
proving that you are also retarded. Or ordinals is retarded, like quote ordinals is retarded,
or ordinals are retarded is like, it's perfectly sufficient as a criticism.
Yeah. And, and I like that approach to it. And it's a, I think it makes people step back and
think a little bit and like with a lot of these debates, I think that many of us, like myself
included from a technical standpoint, we're not always equipped to, to discuss them from a technical
standpoint, but many people seem to try to, but it's like, it's, it's okay for you to not have a
super deep nuanced opinion on everything from anyone listening. Like you don't have to, like it
is sometimes, as you said, like the simplistic definitions, like it's, it's perfectly acceptable,
acceptable just to say that and, and, and to leave it be that like, and the more you try to
explain your position, you know, that one in a bit more detail. I don't want to pick on people
and go and find a thread. Like I have people in mind obviously, but I don't, it doesn't feel
appropriate to just throw them under the box. The reason I, like the way I came up with that was
noted, basically just noticing a lot of really stupid and in some cases, to your point,
quite technically stupid, in my opinion, arguments against ordinals that are inscriptions,
I guess to be more specific. I actually know, sorry, a lot of it was, it was like,
ordinal theory and the whole, the rare sat thing with the, with the having. In my mind,
making really, not just bad or not, not like, you know, controversial or whatever, but like
wrong and or meaningless, like so wrong, it's not even wrong anymore, arguments, I mean,
probably against anything, but in particular this, because I do think ordinals are retarded,
right? But making even more retarded arguments against them damages the credibility of the
people who've made good arguments against them, because people will see that and rightly or wrongly,
is this again, this is like an is all thing is right, this will happen, whether you want it to
or not, people will see your stupid arguments, recognize that they're stupid and think all
arguments in that vein or making that point are stupid. And so, so that's where this came from,
that because I'd identified, I thought at least identified a bunch of really stupid arguments
that were undermining, I would say mine, like I don't feel particularly strongly about it,
but I know people who do who I take seriously and who have put out very thorough, well considered,
well argued arguments that I thought were making them comparatively stupid, which is bad thing.
So that's where that came from. Well, right. And it's, I always find it funny, like the, you know,
perhaps I, maybe this was one of your tweets or maybe I didn't even read it a tweet, maybe it
was something I constructed after the fact, but like, you know, you remember like Animal Farm,
you know, like all animals are equal, some are more equal than others, it was just, it's like
all subjective value is equal, but some subjective value is more equal than others.
No, I remember, I remember the one that I think you got this from, I didn't say exactly that,
but it was the, the Mad Men meme template where, where Don Draper's like, you know,
he's pitching something, right? And I'd filled it out with something like radical subjective value.
Yes. But for the things I value. Yes. Yes. That, that is exactly what I was thinking of there.
And it made me think of Animal Farm and just that, that quote, because it's like, okay, well,
you can't have it both ways. Either all value is subjective or, you know, like,
it's kind of like the basis for, for a lot of this, unless you're larking about that.
But, you know, hey, to each their own, I guess you can choose to subjectively value which
subjectively value, which subjective value is more subjectively valuable to you and which
other people should also, should or should not find subjectively valuable. That's a lot of
subjective value. You know, last, right? Maybe one, one more thing, because I want to be conscious
of your time here. What do you think of the idea of intrinsic value? And, and can you, can you
speak to the perhaps absurdity of the argument that like, whenever you hear like, and I saw this pop
up recently, a little, some video clip I saw, like, Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It's like,
oh my God, I thought, thought we were, we were past this. Like, what does that, when somebody
says that, like, what does that, what does that say to you, I guess, about that person or the way
that they're thinking about? I mean, there is hopeless, probably is, like, there's where do
you even start with that? They're like, five years away. I mean, maybe never, maybe they will never,
ever be orange pill because they're, they're just too far gone. It's, it's sad. I'll give
a bit of that. That's like, obviously the glass half empty, the glass half full on that is worth
considering as well. Like, I mean, you don't necessarily know why the person has said that.
It would probably be something like, they don't actually believe that. Like, they've never thought
about whether it even makes any sense or not. And hence, maybe can be reached by at least to start
with teasing apart whether intrinsic value does make any sense, which obviously we think it doesn't.
They're saying it, it's like a meme for them, right? They're saying it because they've heard
other people say it. It's like a thing. Allegedly smart people have said in circumstances that
seem similar to this one. And like, this is the thing you say. So they said it. And that's preferable.
I mean, it sounds maybe even more stupid, but it's like, there's more promise at the same time.
It's like, it's been in a resolvable way. Like they can be deprogrammed with the right meme. If
they were programmed with the right meme, they can also be deprogrammed by that same
memetic action, basically. Yeah, very well put. Yes. I like that. The memes are,
our memes are so powerful. It's incredible to think about that. I was in the midst of reading
it's René Girard. All right. It occurred to me to mention that as part of that. But I thought,
like, I don't want to have to explain what. Don't have to go all the way into the history of
of acquisitive memetics in this. We're gonna need like, you need like two days for that,
just nonstop. It's a, I need to, I need to finish it. I'm only about halfway through.
But it's a fascinating exploration of that. And I'm sure some people would say that
his analysis is too reductionist. But at the same time, it's like, it all comes down to memes,
right? And, and, and the, from the perspective of acquisitive memetics, it's like, you're,
you're just trying to copy things. Like we're, we're all just, this is kind of how we're
programmed. And you see so many examples of it throughout history. And then you start looking
at that. And it's like, Oh, I need a Miller light after, after this, you know, and we,
and we brought it back full circle. Crush some instruments. Yeah, I need to, I need to just
do some culture press. Yeah. Well, well, I appreciate it. You know, I'll ask you one more
question that is just completely unrelated. And, and I don't think you can skirt it either, which
is good. I can't give an evasive nonanswer to this. When, when you are not, when you are not writing
yourself, well, what are you reading right now? Or maybe what have you read recently that you
really enjoyed and you'd recommend for others? Yeah, it's an interesting time to ask this
question just because since we got axiom up and running, I just have way less time. And I've also
shifted my right. This has come up in a couple of previous answers, I think that I've shifted most
of my writing to stuff that's for axiom. And if it's not me writing it, it's like I'm putting a
lot of time into, into editing it as well. And I actually think the most recent book I read,
I'm just trying to think if I maybe read something light, like something maybe fictiony over Christmas.
Yeah, I did, but I'm, I don't even remember what it was. But the most, the most recent nonfiction I
read was actually Broken Money, which is excellent. Which is kind of boring as an answer for this show,
I guess. It really is. Maybe if I can remember, oh, no, no, I do, I do remember what it is, right?
So this is, this is, I was going to say it's better than broken, like broken, again, broken money is
amazing, but it's, it's too on topic to be an interesting answer. Yeah. Yeah. The, the novel that
I actually finished because I'd started it years ago and it's frigging huge was Life and Fate
by Vasili Grossman. It's very, very good. It's like 900 pages or something ridiculous.
Oh, dear lord. But I, I've got like 600 pages into it. I think about a year or two years ago,
and then I finished that off.
We all have books like that that it's like, made it this far, like, gonna finish this, then you
start reading something else at the same time. And whenever I do that, I end up reading it.
Whenever I do that, I end up like finishing the new books that I started and then not,
you know, going back to the old one, but I'll, I'll have to, I'll have to check that out.
Nine, nine hundreds a tall order, but, you know, it's chunky. You can have one with that book.
For sure. Well, that's good. It's a, it's a, you know, good for the protection of one's private
property, I suppose. Well, I appreciate your time very much here today. I appreciate the
tangents that we were able to go on a for folks that I'll link your, your no-ster, I'll link your
Twitter, where should, and maybe your, you have your website where you, the, the Uncerto,
where you publish some stuff, but then you're also, what's the, what's the AXIUM website?
So the AXIUM is AXIOMBTC.CAPITAL. That's the URL there.
Okay. Awesome. Well, I'll, I'll link that as well just for folks. I saw you guys, I'm, I want to dig
into, you guys just published something recently about layers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just go this weekend.
Or this past weekend. Again, I don't know when this will come out, but.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, good deal. I'm looking forward to digging into that. Maybe, maybe I'll
read it. Sometimes I do read out loud episodes on this show. So perhaps I'll, yeah, read in a real
sultry voice as a bedtime story for folks. But Alan, I, I, I, I'm trying to say that it'll put
people to sleep. No, no, no, no, but I've just been told sometimes no matter what I read,
my voice does put them to sleep. If I, if I read it too slowly, so it's, it's not a you problem,
Alan. It's a me problem. It's not me. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Well, I appreciate your time here. You know, thanks for, thanks for having me on.
Time is scarce and, and, and, and well, if we're talking about subjective valuations of time,
we can subject valuations of subjective valuations. Exactly. And you know, but Bitcoin
podcasts are abundant. Do they have a theory? I don't even think, I don't even think you can,
like that, that, that short circuits, like that, though universe collapses into a black hole as
soon as an MT person starts thinking about subjective valuations of subjective valuations,
I think that's just like, we, we create a, yeah, we all collapse and die. But yeah, on that happy
note, appreciate your time here. And looking forward to hopefully seeing you in the flesh,
one of these days soon. And until then, you know, take it easy, keep writing, keep, keep trolling.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. If you're a Bitcoin only
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