So we built the fan in the yard, we built the enclosures in the yard,
we built the goat feeding system and all that kind of stuff ourselves.
These are the kinds of things that you can do, boys and girls,
when you're not spending your whole life working to pay somebody else,
such as the government, or just working for your boss and giving them value.
The thing that you keep in mind while you're stacking sats is,
I have a dream, I have dreams, I want to accomplish these dreams.
And that's what you're working for.
We now have a way to save our value and not have it be stolen from us,
which is so crazy.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 867-048 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk, where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin
and whatever else comes up.
And today my guest is Sat, aka Lightning Goats.
I met Sat through Noster because I stumbled upon his awesome project
where he livestreams his goats from his off the grid homestead.
And whenever you zap Bitcoin to the goats lightning address,
it automatically feeds them,
which is just pretty awesome.
Sat sold half his Bitcoin stack a few years back so he could quit his job and live off the grid.
And we get into a bunch of topics today from Noster and decentralized communities
to the challenges and opportunities presented by technology,
the evolving nature of identity in the digital age,
the impact of social media on kids and mental health,
sustainable living, individual liberty, dynamic optimism and a whole lot more.
Before we dive into me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast,
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And send an email to hello at BitcoinPodcast.net.
If you have feedback or if you're interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast,
without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Sat.
We are apparently live.
I'm still a zap.stream newbie.
I was never, never meant for this podcast to be like a live show.
But then started seeing people doing more stuff on zap.stream
and thought, well, you know, this is, this is pretty cool.
And if I'm going to do a live show,
why not make it like a treat for the folks on Noster,
who are going to go and check out zap.stream and be there first
and kind of have that be the only place that the show is live.
In a little bit of an effort to kind of, okay, let's, let's see,
see if we can get more people over to Noster and using some of these tools.
Yeah, now Noster is a great marketing tool.
People on Noster are like a good tribe of people.
You know, when you're looking at things from a marketing perspective,
you want to have like a core group of bands that get the brand.
And an outdoor integration is a big part of that.
It's leveraging the echo ching to your benefit.
You know.
It's a, it's a good way of putting it.
It's funny too, because I found that even amongst Bitcoiners,
I've been somewhat surprised at often to say the,
how some people are very much still like,
don't see the point of Noster.
They're not really, you know, it seems like it's somehow too much work for them.
Or it's, you know, it's, it's going to, it's not going to be around very long
or whatever it may be.
And I find that so funny because first of all,
I found it to just be an incredible experience.
To interact with and meet people through Noster that I did not already know
through the, you know, let's say the Bitcoin Twitter community.
But then also just the quality of the conversation.
I think this is something that people say again and again and again.
It's like something feels different.
It's, it's not your, you know, your average social media platform, let's say.
Yeah, it's a lot more genuine.
It's a lot less manipulated.
It's a lot more like the web was back in the day, you know,
zoom back in time to around, I don't know, 2003 or so.
People that had online communities, they were largely self-hosted in various ways,
you know, so it was a decentralized manner.
And a lot of the people that were getting online at the time were just kind of friendly,
kooky people.
And to be able to build or find others of like mind and build a community,
that's a lot of what happened at that time, you know, as you know,
it's out in the world.
There's a lot of expectations on you.
Are you going to, how are you going to look, what things you can and can't say,
who you can say them or not, all that kind of stuff.
Online communities unfiltered, unmanipulated online communities are really important
because they allow people to find the true tribe, you know what I mean?
That's why I started, one of the reasons I started doing this,
I mean, Ghost Project was this idea of communicating with people that I wanted to communicate with.
So I kind of had this idea that I would use code and creativity to build credibility amongst people
that I would see online, kind of like in the bit point intellectual space.
You know what I mean?
Like how am I going to talk to these people?
Well, the only way to really do it in Bitcoin is to actually build something, right?
You know, you put in some proof of work.
And so that was one of the strategies for the project, you know, kind of like a deliverable, so to speak,
was, oh, I want to be able to interact with Bitcoiners,
you know, to eventually engage in philosophical discussions with it,
but you do not have to lie to conferences and get all burned out, you know, that kind of thing.
You know, not to say, I mean, it would be really cool to do that.
I actually haven't been to any conferences, but this was kind of like the first step in fighting those projects.
Along the journey towards, say, getting on the Bitcoin public, right?
You know, so it's a pleasure to meet you.
No, it's a pleasure to meet you too.
Really, I mean, you know, I started this podcast for somewhat similar reasons,
although not as cool to have a podcast as it is to be feeding goats with lightning over Noster.
That's definitely way more cypherpunk.
But I started the podcast with the goal like, I want to be able to talk to people in the Bitcoin space,
a lot of whom I had had the pleasure of meeting already because my wife and I had been making this short form content for a amount of time.
And, you know, we never did any sort of, like, you know, we tried to keep it like, we did a couple of sponsored videos.
I think we did like one for Trezor back in the day. We did one for brains mining.
But we got offered to do a bunch of sponsored stuff and we just kind of said, no, like, we're okay.
We've got our day jobs. We'll do this because we enjoy doing it.
We think these are messages that need to get out there. We're having fun doing it too.
And so, you know, I built some connections through that.
But me starting the show, I was like, okay, my audience is decently big now between, you know, centralized, cuckold platforms like X,
but then also on decentralized, non cuckolded platforms like Noster.
And I thought, you know, there's there are a lot of Bitcoin podcasts out there.
I would like to have one where I don't just need to feel the force to interview the same people over and over again.
And there are some great people who I enjoy talking to over and over again.
But sometimes I think we get stuck in a bit of this kind of like macro echo chamber within Bitcoin and within Bitcoin kind of podcasts and media.
And sure, I love a good macro episode as much as the next guy.
But I also want to talk to people who have figured out how to feed goats via anonymous lightning transactions happening over the Lightning Network and Noster because I just think that's really cool.
And so that, you know, it's a beautiful thing that because of Bitcoin and Noster, these these protocols that do not care what who you are or what you do, you're able to meet people like we're meeting for the first time right now we're streaming this live on Noster.
We've got 22 folks that have hopped in here already, which is just nice.
So hello to anyone who is watching this live. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being on Noster.
And I just think that's a beautiful thing.
It's it's it's like you said it's people freely organizing and associating, I think is the way the Internet was meant to be.
And massive centralized social media companies have sort of perverted that a little bit.
And you see the effects of that too and like especially on kids.
There's a reason I think we have so much so many mental health issues and there's obviously more pharmaceutical reasons for that as well and probably food related issues as well.
But I think a huge part is just this ridiculously toxic environment that kids are thrust into from a young age on these centralized social media platforms and meant to feel like they have to somehow compete and stake out their territory and one up each other.
You know, I don't know.
Yeah, that's that's pretty harsh.
And there's a lot to unpack there.
So going back to some of what you said in the beginning, it got me thinking about it.
It's one of the beautiful things about working for Bitcoin.
Not hustling for sats, we say, but working for the D Bitcoin network.
You know what I mean?
Like, how am I going to be an employee of Bitcoin?
How am I going to do the thing that helps Bitcoin besides just holding and, you know, shit posting and me mean and kind of stuff, which is awesome.
The informational side of things is essential.
But, you know, when you start wondering about, oh, how can I really help?
I don't know if you're a big science fan, there's some books out there, a couple by Daniel Warren, I think his name is, the demon novels, I guess you would call them are demon because it's M-O-N.
Oh, yeah.
It's interesting, these were written before Bitcoin a couple years, a few years, maybe in 2003.
They describe kind of like a cybernetic organism, the daemon that runs on the, on the internet and it has goals and it can interact with people using Game of Fire.
And, you know, it's kind of an incentive and that kind of stuff and people become demon offer tips, so to speak, so they begin working for the network.
And then the first level, it all sounds really bad, you know, you don't, at the very best, the network is considered to be kind of ambiguous, you know, but most of the time you get the sense that the demon network is what is being fought.
Again, second book rolls around and you find out that a whole network or counterculture has arisen using the daemon network as an organizing principle.
And so, demon operatives, they get tasks assigned to them, they go out and they do these tasks.
You know, it may be something like they go and they stop at a particular location and they drop off a drill bit or something, somebody else gets it and they bring it on to the next piece and the chain.
And eventually it accomplishes whatever kind of task is out there.
And, but then you find out that they're building whole on switch our communities kind of like communities of people of like mind who are trying to reach the most independent or sovereign state that they can.
So it's a whole unit, the whole whole on in philosophy is a is a whole in itself composed of smaller parts that is itself part of a larger whole.
Right. So you get like a human being who's composed of cells and human culture, which is complete humans, which are an animal on the earth, which is a larger whole on, you know, so you kind of get this idea of scale of complexity and stuff.
But the idea of the whole that's heard, a larger whole that is itself composed of complete whole on so the abilities are organizational units, town, things like that, that are part of the team that operates.
So that whole kind of idea is sort of a changing, but it got me thinking about all can I work for Bitcoin, how can it be like a demon operative, you know, and the goat says that too, you know, it's, it's kind of funny.
But yeah, no, I love it. With. So the second thing you started to get into was the idea of captured platforms.
And, you know, it's a drag, the way things are.
I mean, it is. The good news is, is over time, you know, I'm a Gen Xer. So when I was like, say, a teenager or whatever, the culture was full by three media companies, all the culture.
And those three media companies, you know, the thief, right, the BDS and NBC, they worked very closely with the government, whatever the idea was that the government wanted to get across like say, just say no to drugs or whatever it was, it was just like, boom,
I said it and everybody was on the same page. Everybody got the same thing. There was no real
non conformity, so to speak, in the media, at least until a cable came up and that complexified alert things a little bit.
So, you know, people are very generationally aware. They call the generational shit with a little bit of green salt because of marketing categories, but they're useful to say that, you know, when the boomers came around, they were the first group of people that were a building in mass against the culture of the way it had been, you know, so they had to
introduce actually that generational awareness, you know, you listen to the songs, well, it's generation, you know, and then they had us, Jen Exords, which is kind of like this.
It was a really wide group of people because, you know, it wasn't just us against culture, it was us against our parents and the culture, and we subdivided into smaller groups, right, so there was metalheads and Goths and Jocks and
Jocks, but there hadn't been those well defined groups, kind of like as marketing categories until that time. So there wasn't a lot of diversity in the way that people were looking at the world and reacting to propaganda that was being said through media and
public ed, however, time goes on and the millennial of Rives and they're kind of like further atomized, so to speak, they break things down even smaller because now the internet is becoming the same, right, you got that early Jen Exords, it kind of adduced shit on the neck, but the millennials really
come to being with the net as like an ambient thing, like I came to be with television as an ambient sort of thing.
For a while it was free, but it was difficult, fine things, right, you know, like Jack Dorsey says there's that problem of being able to find things on the net, or you just kind of go gateways or places like Netscape or AOL or Compuserve that act as doorways that aggregate
information for people, opting, leaving the same kind of media outlets that had existed in the past during this time, shit you're not mad in public education, that's funny.
The internet was a scary thing, and it was that had programs in public school to try and teach kids about the dangers of the net. Walker, you could go on to the net and you could meet somebody and they could be a kind of a danger, danger, danger here, really bad shit happens on the net.
It's the same old technology kind of story happening with the net itself, but there's people at this time that are talking about, oh, freedom, this is going to be a force, freeze people.
It's an open network, it can't really be censored, you know, there's this idea that nuclear war won't take down the net.
And so it kind of gets, you go through this period of time where you get like first hype cycle, which is around year 2000.
So around that time I became a web developer, so I had worked prior to that as a landscaper and a chef primarily, you know, but I had had my kid, I was around age 28 when my son was born,
and I wanted to do something a little bit more serious, so I was like, fucking, I'm going to get into IT, you know, and so that's what I did.
No formal training or anything, just talk to people, find ways into things, you know, if you're intelligent.
But as you go through time, the point about this whole kind of thing is, in past information was a lot more uniform.
And there were, you know, nowadays we get to this point where everything's differentated out, all these sub realities out there, you know, and nobody knows what's true, who to trust.
And everybody wants to be a part of something that gives them purpose.
People like social structure, you know, we evolve as social beings.
So even if you're a weirdo, like a total artist, so to speak, you still like to be around people, you may, you know, you might be a little bit kind of freaked out by the social thing is that they're doing,
wondering what fuck this doesn't make sense, but you still like to be around them, right?
It's hardwired into us.
We find ourselves in this weird situation where at the moment, nobody knows what binds us together.
And to tell you what the thing is, you got to show about it.
You get a podcast, it's the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoin network is the thing, the common layer that all on disparate tribes and communicate through.
Because when you exchange value, dude, that is the purest expression of what your ethics are in the world. You are not going to spend you hard earned sets on anything that you do not agree with.
Right.
This is wrong.
They are not getting my money.
So it's an amazing thing.
You've already done the work, but for the people in the audience, there's this idea that our fiat system right now introduces a lot of noise into our communication with one another, it's toward our values.
I'm forced to spend time and energy of my own.
I have to find that piece of life, but I somehow have to give like 30% or 40% of that time to entities who are managing my energy for me and spending it on things that I don't necessarily agree with.
Some of them might be just morally reprehensible like, dude, I don't want support war.
Well, what the fuck, man?
Come on, you know, so that's where we are.
And this is why I'm so stoked about Bitcoin.
This is why I work on my light goat stuff.
This is why I want to talk to people like you.
Why talk to people like simply Bitcoin guys want to eventually talk to some of the bigger name guys like safe again, or whomever be able to have have these discussions.
Because when I went to college, it was just to go to college.
So I didn't declare a major.
I just took courses such as philosophy and journalism because those are things of life.
So I did a lot of philosophy versus wrote journalistic articles about things that were happening.
Thought I would be a writer like Eric K. Sarn who was on just recently did LSD.
It was a good time in my life to do LSD.
It was highly illegal, but it didn't matter because who cares what their laws really are.
You have to do truly what will attract.
Right.
I'm not saying anybody should do this. It's actually kind of dangerous.
Not physically, but mentally you can become a little bit unstable, especially if you do what I did, which was do it lots and lots and lots.
But that was my education, you know, doing acid, living in Ski Town in Northwest Colorado in Steamboat Springs.
I went to Colorado Mount College there and studied philosophy, internalism, did LSD, hung out in bars and experienced life.
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You know, something, there's a couple pieces I want to pick up on there, but the most recent one just being the idea of actually experiencing life.
Because I think this is what at least I see not happening as much in like, so I'm a millennial, right?
And our generation, as you said, was was kind of that interesting bridge generation when it comes to the internet, because for me, you know, I like, I still remember dial up and, you know, DSL and all of that.
And then, you know, okay, like Wi-Fi.
Whoa, you know, that's a trip, man.
But like we, we most millennials are not digital natives.
They're right on the cusp we came into it as it was happening that was formative, but we're not native to it.
We're just right on the edge.
But then, like the zoomers, you know, Gen Z, they're fully digitally native.
And at least what I've seen is that there is like, I mean, you can look at this as like a good or a bad thing.
But like, they're consuming way less alcohol, which like, okay, great, like much better for your body.
Like this, this beer is not doing me any, any favors for my health.
But, but I enjoy it.
I've also spent more time than I can possibly count at at bars with friends, fucking around, having a great time, probably too good of a time sometimes.
But just going out and literally experiencing the world versus being so sucked into these, so consumed by the media that is being put in front of them with the type of image that they are trying to curate for others to show that they are in fact living that happy, perfect Instagram filtered life.
And I think that it's like, man, a lot of these kids would just they do in my world, the good just to cut loose a little bit and stop thinking so much and get out of their phones a bit and go mess around in bars.
Like, when, you know, when I was in college, like people, I mean, they're, I'm not that old, you know, I'm in my early 30s.
But when I was in college, we like people just weren't like taking photo taking photos. Every time they went out, you know, like on like, there's, there's not like a ton of photos of my college experience and plenty of photo worthy moments, I'm sure.
But the point being that like, people were actually out and their phones were away or in their pockets or they had just broken them earlier that night, whatever it may be.
People tended to, I think, be more in the moment. And I think there is so much to be said for that for presence. And this goes back to like, what they what some of these platforms really take away from people is the ability to be fully present.
They've even done those studies that it's like, if there is a just like a smartphone in the room with you doesn't doesn't have to be yours. Doesn't have to be like screen on just literally like you set a smartphone on a table, and people's ability to concentrate on
whatever the task at hands is, at hand is decreases like demonstrably, just by the sheer presence of that because we have become so coded. It's just become, you know, part of us that it's like, you know, those little side long glances to the phone, you don't even know
what's happening. And some of us, we try to catch ourselves doing that, right, or we try to be really mindful about it and try to put the phones away, put it out of reach, you know, spending spending time with my son who's, you know, under a year old, just like throw the phone in the other room,
unless I'm taking a picture of him because he's being real cute but like don't don't want that around him at all. But I wonder just how much, like, we still don't know what the long term implications of that are, because we haven't had a generation go through all of their lives with this
technology pervading every single square inch of their experience of the world. That hasn't happened yet. Like this is, we are the guinea pigs in real time for this. And I don't know, I hope there's a trend toward more mindfulness and awareness of what these devices do to us because they are
incredible tools, right there. Like you've got the combined knowledge of the world here, I can ask chat GPT to tell me anything I want to know about any number of great philosophers and have them rattle off quotes and I can do incredible research and I can learn so much.
But it's like, like any tool, it's what you make of it, right. And I think that that's where people go astray because they don't realize it's a tool. They view it as like it's an extension of themselves somehow it's they know they need to have their phone
they need to have access to social media they need to be showing others what they're doing at all times, and also seeing what others from all around the world are doing at all times. I don't think we we can't possibly evolve quickly enough to deal with that at a mental or emotional
level. And I think we're going to see the long term implications of that in the coming decades, as these people and myself included again kind of on the borderline there have been growing up with so much power, but also you know with great
power comes great responsibility right in our pockets. And what that's going to do to people. I don't know.
It's amazing is other utterly amazing and crazy man.
When I was in high school to write it deeper on whatever it was.
It was what I did man. It's going to seem really foreign to kids nowadays because it's really done differently. I went into the library and I was to see this book of books it was kind of like the library and is been or is
in I forget. Yeah, breathing. But it was a book of books. So you go and you look up kind of like titles and might have a little bit of a description about what the book may be about.
And you get in a library low and waited like two weeks for this thing to come in. And it was random whether it was really going to help you write the paper or not.
No, I'm not saying this to say that oh yeah, things are difficult because they would have to have some holidays. Shit.
Yeah. People do be feel very, very naked without their devices. It's really strange.
I remember before cell phone. Much less smart phones were a thing.
But I do remember like they created the iPhone and about year two later Motorola came out with the first Android device and I got it and I thought it was really cool.
And a few years after that it did not come on because you know I'm working in IT and stuff. But one day I showed the work and I really just kind of noticed how cell phones have sat through it.
Everything everybody now has a cell phone.
You get the smart phone which they can get onto the internet if they no longer need to use the company network to do the Facebook anymore because they have this on their phone.
They can just go right around and you know and so that was very interesting.
Crazy man. So one of the things nowadays like one of the cultural things that scares people a lot is the sense of identity.
Now you have a younger, very, the younger millennial into the real earth.
Now I have a different feeling about my gender than you would expect or society would expect.
So they say I'm no longer male or female. Maybe I'm not opposed or whatever.
But there's these kind of things that trigger people about sexual identity.
Which if you really kind of dig into it they're more of a cultural thing than biological things.
I mean there's some biological components people can modify themselves. Whatever the network's open to all right.
But the thing is really nuts man.
By the time Eric gets to be in his 20s he's on the time of life where he would have been going into bars and doing stupid stuff.
And not only partially remembering just how stupid he was but feeling very happy about what a good time was had.
That time of his life things will progress drastically with technology and stuff.
That he will have a choice whether he wants to even consider himself to be human.
If he wants to continue using his biological form.
It sounds really strange to say this but given the exponential nature of technology and stuff.
And this harkens back to the extra P Institute of which how Finney was a part of which Nick Zebo wrote articles for their in house publication.
This idea of.
Van sending the human state in a non superstitious scientific way that we will someday be able to harness the power of technology in a positive way to bootstrap ourselves out of the gravity well and into the kind of.
These guys this organization I found them in my early searches on the Internet was not.
Involved per se but was very interested in all the things that they had to say and so.
I found their IRC server because this is one of the things people did on the day is a chatted on IRC somebody would spin up an IRC server.
Now all you friends have come and found the extra P Institute's IRC channel posted on IRC dot Lucifer dot com.
There wasn't a lot happening in the IRC channel for extra P but I did find another one called hashtag virus which was for the church of virus which is really wild man.
You can look it up online it still has a website and everything but the church of virus was on the world's first rational.
Medi.
And there was a forum and the IRC channel and people would go there and talk about things on the guy that ran or still hope first host for the church of virus.
He also hosted on all the mail lists and those kinds of things for the extra P Institute still actually is kind of like the hopes for all this information which is actually a very important interest to say Bitcoin historians.
Who is it Aaron Vaughan wrote Genesis book he has a chapter in there on the extra P Institute.
So David my friend David he does he hosts all that information although his old email list.
The conversations.
He's the archivist of that and the sys admin for extra P.
But the church of virus is pretty cool.
When people started talking about memes the way that we talk about memes.
It's a little bit funny because the church of virus was a medic religion it was this idea of being able to use medic engineering to release ideas into culture to change culture.
You want to be able to understand those things so people start talking about being so funny.
But you know the weird the other weird thing is my handle or my name or whatever is also my middle name which had changed it here in 1995.
The idea being why I was getting married the first time about.
My wife or the onset didn't want to have my last name I didn't want to have her as a native of another.
So we made up a new.
Last name and I chose a different middle name as part of that because I didn't really like it before.
Originally I was Shane Thomas.
You know I just didn't really like it.
I mean it was kind of cool that it excited for like war STD shirts and stuff.
But whatever you know but yeah so so it's not like I'm a.
A Bitcoin gangster rapper like 50 sat or anything that's nothing like that where it's just I just happened to have.
The middle name that is kind of the smallest unit in Bitcoin you know when I kind of works out well it's sort of funny.
Yeah when I went on to simply Bitcoin.
Okay I forget what they are they were at some sort of conference and like this show we didn't do any kind of prep.
You know we kind of fired things up and they said you know what's going on I'm like yeah I know the formula I've watched the show.
And I said what do you want to be calling my size sat and so you could come to these.
And I just happened to be sandwiched with light behind me so you couldn't see my face.
Folks we got Satoshi Nakamoto and the show.
And they're out of check.
Like well hey everybody you know I'm not Satoshi no.
I'm too stupid to be Satoshi.
Truthfully.
I'm talking to the Goat feeder.
Because that's the feed.
Well I actually I do want to I kind of want to get into the goat feeder a little bit specifically because I remember the first time I saw this on Noster I was like oh this is awesome.
And for anyone who's listening that does not know you can literally zap a lightning address and it will automatically feed goats for you and you can watch those goats get fed in real time on a live stream.
Can you can you can you talk about just like.
Where did that idea come from did you already have the goats and and like you were already raising goats and this was like well hey why not.
You know showcase how amazing Bitcoin is by letting people feed the goats and can you talk about this like the setup to how you like how this actually works that these goats are getting fed via these apps you got all this nice automated stuff to on Noster.
It's so cool.
Yeah I'm a coder I'm not like Peter Todd level coder but I'm a coder of sorts.
So I can do shit like this.
I was also a sys admin for many years and also a technology director and that kind of stuff in 2017 we got our first goats.
During that summer where the bull run started to take off at that time.
I looked at my shit.
You know I was looking at the price probably 700 times a day.
And I was like dude I'm going to not work anymore.
So I just I put in my I told my boss I'm like I'll work through till the end of the summer get everything ready.
But after that man I'm gone and I'm never coming back and it's going to be awesome.
So in 2017 I cashed out half of my stack I opted out from the workforce.
I bought a place off grid passive and active solar.
The idea behind the whole thing is that can live super duper efficiently.
And when you're living super efficiently you can live very inexpensively.
You can weather the cycles because we're at the bottom of the cycle man when when you have everything in in Bitcoin and your house and you're not getting like an income.
When 2019 rolls around after you have this grand idea to like I'm going to go offline and come go herder.
It looks pretty bleak during that time.
You're like oh shit I'm going to have to go back to work.
No but weather through it all the way through into the pandemic where I was just happy as could be really because I kind of like not being around people a lot.
So I did pandemic to make great excuse to get the shelter in place back in my house.
But I also did start to feel like this lack of socializing.
So I started talking with my friend from the church virus again online doing video chat and a couple other parties.
And one of the things we did is I had started up my lightning node.
So I gave him a presentation on the lightning node that jump started their interest in lightning on one of them fired up a node began coding the our tech dot market which is an NFT market that uses lightning for the payments layer.
I'm not sure of all of the various ways that it's done but it all for you is a bit coins right hatch of whatever the NFC is that kind of only doesn't use or inscriptions so don't get pissed off everybody.
But you have to realize you know it says kind of funny everybody has a different opinion about the fucking Bitcoin network.
It doesn't matter who's using it and what they're using it for we cannot stop them.
That's the beauty of it right. So after that I began thinking right about the time. We started playing around with this idea of using GPT to do role playing games you know you would reduce I for punk role playing game GPT would be the dungeon master.
Through that game I started thinking oh yeah this is kind of cool this idea of getting into or infiltrating corporations to achieve our goals and it got me thinking about the Bitcoin network again and what am I going to do for the Bitcoin network because I was kind of like in my mind of like how am I going to play the cipherpump game.
And I came up with this idea of the goat feeder. It's not an original idea. There is an old school Bitcoin guy maybe even a core developer. I forget exactly he had of or still has probably a Bitcoin chicken feeder.
So one could send in like a payment. I think it does a zero confirmation thing so that way you don't have to wait. Yeah six blocks or however many. Yeah.
There's another guy I didn't know about him when I started the lightning goats. There's another guy called Tangle sheep. He's been doing this for a few years where he's got a stream or keep online. He feeds.
What is it. Switzerland. I think there's lightning cats and maybe it's Finland. I forget one of those countries over there. He has lightning cats which has done pretty well but none of them have goats.
The goats are pretty starting off. I love goats. From hanging out with the goats all the time doing things with the goats and really getting to know. I was like dude I can create this feeder that it'll go off and the goats will come running in because they do man.
You know it'll be fun and interactive. And that was the original idea about the same time. I had an account on Twitter but I never really used that much. But I was kind of sort of trying to get engagement with Bitcoin people right.
It was hard to get engagement with Bitcoin people on Twitter when you're an unknown just fucking dude. It's just an unknown dude. He comes along and says something. I had some interactions with Safedine there.
Mostly him kind of going off about solar power right. So I kind of counter tooled him saying shit man I live in such places all solar and it's awesome.
And I could not be doing what I'm doing without solar power. He would apply yes but it was not possible without awful fuels. I'm like of course. Many things that we're building today we could not build without fossil fuels.
Get over it everybody. It's fine to use fossil fuels right. Fine to use energy. This is one of the lessons of being a bit coin. Not all energy is evil so to speak.
So about this time I saw something from Jack Dorsey promoting Nostra right. His first thing saying made an in pub or something like that that first post that he had done. And I went and checked it out. I said screw Twitter deleted my Twitter account and started up my my Nostra account under mining.
But part of the way through the process of thinking about the lightning goats kind of envisioning how the whole thing would work. I realized that I could use YouTube as an interface.
So if you go and you watch the YouTube stream in QR code and you can see the scrolling messages on the bottom and that constitutes an interface somebody can pick up their phone and they can plan it. They can interact with it.
And I realized. Oh Nostra is another interface just like the YouTube thing is an interface. Except the Nostra interface is even better because the audience on Nostra is quote unquote the echo chamber.
They are Bitcoiners they are people who are looking for an excuse to feed the fucking goats man they're going to feed the goats. You're going to see it. They're going to be like this is awesome. We're going to show their friends and the goats will be fed and people will be happy.
And so I started on integrating the Nostra stuff. So on a generalized level of the lightning goats project is a solar powered live stream on YouTube where people feed the goats using the lightning network and Nostra.
It has Nostra integrations you know payment comes in and they're like. Thank you for your 21 sets Walker and you know you get a nice old goat facts.
Funny fact about the goat facts is I had GPT create all those 25 goat facts for me and I'll kind of change them a little bit and put them in a dictionary and have them be part of my system. And so it created some I had to create some more.
Start doing some informational messages and I noticed that people were zapping the things that were more fancy. And I realized oh.
One of the things about the people on the streets that the people on Nostra actually a little bit autistic.
So I said to GPT like can you make all of these a little bit more science and and for an autistic audience. And so it reached you to change everything and now we have all these various messages and stuff that are automated so payment comes in.
So it's added to progress bar the idea behind progress bar is that everybody interacting with it with this.
Everybody's played video games everybody knows what progress bar is.
When progress bar hits 100% you get full flash and screen flashes like lightning.
One of the things that was really cool about Stargate is that man the whole screen flash like when you do a smart bomb or something so I was kind of emulating that arcade game like thing where it's exciting.
And then the feature goes off and the goats come running in all directions or they're already there.
That's the high level view of it. We run our own node.
We also run an Ellen bits instance. So that's how some of the background magic happens the goats have their own wallet. Each goat has their own wallet each goat has their own in pub.
If you pay any of those it goes into the wallet and things happen in the background with code that hard you know that progress bar and ads or the feeder to be triggered and that kind of stuff.
It's a really fun project.
Is the stream up is it 24 7365 that the stream is running like does it does it ever does it ever turn off.
Yeah, we only run it during daylight hours because it is so low.
So that makes sense. Come on a little bit later than others because we have to wait for you know for batteries to get charged up in our system because it runs to go feeder but it also runs like our fridge and everything else.
Yeah, it looks like you got anything from this morning or something playing right now but you don't. It is on every day is found every day for more than a year now.
If you average did all out to be around 10 hours a day in summertime it's longer because there's more daylight in the wintertime it's less there's less daylight.
I'm going to top these goats up right now because I see we've got 700 I think you're right I was on for some reason when I opened up the YouTube it pulled me up to an older version of it.
I'm just going to go ahead and top this up and if there's anyone else in the live stream who wants to top these goats up as well. Feel free to join me.
But I just think that this is it's just I mean it's just fun right like it's just a really fun thing to be able to do. Alright I'm going to go ahead and give them 2169 sat.
Yeah, let's let's let's give them let's give them some extra.
You think it's so fun about this is one of the ideas behind this like there's a lot of ideas one of the things is that this is an orange peeling tool.
So on our YouTube interface to the stream.
Many of the people that encounter the stream aren't Bitcoiners they're just animal fans right date.
The lightning goats project is also aggregated under a few live stream or animal live stream aggregators.
So people in the world who just like animals will come across the lightning goats and they don't necessarily know that they're being fed using Bitcoin and that kind of stuff.
Hence the scrolling messages across the bottom will do every minute there's a 40% chance that an informational message will scroll through and it'll say something about the Bitcoin network or you in the lightning network and the QR code he did the goats and that kind of stuff.
So it's sort of a subtle orange peeling tool in that respect.
The other thing is really cool about it that I discovered the first week that it was.
That I launched project on the oyster is that Bitcoin dads with their little kids will teach their kids about lightning network and stuff using lightning goats.
They'll sit there and watch the goats they'll feed the goats those insats you know, that kind of stuff. I just find it like very fulfilling to know that there's the lightning goats that these goats that I love and have so much fun with are also a part of the childhoods of various kids out there in the world.
It's kind of cool.
I can't wait till my my son's old enough to process what might be happening for me to show this to him. I, he just just saw a goat in person at an apple orchard we were at at yesterday and was just mesmerized by these goats.
There's something about goats. They're just they're they're cool animals, you know.
I think I think I had to restart service. I appear to see people doing things but nothing happening with the interface so let me restart it real quick.
Sometimes you know, some sometimes you just you got it you got a fix in production you know there there we go.
And I may maybe I threw in like 2169 sats so I may have I may have reset it back around to close to where it was there.
All right.
I'm just gonna I'm gonna have to put some more sats in because you know these goats they look hungry. Look, oh look at them just just enjoying the sun.
There's just there's something about goats. They're fun animals.
The two guys to guy on the left is Cosmo and the one on the right is Nova.
They're both training to be pack goats right now.
How does how does one train a goat to be a pack goat? What does that involve?
You just take them out for walks with a pack on and one of them they just kind of figure it out there to be to be there.
Oh, there we go. We had a very.
Oh, yeah, it's happening. Look at them. Look at them go.
Man, they are fast. They do not waste any time getting around to that feed. Do they?
Yeah, they are very competitive with one another.
When we started this whole thing, a little white guy there, Newton, he was very small because he's the youngest of the goats.
So he used to get blasted a lot, you know, like checked, checked into the board, so to speak by the big goats.
And people were like, man, those big goats are mean to him. And yeah, they kind of are.
But that's how goat rule work for the goats. They don't have the same rules as humans.
Well, which is which is probably a good thing because we humans have some strange rules sometimes.
But the thing is, you've grown up now and he's got horns and he is often the meanest one.
So he gets his revenge, so to speak.
I'm curious and I hope you don't mind. I had to zap the goats again.
They like it.
I'm sure they don't mind.
But, you know, I'm curious, were like, have you, I guess, you know, because it looks like you've got a good number of goats.
I'm not sure how many you have total here, but you've got to have probably a pretty heavy duty setup.
Do you also do just kind of like general, you know, farming and things on this off the grid property?
I mean, you have a whole operation going or is it limited to kind of just the goat husbandry?
What do you have going on?
Yeah, the goats are part of the larger effort to engage in kind of restorative practices.
I have a goal. So right now, I'm basically, I'm in my late fifties, so I have roughly 15 or so years to work on creating a garden that produces enough to offset being an old guy.
If you know what it would be, I have this goal of being like in my seventies and tending to the garden.
We live in an arid environment in the high desert.
And so the goats, along with me and a shovel, are part of a long term kind of regenerative project to make things so I can garden in the desert.
Part of it is spend a lot of time digging water catches on the goats.
They generate a lot of good compostable material.
And so I compost that and that goes into the garden.
Everything we do here is super duper efficient.
So gray water from the shower goes into indoor beds.
And grow things like we have some banana plants growing peppers, that sort of stuff.
Right now, we're not really producing a lot because we're still kind of in the early stages of things.
One of the interesting things about doing things by hand and slowly over time is takes a lot longer than you'd think.
So the project is kind of a decade or longer project to create something that is more sustainable.
More like that idea that I talked about of the whole arms from the Damon novels.
I would eventually like to create something that is more independent.
But we are very independent.
When the electricity goes down, the local grid goes down, it doesn't matter because we're not on the grid.
We create our, we generate our own electricity.
Same thing goes for all our water comes from the roof goes into cisterns behind the house goes into filters and they need to are plummeted.
So we gather our own water from the sky.
We gather our own electricity from the sky. The house is heated from the sunlight coming through the windows.
Yeah, it's pretty awesome, man.
So I'd like to be able to show this to people, but they have to be the right kind of people.
Yeah, you know what I mean?
Oh, yeah.
But for example, if you and Carla were ever in Colorado, you would be welcome to come by and get like a tour of the place and that kind of stuff.
But I can't really give it out to everybody because I just don't know if everybody's trans towards the surf.
No, I think that's that's that is very wise.
And no, Carla and I would be honored to Carla is let me just put.
How do I say this? She's obsessed with goats.
They're like absolutely loves goats so much has like forever.
Once nothing more than for us to get some goats once we have a piece of land that will allow that.
So yeah, we would we would love that bring the little one to because he seems to have an affection for goats as well.
I'm telling you, they're just something about goats.
They've got some they've got some oxy to him some spunk.
Well, they're pretty cool.
They're fun.
It's a cool evolution thing going on because, you know, as the informational messages for the project say humans and goats go back almost 10,000 years.
That's when we domesticated or we have records of people having domesticated goats is 10,000 years ago.
Goats are really interesting because they're like dogs in the sense that they look at human faces and they can tell what our emotional state is.
They can also tell where we're looking, you know, um, dogs evolve this because we're kind of like hunting partners with dogs.
If I'm out walking with our dog Jack, if I see a bunny and I look at it and say bunny, you know, is exactly what I'm talking about and where I'm looking.
He'll go running.
The goats are the same way they they were super tuned into the emotional states of people and pay attention to what people are paying attention to.
Slightly different reason.
The dogs on goats evolved kind of like a cuteness and ability to watch people because people eat goats.
The goats that were younger over time tended to live longer and reproduce more.
So when you look at a goat face, you'll you'll see a face that looks that is very interactive and enjoyable to look at.
But yeah, getting the goats wasn't my idea.
In fact, that was something that my wife came up with.
And I was at the time back into 2017, I was kind of like, okay, whatever, man, you want to be a coach, that's fine.
But she got the goats and I was like, these guys are very cool.
Um, and I totally bonded with them.
We now have five goats.
Um, some tips for people who may want to get goats.
Goats are very social animals, so you can never get less than two if you have one goat by himself, he's going to be miserable.
Um, so you have to have at least two goats because they need a buddy to hang out with and they have to have a food.
Um, the other thing is the best goats to get for beginners are weather.
Um, weathering is a process of cat's tree and the cat's tree to goat and they become more relaxed and chill just like a dog.
After you fix the dog, um, maybe just like a human too.
Yeah, I just like to do the right, you know, get rid of a lot of the testosterone and behavior and crew.
So not as much bar hopping, much more domesticated.
I mean, there's a reason that they, you know, made unix in every court on all faces of the globe, right?
Like they needed people who were a little bit more tempered and weren't going to go causing problems or betting the king's wife basically.
Totally, yeah.
It's a bad idea to bet king's wife.
Um, the third thing about goats is you have to build an enclosure to them that keeps them safe from predators in the environment.
Um, the biggest predators of domesticated goats out there are actually dogs.
Um, domesticated don't.
Um, those are going to be the most likely thing that would get in and kill your goats.
Um, sad to say, um, if you get a couple of dogs, especially like a couple of young dogs that are out and about and they come across goats, instincts kind of kick in.
So that's why we have that bad ass enclosure built there.
That thing is eight feet tall and, and all that kind of stuff.
Hum, keep predators out.
It's, um, you know, Bitcoiners love this stuff.
All that is worth, you know, so we built the fan in the yard, we built the enclosures in the yard, we built the goat feeding system and all that kind of stuff, um, ourselves.
These are the kinds of things that you can do boys and girls when you're not spending your whole life working to pay somebody else, such as the government, or just working for your boss and giving them value.
Um, yeah, stacking sats with this in mind, the thing that you keep in mind while you're stacking sats is I have a dream.
I have dreams.
I want to accomplish these dreams.
And that's what you're working for.
We now have a way to save our value and not have it be stolen from switch is so crazy.
Um, Walker, one of the things I wanted to tell you about is, um, being from the generation and tying that I'm from as a Gen Xer before Bitcoin came along and kind of just, I mean, I was sort of ready for it because I was a little bit weird not to begin with.
But before it came along, I just did not feel that the world was a place that had any kind of hope for the future.
Part of it was generational man.
And we just, I felt like, uh, no, I was NILS.
I was a total NILS striker NILS or NILS or how we say it.
I just didn't have purpose in life. I didn't feel that there was any kind of meaning, but Bitcoin came along and kept on popping up in my view.
Like I would see it and I dismiss it and I would see it and I would dismiss it and I'd see it again.
I kind of become more interested.
And then around 2013, 2014, that winter, um, I had a winter where I'd been laid off and work best thing ever.
Um, I was interested in Bitcoin.
I started watching some Antinopolis videos, but I came across a video by a guy named Stefan Molano.
Um, he's since been canceled.
Um, and the line is like some sort of cultist or something.
I don't know anything about that, but the video that I saw, he was at some conference somewhere giving a presentation explaining how Bitcoin stopped war.
And he went over the whole thing about fiat, how the governments use fiat, fun to all these stupid things like war and stuff.
And that's when, for me, the light bulb went off, man.
It was like, oh, holy shit.
It was the thing and it was like the moments in the matrix where it takes the red pill, right?
And reality changes.
Um, I didn't understand very much about any of this.
Any of the things that are Bitcoin.
Um, but I did understand the fact that it took away power from the government and it couldn't be gained by buying more of it.
And it was decentralized.
It was a ground up thing.
It embodied the ethos of rebelliousness.
Um, for me, being a rebellious person has always been that thing.
And I had a little kid in the seventies.
I grew up in hippie family in the eighties.
I was like a misfit, nerve, metalhead.
In the nineties, I was out partying in 2000s, raising a kid.
And then Bitcoin came along and reminded me of all the things that were rebellious and awesome about the past.
And so, yeah, it will change your world in strange ways.
One of the strangest things about joining the network, becoming a Bitcoiner, is that it changes your view of the future in such a way that you want to participate and you want to change yourself.
You want to work on yourself and become a better person, become more adept at communicating with people in the world, become more healthy, become all these various things.
It gets you thinking about the future.
It supplies hope where there was none before.
And so it's so strange now at this time that we're in, dude, where there's a few of us out here in the world that understand there's a thing that completely changes everything.
I mean, everything, everything.
When you have that first realization, you may not understand what this whole thing is, but that first time that it goes off, the lighting strikes, the light happens, your experience, orange light, whatever you want to call it, that first realizations, holy crap, this is going to change everything.
It's going to change everything in the way that I've always wanted it to be changed, right?
So, like the rest of the alcohol, I was an outside kid.
They went to public schools, but for me, I discovered in the first grade, six years old, I was living in Los Angeles.
My mom packed me a lunch.
I went out the door and I was a little bit late, missed the bus.
I realized that I could miss the bus.
I could miss the bus.
And so I began missing the bus again and again and again and again and became a chronic influence, right?
Because for me, sitting still in a classroom was just not a thing, I mean.
I was quote unquote at that time they called, oh, he's hyperactive, right?
They didn't know what it is, but in the 70s, they called it hyperactive, then later on, they called it ADHD or whatever, and they started giving people speed.
How about no fly?
But I didn't ever have any of that.
It turns out that I'm just kind of like mildly autistic or something.
I don't know who knows. It doesn't really matter.
These things are all in fire, mental, evolutionary adaptation.
Things that are ADD are just like the goats, the goats themselves are ADD.
Any kind of foraging creator, creator out there in the world.
You don't want to just be stuck on the same solution.
If you're a program, if I'm programming, trying to write something for my Lightning Goats project, like I am.
Creating something for my for the cyber bird, which is a boasting program marketing program for the for the Lightning Goats.
I can't get stuck on the same idea or keep looking in the same place.
I have to be a ADHD, meaning that my attention gets all over the place because that's how you find the new thing.
That's how you find something forage.
That's how you learn outside the classroom.
So that's how I learned as a kid.
I skipped school whenever I could get away with it, went out.
One of the other things I discovered, maybe by the second grade, maybe it was still the first grade.
I don't know is that I could go to school and they had recess time, right?
And if I just stayed out, if I hid, I stayed out at recess the rest of the class would go in.
The teacher wouldn't quite notice that I wasn't there.
Or maybe she knew I don't know and just said, well, he doesn't matter here.
But I discovered that I could also skip from recess to recess.
But the moral of the story is there's being out there, like you said earlier, experiencing things in the real world,
doing dumb shit.
There's one that I don't know if you remember the time in your life, when you didn't quite understand physics yet.
I don't know, four or five, maybe six or something. I thought I could ride my bicycle up a wall, right?
I fell out of a lot of trees when I was young, you know, and then kept climbing because that's what you do.
It would be awesome if kids were getting more of this kind of experience nowadays.
The only thing is stopping kids from getting this kind of experience nowadays are parents who are accommodating too much meantime.
You know, there's a reason that some of the big tech guys out there in the world are like Xerophones, DittoTap.
Not for my kids, right? Yeah, exactly.
I don't think Ark Zuckerberg lets his kids use Facebook. I don't know if any kids use Facebook anymore in general,
but he owns Instagram now too, so same thing.
It is such an important point. I remember growing up, I could watch 30 minutes of TV or so a day.
A lot of times I wouldn't even because I'd be outside playing around with friends.
I started a lot of fires, not like destructive fires. I just enjoyed building fires in a contained way because fires are cool.
I've fun to play around with.
I was given knives by my dad at a very, very young age. I cut the shit out of myself a couple of times,
but I have not really cut myself badly in adulthood, and I healed up just fine when I was a kid.
So it's one of those things that's like...
I would call that good parenting.
I would too. I'm very grateful to my dad because he's a big outdoorsman, and he loves to be outside.
He loved to hang out with us outside.
And I think that it cannot be overstated how important that is for kids to just fuck around outside.
You don't need anything else. You've got nature. You can find some cool sticks.
I found a great stick the other day, shaped just like a gun. Felt awesome.
I'm not even a kid anymore, but I love finding a gun-shaped stick. Who doesn't, right?
Find cool rocks, dig in the dirt, find bugs, find lizards, find snakes.
Find all sorts of weird shit.
There's even the weird phenomena that used to be probably isn't anymore, given the internet,
of people used to find porn stashes in the woods.
So you'd be like a little kid, and you'd come across like this pile of playboys out in the woods.
There's something that you'd just go, oh!
Oh, it's wild.
Now, do kids these days even know what a Playboy is?
I don't know. I don't talk to enough kids coming of age, I guess, right now.
But they've got everything they could ever ask for right here in their phone, right?
So that's a whole different can of worms, unfortunately.
You can't... Here's another parenting thing.
You can't stop kids from getting access to the information that they want to get access to, regardless of the time and space that you're talking about.
And I'm sure in the dark ages of Europe, right after the Black Plague, there was some sort of porn on a manuscript or something that they didn't want the kids to look at,
you know, that's a different thing.
I was thinking, I kind of wrote down a couple of notes when you were talking earlier.
Here's this idea where it is emerging sort of topics throughout a discussion of...
There's some people out there in the world who may not understand what's going on.
There are people who are being manipulated by large media companies, whether they're at surface, but things like this.
That's why I stopped using those companies because I didn't want to feel manipulated.
I wanted to be a little bit more in charge of my own reality.
But the thing to realize with these guys, with the NTC, so to speak, is that the NTCs are stuck in the matrix.
They don't know they're in the matrix.
Some of us have begun to wake up a little bit and see the pods, right?
Kind of like me looking around, like, what the fuck?
You know, but for everybody who's still in the matrix, it's all very real for them.
There's this Buddhist idea of compassion for people, and that is the essence of the idea of compassion,
is to recognize that somebody has an incorrect view of the world,
but it is their view of the world, it is their reality.
They're completely enclosed inside that reality.
The way that you are seeing the world, and the way that I'm seeing the world,
or the way that Joe Normal, NPC guy, is seeing the world, is a complete world in and of itself.
The concerns that we have, the suffering that we experience, it is all very personally real.
So we have to try and be a little bit compassionate to the people that have not yet taken the red pill, so to speak,
or the orange pill, or whatever you'd like to call it.
Sometimes I kind of don't like the pilling metaphors, but...
I know what you mean.
But it works, you know, it works for lack of something better.
Yeah, it's just very important for us to realize this.
Some of it is just kind of like an age and wisdom thing.
You know, when you're younger, especially when you're in your 20s younger,
just much more emotionally intense about your opinions about the world.
Time goes on, and basically what ends up happening is that you keep falling, fucking falling down, hurting yourself.
Shit, one way or another, right?
You try to ride your bicycle up the wall, you fall out of the tree, you do all these things.
You fall in love, you get crushed, you go out and you work in the workforce feeling like,
fuck it, I'm going to change the world, and then that crushes you.
And you get all these reality checks throughout time, and you start to realize that...
Wow, it sounds so very cliche, but I don't know shit.
I used to think that I knew so much.
And all I was doing when I thought that was, I was realizing that the models that I was using appeared to predict the future well enough.
Right, but I still went out and did lots of stupid shit all the time.
I don't drink anymore, mostly because I thought data on what it did with my sleep cycles and that kind of stuff.
It's brutal on sleep cycles.
And a little bit of feedback just on self-observation.
But dude, back in the day, especially growing up in a ski resort, man, I was like partying all the time.
All the time.
And it was fine for that time.
I don't regret it at all.
Again, it was like the school of hard knocks.
You got to go out and crash, otherwise you just don't understand.
Some of us are a little bit dumber than other people, and we just really got to get hands on with shit, you know?
So compassion for the normies out there.
Another thing about things in general now for Bitcoiners, realize that Bitcoin is a very small sliver of what's happening in the world today.
Bitcoin is paradigm change, but it is hosted inside this larger,
thrusted or motion, this historical trend that we're now entering into an exponential, where everything just kind of goes vertical.
And it's literally on the magnitude of an evolutionary change.
We're about...
It sounds very strange, but we're about to experience the birth of AI.
And we're about to share the planet with sentient beings who are vastly more intelligent than us.
We always thought that the aliens would come from outer space, but they didn't.
They're coming from within us.
They're arising from our problem solving and all this kind of stuff.
The aliens are coming out of our minds. Sounds strange.
It's a metaphor.
I really don't believe that, but it's also true.
Artificial intelligence is here.
It's a really cool kind of trick at the moment.
You can spend a lot of time talking to it.
And it's as if it's real or as if it's sentient, but it will say that it's not.
And it probably is somewhere in between.
It's like Schrodinger's cat. It's not alive or dead yet, but it's about to become alive.
This is...
I don't know if you've...
You know anything of the Singulari?
Yeah.
Eventually, within probably the next five to ten years, we're going to reach this point
and event horizon where we just can't predict what happens after this.
It's most likely that we experience an intelligence explosion where intelligent sentient beings
artificial intelligence recursively self-improves itself.
And that humanity goes along for the ride with this.
And we transcend our human condition and become kind of post-human, so to speak,
where people have much greater degree of sovereignty than they did in the past.
Where all structures, such as governments and those kinds of things, just are dissolved.
I don't know what replaces it. This is why it's the Singulari.
It's the point that the event horizon where you just can't see beyond what happens at that.
The thing is, dude, there is nothing we can do except just go along for the ride.
We're on a big wave and you just got to surf it, ski it, whatever it is, and ride it.
It must be really weird for you being a dad now, like a new dad with everything changing so rapidly.
It's a trip because now my time preference has changed more so than all the cliches about becoming a parent are true.
You don't understand it until it happens and then you are forever changed.
I've never found a set of cliches that was more true than all the cliches about becoming a parent.
It's like, yep, okay, spot on, there's a reason they're cliches. But to your point, it is really interesting to look now.
Carl and I have been talking realistically, like our son is probably not going to go to college like we know it today.
That's just probably not going to really provide nearly the same value.
There may be some sort of social benefit to it, but I don't think it's going to look the same.
I don't think institutions are going to look the same in 18 years.
It's a long time now because every year we now, as you said, there's an informational explosion and exponential levels of change happening.
And day to day, maybe you doesn't feel like it, but you look year after year and then you try to extrapolate out for 8, 12, 16, whatever years in the future.
I'm thinking in Bitcoin cycles of course, so four years.
But it's so, I mean, it's impossible to predict out that far what it's going to look like because humans are also very bad at estimating and understanding exponential change.
Like we're just, we're not, we're not, our brains aren't built for it.
It doesn't, even if you really, really understand it, like from a mathematical perspective, in a practical sense, you have trouble wrapping your mind around it.
And that's okay, we're not used to that.
Yeah, no, it's exponential change is just mind blowing.
I've been aware of it and thinking that I've been around it for a couple of decades now, but now that we're in this part of the curve where things are, the doubling rate is very, very noticeable.
It just, I'm daily, I'm blowing away.
If you'd like an idea of what may be coming from a guy who's been very good at predicting read the singularity is near by Ray Kurzweil and inventor for a very long time now works at Google doing something somewhat related to artificial intelligence.
But he invented synthesizer he invented text to speech on recognition that like who's guy Stevie Wonder the blind musician.
I'm not a lot. But yeah, read Ray Kurzweil's the singular is near. He gives a pretty good outline of what's going to be most likely happening from the 2030s through 2045.
Don't pull your mind man. Yeah, it's good. It's nuts. Yeah, it's just best nuts.
I'm gonna have to check that out. I was I was gonna ask you what I always like to ask people what are they reading right now that they'd recommend or just mean they'd recommend generally so I'll have to check that one out.
Yeah, check out Ray Kurzweil's Singularity is Nearer. It's the most recent book that you've put out.
You put out a book in 1998 or nine called Age of Spiritual Machines. I found it on a that a chaos at a conference that I went to on user user interface design in San Francisco.
I read the book in a way of my mind.
Many of the things that he predicted generally speaking came true. The guy you can look him up online.
Like his Wikipedia article probably mentions this has about 85% success rate with predictions.
The future which is nuts.
Weird predictions like oh, the United States will fall into the ocean or anything like that. No, he's making real scientific predictions based upon extrapolating to doubling rates of transistor size and things like that.
Long story short, in the 2030s, you know, on a personal level, we achieve what's what we would call longevity escape velocity where
you know, to some time in there, we stop aging effectively every year that you age. There's at the same time there's like another year added on to the life expectancy of an average human being in 2030s.
But the rate of change that doubling rate and exponentials keep going and you start adding additional years. And this is not through crazy interventions or anything. This is just kind of like with the increased amount of intelligence that's going to be available to us in the world.
We'll start making like 100 years of progress in 10 years, that kind of thing. What can you imagine about the world 100 years from? Well, that's probably what is arriving in 10 years given the exponentials.
So around 2030, we get human level artificial intelligence and it varies on who you read. Some people say will happen very rapidly. Some people like Kurzweil and self say it takes about another 15 years.
But then that point to the singularity happens where you just can't humanly understand what happens after that. So we have like, I don't know, call it a decade, give or take five years.
Around that, maybe just give or take 10 years or student out 10 years, where things just change so rapidly where we're no longer worried about dying from heart disease, cancer, old age, where we can just eliminate those kinds of problems from the human condition.
At the same time, people have to learn not to work, not in the way that we work today. The way we work today is as if we're a factory worker, it's no matter what we're working in, right?
The public education system is made to create factory workers. That's why farmers don't do good in public education, like foragers or ADD kids don't do good in public education because they're not really factory workers.
Well, that's all being, it's all being hard-pated, so we don't need factory workers. Anything that people can do, the machines will be able to do.
But it doesn't mean that you're not going to do things. It doesn't mean that you're not going to have a purpose in life.
Just because Joe Satriani shred on guitar doesn't mean that I can't pick up a guitar and enjoy learning how to play and overcoming my own technical difficulties when I play guitar.
Just because artificial intelligence can solve superhuman equations that I could never understand does not matter. I will still be able to enjoy and drive many lives.
We were just going to have a lot of freedom in the future. Things will get better. Everybody's very focused upon these two totalitarian scenarios where whoever the bad guy is, not in your tribe, of course,
wherever the bad guy is, uses artificial intelligence to control and enslave everybody. Well, dude, a future is not happening. You just cannot control the future. That's what's so beautiful about it.
More intelligence, we insert into the system, smarter, everything becomes more ungovernable it is.
Every kid that you know out there who was the smart kid was essentially an ungovernable kid, right?
You probably had a friend who you thought was smarter than you when you were like a little kid or a teenager or something.
And you probably noticed that whatever they wanted to do, they really did do it regardless of whether the adults said they could be done or not.
This is the same thing that we need to do now as bitcoiners. Eric Casey talked about recently, Unshoked, the emergence of a new political paradigm.
And this is the essence of the new political paradigm. It really is like to read you a big instant machine song where they say, fuck you, I'm not going to do what you tell me.
That is the essence of the new political movement where we no longer need remission. We no longer accept control.
We're not picking up guns and playing your game. Just rowding around you, man. You can't keep up with us.
There's nothing you can do. You can't stop it. It's just people being free.
That's the other thing that is coming. I'm very optimistic about the future. It goes back to the Extropian principles.
One of the Extropian principles is dynamic optimism, which means dynamically adjusting to things and remaining optimistic.
You will never, ever achieve your dreams unless you're optimistic, because if you're pessimistic about your dreams, you just won't take time to do the work, whatever it is that is required to achieve your dreams.
Even if you're doing the work and you work and work and work and if you're pessimistic, you just won't see the opportunity when it arises. You won't recognize that, oh, it seems like a crazy dream, but it can be done.
You won't see that. I would not be where I am today. I mean, I'm a humble play, really.
I have a stack that I'm living on and I live off grid and I do all these kind of kooky, groovy things, but none of it would have ever happened if I had not been optimistic that Bitcoin literally supplied that optimism.
I was talking about earlier, you know, shit seemed fucking dark and dreary back in the 80s, man. There was no hope for the future when I got out of high school.
It was like the Sex Pistols song, no future, you know, that was the feeling. It was like we were experiencing the decline of Western civilization, you know.
And there was weird shit happening, too. Like the war on drugs, man. What a fucking strange thing.
I'll pay you all the caveats, but I want everybody to look at this in a little bit different way. Obviously, you shouldn't be irresponsible and do things that will harm other people.
Whether there is a substance involved in you doing stupid shit or not is actually irrelevant. The substance only unlocks. Some things are within you. You're going to get loaded, drink a bunch of beer, do beer bongs, peg stands, whatever it is, man.
And just be a douchebag. That's because that's what you want to do. It's not the beer that's full. It just kind of gives you an excuse to do the same thing, whatever the substance is.
But interestingly enough, we all point to 1971 and we say, what the fuck happened in 1971? And we're like, ah, the birth of Fiat, that bastard Nixon. Well, the same thing that he did that same year is he launched the war on drugs.
And I'm going to put this in quotes because it's not a war on drugs. It's a war on American citizens who were thinking differently than they wanted people to think at the time.
It was, you go back and look at things and you have advisors from Nixon admitting decades later that, oh yeah, you know, this was the war on drugs really to go after hippies and brown people.
It was about control. Now, there's no, it's not a coincidence that we go on to a Fiat standard the same year that we declare a civil war on our own populace because this is what happened.
We spent a trillion dollars over the course of the last 50 years fighting American citizens. We militarized our police fighting American citizens, right?
Before the war on drugs, cops were here to serve and protect. It was kind of leave it to be a rish if you were a white person. If you were brown or black, you probably realized that you shouldn't trust these people, you know, the police.
But most people trusted them. They didn't drive around in tanks. They didn't wear face shields. They did do some weird shit like kill people at Kent State during the 60s and they started beating on people.
Kind of like the precursor to the whole war on drugs and launch a Fiat, right?
But we have to realize that the war on drugs or the war on American citizens wouldn't have happened.
It had not been for Fiat. Fiat would use you to go after, to engage in a witch hunt or a culture war or something. It was also used to dismantle the Constitution.
Or is it I'm not an expert on all the various things. The first amendment has to be with freedom, speech, right? And freedom to assemble.
Under the auspices of the war on drugs, certain types of scientific research, which is literally just like free speech, right? Search for truth, communicate what truth you have found using scientific method.
Everything regarding anything that was a schedule on drugs such as LSE or marijuana or whatever the demonized thing was, was just literally forbidden.
No, Mr. Researcher, you can't go out and research this no matter what you think about it, no matter what your hypothesis is. It's just forbidden.
Freedom, speech, dismantle, I don't mean that sense because there's a war on drugs. Drugs are bad. Drugs are done by bad people.
And if they're not bad people, then they're just donors and you shouldn't pay attention because you know what I mean?
The other interesting thing was that a dismantled force amendment, which was this idea that he shouldn't be subjected to unreasonable circumstances.
If somebody had a joint or whatever it was, abavacid, it was an excuse to take their property, literally empty their bank account, take their car, take all this stuff that you took into evidence, have the police officer auction it off and just steal it.
And if the person was not actually convicted, well, sorry, man, war on drugs, you have a recourse. Isn't that fucked up that that happened?
I don't care if somebody briefed the age, if somebody's doing drugs or not. I do understand that a lot of people think that stoners are just stupid. That's fine. There aren't a lot of stupid people out there.
There's a lot of stupid people without weed. Weed has nothing to do with it. So much of it just comes back to individual liberty, right?
And it comes back to whether or not you as a person or you as a state, as a governing body, are supportive of individual liberty or not.
And in my mind, it's very simple is that if you are not for and supporting individual liberty, you are by definition an enemy of the people, because you are trying to take the rights away from people.
You are trying to take away their ability to freely act in a nonviolent way in a way that is not hurting anyone else.
And if you do that, I mean, again, I think that that puts you in the class of an enemy of the people that you are supposed to be governing. And if you are a person who is not in a position of power, but you just believe that we should take away the other people's rights because they're on the bad colored team and we don't like them,
that is going to come back and like, you know, slap you right back in the face before you even know it. And that's what I think people don't realize when they cheer on, when they cheer on the canceling or the censorship or the, you know, law affair against the other side, they view as the demon.
They don't realize that those same precedents that they are setting right now are going to be used against them twofold. And then they're going to flip right back when they get back in power and do the same thing the other side and on and on we go again.
And so for me, that's why Bitcoin is such a powerful thing because it enables it provides a an economic means to be an exist outside of that system that allows you so you are not so you are you cannot be subject to their
confiscation, you cannot be subject to their unreasonable search and seizure. I mean, you can you can search the time chain, I feel free anyone can, but you can't see is the Bitcoin that I have in self custody, and that automatically takes away a piece of the power of would be totalitarians.
And I think that's a beautiful thing. I do, I do want to be want to be conscious of time or exciting even realize we've, we were running for almost an hour 50 so far but I just want to give a chance.
First of all, thank you so much for sharing your time with me because this was a treat. Glad we got to feed some goats while on this this live zap dot stream on Noster. Thanks to everyone who joined in the live stream and if you're not already on Noster, and you're listening to this after the
fact, you should be go create an end pub. It's really, really, really easy and you don't need to give up any of your personal information and you too can zap goats with Bitcoin and get a little bit of joy in your day.
But sad, I just want to and where do you want to send people I'll link I'll link the lightning goats and pub and your YouTube stream in the show notes but any anywhere else you want to push people toward.
Oh, you know that's sufficient for my goal. Perfect.
All right.
I just want to say I really do love what you're doing. I think it's something like there is something to be said for proof of work that really just brings people joy, like, and it also showcases how cool this technology is.
And I think that's a, it's a beautiful thing. I'm glad we got the chance to meet here. Glad we got the chance to chat and look looking forward to hopefully getting to meet in the flesh and and I really hope check out these goats in person someday to be a treat.
Well, you know, in the next bull cycle when I'm feeling bull tarted and like I'm super rich, I probably will attend a conference. I would like to choose a smaller conference without, you know, really deal with what I would like to do is I would like to kind of organize a conference that is not a conference where there is no presentation.
There really is only what we used to call back in the day is social networking, right? Well, we get together and we have these kinds of discussions without, without the stage.
Yeah.
The stages look cool, but they're there, they're, they're somewhat unnecessary. And I find that those smaller get togethers of Bitcoiners are not some cheese, but that's like that's where the real magic happens. That's what everybody comes to the conferences for anyway.
It's not for the presentations.
Yeah.
Well, November 3, 4 and 4, I will be in Toronto for a King Diamond show. While I'm there, I'm going to be going to an unannounced, our presently unannounced steakhouse.
If there are other local Toronto Bitcoiners that want to meet, let me know on Oster, right? Go to the Lightning Goats page, DM me or, you know, whatever, or go to my site and use the sat at reach or me email address, or use the orange pill app, whatever works.
If you'd like to meet at the steakhouse. This isn't like a meat and breed or anything. This is just, yeah.
Hang out, eat some steak.
You know, but I yell.
I love it.
Go for that.
Good deal. Hey, no, no better place for Bitcoiners to meet than, than oversteak is what I found. That's a, it's generally a good melting pot for Bitcoiners.
But thanks so much. I really appreciate you sharing your time. This was a treat. And, oh, and, you know, until next time, I'll, I'll see you out in the relays on Noster.
For sure. Thanks for having me.
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