I think people just need to look bigger.
They need to think bigger than themselves.
They need to think bigger than just
their own little selfish personality.
And I think having kids now that you're a new father,
congratulations, it really changes your mind to that.
Because look, I've done pretty well in my career.
Well, I made a lot of money, I lost it all,
I had to redo it again, that sucked.
But I could just go disappear at this point.
But how does that help my kids?
It doesn't.
How does it help your kids?
It doesn't.
I think as bitcoiners, we're supposed
to have this long-term perspective.
We're supposed to envision this world where things
could be different.
Value systems could be re-aligned.
We could shift the balance of power.
Like, we all want that, but it doesn't come by being passive.
It only comes through building.
And it's up to us, up to you and I, up to the bitcoiners
listening to this show to go do that.
And if that means you've got to sacrifice
a little bit of your money, some of your bitcoin, so be it.
If that means you've got to sacrifice some of your time,
then so be it.
If you want that world to come true, then it's up to us.
[?].
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker, and this is the Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 838653.
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 Mark Moss.
Mark has been a full-time investor and entrepreneur
for over 25 years.
He's a partner at the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund,
has a massively popular YouTube channel
with almost half a million subscribers,
a radio show on iHeart, and he gave one of my all-time favorite
conference talks at Unconfiscatable in 2022, titled,
Come and Take It.
He's also an all-around great guy
who I've had the pleasure of hanging out with at multiple
conferences these past couple years.
I love getting Mark's perspective
because he has an extremely practical way of framing things.
And we cover a lot in this episode,
from the Alamo and Sparta, to politics, to localism,
and individual action, to bitcoin and parallel systems,
to inflation, and a whole lot more.
Before we dive in, I'm pleased to announce a new partner
for the Bitcoin Podcast, Cloaked Wireless,
a privacy and security-focused 5G wireless service
built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners.
Head to cloakedwireless.com and use the promo code
WALKER for 25% off your first month of eSIM
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Go to bitbox.swiss.walker and use the promo code WALKER
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Bitbox O2 hardware wallet.
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.
But if you're like me and you prefer to just listen
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Not only can you send bitcoin to your favorite podcasters
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Finally, if you are a bitcoin-only company
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Without further ado,
let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Mark Moss.
Man, welcome.
I gotta say, sweet entrance and your background.
I wasn't sure if you were gonna have it up.
I know it's in all of your videos, obviously,
but it's definitely like studio goals, I would say.
Yeah, it's goals for sure.
It doesn't start this way.
I started making videos from my webcam.
Like literally in my webcam on my computer,
I'd have up like some notes on my screen
and I had my webcam just on the computer.
And I made videos that way.
And then I went to using my phone in a tripod
with a corded lapel mic and I would like get up,
hit record, walk around to my desk,
clip on the mic, spit the video,
go around, hit end recording,
and I would just chop the beginning and the end
because I didn't know about editing.
Just chop the beginning and the end, upload it that way.
And then continuing to sort of up level.
And yeah, now I have this 1600 square foot studio
with the highlights, you know,
all the professional 6K cameras, all this,
this video wall.
And so it's definitely been a work in progress
over whatever five years now.
I mean, it's proof of work, I suppose.
You know, it's pretty impressive though, I gotta say.
I need to at least get like one little monitor
behind me or something so I can have some
cool imagery cycling just to feel like
I can slightly level up.
I think, you know, I think one thing
that's working towards your favor is that
I think content is changing really rapidly.
AI is definitely causing that to happen.
And I've been talking about this quite a bit.
I was on a podcast recently, a non-Bitcoin podcast,
and I was talking about how I think that AI
is gonna create this cataclysmic event
to where the internet is gonna be almost unusable.
Like we can certainly talk about this
in regards to like Nostr,
which I know you're super deep down,
and all the KYC hacks that are happening with AI,
for example, but just in regards to content,
I said it's gonna be this cataclysmic event
that will make the internet almost unusable
because already what happened is really
with the rise of the internet,
it created all these commodity workers across the world.
And so all of a sudden we brought all these workers in.
Some of those people were writers,
and so then companies would hire these overseas writers
to create articles for SEO.
And if you Google today and you're looking for information,
a lot of times you just come across these SEO articles
and they're garbage, right?
It's just a bunch of SEO nonsense.
And that's already a big problem.
But today AI is telling everyone they can be a creator.
Oh, AI can write books for you.
They can write articles for you.
And so now these companies have 10X or 100X,
or they will 100X their output,
and they're gonna create thousands and thousands of articles,
thousands and thousands of books from AI
that will be mostly just garbage.
And it's gonna become this cataclysmic event
where like the internet will almost be unusable.
And I think the trend is gonna be personal brands.
So like I can't trust this nonsense,
this unknown information.
I have to go to a trusted source,
and that'll be the sort of like that personal brand.
And so back to the original point I was gonna make
is that going back to less produced, more raw,
more real content is the trend that we're already seeing.
You're starting to see a lot of people online
doing like hand-drawn pictures, things like that.
And I think less polished, more raw video
is gonna be the trend for a while
until we can figure out this whole AI thing.
So anyway, you're ahead of the curve with that.
That's my whole point.
Yeah, you know, I mean, that's a,
it's a very nice way of saying,
hey, what you've got going for you in the background right now,
you know, use it to your advantage.
But I mean, you make a great point,
and it's interesting because if you think of the,
the legacy media landscape served as that trusted source
for so long, partially because there was no other option,
but partially because, you know,
you went on to see that news anchor
that you knew was gonna give you, quote, the truth,
or at least talking away that you liked.
And then with the massive distrust in legacy media
that has been growing and sowing for these past years,
it's almost a shame if they wouldn't have shot themselves
in the foot so hard by spewing all of the fricking propaganda
that they have over the past few years.
I mean, they've been doing it always,
but it's just become more evident in the past few years.
They might have actually had a chance in existing more
in the post-AI cataclysmic era
because they could have been that trusted source again.
But now there's just no trust there.
People wanna trust a person.
Like I wanna go into Mark's channel.
I wanna see, you know,
because I know Mark's gonna give it to me straight,
and I know he's a human being and not an AI,
and he actually thinks for himself.
So sad for them, they kind of missed an opportunity
by shooting themselves there.
I did a show with Breedlove on his channel,
and I called it the Crisis in the Confidence of Authority.
Crisis in the Confidence of Authority.
You see, in our society,
society can't exist without trust.
We have to have trust.
How do I know my food's not poisoned?
How do I know my tire was put back on properly
when I drive out, go 100 miles an hour,
whatever, 60 miles an hour on the freeway, whatever it is?
Right, and so we need trust.
Trust is a way that we build a society,
but it's so we can shortcut,
so we can build things like that.
And in society, then we have certain people
that are built up to certain levels that we trust them,
and we had signs or insignias that we could trust them.
So for example, a doctor might wear a smock, right?
And we go, okay, that doctor now,
he's gone through this education,
he looks the part, I trust him because of that.
To your point that you made earlier about news broadcasters,
well, they're on TV, so I know they have this responsibility
for doing research, so I'll trust them, right?
But the problem is, as I was talking about with Breedlove,
is the crisis and the confidence of authority.
We no longer have confidence and authority.
It's partly because as to what you said,
they just constantly lie to us.
That's partly it, but it's not just that.
So if we take it back to the money supply,
which is where our conversations always go,
and start, because obviously Bitcoin,
but if we go back to the money, right,
we know that we can't trust the Federal Reserve
with how much money they have, but it's bigger than that.
Why doesn't the Federal Reserve work?
I've talked about many times like Jerome Powell,
Janet Yellen, they're all idiots.
And they're not just idiots
because they know what they're doing, that's part of it.
But they're idiots to think that they can control the market.
For any one person to think they can control
a complex system like a market is an idiot.
Like you can't do that.
And so, and part of the reason why they can't do that
is because of the information problem.
They can't have enough information
to control all of that input.
Now of course Klaus Schwab and his fourth industrial
revolution thinks AI can do that.
That's a whole other topic,
but back to the crisis and confidence of authority.
So we have these authority figures,
the doctor, the broadcaster,
they don't have enough information.
Cool, you're a doctor, cool.
So you did your eight years in medical school, cool.
You've been a doctor for 10 years, cool.
But you're a general practitioner,
and all you've seen is this.
You don't know anything about these specialty things,
or you're the specialty, but you don't know about general.
So that's still, they have that problem
with the information gap.
And what caused this crisis is the internet.
So now we have access to this information
we didn't have to, so the doctor would have had to have gone
to medical school to learn what was in the books,
and he could tell us that, but today,
with a snap of finger, I can just find that information.
The broadcaster went to learn journalism and research today.
I can just click that information and click up a button.
And what happens, and I know you're way out in front
of this even more than I am,
I call them the internet slews, if you will.
Like, dude, the guys on the internet
can figure out anything so quick, the crowd,
the power of the crowd.
So like, for example, I put a tweet a couple months ago,
and it was about not to get into this topic,
but to prove the example, there's a situation
with the January 6th situation,
and there was a bomb put at the DNC.
And all of a sudden, that story's like getting buried,
but the guys on the internet found all the footage,
found all the cameras, watched all the evidence,
and put it all together in a way
that just could never have been done before.
It was the power of the crowd that sourced that,
and I think my tweet was like,
they never wanted us to have this much power, right?
This is why we can't have this much power.
They can't allow us to do it.
So it's a Christ in the Confidence of Authority.
I don't care if you're the doctor, the broadcaster,
and assuming you're doing your best.
Let's just assume that you're doing your best.
Now, you made the point, they're lying to us,
but assuming they're doing their best,
they just can't, they don't have enough information
to go against the power of the crowd.
And so it's a big shift, as I always say,
technology is what changes things.
It's a big shift, and it just changes that authority role.
And I don't know what that means for the future,
but it's a big shift.
You know, it's wild to say, I remember seeing your tweet
about the, and like many other tweets from these,
you know, pseudo-autistic sleuths, which is just beautiful
of people going, and as you said, it's this hive mind.
It's basically the free market of, you know,
the internet should be a free market of information
where you can take those signals, and the collective,
as opposed to, you know, a couple of people
sitting in a smoky room somewhere,
can use that collective intelligence
to use their own personal specializations
to figure out things that would never be figured out
by a small little working group sitting, you know,
making policy or dictating policy.
And it's incredible also the speed at which it happens.
And now, I mean, also these types of people,
and I include myself in there, you know, in many Bitcoiners,
you can utilize these different AI tools now,
which is really wonderful,
because that can help you collate information
so much faster, like, hey, just give me,
I need to know where to look,
because as you pointed out with Google,
if you just Google something, and we know how Google's,
how biased Google is, because we've seen it directly
through their AI's results.
Like, that was just shining a light on what already-
If there was any doubts yet.
Should have been known.
Yeah, just in case you were wondering how biased Google is,
and what crap they feed you,
the AI showed that because it was just
giving back responses.
But you have this ability to use these tools,
and I'm glad that there are folks like NVK,
I don't know if you've tried his Unleashed.Chat.
You can pay for it in Bitcoin, it's completely private,
so you don't have open AI looking at all of your,
everything you're feeding into there,
all your ideas that you're feeding in,
and that's fantastic.
And as we see the emergence of more of these,
that just gives more power to that collective hive mind,
to go out, to sleuth, to find whatever the actual truth is
through the layers and layers of bullshit
that are thrown out at you, by Google,
or by whatever regime you happen to be a surf underneath.
And that at least gives me some hope.
You know?
Yeah.
The problem is, is these tools are so powerful,
but they don't make dumb people smarter.
They make smart people smarter.
So what do I mean by that?
Like a set of mechanic tools, for example,
are very powerful in the hands of a mechanic.
For me, not so much, I'm not very mechanical.
So like they don't make me any better,
they don't make me a better mechanic.
Having access to the best tools,
because I don't know how to use them.
Tools in the right hands use the right way
make people smarter, make people better.
I could use, I could go get golf clubs from Walmart,
or I could use Tiger Woods golf clubs,
and I'm probably not gonna play any different, right?
Or Tiger Woods could play the same with either club, right?
And so back to the AI, it's like,
it's only if it's used properly.
I say over and over as sort of we've been in this AI revolution,
LLM revolution, whatever we're gonna call it,
but the quality of your life comes down
to the questions that you ask.
And unfortunately, dumb people ask dumb questions.
They ask very broad, very general questions,
and you get back very broad general answers.
When people ask me all the time,
Mark, what asset should I buy?
It's like, man, that's like the broadest question, right?
And so if I ask AI that question, chat, GPT or whatever,
it's gonna, what will it say?
But if I say, tell me in times of high inflation
and low economic growth when debt to GDP has exceeded 120%
and we're in a commodity bubble,
what assets have worked best?
Okay, now I've got a very specific question
and it can give me back a much more detailed answer.
And so I was actually talking with somebody
on a call earlier today, and I was explaining to them
that they were talking about kind of the US
being in this re-onshoring bubble,
or not bubble, but trend, if you will,
and how the goal of the US is to sort of rebuild
this middle class.
And I said, you could re-onshor all the manufacturing
and that will not build the middle class back up.
And the reason why is because the middle class,
partly sure it was hauled out
because those jobs were sent overseas,
but those are low paying jobs today, right?
And what happened is we were in the industrial age
where everybody was on the assembly line
and dumb people and smart people were on the same path.
So it created this massive middle class,
but we're not in the industrial age anymore.
Now we're in the information age.
And so now you and I can use the power of chat GBT
or the internet or whatever you will.
And now it's meritocracy.
Now we can start to pull ahead.
And so the meritocracy of the world
is starting to really show its head.
And so there's really nothing that can be done
other than learn how to use these tools properly.
And that's again, back to that meritocracy.
It's such a good point
because some people I think have this,
you saw especially as like whatever last,
it was what a little over a year ago now
when chat GBT was first coming out, something like that.
And you saw all these thread boys on Twitter
who are, here's how to make $15,000 a day using chat GBT.
And it's gonna write you this business plan
and you just, you implement it
and you'll be a millionaire by next month.
And it's like all of this just generic click baity stuff.
And at the end of the day, you're exactly right.
It's not going to increase,
it's not gonna make a dumb person hyper intelligent.
The, you know, garbage in, garbage out.
That's how it works.
And honestly, to the umpteenth degree for AI
because it really like you can put in very little garbage
and get a whole lot of garbage spewed back out at you.
Or you can use it in an intelligent way
and know how to prompt these things
and the right questions to ask.
But it's an interesting point
about kind of the hollowing out of the middle class.
And I would agree with you
that we won't see that kind of middle class,
you know, expansion that we had, you know,
as Biden from the bottom up in the middle out,
it's like, that's, we're past that.
Like that ship has sailed.
And your point that, okay, these jobs now
are not high paying jobs.
They're not middle class jobs anymore.
There's a reason we offshored them in the,
well, there's many reasons,
but after them being offshored,
that is now a low paying job.
The only way you make that a decent paying job
is by subsidizing it, right?
You subsidize it, that's gonna just lead
to disruption of market signals.
That's not going to be ultimately effective in the long run.
It's a short-term band-aid.
It looks great for your next election cycle,
but it's not gonna work in the long run.
And so it'll be very interesting to see
how some of these things play out.
I mean, okay, if you want to re-onsure everything
in America, fine, but what's that gonna do
at all your prices?
Because Americans aren't gonna,
they're not gonna work for cents on the dollar
like the manufacturers overseas.
It's just not gonna happen.
So we got all these migrants now, so.
Well, and maybe that's all part of the master plan, right?
It is, okay, we're gonna need the cheap labor.
We gotta have people who are willing to work for it.
And hopefully they'll vote blue at the end of the day.
I don't know.
I put up this thing on my Instagram.
Man, I got, as you know, I got kicked off of,
well, not kicked, hacked out and locked out
of my Twitter account for five months.
I started spending some time on Instagram.
I should have probably spent time on Nostra.
I spent time on Instagram.
And so now I've been putting a lot of content over there.
But I put this thing up the other day on there.
And I said, I haven't, I've only been on YouTube.
And then I was on Twitter.
That was it.
No LinkedIn, no nothing.
But anyway, now I'm a little bit on Instagram.
So follow me there at Mark Moss.
But I put up this thing that said,
unsuccessful people think the game is rigged against them.
Successful people realize the game is rigged
and learn how to play it.
And so when you think about, you know,
this, the hauling out of the middle class
or the use of these tools or the migrant crisis,
for example, these things are happening.
Bitcoin is here.
And like, you can either think the game is rigged against you
or I was, I was, I was talking about this
in many different ways, but like inflation,
inflation is a problem.
You and I, we talk about it all the time.
Our money's being debased.
It's stealing, I say it's stealing our life, right?
It's stealing the hours that I have to work
to get the same cost of goods and services.
That's a big problem.
But I can either say the game is rigged against me.
They use inflation to steal my wealth
or I could just play the game as the saying goes,
if you can't beat them, join them.
So great.
So what is the, what is the government or the Fed?
What are governments trying to do?
They're trying to inflate away their debt.
Great.
That means they inflate away my debt as well.
What does inflation do to asset prices?
Oh, it pushes them up.
So I can get my asset prices to go up
and it can inflate away my debt at the same time.
Well, great, I'll just do that.
So the game is rigged and it is bad
and I'm not a fan of it.
My goal is to end the Fed, right?
I'm trying to carry on for Ron Paul from 2009,
but can't beat him, join him.
So they're trying, the game is rigged.
Let's just play the game.
Let's just let it inflate away my debt
and let me push my asset prices up as well.
Well, and I think that that's a, it's a great point
and it actually leads into something
I wanted to talk to you about today,
which is, okay, if you can't beat him, join him, yes.
But at the same time, something that I've heard you make
an extremely compelling argument for in the past.
One of, I still think the best speeches I've seen
or presentations I've seen at a Bitcoin conference
was building parallel systems.
And you talked about this, it was at my first,
you know, official Bitcoin conference
that Carl and I went to, Unconfiscatable 2022.
You were there, you gave a presentation called
Come and Take It.
Come and Take It, yeah.
And part of that, I mean, it was, it was fantastic.
Like it really, it stuck with me.
I watched it again today.
It was just as good, maybe better than I remembered.
I wouldn't, I didn't have any beers in my system yet.
You know, at this point when I watched it.
So maybe I was a little more clear headed.
I was going into it with a, not the Vegas brain,
but in that, and there's, first of all,
you were incredibly prescient with,
I'll link this in the show notes
as folks should watch it.
You're incredibly prescient with a lot
of the things you discussed,
because you talked about weaponization of money,
weaponization of regulation.
And I mean, things that we're seeing playing out
just to a tee today.
At that point, it was the Canadian truckers
and it was the initial round of Russian sanctions.
And you talked about that weaponization
of the financial system, but you also then,
you ended it on a very hopeful note,
which was of course, you know, come and take it.
But the big point in that was, you know what?
They're going to keep doing what they're doing.
You're not going to fix that system.
You need to build parallel systems.
So maybe that's something we can,
we can kind of dig into a little bit
because again, that talk, like people should go
and watch it.
It's like a 25, 30 minute talk.
It is worth your time.
But you started off with a little talk about Sparta
and then ended it on the Gonzalez flag
and the cannon at the Almo.
Can you give a little bit of that story?
Cause I think it's really powerful.
I love that story.
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So thank you.
You won't be able to see this,
but on my home screen,
I have that come and take it.
I have a graphic I had my designer make,
which is the Canon with the,
basically the Gonzalez flag.
It's the Canon with a Bitcoin logo behind it.
And it says come and take it.
And that's my home screen.
So every time I turn my phone on,
it's just come and take it.
Come and take it.
Come and take it, right?
Human beings are different for lots of different reasons
and animals.
One of which is that we can speak things
into existence.
I believe it's because we were made in God's image
and God made, spoke things into existence,
let there be light.
If you're not a believer,
then you can see how you want,
but you understand the power of positivity
or positive affirmations.
If I tell,
if I tell, was it Henry Ford said,
whether you think you can or you can't,
either way you're right.
Right?
And so you understand there's the power of that.
And so this is what I tell myself.
Every time I turn my screen on, come and take it.
Anyway, let's talk about that story
because it's a great story.
Molen Labe is what they said.
So the power, the story started in Sparta
and they basically, if you've seen the movie 300,
they made their last stand
and they started that Molen Labe, the come and take it.
And that has been used throughout history
as sort of this like challenge,
which is like, we're ready to die.
And when you study history, it's crazy.
I love history.
I use it a lot through my content,
but the passion and the values
and the principles that people used to live by.
Like in the old days, if you insult me,
let's just go outside and duel right now.
To the death, let's just go.
Like, that's it.
Like men had lines, real men have lines.
And they always did throughout history
and Sparta is an example of that.
Like let's just go.
Like we're ready to die right now for this.
Obviously, you know, Braveheart and all of that.
Let's fast forward the story of the Gonzalez flag,
that's my favorite.
If you've never been to the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas,
you should go.
I've been a couple of times throughout my life.
I took my kids there a couple of years ago
and you know, man, you can read the stories,
you can read the letters, you can see the timeline
and I'm just like getting chills from this.
And my kids are just kind of like, eh, whatever.
And I got angry with them.
You know, it's like, how dare you like not,
not understand how viable this is.
But anyway, so the story is the Alamo
during the Mexican-American war,
the Americans were mad at the Mexicans,
sort of like they were at the Tea Party,
like taxation without representation.
Like, hey, you're taking all of our money,
but you're not giving us any benefits.
And what had happened is there was this outpost
at the Alamo in San Antonio
and the Mexican army had given them this old cannon.
And it was like a worthless cannon.
It didn't really work very well.
It was more like symbolic than anything.
And as sort of Texas started trying to separate from Mexico,
the Mexican army said, hey, give us the cannon back.
That was kind of the first thing,
like give us the cannon back.
And the US is like, no, like,
we're not gonna give you the cannon back.
And what they did is in the middle of the night,
the Mexican army, I think was forgive some of my facts here.
I might be a little bit off on this,
but I'll get the broad structure right.
But the Mexican army was, I believe,
on the other side of the river,
on the other side of the border river.
And the Americans had snuck across
in the middle of the night and they fired the cannon at them.
And then they retreated back to the Alamo.
Well, of course, that didn't make the Mexican army happy.
And they got all the troops, I think, 5,000 men,
and they came to the Alamo to like,
give us the freaking cannon.
That's like the come and take it, right?
So they showed up and they had the Alamo surrounded,
5,000 men, I believe it was.
And I believe it was Travis Scott, was it?
Man, I'm a little fuzzy on the story now.
I've been there a couple of times,
but I'm drawing some blanks on the names.
He wrote a letter, and you can see this letter at the Alamo.
It's like at the entrance on a plaque.
And he wrote a letter basically saying,
look, we're not gonna give you this back.
We're gonna say here a fight.
And at the end, he signs it like,
give me liberty or give me death.
But so as they're there surrounding them,
saying, hey, we're gonna come in,
and they gave them sort of an option,
like, hey, either surrender and we'll let you live,
or we're gonna kill all of you.
Like, that's just it.
And so rather than send a reply to the letter,
he let the cannon fire and said, just come and take it.
And they did.
And the sad story is they killed everybody there.
But it was the trigger point that led to more troops coming.
The U.S. obviously won the war and we got it.
But that's sort of the story of it.
And it really comes down to, like I said, having conviction,
having a line.
And ultimately, what the guys in Sparta said,
and what they said at the Alamo,
is give me liberty or give me death.
I'd rather live on my feet than die on my knees.
And you can take that for whatever you will.
There's obviously different levels of that.
But when it comes to Bitcoin, it's like, look,
there's no way the government can take it from us.
And if you've read The Sovereign Individual,
you understand the return on violence,
as they call it in that book, which is really good.
And the return on violence would be way too low.
They're not going to be able to come homestead to homestead,
tie you upside down by your toes and tickle you
until you give them your private keys.
And so it's just not possible.
And at some point, we're all going to have to decide
what that line in the sand is for us, as men, as humans,
as people, as citizens, whatever you want to call that line.
That's the story I think about.
And that's what that talk was about.
It was such a beautiful way to frame it
and to bring it back to Bitcoin.
And one of the other things that you touched on a lot
in that talk was freedom to transact.
Because without that freedom to transact,
your freedom of speech doesn't mean much.
Not in the information age.
Not when you need to be able to pay for your internet plan
and pay for your phone plan.
If you can't spend money, you're shit out of luck.
Freedom to assemble, good luck with it.
You want to buy a plane ticket to go protest somewhere?
Too bad.
You're on the no fly list.
And by the way, your bank account shut down anyway.
Freedom of religion, you're not building any church without money.
All of these things come back and it always comes back
to money.
And so when you see, I find it so, it would be humorous
if it wasn't so goddamn stupid and frustrating to see folks
like Elizabeth Warren, who on the one side claim
that you need to be able to have, you should have privacy.
And you should be able to do whatever you want with your body.
And fine, I believe in freedom of choice
in all aspects of life.
But then to see someone like her completely go to bat
for the big banks.
And to literally try and restrict the most basic, most
basic freedom that you have, which
is the freedom to spend your money how you want.
Because as we know, it's not your money
when you're using their system.
It's an IOU.
And this whole idea, especially in the age of cash
is going away, sadly.
I like cash.
As far as Fiat goes, using it in a cash-based way
is really nice, because it's one person to another.
That's peer-to-peer cash.
And there's not too much snooping you can do.
But that's going away.
We know CBDCs are on the horizon.
They're piloting everywhere.
And pretty soon, you already do not
have a way to self-custody Fiat currency unless it's in cash.
That's the only way you can do it.
And it's still a liability of the central bank.
But now with CBDCs, there will be literally no way for you
to ever actually have custody of money.
It is always going to be on someone else's ledger
that they can pull at any time.
We won't have any.
We'll have credit from government gives us.
Yeah.
If you're a good boy and don't eat any steak
and don't drive your car and don't say anything bad,
you'll get some extra credits.
I mean, let's talk about that Elizabeth Warren thing,
though, for a second.
Because today, at the time of this recording,
there's videos of her going around.
And that's what people are saying.
She's on one side attacking Bitcoin,
trying to prop up the banks kind of a thing.
But is she really?
Like, if I think about this, I was just thinking about it.
I haven't actually tweeted or said anything about it.
But the banks, what banks?
So we use these words.
I was listening to this interview with Jordan Peterson
on Tom Bylu's Impact Theory channel the other day.
Really good conversation.
And Jordan Peterson said, when you use cliches,
you're using old dead conversate.
You're using the language of the dead.
That's what he called it, cliches.
Because cliches, reciting something as fact,
that was told through whatever, multiple generations
or whatever.
And it's not alive.
I'm not thinking about it.
I'm not massaging it.
And the opposite would be, as Jordan Peterson, if you've
ever watched him, give live presentations,
he's thinking about it as he's talking it.
So he's like living it, right?
So we use these cliches, as he calls them, are dead.
There's a language of the dead.
So we use these cliches such as they.
They will never allow Bitcoin to succeed.
Because they will never give up control over money.
We say these things in regards to protecting banks.
But that's language of the dead.
What does that even mean?
Who are they?
And the reason why I bring that up
is because there's multiple factions.
Who are they?
OK, they, the government.
Really?
Because there's a lot of people in the government
that want Bitcoin to succeed.
And there's people in the government
that don't want Bitcoin to succeed.
OK, well, they, the banks.
Well, which banks?
Because Fidelity and Goldman Sachs and BlackRock
certainly want Bitcoin to succeed.
JP Morgan, maybe not so much.
And so it's like, one thing that I see,
and after creating content for many years,
I get thousands of comments a week across my platforms.
And so I almost have this finger on the pulse.
And people have a lot of people back to generalization.
Stereotypically, a lot of people have lost the ability
to have nuance in these things.
And so back to they.
So she's protecting the banks.
Really?
Because I would think that a lot of the banks
want Bitcoin to succeed.
Like, collectively, they've spent billions of dollars
to bring Bitcoin products to their clients.
Collectively, they've spent billions.
And they're hoping to make hundreds of billions
or whatever more.
They want it to go.
They want it to be illegal?
Is she really protecting the banks?
You know what?
I'm glad that you called me on that.
Because I firmly believe that the words we use do matter.
That nuance is important.
And so thank you for that.
Because I think it is important to clarify.
I sometimes with not to single Elizabeth Warren out,
but she deserves to use her.
Yeah, she does.
She's asking for it with the way that she acts,
the way she tends to spread.
She's an enemy of the people.
Because she wants to take away our ability to choose.
So she's certainly an enemy of you and I taking away our choice.
I'm not sure who she's a proponent of.
I would say she is perhaps an inadvertent lackey
of certain large financial interests that
have a vested interest in their own privatized blockchains,
you know, blockchain technology.
But I don't think, I think she genuinely believes in her mind
that she is on the side of the little guy.
Like I think she believes her own story enough at this point.
Because she's told it so many times.
Like she's Elizabeth Warren.
She fights for the little guy.
She fights against the big, you know, the big dogs.
For the Native Americans.
And I think, yeah, dear Lord, you know, just ridiculous.
But so I think that she's she's drank her own Kool-Aid so much
where she thinks that what she's doing is somehow
protecting the little guy that that because she doesn't
separate Bitcoin from the larger crypto
nor from the companies that operate in the Bitcoin space
that provide Bitcoin services.
She's basically conflating the Bitcoin, the money,
and the technology with anything that has anything
to do with Bitcoin blockchain companies there.
And FTX is Bitcoin to her, basically.
And so I think that's where the problem comes in.
Because she somehow thinks that she is still
on behalf of the little guy fighting
against the FTX's, the Sandbakeman frauds of the world.
I'm not sure if she took any money from him for donations.
That'd be interesting to find out, but different story.
But it's she's it's misplaced.
Like, and I think now she's in so deep,
she's in so deep in that political apparatus
that she she can't she's a fish in water.
She doesn't know what water is anymore.
She's swimming in it.
But I don't think she's purposefully doing the work
of the banks.
And as you said, some banks have a vested interest
in Bitcoin now.
JP Morgan, even they do because they're still
providing services for multiple of these ETFs.
So, you know, no organization is a monolith.
The government is not a monolith, as you pointed out.
And I guess the larger point would be there are people
who because of lack of information or lack of desire
to understand something like Bitcoin,
inadvertently do things that are anti-human, anti-freedom,
and against what their citizens would benefit from.
And that's the freedom to transact.
Because we're law abiding people for the most part, right?
And I think that's the attack vector.
I mean, I'm sure we probably agree on that, right?
Like, I don't think she's trying to make Bitcoin illegal.
She wants to make it where we can own it through an ETF.
And that's probably in behalf of the bank.
So that's something all the banks could get behind.
Hey, don't take away my Bitcoin products.
But yeah, make it where I can be the monopoly.
Because that's what governments and businesses do.
They build these moats, right?
And so these banks, I'm sure, I've said it for a long time.
Like, how crazy is PayPal bringing Bitcoin into PayPal or Venmo?
It's a Trojan horse.
It gets away from even needing PayPal.
Why would they help that?
And the banks the same way.
Why would they use Bitcoin?
Because it gets away from banks at some point.
So is that Trojan horse?
And I'm sure they're smart enough to have seen that as well.
But if they could keep UNI from transacting it directly,
and we could only own it as an asset through them,
then they could actually benefit from having Bitcoin
and having the regulation.
So if you think back, I mean, we've
all seen the movies of the James Bond movies
or whatever, the criminals.
And they want to get paid in bear bonds.
So those bear bonds were assets that they
could cussie themselves.
Stocks used to be paper stock certificates.
And so we had that.
But now you can't own stocks directly.
It has to be through your E-Trade or your Charles Schwab
or whatever broker.
And so they don't want you to actually have the asset
that you could exchange.
You and I could just, hey, take two shares of Tesla
for one of Apple or whatever the exchange is.
I don't even follow what those prices are.
But you know what I'm saying, right?
Where we'd have that as an asset.
And I think that's what they would like Bitcoin to be as well.
Where, sure, we can own Bitcoin just
like we can own Apple, Tesla, or bonds,
but we can't actually custody the asset ourselves.
And that appears to be the attack vector, in my opinion.
I think that you're right there.
And that really comes back to the financialization
of everything, right?
Like they want to be able to have that measure of control.
And now I'm saying they again.
Let me be more specific.
It is in the best interest of the banks
to be able to make a profit off of any sort of Bitcoin product.
If they are the ones who are in control of that product
and the flow of that product, it is in the best interest
of the government.
I think they work better in that regard.
I think the government and the banks
would all like to see that happen.
They don't all want to see Bitcoin go away,
but they would all like to see where their monopoly gets
enforced, right?
Well, it's a good point.
I'm curious.
I think we're entering into a very interesting year here
with the election cycle in the US.
But not just in the US, we have a historically large number
of top level elections across the world.
Like it's some great, I think it's like 49, 50% of the world
population this year is going to be voting in a top level
election.
That's wild.
That's potential for seismic shifts.
We've seen some seemingly very large shifts such as Javier
Malay in Argentina.
And that's definitely out of, I was
going to say out of left field, but he's definitely not
from left field, out of libertarian field,
move that came.
But I'm curious to hear your take on the landscape in the US,
but then kind of what you, because I know you don't,
you're obviously a US citizen.
You think about the US a lot, but you also
keep a pretty good pulse on the rest of the world,
because you're not sure if you might need to potentially make
a move somewhere at some point, depending
on how things go here.
What's your take on this year as we come up?
We've got the two old guys again, red and blue,
smashing heads together, Trump and Biden.
But we actually have an independent candidate that
seems to have the best chance in a long time.
I don't know if it's a real chance, but it seems like it.
And at least out of those three, he
seems to be pretty pro-Bitcoin, vocally so,
and even know what he's talking about, which
is shocking for a politician.
But what's your read on this coming year?
Is it, you know, it's always the most important election
in history.
Because they kind of are becoming, each one
is more important than the other.
I did an episode on my radio show a month or two ago,
which I got inspired by Dr. James Lindsay.
If you're not following Dr. James Lindsay, you probably should.
He's probably the smartest, most up-to-date guy
on communism, socialism, all the isms, and cultural revolutions,
and exactly what's going on right now today.
So anyway, I got inspired from an episode he did,
and I did my own episode.
And I basically said that before I answer the question on that,
I'm going to give a bigger answer,
is that I called it a scam.
And the reason why it's a scam is because scam is like, hey,
I'm telling you that you're going to get this,
but really you're going to get something different.
You're being sold a false bill of goods, if you will.
And really, it might not be so much as a scam as it is,
like almost like magic, like sleight of hand.
Hey, look over here.
Meanwhile, they're doing this to you over here,
kind of a thing.
And what do I mean by that?
So the whole world is caught up on the presidential election.
Not just the US, but the world is caught up
in the presidential election.
I spent a month traveling Europe with my family last summer.
And everywhere I went, people wanted to talk about Biden.
You know what I mean?
So it's like, the whole world's caught up in the president,
the biggest election in the world.
But in the United States, we are not
in a democracy run by a dictator or a king.
We're in a constitutional republic.
And the states are independent or should be.
And so the reason why I call it that magic, that scam,
that sleight of hand is because we're all
looking at the president, which we'll come to,
and you're asking me about.
But in a constitutional republic, and even today,
in this whatever we're in today, the president
doesn't really matter to my life.
What matters to my life most is my city council.
And what matters above that is my county supervisor.
And what matters more than that is my governor.
So let's just take a look at this, for example.
During the pandemic, California and New York
were out competing each other to be the most totalitarian
states that they could be.
I actually, I'm in California.
I had to leave.
I'm back, but I left during that time.
Gavin Newsom was doing his best president G impersonation
that he could and locked down the state and passed mass
ordinances and all these different things, right?
But in my county of Orange County,
our sheriff put out a memo and said,
don't call me for anything COVID related.
We're not responding.
Straight up.
Like, I don't care what the governor says.
I don't care what the state says.
We ain't doing it.
In my town, we're in a red town in a red county,
and they didn't have any restrictions.
And another example, late last year,
when they started talking about mass restrictions coming back
and pandemic things coming back, the town of Huntington Beach
in Orange County preemptively put
ordinances into place that there would be no mass mandates that
would happen in that town.
So you see, that city inside of a county
had more to control that person's life
than what the president did.
And the reason why it's a scam is because they want us
to get all caught up in the president for two main reasons
I can think of.
One, it's demoralizing.
What does my vote matter?
I'm one person.
I have 330 million.
Why should I even bother?
So it's demoralizing, number one.
It makes me not even want to try.
It's too big of a goal.
Two, it puts all of our attention there instead
of where it should be going.
I personally can affect the outcome of my city council.
I can.
I could get behind a candidate.
My town is not that big.
I'm a pretty good marketing guy.
I could affect that election in my city.
I could probably affect it on my county.
And that has more control over my lives.
And so I think, and this is this whole rant I went into,
and I actually gave a step-by-step detailed plan
of how we can win this back over if we
have a long-term perspective.
But it starts by, if you set a goal,
if you set too big of a goal, why bother?
I want to make $100 million by next month.
Well, that ain't going to happen.
So why even bother?
But if I said, well, if I want to make $100 million in 30 years,
and so then I milestone it down to, OK, by next week,
I need to make $10.
OK, well, I could probably do $10.
And if I make $10, I can probably get to $20.
And you start building momentum.
So if I said, my goal is to get the city, and I get the city.
And then, OK, now let's get a county.
OK, now let's get three counties.
OK, now let's get a seat on the state.
And I could lay this whole plan out for you.
But then I think we could win.
So it's a big scam.
Why are we so concerned with the president that has almost
no control over our lives instead of what really matters
right here?
I'll jump into the president now,
unless you want me to stop and we can talk about that.
No, well, I mean, honestly, I like this angle a lot better.
Because I think that you're correct.
And it almost gets to one of the other points
that you made in that Unconfiscatable Talk, which
is about parallel systems.
Now, in this case, it's not so much a parallel system
in the strict sense of the word.
But you are building a smaller parallel structure that
is operating independently from what
is seemingly the homogenous country.
But we all know it's not.
It is a large patchwork of 50 states.
Within each of those states, it is a patchwork of counties
and townships and everything else.
You can affect change at that smaller level.
You can build your own smaller parallel system
that is able to operate outside of whatever
the way up at the top, many layers of bureaucracy
is throwing down at you, mandating that you do.
Because what?
And the reason why it's a scam card,
the reason why it's a scam walker is because while we're all
focused on the president, so we're
ignoring what's right in front of us, but they're not.
The George Soros's understand this.
And they've been methodically taking over district attorneys,
district judges.
So that's why it's a scam.
They're saying, look over here.
Ignore this while we take that over.
As opposed to we could make a fight here.
We could control that.
But yeah, to your point, yes.
We have control over ourselves and our local area.
So whether that be through politics or through parallel
systems, so that would be starting businesses and things
like that, we have a lot of power in front of us.
It's just we get focused too far out
where we don't have control and then we sort of give up.
I think that that's a really good message for people,
because there is a lot of, I would say, hopelessness,
verging on nihilism from, doesn't matter what
side of the political spectrum you're on.
And again, I think that even those characterizations
are ultimately just meant to be an us versus them cliche.
I always say ad nauseam to the point
where my lovely wife, Karla, will get annoyed with me.
But there is no red.
There is no blue.
There is the state.
And there is you.
And ultimately, that's what it comes down to.
There is you.
And that's where you can start with change.
And you can start, as you said, in that local community.
And that is also that was kind of the goal of the United States
from the start.
The goal was not a top down, quote,
democracy that was presided over by an omniscient president.
It was states' rights.
It was localism.
It was ultimately decentralization.
And not having, like, we got to the reason
that we fought a revolutionary war was to get away
from centralized control.
Exactly.
And I think that we've forgotten some of that.
We've forgotten that men who were 18, 19, 20, 22 years old
decided to say, no, we're not going to do this.
And to the British, why don't you come and take it,
essentially?
We forget those things.
Yeah, so I think it's right there in front of us.
Now, back to that cliche that you often cite, red or blue,
there's no difference, right?
I mean, obviously, that's not true either, right?
I mean, look at the difference of the red and blue states.
I mean, it is like, they're literally
like different countries right now.
I mean, it's pretty crazy.
I mean, look at the red states trying to put up a fight
at the southern border while the Biden administration is
sitting there trying to tear it down.
I mean, so yes and no, right?
I mean, again, there's a lot of nuance in there.
At the top level, though, to your point about the presidencies,
that's where I think it applies most.
Whether it's a red or a blue guy.
Where there's certainly no red or blue is they're both
going to spend us into oblivion.
That's going to happen.
So Trump spent more than Obama.
Obama spent more than Bush.
Everyone's going to spend us into oblivion.
The Democrats would like to spend $100 trillion.
They were hoping they was going to spend $90,000,000.
But there's a lot the same there.
Also, we have within the party, and this
sort of goes back to this whole episode that I did,
if you think about the political parties as an apparatus
and not as an ideology, OK?
So you have two apparatuses that fight for power
over the country or whatever jurisdiction, right?
So if you think of it as an apparatus,
and the reason why I say that is within the Republican
apparatus, there's multiple ideologies.
There's the House Freedom Caucus.
There's certainly libertarians in there.
There's Rhinos, Republican in name only.
So within that apparatus, there's a bunch of ideologies.
Same as on the Democratic side.
There's still some of the Kennedys, some of the liberals,
the freedom liberals, classic liberals, or some of those.
And then you have the radical left that are communists.
And Bernie Sanders is, admittedly, a socialist, right?
Blasio from New York.
I mean, he's a communist.
He recites the communist manifesto.
So you have different ideologies within each party.
So I think of him as an apparatus as opposed to an ideology.
And what we've seen, and this is, again, back from credit
to Dr. James Lindsay, but within the Democratic party, which
used to be the Freedom Party, or they would call it
the Liberal Party, it's been taken over by the left.
You have the squad, the AOC, whatever.
And what they've done is they've made partnerships and agreements
and so forth with other like-minded people
to push the liberals out and really bring in that left
agenda.
And that's where I think you could win, right?
So you could come into the Republican Party, for example.
And you could unite the other ideologies, the libertarians,
the Freedom Caucus members, to get rid of the rhinos.
And that could happen pretty quickly.
But again, that's a whole political conversation.
I think for the most part, we can just go build.
And that's sort of the challenge that I have at that.
I gave a couple of keynotes last year,
one at BitBlock Boom and one at PacBitcoin,
where I talked about, as Bitcoiners,
we can't just go buy our 6.25 Bitcoin
and go disappear on a hill and come back in 10 years
and think the whole world's going to be better.
It's up to us to go build that world.
It's up to us to build the world that we want.
A saying that I learned when I was young, and I say all the time,
is that you either build the life of your dreams
or somebody else will hire you to build their dream.
And so if we're not actively thinking of the world that we want
and we're not actively sacrificing
our time, effort, energy, focus, money
to further that world that we want,
then someone else is going to do that.
We have, a lot of us have sort of abdicated our role,
our responsibility.
I don't want to be involved in politics.
Man, I got kids.
I want to be with my kids.
I got my business.
I want to go to the beach.
Let me just do that.
But the problem is, when you abdicate that role,
when you remove yourself from that role,
someone else is going to step in and take care of that.
And unfortunately, the types of people that want that job
are not the people that we want.
And so when I gave those keynotes at those two events,
it was that challenge, specifically to Bitcoiners,
because I'm like, hey, you guys are here at BitBlock Boom.
You're a Bitcoiner.
You're not at a crypto conference trying to get more US dollars.
You're a Bitcoiner.
And I'm like, if you're not going to do it, who is?
You're the true believer.
You're here before the early majority, right,
in the diffusion of innovation.
You're the early believer.
So you're doing your part.
You're putting content out.
You're trying to wake people up.
I have the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund.
And we're actively deploying capital, actively putting
our money where our mouth is, actively working with these
businesses to reshape the world the way that we want it.
And everybody has to do that.
And everybody has a different role to play,
whether that be education, like with what you do,
whether that be, and I told some people,
whether that means that you sacrifice some of your money.
Because a lot of people would say,
why would I put my money into a Bitcoin company when I could
just buy Bitcoin myself?
OK, why would you say that?
Well, because I might make more money if I just buy the Bitcoin.
Yeah, well, back to the founding fathers,
like they sacrificed their life.
They sacrificed everything they had.
And unfortunately, most of them died in that.
And we don't have, luckily, thank God,
we don't have to deal with that.
I'm not going to die.
At least not right now.
We don't see that, right?
But maybe I lose a little bit of my money.
Maybe I do.
But for what?
What's the trade off?
And I think people just need to look bigger.
They need to think bigger than themselves.
They need to think bigger than just their own little selfish
personality.
And I think having kids now that you're a new father,
congratulations, it really changes your mind to that.
Because look, I've done pretty well in my career.
Well, I made a lot of money.
I lost it all.
I had to redo it again.
That sucked.
But I could just go disappear at this point.
But how does that help my kids?
It doesn't.
How does it help your kids?
It doesn't.
I think as Bitcoiners, we're supposed
to have this long-term perspective.
We're supposed to envision this world where things could
be different.
Value systems could be re-aligned.
We could shift the balance of power.
Like we all want that, but it doesn't come by being passive.
It only comes through building.
And it's up to us, up to you and I, up to the Bitcoiners
listening to this show to go do that.
And if that means you've got to sacrifice
a little bit of your money, some of your Bitcoin, so be it.
If that means you've got to sacrifice some of your time,
then so be it.
If you want that world to come true, then it's up to us.
And first of all, that was beautiful, Mark.
And any time I talk to you, I get a little bit psyched up,
which is good.
It's why that speech from Unconfiscatable stuck with me
even years later now.
And I think that that is such a vital point that within the,
quote, Bitcoin space community, however you want to look at it,
it's very easy to get sucked into this mentality of you only
just you live to accumulate Bitcoin and accumulate more.
And there's no such thing as enough Bitcoin.
And you should never spend your Bitcoin
and just keep accumulating it for some vague time in the future
where hyper Bitcoinization has happened.
And then you're still not going to spend it,
but you'll be this demigod king living on earth.
And I don't know how you're going to get anything
without actually spending the Bitcoin, but it won't matter
because whatever hyperinflation.
OK, I fully believe everyone should do whatever the fuck they want.
That said, I think that sometimes people
miss the forest through the trees, which is to your point
of money itself, the accumulation of money is not the end goal.
It is a means.
Money is a tool to be able to achieve what you want in your life.
If your goal is only to accumulate money,
that is not really a goal.
That's what allows you to, helps you on your way
to achieve your goals.
But that's not a goal in and of itself.
That's just, I don't even know what you call that.
That's it.
It shouldn't be.
For some it is.
And fine, if that really makes you happy to just have that be
the goal to accumulate ever more, fine.
But and you're right, I've become a father recently.
And wow, does that everybody says, oh, it's going to really
change you and you can't totally understand it
until you're actually in it.
And I was like, yeah, OK.
But then you are actually in it and you're like, well, everyone
was absolutely right about that.
And I couldn't see it until I was in it.
I could imagine it, but not even close to what the reality is.
And you want to build something that actually has meaning
and helps those around you versus just I'm going to accumulate
and never spend.
It's like, no, I want to be able to accumulate
so that I can invest in myself and invest in my family
and invest in my community and in businesses
that I think are doing great things.
That's what moves the needle.
Me just stacking ever more, fine.
But what's your end goal?
What do you actually want to achieve
with that stack of precious Bitcoin?
Yeah.
Well, and at the talk that I gave both at those two events,
it was that challenge.
But it was even bigger than that because as I tried to make
the case, I also just spoke at this resource investor,
Vancouver Resource Investor Conference a couple weeks
ago.
Natalie and Brunel and I were up there in Vancouver.
By the way, it's mostly gold, but it's mining.
So it's also lithium copper, whatever.
But it's mostly gold people up there.
We got to hang out with some really cool people.
Adam Tagger was up there.
Brent Johnson was up there.
Andy Scheckman from Miles Franklin, gold was there,
which we convert him to become a Bitcoiner.
He bought Bitcoin and I was in the 30s.
And now I was texting with him today.
And he's like, oh my gosh, I've never
seen an asset go up like this.
And they sell a billion dollars worth of gold a year, man.
Like, it's a big deal.
Anyway, I also gave a version of it at that event.
And I used it in a sense where Michael Saylor made the case
very well that Bitcoin is a commodity and not an equity,
right, for all the different reasons we can get into.
But I'm sure you're aware if you want, we can go through those.
But if we think of Bitcoin as a commodity, as an asset
as a commodity, think of oil.
Oil is also a commodity.
Gold's a commodity.
Wheat's a commodity, right?
So oil is a commodity.
Oil is an asset.
I can buy oil.
I mean, I can't really custodiate myself,
but I can buy oil futures and things like that, right?
So you have oil, the asset, the commodity.
And then you have an oil industry
that's built around oil.
It's the eighth largest industry in the world.
Who makes the sonar that goes on the oil tanker
so it can navigate the Red Sea?
Who made the brand new drillhead so now they
can go further horizontally to find the pockets?
Who came up with the pressure system
to get the oil to flow through the pipeline to transfer?
Like, the oil industry.
So you have oil.
And sure, you should buy oil.
And yes, you can buy futures on oil.
But the asset is nothing without the industry around it.
If oil has no pipelines and no tankers, then it does no good.
It's just sitting there in a frigging barrel.
And that's what I tried to make the case with Bitcoin.
Like, cool, buy Bitcoin the asset.
You certainly should.
But what about Bitcoin the industry?
Because if you can't use the Bitcoin,
if you can't use the oil, what good does oil do you?
If you can't use the Bitcoin, what good does it do you?
You bought a Model T. Congratulations.
It's on blocks in your front yard.
But there's no roads.
There's no gas stations.
There's no tires.
And if somebody doesn't go build those things,
your Model T doesn't matter.
And that's kind of the point I have with Bitcoin.
It's like, cool, you bought the Bitcoin.
But if there's no industry, if there's no ways to use it,
no ways to manage it, no ways to secure it,
no ways to use it privately, then what good does it do?
And that's kind of the bigger challenge there.
And I think that that's a really good framing, though.
And I like the analogy of the oil industry.
And it should also make some lights go off in people's heads
because there is so much opportunity there.
To use the old analogy of, to talk about another sort
of mining, gold mining, you know, yeah, you can mine the gold
or you can sell the picks or you can make the picks.
You can manufacture them or you can make a better one
and you can make all sorts of other equipment
with any industry like this.
And Bitcoin is unique, but also shares a ton of parallels.
There is opportunity for so many different kinds
of creative entrepreneurship.
And because if you are one of the people who is listening
to this or listens to your show or listens to any
of these Bitcoin podcasters on Bitcoin, Twitter, and Oster,
you are still really early.
Like Wall Street just got in the door.
You know, you're not as early as some, but you're still.
I have a video dropping tomorrow where I'm breaking down
the math of how Bitcoin gets to 43 billion per Bitcoin.
So we're pretty early.
Wait, I don't always like to talk about price in this show,
but I think it's worthwhile because let's shift gears
a little bit on that.
To wrap that point up though, don't be afraid to go build shit.
And remember that money should not be the goal in and of itself.
And to wrap that up, I mean, think about it like this.
So like I was speaking to this gold mining crowd mostly, right?
And so I said it's like this, right?
So like buy gold, you should certainly buy gold.
Then or buy Bitcoin, right?
If I'm using like a parallel thing.
So buy the asset, let's just say, right?
So buy gold, buy Bitcoin.
OK, then once you buy gold or Bitcoin,
then you can buy gold miners.
Gold miners give you alpha on gold itself
because gold miners are leveraged.
If gold goes up 100 bucks, they got 100 million ounces
in the ground, 100 million times 100 bucks, right?
So gold miners are leveraged.
Then you have what's called major producers, the Barrett
Golds.
Then you have like the junior explorers.
And they're more risky, but they provide better alpha.
Risk and reward is higher.
And then you have the explorers down here.
So you have sort of these three levels.
And I said Bitcoin is the same way.
Certainly, yes, buy the asset.
You certainly should, yes.
Buy that first, just like you should buy gold first.
If you want extra alpha, then you
can go to public equities.
You can buy the miners.
You can buy the micro strategies, OK?
Miners are moving three to five times beta
on what Bitcoin is, right?
So then that's the next part.
Then if you want even more alpha, risk and reward,
you can go into like the VC.
So 1031, Tramble Venture Partners, and My Fund,
the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund.
And you can go into those.
Now, each one of those provides you more risk and more reward
on that asset stack.
And so it's sort of the same thing.
But again, oil has stuck around $80 a barrel, $60 to $80
a barrel.
Pretty much, that's just like the range it trades in.
But yet the oil industry itself has grown to like $80 trillion.
Same with gold.
And I think Bitcoin will be the same way.
So Bitcoin will keep going up, and now we'll break down that math.
But that oil, I'm sorry, the Bitcoin industry
creates enormous opportunities for you as a builder,
as an entrepreneur.
But also as an investor as well.
But to get to that number, to get to the $43 billion number,
I did a show with Jeff Booth, and we
were talking about repricing assets.
And so I was explaining this to somebody else,
and it's very simple if you think about this, right?
You mentioned earlier like the goal shouldn't be to get money.
And really, nobody wants money, which sounds crazy,
because everyone spends their whole life trying to get money.
But we don't want money.
We want the goods and services that money buys us.
That's what we want.
So we use money as a way to get those goods and services
or to hold our value to a rate to deploy it.
So really, wealth as goods and services is not gold.
Gold is the medium of exchange, of course, right?
So you take up until 1971, gold was money,
and you say 1933, but gold was money,
and you took all the dollars in existence
divided by all the gold.
It was $20, $20 US dollars for one ounce of gold up until 1933.
Then it went to $35.
Then it was $35 US dollars for one ounce of gold.
All the dollars divided by all the gold.
Very simple.
Now, you hear people talk about going back to a gold standard,
Peter Schiff, Jim Rickards, et cetera, right?
So how would that work?
Well, we know how it would work, because after World War I,
England had got off the gold standard,
and they went back to the gold standard.
Now, John Maynard Keens, the father of Kenzie and Economics,
was talking to a consulting with Winston Churchill.
And he told Churchill, he said, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey,
you printed so much more money, you
can't go back to that old exchange rate.
If you do, you're going to cause a massive depression.
You have to revalue gold higher.
And Churchill said, nah, forget you.
He tried to revalue it the way it was,
and it caused a great depression.
All right, so we have that whole story.
So we know when you print more money,
you have to increase the gold, because you
have to divide it by itself.
So if we wanted to go back to a gold standard today,
we would have to do the math.
So we have in the US $20 trillion of fiat currency.
Apparently, there's 8,000 tons of gold in Fort Knox.
We don't know.
It hasn't been audited.
So you take the $20 trillion US dollars divided
by the 8,000 tons, 252 million ounces.
It brings you about a $73,000 per ounce price of gold.
If we look globally, because it's a global asset,
we can take all the global M2 of the main central banks.
We're looking at $187 trillion divided by 187,000 tons of gold.
And it brings it to, I think, it was like $17,000.
Take all the fiat divided by all the gold.
So that's how it works.
OK, so now that you understand that metric,
I gave a talk at Bitcoin Amsterdam
talking about the end of the international monetary order.
So not the death of the dollar, the end
of the international monetary system, as we know it, fiat.
Fiat's dead.
And so what comes next was the question
that I was answering in this presentation.
And what comes next?
And so we have two choices.
Like, one, we can go back to gold.
That's what some people think we'll do.
Central banks are acquiring more gold than any time in history.
Again, the shifts and the gold bugs
think that we should do that.
And I broke down that math for you.
We can go back to gold, but it won't work.
It's old technology.
It's too slow.
We moved into an information age, instant transactions.
We need instant settlement, et cetera.
We can talk about that later.
But so that's option one, go back to the past, what I call
de-evolution.
We can do that.
Or option two, what they're probably
going to try is like a CBDC.
But the problem is that's just fiat.
It's just no different.
And the problem that we have is unlimited money printing.
The problem isn't that it's not digital.
The problem is that you can't create money.
And so we know that will fail too.
So then, as I said in the talk, if it's not Bitcoin, then what?
So if we were to go to a Bitcoin standard,
which I think most of us agree, at least
to listen to this show that we will at some point,
probably 60 to 80 years out.
It's a long time.
But eventually, as Jeff Booth was talking about,
you and him and I were talking, is that it reprices everything.
So Bitcoin isn't competing against new technologies.
Bitcoin is competing against value itself.
That's what Bitcoin is competing against.
So it's competing against other store of value assets.
So you add up all the store of value assets.
It's about $900 trillion.
Now, if we capture 5% of that, or 10% of that,
we get to $10 trillion, which is whatever, a 20x
from where we're at today.
But at some point, it becomes so money is not only emergent,
it's evolutionary.
So it goes from a collectible to a store of value
to a medium exchange, and maybe eventually
to a unit of account.
If it becomes a unit of account, we
take all the wealth in the world divided
by all the Bitcoin in the world.
$900 trillion divided by $21 million.
And you get to $43 billion per Bitcoin.
It's a pretty compelling argument.
I love that framing that Jeff puts out there too.
And I saw that clip on your show.
And one thing he talked about, I was privileged enough
to have him as, I think, my second guest on this show,
because he's a lovely guy who, like yourself,
shared his scarce time with me.
And he made that point that people focus
on the fiat price of Bitcoin.
And for us, we tend to focus on US dollars.
That tends to ignore that, in the current state,
Bitcoin made an all-time high in the Turkish lira last fall.
It's made an all-time high in the Japanese yen.
It's making all-time highs already
in many different currencies, fiat currencies around the world,
because fiat is a bad measuring stick.
And he said it's Bitcoin that's repricing the entire world,
not the other way around.
And when you can't measure a system from a system,
you have to go out and look back in.
And so people may hear that you throw out that number
and say, oh, that's insane.
But to be honest, the math checks out.
And I think the question is, will we ever get there?
Will we ever get there?
That's the question.
And there is no certainties in life.
There's only probabilities.
And is it 100% guaranteed that happens?
No, certainly not.
Is it 100% guaranteed it doesn't?
No, certainly not.
So somewhere in that range from 0 to 100,
there's a probability that happens.
And some of us think it's a higher probability
than the others.
And that's what markets are.
That's what markets are.
We bet on that.
And you and I think there's a much higher chance.
I think there's at least a 50% chance that happens,
probably much higher than that.
And everybody gets bet.
But there's definitely not a zero chance.
It's going to be really interesting
to see in these next couple of years what starts happening.
Because we talked very much at that.
You can affect change at the local level,
at the personal level, at the familial level,
at the decentralized small scale.
But at the same time, there are changes
that happen at the more macro level, at the nation state
level, that very much can have an impact on you.
If we're talking about Bitcoin specifically,
Snowden just had a tweet today where he basically,
this was a couple hours ago, I think, he said,
I wonder how many, or in 2024, we're
going to see some nation state.
It's going to become public that a nation state has been just
acquiring Bitcoin quietly in the background
and not telling anyone.
And then it's going to get out.
We've already discovered that multiple nation states have
been acquiring a little bit through mining.
And there's certain partnerships,
like public private partnerships with like Mara
in the marathon in the Middle East.
We know that nation states are gearing towards this.
We know that El Salvador is doing this out in the open,
kind of the Michael Saylor playbook of,
I'm going to tell you exactly what I'm doing,
and you're going to watch as it succeeds.
But I'm curious to hear your take on,
do you think we're going to see a couple of emergent nation
states that all of a sudden it comes out?
Yeah, we've actually been acquiring significant Bitcoin
over the past however many years.
And yep, you caught us.
And then do we see that game theory start
to kick into overdrive as they all realize, oh shit,
we can print our own currency and buy this scarce asset
with our unlimited printing press.
But you get diminishing returns on that purchasing power
of your fiat as more nation states jump on board
and start doing that.
I'm curious of your take on that.
Certainly.
And we already are.
We already are, right?
So obviously El Salvador was the first one
to sort of come out and publicly say that.
But we know that nations are stockpiling lots of Bitcoin.
We know the United States sits on a lot of Bitcoin.
Rumors are China has a ton of Bitcoin.
We know Bulgaria has a ton of Bitcoin.
And so a lot of nations already have it.
They've already sort of disclosed that.
Most of it has come through confiscation.
Either way, they're sitting on it.
I know the US was talking about dumping
all theirs, which would be just a stupid decision.
But I think, again, so we already know it's already started.
And back to kind of going all the way back
to sort of the United States being set up as this republic,
sorry, the Constitutional Republic,
it's so that independent states can compete.
And we can start to see experiments.
And we can start to learn what works better and what doesn't.
And so in real time right now in Central America,
it's very interesting, we literally
have Bukheli taking El Salvador super pro-freedom.
And right next door in Nicaragua,
they adopted a complete communist.
So we're literally two states right next to each other
and watching it play out.
And most of South America is like that.
And now we have Argentina with this pro-freedom libertarian.
But yet in Brazil, they just kind of brought in a socialist.
Chile, they just adopted an entire communist constitution
there.
And so we're witnessing this play out.
But as we're seeing El Salvador now back into the black,
they were upside down on a lot of their Bitcoin investments.
Now their Bitcoin is starting to stockpile it pretty quickly.
And of course, those nations are starting
to pay attention.
As a matter of fact, I tweeted out earlier today
before we jumped on, money is a competitive game.
And wealth managers want to win.
As soon as one adds Bitcoin and generates higher returns,
the next one must follow suit.
The reflexivity of wealth managers adding Bitcoin,
number go up.
More wealth managers add it, number go up.
More add it, number go up.
Right now we're seeing 1% to 3% allocations
wait until it's 5% to 10%.
And that continues, that reflexivity
continues up to nation states.
They're watching El Salvador get ahead
while they're falling further and further behind.
And they have no choice but to jump on and take advantage of.
So I think it's inevitable.
I mean, what Jeff Booth always says,
as long as it stays decentralized and secure.
So there's certainly things that could go wrong.
But as long as it stays to borrow from members,
as long as it stays decentralized and secure,
it's almost inevitable that if it stays that way,
if it continues to go up, they will be forced to adopt it.
And we've seen this play out.
And this is why I love history.
Look, if I touch the stove and I burn my hand,
I know that if I touch the stove again,
I'm probably going to burn my hand again.
Now, I might have touched it with my hand this time,
next time it's my arm.
So it rhymes.
It's not exact.
But we've seen this play out before.
The whole world was on a silver standard.
Then the whole world started moving to a gold standard.
China didn't want to go to a gold standard.
They wanted to stay on the silver standard.
Nope, I'm not doing it.
I'm staying here.
And they lost their position as a global leader.
They've been trying for 100 years to get back.
And they own more gold than any nation in the world right now.
Rumors are about 30,000 tons.
And good job.
You owned it.
But now the whole world is shifting.
And you're stuck with that.
But so we already know, I think maybe it was Tour de Meister.
Maybe it was safety.
And I forget who said it.
But I think maybe with safety, you probably know.
But he said, like, Bitcoin is more like the gunpowder
revolution.
You have to adopt it.
And that kind of goes.
If this reflexivity can, if it stays decentralized and secure,
then the reflexivity will push the price up.
And then nation states will be forced to adopt it.
I think you are correct.
I believe it was safety.
And you said that.
I thought that was a great analogy.
It's not an optional thing.
I mean, it's optional if you want to lose.
But if you want to have a chance at winning, it's mandatory.
And that's really the brilliance of this.
And I think that not just at that, the other is the top down.
But again, when we talk from the bottom up,
people start seeing, they look across the border
into El Salvador, for example.
And they see, wait, why is their standard of living going up?
Why is there crime going down?
What are they doing that's different?
And why aren't we doing that here?
Exactly.
And then you start to have that bottom up
that starts to influence the top that
is making those decisions.
Look at China.
I mean, they were super strict in the pandemic.
They brought back all the restrictions.
And in that World Cup game, whatever that was a year ago,
they showed the World Cup games to the people.
But they tried to black out or blur the people in the stadium.
And once the people in China watched it
and saw that people were not wearing masks,
they were like, wait a minute.
What are they doing?
We have to have that.
They demanded it.
So that's game theory in action.
I want to go back just for a second real quick
so people can understand this a little bit better.
Back to the Jeff Booth sort of argument.
I think this is an important piece.
That's why I want to come back to it.
As an investor, if I buy or think about as a venture capital
or as a company raising venture capital money,
part of the goal of selling raising money
is I don't want to give up too much of my equity early on
because my value is not big enough, right?
Because I want to keep a percentage of the company,
a percentage of the company.
If I invest into that company early on
and I buy 5% of that company, I don't
want to become diluted in that company.
And that happens a lot.
So as they're raising money, the valuation went up.
But my percentage of ownership went down.
And this is a key piece that Jeff Booth brings up
is that if you take all the money divided by all the wealth,
then there's a percentage.
So back to the $20 trillion, if I have $1 trillion of it,
then I have $1.20 of that ledger.
And as the value of the goods and services goes up,
I still have $1.20.
And so my value goes up.
But because we don't control the ledger,
every time they print money, we're getting diluted,
like stock owners.
And so because we don't control that ledger.
So my $1 trillion just becomes less and less and less
of the ledger as they print $30, $40, $50, $60, $70 trillion.
But Bitcoin allows us to own a percentage of the ledger
because it's fixed.
And that's the key piece back to this sort of repricing
all goods.
And that's the big difference.
As it reprices all goods, we own a percentage of the ledger,
which is why our value as a percentage of that ledger
continues to go up as opposed to fiat currency.
So I just kind of want to go back and make sure we drove
that point home so people understood that.
I think it's a really important point.
And you had a tweet maybe it was a couple of days ago,
but it was just about the actual long term,
like generational effects of inflation, which I think
are really, people are not generally good at thinking
in the long term.
Like it's difficult to do, right?
We tend to be more focused on the here and now.
Bitcoin is a great way to be able to lower that time
preference, but it's a process, right?
But you had said that with a 3.4% inflation rate,
it cuts the value of the dollar in half in 21 years
and in half again in another 21 years.
So that's 75% devaluation in 42 years.
And that's basically a career.
That's basically you're working, give or take
a couple of years, a typical working life.
And I don't think that, and it's a sad thing really,
that we've been fed this sort of lie that inflation is just
natural, that I should say that prices rising is natural.
And they always talk about when they, you know,
they, when economists, when Keynesians and certain folks
who hold political office talk about inflation,
what they really mean is prices rising.
People are generally unaware, until you've
done a little bit of study, that wait a minute,
it's something deeper than that.
Prices don't just rise because of corporate greed
or whatever else.
They rise because when you have a glass of wine
and you pour a half a glass of water in it,
you have more fluid, but the potency of that wine
is reduced.
Like this is what happens to your money
when they create more out of thin air
with absolutely no accountability.
And they target, they tell you that they target 2% inflation
per year.
It's 2% theft of purchasing power.
Two year is their stated goal to maintain price stability.
But price stability means rising.
Do you have a, because you are someone
who articulates these things very well,
I think in a way that non-Bitcoiners also
can understand and grasp, how do you
like to talk about what that theft actually means
to somebody who's maybe not quite so far down the rabbit hole
that they're like, yes, inflation is theft and the Fed?
Yeah, I like to call it stealing my life.
Because at the end of the day, I got into this little tweet
back and forth with this Michael Gaye earlier today.
He was talking about how Bitcoin is not a store of value.
And I'm like, well, what is a store of value?
And he says there's nothing.
And I had to remind him what Misa said,
that in nature of money, that there is no such thing
as constant value.
But what there is constant is, well,
there's not really constant, but really all economics boils
down to the most scarce asset, which is our time, our life.
We only have so many hours.
You hear stories of a billionaire on their death bed,
not asking for it to see their money.
They want more time.
They want to be with their loved ones, things like that.
And so we can just put this into actual data.
So for example, using the median wage in the United States
and the median expense of the United States
at 8% inflation, I did this calculation back then.
So I'm going to use that as an example.
We got up to 9%.
CPI, the government published data, right?
It's obviously much higher.
But at 8%, that means the average American, it
costs the average American $327 more per month
to have the same quality of life they had the month before.
So if my wage is $32 an hour, that
means I have to work 10 more hours this month than I did
last month just to have the same quality of life.
So that's my life.
That's 10 hours per month that I could be with my kids,
making sure I'm raising my kids properly.
That's 10 hours I could spend with my wife
so we don't get divorced.
That's 10 hours I could spend on a second job or a side hustle,
building a new skill.
That's 10 hours I could spend.
That's 10 hours of my life.
That is finite.
That has a fixed amount.
So that's the way that I think about it.
Inflation is stealing my life.
It used to take me 24 weeks to save up for a house.
Now it takes me 147 weeks.
That 100-week difference is my life
that I could have spent any way that I wanted.
But you took it, the Fed, the money printers took it from me
by inflation.
So that's how I think about it.
I boil it down to it's most basic.
It's time is my life.
I love that.
And that's also a good segue because your time is scarce,
Mark.
And I really appreciate you sharing that scarce time with me.
Bitcoin is scarce.
Your time is scarce.
But Bitcoin podcasts are becoming more abundant.
So thank you.
Thank you for joining this one.
So I want to wrap up here.
But anything else you want to end with?
Yeah.
So a couple of years ago, I made a video on basically
how you can retire off of Bitcoin.
When somebody asked me the question, which
I get asked this question all the time,
I'm sure you've been asked this question,
at what price will you sell your Bitcoin?
You've heard that one before.
When somebody asked me that question,
I realized that they have no idea the game they're playing.
The game of money is different.
And most people just don't know the game they're playing,
which is why they don't win, which
why they have no success in it.
The game of money is to acquire wealth, assets.
And we want to acquire scarce assets.
But there's a way that we can acquire scarce assets
and still get cash flow and reduce our tax at the same time.
And we do that through debt.
And there's different complex strategies
that we can add to it.
I did a video a couple of years ago talking
about how we can retire off Bitcoin, not by selling it.
So we can still have it to pass down to our kids and so forth.
And I've put it together in an actual report and a guide,
an article that breaks this whole strategy down.
What the game is that we're actually playing,
how you can play it.
I talked about where Bitcoin came from.
It's price growth.
Where I think it's going to go.
Some of the projections we put out here,
but I put milestones where I think
it'll be in one year, five years, three years, et cetera.
And I have a calculator so people
could put in how much Bitcoin I have
and how this might work for me.
And it's all free.
If you'd like to get that, you can just
go to my website, onemarkmoss.com.
And this is going to be a free download.
And you can plug that in.
And my goal is that once you see this,
you won't ever want to sell your Bitcoin.
You'll realize that the right time to sell your Bitcoin
is never.
So that's a free resource.
And then if you go to my website,
you'll see all my social media, my YouTube channel,
all of that stuff as well.
So that's the best place to go and hang out with me there.
You had one last question for me.
And then I'll give my closing remark.
Yeah.
Well, the last question was, are you
reading anything right now that you'd recommend?
Bitcoin related or otherwise doesn't matter?
So people ask me all the time, what book should I read?
I read a lot of books.
What should I read?
And the answer is it depends on what
you're trying to learn.
Just like we had these just-in-time supply chains,
I think of my knowledge as a just-in-time knowledge.
And the reason why is because there's
three types of learning.
There's receiving information.
There's applying information.
There's teaching information.
And so I'm typically trying to get the information when
I'm ready to apply it.
So sometimes I might be reading hiring books, recruiting
hiring, human resources books.
Sometimes they may be marketing books.
In regards to Bitcoin specifically,
a book that I recently read that I'm actually
wanting to write, I already started
on writing a whole article about Bitcoin against,
it's not a Bitcoin book at all.
But it's The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek.
And I'm writing a, I've already started it.
It's one of my things to do.
But Bitcoin and The Infinite Game.
So I'm taking his book and his concept.
And I think it overlays with Bitcoin.
Again, he's not a Bitcoiner.
But I think that concept needs to be written about Bitcoin.
The infinite game and the strategy of the infinite game
is some games are finite and some are infinite.
And you have to understand back to the game of money.
You have to understand the game that you're playing.
If you don't understand the game that you're playing,
if you think you're playing a finite game,
but you're an infinite game, you're going to lose every time.
And so that book is one that I recently read that really,
I think that in order to understand the world generally,
Bitcoin for sure, it's multidisciplinary.
And one thing, I mostly talk about macro
if you follow me on YouTube and stuff like that.
It's mostly with the Fed and inflation and debt
and all those things are doing.
But I think what a lot of the guys that are way smarter
than me, that are way down deep into the interplummings
of the financial system, I think that they're so smart
and they understand the data so well,
but they don't understand things like human psychology
and incentive mechanisms and things like in history.
And so they are not able to take that crazy amount
of data they have and apply it more broadly.
And so then they miss the bigger picture,
miss the force for the trees is kind of what you said.
And I think Bitcoin is the same way.
Like you have to understand incentive systems
and game theory and you have to understand history
and money and technology and all these things to get it.
And so reading books like this, the infinite game
gives me these other data points to understand it better.
And to give you an example of what that means,
finite game versus infinite game is like,
how do you win the game of business?
You don't go out of business.
How do you win the game of marriage?
You're married, you stay married, right?
But there are finite games as well, right?
So the US, in the opening of the book,
he talks about how the US got into trouble
when it went to Vietnam,
because it thought it was fighting a finite war.
Like, hey, we'll come here, we'll get this over
and we'll leave, but to the Vietnamese that were there,
that was their home.
It's an infinite war, they'll never leave.
They'll fight till everyone's gone.
And the US was fighting a finite war,
they were fighting an infinite war and the US lost, right?
And that's kind of an example.
So we have to understand the game we're playing
with Bitcoin, fiat is a finite game,
Bitcoin is an infinite game.
That's the spoiler alert.
Oh, well, I like, I can't wait to read that when it comes out.
I'll have to check out the book too.
I've heard about it.
It's been like on my laundry list of books to check out,
but your endorsement tab.
Well, look at what you read recently
that you think are good.
You know, I read for the first time in a long time
a science fiction book, which I have not,
usually I've read broken money recently.
I usually am, I've read a decent amount of,
of Mises and Hayek recently because I'm trying to make sure
I have a foundational base in Austrian economics
and monetary theory.
I love it, but it's so hard to get through, isn't it?
I know, I know.
Lin's book, Lesso, that was actually.
Oh yeah, I'm talking about Hayek and Mises.
Yeah, yeah.
But I, I read this book, it's called,
it's called Theft of Fire.
It's by a guy named Devon Erickson.
You might have seen his Twitter,
like he had like basically a Twitter argument
with that interim CEO of OpenAI.
What's his name?
Sam Maltlin, I'm blank.
Oh, no, no, no, it was the interim guy.
Doesn't matter, I'm blanking on his name right now.
But he had just basically the guy,
the guy just threw off the cuff.
Well, maybe we should have 100% inheritance tax
and that would fix all the problems in society.
And this author just went off on him
and basically said like,
I'll send you the links.
That's maybe I'll drop them in the show notes
because it's hilarious.
I mean, he just destroys this guy.
He went from Devon Erickson, the author,
went from like a thousand followers
to overnight like 20 something thousand.
His book, which he had just published,
like went way up the Amazon charts.
And it's some damn good science fiction.
I hadn't sat down and read a fiction,
a work of fiction in a while.
And that was a really nice treat.
He also talks about Bitcoin in the book
in the context of this future,
you know, future vision of the world.
And well, it's an interplanetary book.
I'll just say that.
But it was really good.
I recommend checking it out.
I had him on the show actually,
because after I read the book,
I was like, I gotta talk to this guy.
And he's just a, he's a very cool dude,
has very strong views about communism,
about private property,
and he expresses them extremely eloquently,
but also just very, you know, no bullshit.
You'd like the guy a lot.
I'll shoot his details over to you.
He's a cool dude.
But yeah, that was for me something new.
I love F.A. Hykes book, The Road to Surftim.
So anybody that hasn't read that book,
put that on your list.
That one's an easier one to read,
but man, if you wanna understand the world
and where we're going, Road to Surftim, read that one.
His seminal book, which is Constitution of Liberty,
man, no one will ever be as smart in these days and age.
I mean, he wrote,
I was like 90 different,
or no, 190 citations in like 19 different languages.
It's crazy.
But yeah, The Road to Surftim is one you should read.
I also recently read Revolt of the Public.
And it's about sort of what we opened up with,
with the internet and how the world can't really,
government can't really hold together
with the way the internet works.
Revolt of Public, that was really good.
But anyway, yeah, good stuff.
Yeah, I love it.
Well, anything else you wanna,
I'll drop all your links,
I'm looking forward to checking out the calculator as well
in that piece you're publishing.
And I'll drop the link for that in the show notes additionally,
but anything else you wanna close with?
No, just the last thing I wanna just close with
is sort of echoing on top of what we already talked about,
which is just kind of challenging people
to like go build the world that you want, right?
Either someone's gonna build it for you,
or we're gonna build it ourselves.
And being a new father,
I'll just leave this comment,
one of the founding fathers of the United States,
Thomas Paine, he said,
if there must be trouble, let it be in my day,
so my kids may know peace.
I love that, that's a great note to end on.
And yeah, I may be hitting you up
for some fatherly advice coming up
as somebody who is much further down the road than I am.
And that's the great thing about the Bitcoin community
is people are willing to give you some good advice
that comes from the heart.
And to share their scarce time,
and Mark, you are a busy guy.
Again, I wanna thank you
for sharing your scarce time.
This was a pleasure.
And I'm psyched up now after talking with you.
This was really enjoyable.
Thanks, always a pleasure.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode
of The Bitcoin Podcast.
If you are a Bitcoin-only company
interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
head to bitcoinpodcast.net,
or hit me up on social media.
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Bitcoin is scarce.
There will only ever be 21 million,
but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time
to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.