You missed a Bitcoin or are gonna hold a bunch of Bitcoin
and you are going to become disproportionately wealthy,
which comes with a level of influence
that you might not be ready for.
You're no longer gonna be a pleb.
You're actually gonna be socioeconomically speaking
an aristocrat.
You become economically strong.
You become economically significant.
You become therefore socially significant.
That comes with a set of duties.
That comes with a set of responsibilities
that if you don't begin to inculcate
that in yourself today,
it's going to crush you under the burden of that weight,
the burden of that economic responsibility
and you're gonna deform into a fucking Brock Pierce
or into someone retarded like that.
Because that's what happens when people come into wealth
all of a sudden and they haven't developed the character
to support that capital or that wealth.
How are you gonna behave?
Not just for yourself or for your family or for all of that,
but to the world, to your community, to all of these things.
The whole point of Bitcoin is to fix the money
so that we forget about the money.
Today in the modern world,
everything is so overly financialized.
Everything from Wall Street, Silicon Valley
to just everyday living.
People are sitting there talking about
their fucking investments and their Robin Hood
and their 401Ks and their superannuation in Australia,
like all this sort of shit.
It's like things that people should not need to worry about
but it's all a function of upstream,
the money being broken,
so therefore we can't save,
we can't be normal human beings, et cetera.
There's a lot of skepticism on the right,
particularly the new right,
with people that are just looking to make money and gamble
and this financialization of the world,
as opposed to establishing families and culture
and dynasties and lineages
and building things of quality, et cetera,
which are sometimes counter to making money.
These things are not often in alignment.
This is about fixing the money
so that we can forget about the money.
When it's like the air we breathe,
we can then think about other things,
like family, like nobility, like excellence, like virtue,
like all of these things,
which are about creating a ascendant civilization
or a beautiful culture.
All the great civilizations, all the great cultures
encoded that in these Bushitos or these chivalries
or these commandments or whatever, right?
They all had a slightly different name.
And I genuinely think there's gonna be a version
for this new world, which will be underpinned by Bitcoin.
The desire for average, the desire for equality,
the desire for all of these things,
I believe is largely driven by this envy
and it's been weaponized
because everybody can feel envy in some way,
but if it's particularly weaponized,
if you are particularly made to feel like you must eat the rich,
you must do this, you must do that,
all this sort of stuff.
I mean, this is literally where communism comes from.
The entire fucking playbook of communism is envy, right?
You got these like dumb fucking kids out there
throwing paint and shit like that
on these beautiful sculptures and statues and stuff.
People like trying to pull down statues
of the people who came and like built civilization,
everything like that.
And then they're like making artwork of like fat blobs
and whatever that other stupidity they're making these as.
It's completely like, it's a revolt against the beautiful
and it's disgusting.
It's like, it's elevating the ugly
and de-elevating or denigrating the beauty
and the beautiful and that is,
that also comes from what was the word we spoke about earlier,
envy.
It comes from the same fucking place.
And this is why coming back to our last conversation,
the opposite of communism is not capitalism, it is beauty.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is The Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 886-329
and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today, my guest is Alex Svedzky.
We discuss Svedzky's latest book,
The Bushido of Bitcoin,
a code for virtue on a Bitcoin standard
and also go down a bunch of different rabbit holes,
including why communists hate beauty,
whether NPCs can be saved, morality versus virtue,
how Bitcoiners need to prepare
for when Bitcoin inevitably wins,
what it means to truly excel and be excellent
and why modern society is focused so much on mediocrity,
equality versus fairness, war,
building the culture of the future and a whole lot more.
Before we dive in, do me a favor
and subscribe to The Bitcoin Podcast
wherever you're listening and make sure to subscribe
on YouTube or Rumble as well, just search at Walker America.
And if you find this show valuable,
consider giving value back
by giving it a zap on Noster or a boost on Fountain.
You can find me on Noster at primal.net slash Walker
and this podcast at primal.net slash TIT coin.
Without further ado,
let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Alex Svedzky.
Well, dude, Svedzky, it's good to see you, man.
It's been a while, it's been too long.
We were supposed to do this conversation.
I realized I checked my notes
from the last conversation when we were supposed to have it.
It was like right after the Trump assassination attempt.
Like a couple days after I think is when we were scheduled.
But yeah, it's good to make this happen.
Good to see you again, man.
You too, my friend.
You too, it's been, as you said, too long.
I think when was the last time we saw each other?
I've got this vision in my head of Lugano,
like when we were sitting at dinner next to each other,
but that kind of been the last time.
I feel like I must have seen you in the last one.
I mean, was it Nosterica?
Would that have been it?
Okay, okay, yes.
Maybe.
That was more recent, correct.
True, true, true.
Yeah, either way, it's been a while.
Yeah, it's been a while.
So you are without doxing anything,
you're in Brazil, right?
Yes, thank you for doxing.
I'm kidding.
Yeah, okay, I know you've said it.
I know you've said it at other shows.
And Brazil's a big ass country.
Like good luck finding you.
It's a massive country.
I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
But how do you like it down there?
The weather is obviously pretty stellar, I assume.
I mean, it obviously just depends on where you are, right?
So in Brazil, as you said, it's a big ass country.
So the South is colder than the North, obviously.
The North is basically tropical, right?
So it's like, it's, you know, the North hits the Caribbean
and it's sort of up there in the warm waters
and stuff like that where if you go surfing,
the sharks are gonna fucking eat you and stuff like that.
I've seen some like wild like videos,
like people just jumping in the ocean
and then like this lady got her leg fucking bitten off
and they're like dragging her out of the beach
and like blood's pissing out of her.
I was like, what the fuck?
I was like, okay, I'm definitely not gonna go up there.
So I think I prefer to stay here in the South, where we are.
A little bit less on the shark side of things.
And actually literally, like we live right on the beach.
And when you look outside in the winter,
there's whales swimming in the beach.
Wow.
It's fucking beautiful.
That's pretty amazing.
That's really nice.
When I look outside in the Midwest of the United States
during the winter, I see gray in some shades of brown.
So yeah.
It's a different experience.
Yeah, I just, you know, I tell myself, I'm like, yeah,
I just, I love the seasons,
but I'm pretty sure that's just like my coping mechanism.
It's like, you know, it's so great.
Like, you know, those two weeks of summer
and a couple of days of fall and spring,
we get our immaculate, but yeah.
It's got its perks though.
Being around like we're close to both of our families.
So that's like a huge thing with the little one.
Like you'll make some sacrifices, you know,
for family closeness.
Honestly, that is super important.
And honestly, I feel like that's probably even more important.
That's our biggest issue.
If I have to be frank here is that I,
we are quite isolated.
That's like my one quorum with being all the way over here
is that like the place is beautiful,
the environment's beautiful.
You know, we've got our gym, we found our raw milk,
we, you know, we found our local butcher
and all this sort of stuff.
Like we've got all of that stuff down Pat,
but it's, yeah man, super far from family,
super far from friends.
You know, we've got a couple, you know,
good sort of friends down here, but it's,
it's difficult in a country where you're never gonna,
like I'm too old to learn a language.
And I don't mean that like facetiously.
I mean it as like, there's no way I'm gonna get
35, 36 years of like English proficiency
that I've developed from fucking as a child, right?
Like to, and, you know, having that real depth of language
is necessary to build depth of relationship, right?
So like, by the time I get proficient in Portuguese
to that degree where I can really have
a deep kind of conversation,
it's probably gonna take me five or 10 years.
And then by the time you build those relationships
another, fuck that.
So anyway, we've been, we've been contemplating
what to do and, you know, first step is to,
you know, pop the baby out and then second step will be
then to decide whether we stay here
or whether we piss off somewhere else.
Do you have a place in mind in the world
where you're like, this is kind of the area
I would like to end up?
This point, I think Dubai is in the leading
sort of candidates of locations.
For a couple of reasons.
One is kind of the center of the world.
So for travel, it's the most connected airport
on the planet basically.
Like with Emirates you can get to any corner of the world
with a single flight.
So that doesn't exist anywhere else.
It is a place of high collision factor
and what I mean by that is there's stuff happening
on a consistent basis, whether it's conferences,
whether it's, you know, people traveling through,
whether it's whatever, it's like a,
I think of when Steve Jobs built the Apple campus,
he built it and he architected it in such a way
that people would collide from different departments
as much as possible and Dubai really has that going for it.
I mean, the US has that as well, big time.
I mean, that's why as much as there's complete retardation
happening in Silicon Valley,
it is still a place of extremely high collision factor,
which is why still some of the best startups and talent
and everything in the world still comes from there.
But you know, Dubai has that and it's also,
it seems to attract, like you don't get to live in Dubai
unless you're there to work.
And so like everyone's on some sort of mission there.
Everyone's building something.
Now, you know, sure, you've got your grifters
and your morons and everything like that,
but you know, that's kind of like everywhere these days.
Same everywhere. Exactly.
So, you know, everyone's got a story over there.
And I mean, just to give you one example,
I was there for a conference and some meetups
a couple of weeks ago and swear on my life,
I ended up at dinner at the palace of Sheikh Zayed,
his grandson, so the actual prince.
So he's the great grandson of the founder of Dubai.
And yeah, but it happened because of that sort of
collision factor, right?
Like I was there caught up with Bruce Fenton.
Bruce was like, hey, you want to come to a dinner?
I was like, yeah, sure.
And he was like, it's the prince.
I'm like, okay, no worries.
Cause you know, everyone kind of calls themselves
a prince over there.
Like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's the prince.
Like he's- It's the prince.
Yeah.
He's like, his art collection is worth $20 billion.
I was like, what?
My God.
So I was like, okay, I'll come.
I was like, can I give him a book?
He's like, yeah, sure, no worries.
So, but that kind of stuff,
I don't say that to brag in any way.
What I'm saying is that it's the kind of collision
that was never going to happen here in Brazil.
And I find that interesting.
Now, I don't know if I could live there full time.
I think it'd probably end up being a bit too much.
So my gut instinct is that I would like to
potentially move my base there and then figure out
where to sort of spend the other parts of the year.
So anyway, this is a thank you for coming
to my TED Talk about Dubai and where I'm going to live.
No, no, I mean, I'm interested by Dubai
because obviously I know a lot of people who have moved there.
There's, you know, that have expatriated
from a number of different countries to Dubai.
And it certainly has like a lot of benefits.
There are other things on the other side of the coin
where I'm like, man, you know, it is,
it's people like, okay, how do I say this?
People, everybody who lives there
and comes as an expat seems to really speak highly of it.
At the same time, there are restrictions there
based on the style of, you know, monarchy, government,
general, you know, control that they have
where you are maybe more free in some ways,
you are less free in other ways, absolutely.
That being said, this is the case everywhere, right?
Everything is trade-offs.
Everything is deciding what concessions
are you willing to make to get which benefits?
What is most important to you personally?
And so that's why, like, it's,
there's no one size fits all for anyone, you know?
But-
Exactly, it's certainly, you said the magic word,
which is trade-offs is, the thing I like about Dubai
is it's very clear, like you are coming,
it almost feels like you're coming into someone's house.
Like you actually feel like a guest
and you get treated like a guest.
That's something I noticed.
It's, you know, you get treated very courteously,
you get treated very friendly, everyone's nice to you.
Shit gets fucking done, like,
because you're effectively a customer
and they don't treat you like a subject.
So that's very important.
But there are very clear rules around, okay,
well, you're a customer and you're a guest,
you're not actually part of the family.
And that's okay, because we're not gonna
pretend like you're a part of the family.
You know, for example, there's no way to get a citizenship
that you can't be naturalized.
Like if you have a baby on, you know, UAE soil,
the baby is not an Emirati.
Like it's, so, so, and I actually have a lot of respect
for that because it's, it means that they,
they have a different relationship to their own people,
to their own ethnos, which is really how the West
was built originally anyway.
Like we had, you know, we valued our own people first
and then everybody else.
And we've kind of like inverted that.
And now everybody else is more important
and our own people are not important anymore.
And, you know, the difference,
I've got this montage of, of Dubai in the last like 40,
50 years, it was like a fucking desert patch.
And now it's like this metropolis.
And in that same period of time,
the metropolis that was San Francisco, for example,
has turned into a turd infested fucking, you know,
junky alley.
Like, and so, you know, one is like democratic
and outsiders are more important than insiders.
And the other one is monarchies, our people come first
and you are welcome as a guest,
but there's some clear rules
and you sort of see what's happened.
So, yeah, I mean, it's, as you said, trade-offs.
Like it's, you know, you don't go there to, you know,
talk shit about your host basically.
Yeah.
And, I feel that.
And like, again, trade-offs, trade-offs, trade-offs,
nothing like nowhere is perfect.
Like if there were a perfect state,
everyone would live there.
And then, you know, it's also a question of,
okay, like what is a perfect state?
Like, what does that even look like?
Like, I, you know, I would want one that is as small
as is humanly possible, takes care of basic safety.
That it's basically a, you know,
it's basically a security force
that is organized for the collective defense
of my private property.
And like, so that we don't have to resort to mob violence
and I don't have to string up my neighbor Bob
when he steals my car.
Like I will, but I don't want to have to do that.
And it's also, we're going to have a more respectful society
if we do organize in that way.
But that's, yeah.
I mean, you just, you somewhat described Dubai in that sense
because like it's one of the safest places.
Like I, I fucking, I was in such a rush to get to the hotel
on the last trip that I was there.
I left my laptop in the airport for five hours.
And I came back and it was exactly where I left it.
That's okay.
I've like heard stories about that, you know,
but like this is the first firsthand story I've heard.
Totally firsthand story.
I got, we got to the hotel, Paloma and I, we checked in,
we were sitting there and I was like,
I'm going to get some work done.
And I'm like, fuck is my laptop?
And I was like, fucking searching through everything.
All this sort of shit.
I was like, holy shit, I lost my laptop.
Went down to the, to the front desk
and I'm like panicking.
They're like, so don't worry, it's okay.
We'll find it.
And you know, they got me a taxi when all the,
and we were right on the edge of the palm.
So it was like an hour back to the airport.
And I went to the airport and I'm like freaking out.
I'm like, hey, you know, I left my thing.
And the guy's like, look, relax, don't worry, it'll be there.
And I'm sitting there in the back of my mind thinking,
there's no fucking way that laptop is going to be there.
It's like, gone, gone, I fucking, I fucked up.
And yeah, he walked me through like, you know,
the part where you're not allowed to walk back in.
Like he's like, look, come with me, security walk through.
And the bag is just sitting there on the floor.
And I was like, okay, that's super interesting.
I've got actually second story like that.
The first time I went to Dubai in 2019,
I forgot my phone.
I was listening to, like it was when the AirPods first came
out, so I was listening to some music.
And the phone was not in my pocket,
it was just on the train seat.
And I got off the train and at my stop.
And all of a sudden I heard like the Bluetooth like disconnecting.
And I was like, fuck my phone.
I was like running off to the train, but the train left.
I was like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
You know, I'm stuck in Dubai.
I was only supposed to be there for like a week,
all this sort of shit, I'm panicking.
So I waited for the next train to come.
I jumped on the next train and like,
I had no idea what to do.
So I was like, okay, maybe I'll just go to the next stop.
So I jumped off at the next stop and I'm like running around
and I ask a few security guards.
I'm like, have you seen my phone, this and that?
And one of the kind of, he was, he wasn't a security guard.
He was kind of like military police,
whatever they have there.
And, you know, he asked me to explain the phone,
describe it, all this sort of stuff.
And like, again, I was in this panic state.
And then he just like pulled the phone out of his pocket.
It was like, here you go.
I was like, what the fuck?
So someone literally got off at the next stop,
gave the phone to somebody and then I came and picked it up.
Like, I was like, holy shit.
So anyway, there you go.
Two first hand stories.
I mean, honestly, it's pretty impressive.
Like that, that would not be the case in Chicago.
I can tell you that.
That laptop and that phone are gone in 60 seconds or less.
But yeah, well, you know, and that,
that's kind of a nice bridge into our main topic for the day,
which is I think a lot of it is going to center around virtue.
Cause it's one of the things that you have focused on a lot
in this book, the Bushido of Bitcoin.
Can we maybe, maybe we need like a little bit of a primer
first for folks about like they see the word Bushido
and they're like, I don't even know what that means.
Like, is this, you know, some, some Japanese stuff?
There's crazy characters.
So like, could you give us the backdrop for this?
Like, what, what is the Bushido of Bitcoin
and what the fuck does Bushido actually mean?
Okay, let's, let's start with the same question first.
And then we'll go into what Bushido.
Sure.
So the word Bushido in Japanese means way of the warrior.
That's that etymologically what it means,
but it essentially stood for a,
it's another way to say a code of virtue, right?
And the Western or the Western Christian European equivalent
was like chivalry, right?
So it's like a way of living or a code of virtue
that was primarily established and adopted
and embodied by the warrior class.
And it was the same in both Christendom,
European Christendom and in, in feudal Japan,
which is very interesting.
We'll get into it later, like the,
these sort of parallels in different civilizations
at different times in different regions
and everything kind of converging on these like codes,
which were almost carbon copies of each other.
And you're like, what the fuck?
So like as, as I wrote the book, I found that out.
So you got this code of virtue.
So when, when I originally started the book,
it actually came about as an idea from a,
from a podcast that Eric Kasin and I did
on my old wake up podcast from back in the day.
And he and I were discussing a book called Shogun
by James Clavel, which is, is now like some HBO show.
And actually they did a good job of that.
I must admit.
I wanted to read the slight interjection.
I watched the show and I was like,
this is fucking badass.
Like it was just really well done.
I would need to read the book now, I feel because it,
Do the audio book.
The audio book is, I would say,
as much as the show was fantastic,
the audio book is even 10 times better than the show.
Nice.
The first time I listened to the audio book dude,
I was in Germany during lockdowns.
And here I am like listening to this book,
you know, I was like transported back through time.
And you know, there's like honor and virtue
and like people who, you know,
they do something slightly wrong
and they fucking cut out their spleen,
you know, for the dishonor and stuff like that.
And then I walk outside and there's people wearing masks
in the middle of the day,
protecting themselves from a fantasy virus.
I was like, what fucking planet am I on?
God, that's a trip.
I was almost gonna fucking commit
to booking myself for us.
So anyway, Kasin and I had both had a book
and we both read or listened to this book multiple times
and we ended up doing a podcast on it.
And the theme at the time was this idea
of these emergent values
or these emergent virtues in the Bitcoin space.
And a couple months later, I thought,
shit, this is a great idea for a book.
So that's what the original incarnation of the book was.
And the book evolved.
The one that I ended up sending you,
the one you read is draft number eight.
I rewrote this fucking book eight times.
Probably could have rewritten another eight times,
but it just evolved over time
and it became something different.
It became more a exploration of history,
culture, civilization, of what it took for us to get here
and what we can learn from what it took for us to get here
and project forward on a new socioeconomic standard.
And that's why the subtitle of the book is
a code of virtue for a new socioeconomic standard.
And it became over time less and less and less
about Bitcoin and more and more and more
about what do we do after we win the economic game?
Because that's like, I just did a,
I don't know if you know, Will Tanner from,
he's been doing a lot of great content on Rhodesia
and stuff like that on Twitter.
But he and I just did a podcast earlier today
and I'm on this sort of crusade to orange pill,
the right wingers.
And he's one of the key figures
that I really wanna get on board.
And I kind of told him, I said,
look, the whole point of Bitcoin is to fix the money
so that we forget about the money.
Like today in the modern world,
everything is so overly financialized.
Like everything from Wall Street, Silicon Valley
to just everyday living.
Like people are sitting there talking about their fucking
investments in their Robin Hood and their 401ks
and their superannuation Australia,
like all this sort of shit.
It's like things that people should not need to worry about,
but it's all a function of upstream, the money being broken.
So therefore we can't say we can't be normal human beings,
et cetera.
So I said, the whole point,
because there's a lot of skepticism on the right,
particularly the new right with people
that are just like looking to make money and gamble
and like in this financialization of the world
as opposed to establishing families and culture
and dynasties and lineages
and building things of quality, et cetera,
which are sometimes counter to making money, right?
Like these things are not often in alignment.
So the argument I made to him, I said,
look, this is about fixing the money
so that we can forget about the money.
When it's like the air we breathe,
we can then think about other things like family,
like nobility, like excellence, like virtue,
like all of these things which are about
creating a ascendant civilization
or a beautiful culture, right?
These things, because, you know, if you,
because I've come with this, you know,
I'm going off on tangents here, so I apologize, but like-
You know that tangents are always welcome on this show.
No apologies.
So the, you know, the critique I've had recently
is the sort of the incessant focus on pure economics.
Like I kind of envision now economics as like the foundation,
but a healthy society doesn't focus pure in economics,
it focuses on something higher, which is beauty and truth,
right?
Like that, that should be the, where the gaze is,
and then it should be under,
underlie it by sound economics,
but that's not the goal.
The goal is not to build something because it makes money.
The goal is to build something
because it's beautiful and transcendent, like,
and it should also make money,
but that should be the secondary factor,
not the primary factor.
And then this is sort of like a little bit of a,
not an issue, but a small disconnect
that I have personally developed,
particularly with, you know,
Austrian economics and libertarianism
and all that sort of stuff.
But anyway, without going off on that tangent,
the book evolved a lot,
and it became a book about constructing,
as I said, an ascendant civilization,
and what are the virtues, what are the values?
What is the, what is the way that we must behave
when Bitcoin sort of wins this economic game?
Do we become a new parasitic class?
Do we become Lambo bros,
or do we become men and women of virtue?
And if we're going to become the latter,
what are those virtues?
And the best clues we have to those great virtues
are the cultures and the civilizations that preceded us,
that were great,
that set the foundation upon which we built.
So that's where the digging came into it,
and that's where I ended up,
and the book really turned into something I didn't expect.
So I think I've answered both questions.
Yeah, no, you definitely haven't.
So I mean, fair to say that the book presupposes
that Bitcoin wins,
and is that your,
like not just as a literary device,
but your personal belief that like Bitcoin will win,
you view it as inevitability?
It continues to blow my mind
that there are Bitcoiners out there
who are not yet on no-ster.
Seriously, what are you doing?
Just like you shouldn't need to ask permission
to use your money,
you shouldn't need to ask permission to speak freely
or have control of your own account,
but that is exactly what you are doing
if you are still trusting
centralized social media platforms.
You may have seen several high-profile Bitcoiners
and friends of mine like Lawrence LaParde
and Lynn Alden more recently
get their X accounts hacked
and then struggle to work with X support
to get those accounts back.
Where did they go to give people updates?
They went to no-ster.
On no-ster, you can't be censored,
you can't be banned,
and you can't be deboosted for saying words
that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk don't like.
And honestly, the vibes are just better on no-ster.
Plus, no-ster has Bitcoin payments built in,
so when you post a meme, a spicy hot take,
or just a photo of your steak,
people will zap you Bitcoin
to show you they like it and find your content valuable.
And if you are a content creator,
you can start monetizing your work immediately on no-ster,
unlike on X, YouTube,
or literally any other centralized platform
where you have to hit engagement thresholds
and then KYC yourself.
You can find me on no-ster
by going to primal.net slash Walker.
And you can find this podcast on no-ster
at primal.net slash TITCoin.
Primal also has a built-in Bitcoin wallet,
so you can literally get zapped by people for your posts.
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Almost, I think so.
I think in my opinion,
the economic gravity that Bitcoin has
is too strong to unwind now.
Sure, we've got the black rocks and this problem
and that problem and all the crap
that we're gonna have to fight along the way.
But in the end, Bitcoin is a bit of a black hole
in that sense, which we all know.
Everyone listening to this is gonna agree.
It's gonna keep sucking in capital
and it'll keep getting heavier and heavier and heavier.
And as it does, it'll do its thing.
I genuinely believe that while that fight
still needs to happen,
because we're obviously not out of the woods yet,
I think the probability of Bitcoin failing
and not winning the economic game is lower
than the probability of Bitcoin winning the economic game,
but the culture still being a shit show
and the people who end up with a bunch of Bitcoin
not being virtuous.
I actually think that's a bigger risk
because as much as, I guess,
there is a subset of Bitcoiners
who are thinking about family,
thinking about nobility, thinking about community,
thinking about all of the things that we know
that are wholesome in the Bitcoin space.
But I've spent a little bit of time outside
of the Bitcoin bubble of the last year.
And I found that actually more people who have Bitcoin
are more likely to be degenerates.
Like it's not, like I've actually back flipped
on my belief that Bitcoin fixes people.
I actually think that people need to have
a particular predisposition for Bitcoin
to affect them in that way.
Because I've met way more Bitcoiners now
that are not what we would call Bitcoiners,
but they consider themselves Bitcoiners
and they're more interested in Lambos
and whatever the fuck else
that we would not consider wholesome.
So it was like a real shock for me
because it's very easy for us to get caught
in our own little echo chambers, right?
Like we did that on Bitcoin Twitter,
we do that a lot on Nostra.
It's like, it's us and it's our little crew,
but it's not so clear to me that Bitcoin fixes everyone
at touches, if anything, it magnifies the ingredients
that are already sort of within them,
you know, particularly if that's their nature
and particularly if the nurture
has reinforced that nature.
So this book is almost an attempt to say, look,
you missed a Bitcoin or are gonna hold a bunch of Bitcoin
and you're going to become disproportionately wealthy,
which comes with a level of influence
that you might not be ready for.
So you're actually, you're no longer gonna be a pleb,
you're actually gonna be socioeconomically speaking,
an aristocrat.
And to be an aristocrat, you know,
the word aristocrat is, you know, power.
What the fuck was it?
Like rule of the strong, right?
So you become economically strong,
you become economically significant,
you become therefore socially significant.
That comes with a set of duties,
that comes with a set of responsibilities
that if you don't begin to inculcate that
in yourself today, it's going to crush you
under the burden of that weight,
the burden of that economic responsibility
and you're gonna deform into a fucking Brock Pierce
or into, you know, someone retarded like that
because that's what happens when people come into wealth
all of a sudden and they haven't developed the character
to support that capital or that wealth, right?
And that's the whole premise of this book.
It's there's things that we all need to work on
and I put myself first on that list.
You know, I've been a complete cunt at, you know,
sorry for swearing, I've been a complete asshole
for a long time and writing this book was for me
an opportunity to say, okay, Alex,
how are you gonna behave,
not just for yourself or for your family
or for all of that, but to the world, to community,
to all of these things and all the great civilizations,
all the great cultures encoded that in these Bushitos
or these chivalries or these, you know, commandments
or whatever, right?
You know, they'll have a slightly different name.
And I genuinely think there's gonna be a version
for this new world, which will be underpinned by Bitcoin.
And my attempt at distilling those
is the premise of the book, like there's these 10 virtues
and they're not Swetski's virtues.
They're like, they are the timeless virtues
that seem to come up again and again and again.
I'll shut up there first.
No, not at all, again, safe space for rants,
safe space for swearing as well,
because let's be honest,
sometimes it's just necessary to emphasize a point.
I'll put the explicit tag on there
for if anyone's listening with their kids.
And if not, well, then, you know,
your kids are gonna hear these, they're just words, guys.
They're just words, your kids are gonna hear them anyway.
Like, can't shelter them forever.
But so, you know, one of the things that I loved
and it's something that you've talked about before,
it's also kind of mentioned the book.
It's this idea that it's not enough to have,
just have capital, you must have character as well
to make a positive impact on the world.
I'm paraphrasing here,
but without character, capital is a magnifier
of the worst traits in us.
And I thought that's a really interesting point
because it's easy to say, you know, Bitcoin fixes this.
You know, Bitcoin fixes me, right?
It's like, no, Bitcoin fixes this.
Bitcoin doesn't necessarily fix you.
Like Bitcoin may be a path to a better version of yourself,
but it could also be a path to a worse version of yourself.
Like that's, it's not like deterministic
in a positive direction.
And so like, is that kind of what you're seeing is like,
no matter what the form of capital is,
and perhaps some forms of capital,
perhaps forms of fiat capital have a more potentially
negative effect on you because of the game
that you have to play.
But even with Bitcoin, you're still susceptible
to the same weaknesses, negative traits,
whatever they may be within you.
And it's going, you know, it's like, you know,
the line between good and evil cuts
through the heart of all of us, right?
It's the question of which side is going to win.
Is that kind of how you view this?
Like it's not gonna just fix you.
Like it doesn't fix everything.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
In short, yes.
Like,
I, you know, this came from a place of a little bit
of disillusionment because I, you know, I went through
and you know, there was people that I, you know,
thought were real solid people in the Bitcoin space
that turned out, I was like, you know what, actually,
you're not actually as solid as I thought.
Like, you know, there's, and you know,
I'm not gonna name any names or any of that sort of stuff.
But like there was a period of reckoning for me
and I felt like I, you know, the whole rosy veil of like,
yeah, you know, we're all Bitcoiners,
we're all on the same side, you know,
we're all kind of like think, live, breathe
and all this sort of stuff the same.
Like that kind of disappeared.
And I ended up finding people who I aligned with more
in a values capacity outside of Bitcoin as well.
So then I realized, wait a minute,
there's actually super based people that are not Bitcoiners.
Then there is Bitcoiners that are literally
the opposite of fucking based, completely retarded.
So I'm like, how do I reconcile that?
So it's like, clearly Bitcoin didn't fix this person
and clearly Bitcoin turned this person into a bigger retard.
So the equation Bitcoin fixes you
and all this sort of stuff, just I found, you know,
I guess this is the mathematician in me.
When I was young, like I was really into math
and like I would, you know, you find something,
a proof or a disproof for an equation.
And like I found something that disproved the equation.
So I was like, okay, there's something else here.
And I, you know, Russ Stevens and I were having a discussion
because he, you know, very graciously agreed
to write the forward for the book.
And he, he and I had a discussion about this
and we kind of came to the conclusion that
Bitcoin is like a keystone.
So if you want to build a bridge,
like Bitcoin is necessary,
but it's not sufficient for the bridge.
So you can't finish the bridge without the keystone,
but you can't just put a keystone in the middle
without the rest of the bridge.
So there's other stuff there that is necessary.
And that's, I guess, if I had to boil down the whole message,
it's that that's what this is about.
Like it's about what else do we need to do
other than stack sats?
And there's a lot.
And I think Bitcoin has slowly sort of found that
to some degree, but I think there's so much more.
That rabbit hole goes just as deep as the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
But it's a rabbit hole that is often ignored
or at least not explored to the, to the same degree.
And yeah.
I completely agree.
And I mean, it's this, the other idea here is that
like money itself, the accumulation of more units of money
is not the end all be all, right?
The money is a tool.
For some people, the sheer accumulation
of more monetary units is the end all be all.
I would argue that those people have a lot of regrets
on their death bed.
Totally, totally.
You know, but like you hear these,
it gets a cliche at this point,
but you hear these stories that nobody is ever sitting
on their death bed being like,
you know, like I wish I would have, you know,
spent a little more time away from my family
and, and you know, done that it's like, no, you,
you always wish I wish I would have spent more time
with my family, with my friends.
I wish I would have, you know, helped build my community more.
It's those things that are, yes, does money help you
to do those things in perhaps a better, more enhanced way
because you have more freedom over your time?
Yes, but there's a point of diminishing marginal return
where additional units of the, you know, of money
don't actually get you anything else
when it comes to the real,
the things that life is actually about, right?
And so I think, like, and I agree,
I think that gets lost in the sauce a lot
for Bitcoiners too.
But I hope that this,
that we see a little bit more of an awakening in that.
And I'm curious to the, so these virtues, you said,
you know, these aren't Swetzky's virtues.
These are kind of, let's say universal virtues
or these are time-tested virtues.
I wanna talk through those a little bit now.
And maybe another thing that I think you maybe wanna
clarify is like the difference between virtue and morality
and kind of this interplay a little bit
because I think that does get muddied a bit at times.
It does, yes.
So let's again start with the second one first.
So the original subtitle of the book
was a moral code for a world on a Bitcoin standard.
And I went through and I just kind of like removed
the word morality from a lot of the book
and from the subtitle on the basis that, look,
if you want morality, go read the Bible
or the Quran or something like that.
Like I'm not here to moralize to you.
And I feel like that happens a lot with people
is that they try and like, you know,
I'm holier than thou and you know,
I am better because I did this or whatever.
Like there's like, I don't think moralizing
works very well because it's very hard to disprove, right?
Like a virtue in my opinion is an act.
So it's like a principle in action
that that's maybe a way to conceptualize what a virtue is.
And like if we use courage as an example,
when you see someone do something courageous,
somebody else doesn't have to tell you
that, oh, that was a courageous act or something.
It's something you feel like it moves you, right?
Like there's a feeling, you know,
same with compassion or you know,
you see something and you can tell
if it's just or unjust,
it doesn't have to have a fucking label on it.
So to me, you know, that's sort of like the difference
between virtual morality and I think virtue is actually,
in my opinion, upstream of morality
because you can have different cultures
or different religions with different morals
or different frameworks for morals.
But from what I've noticed,
and I have an example in the book about the crusades
with Saladin and I can't remember
who was on the Christian side,
but they developed a respect for each other
because of the way,
the virtues they respected about each other,
courage, justice, you know, Saladin was very well known
for like honor, for example,
like he, there's one story in the book about how
he captures his enemy's father and at any point in time,
it could have used them as ransom,
could have killed him, whatever, all this sort of stuff,
but it was not the honorable thing to do.
So he actually took care of him
and once the siege was over,
he handed his father back to him
because it was, you know, the dishonorable thing.
And that kind of like respect among enemies,
you know, comes from a place of less,
I guess you could argue it's morality as well,
but it comes from a place of virtue.
And I guess what I'm going with this is you could be Muslim,
you could be Christian, you could be Buddhist,
you could be whatever, but every single one of us
will recognize courage or recognize compassion
or recognize a virtue, right?
So the virtues kind of to me transcend morality
or at least if they don't, you know,
for those who are getting triggered by my interpretation
that they transcend morality or that they come higher,
they are on a different plane,
you know, maybe we can put it that way.
And for me, I felt, it was,
I felt I could write about virtue,
but I didn't feel I could write about morality.
Let's put it that way.
And that's why, you know, to kind of tie it back
to my initial comment is like, you know,
morality you'll find in the good books.
Here you'll find a guide on what are the virtues
and who embodied these?
Like I talk a whole lot about Alexander the Great
and Caesar and Napoleon and Tokugawa Yasuo
and all these sort of like great figures
who bent the arc of history, you know,
in the direction of their will, for example.
So-
A quick question.
It's just to be fair to say then that in your mind,
morality is more of culture,
it's more culturally subjective,
whereas virtue is something that sort of transcends culture.
We're not saying it transcends morality,
but it does transcend culture.
It's, one can't say that it's purely objective,
but it's certainly more objective than morality,
which is entirely culturally subjective.
Fair characterization?
Yeah, I think so.
I think so, that's a good way to summarize it.
So the first question,
what are the virtues that I selected?
So I started off with the eight virtues
from Japanese Bushido, from the feudal time.
And these are not like,
the thing about the Japanese virtues was that
it was never like a 10 commandments or something, right?
It wasn't like something that was written
and this is what the virtues are.
So there's no real official eight virtues.
There's just like a consensus around
what were the most common of the eight.
And they include justice, compassion.
Let's see how good my memory is here.
Justice, compassion, loyalty-
I can throw it open the screen if you want.
If you want-
Yeah, I do have them handy,
just for a visual aid for folks.
Excellent.
Yeah, loyalty, respect.
Wait, they're the 10, okay.
Um, so let me make sure I read out the right one.
So yeah, so justice, courage, compassion, honor, integrity,
respect, duty, loyalty, and restraint or self-control.
So they are the kind of the original eight Japanese ones.
And the two that I added that were explicitly not,
or that explicitly did not come up in a lot of the texts
that I read on Japanese Bushido were excellence
and responsibility.
And I think the reason why they weren't explicitly mentioning
those is that those cultures
kind of had responsibility and excellence embedded within them.
And, you know, maybe 100, 200 years from now,
we'll, you know, we'll once again enter an age
where responsibility and excellence
are like kind of second nature.
But I felt that it was necessary
to have these as explicit virtues
because the job we have over the next century or two
is to rebuild civilization and point us back
towards an ascendant direction.
And that fundamentally requires responsibility and excellence.
And honestly, though, they were two of my favorite chapters
in writing, like there's the responsibility one
as well as like there's some real fire sections in there.
Like I, in there, I talk about Alfred Adler,
who's like the forgotten Austrian psychologist,
who's kind of like the psychology equivalent of Mises,
who, you know, the universities will never teach you about
because he does away with labels and therapy and drugs
and all this sort of stuff.
It's incredible.
But anyway, that's the 10 virtues.
Now, I like it, it reminds me, so I'm a fun fact about me.
I'm a, I'm an Eagle Scout.
And I still like to this day have it in ingrained in me.
A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly,
courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave,
clean and reverent.
Like I can never, they're literally like in,
they're so deep down in my brain
that they like, they just are always there.
And there's a couple of those
that I will take issue with on occasion,
like the obedient one, because they don't mean it
in a negative connotation,
but I think the way I take it is sort of,
is when it means like automatic obedience to authority,
which I don't support.
But that being said, it's this idea of a code of conduct,
right?
It's a framework for not what you should do,
but how you should go about doing it.
And I think that that's something that,
like I don't think most people think about this kind of stuff
literally at all, like ever in their whole life.
And I guess maybe that's just like the NPC class.
Like there's no curiosity, there's no desire to say,
like instead of whining about how unfair the world is to you,
what can I do to actually better myself?
What can I do to elevate myself on this playing field?
What can I do to take myself to the next level?
But the sad thing is that I think,
I would argue the majority of people
will never ask themselves that question.
And that's really sad.
Totally, totally.
Let's, do you know what?
I wanna dig into what you just said about obedience then,
because it, I like you,
have like a trigger to that word, right?
Like it's like, you know, just like,
it's almost like an electric shock.
It's like, fuck you, I'm not a rumble machine, right?
But when you, it's interesting, like,
the duty and loyalty part is related to obedience, right?
And these virtues are extremely important
in these warrior cultures,
and obviously in family and all sorts of things like that.
But when you unpack the reason why
in Eagle Scouts or these kind of environments,
like, obedience is necessary almost,
is because of how,
it's because of the environment in which
the obedience is necessary.
And I think of, I think of a, two examples,
a phalanx in battle,
or, and I think of also a sailors on a boat.
And I have a vision right now in my head
of there's a great movie called Mutiny on the Bounty.
It's also, it was, I don't know if it was based on the book,
but I read the book before I saw the movie.
It's about these English sailors
who are going to Tahiti to get breadfruit.
And without getting into the story,
there's a section where they're trying to round the cape of,
oh, I can't remember if it was the Argentinian one,
or if it was the African one.
I think it was the Argentinian one
because of the coldness of the weather and stuff.
And basically it was like a visceral example of,
the only way they survived was 100% obedience
to the captain of what, like,
they had to function like a unit.
There was no, oh, I'm a libertarian, I'm free,
don't tell me what the fuck to do.
Like, sorry, bro, that shit doesn't exist.
You're dead, yeah, yeah.
You're dead, exactly.
And everyone around you is dead.
And not only are you dead, yeah.
Not only are you dead, but probably everyone else
is gonna die because you didn't do your duty.
And the phalanx is a similar situation.
With the Spartans, the Macedonians,
and all this sort of stuff,
there was a greater penalty for dropping your shield
than there was for dropping your weapon.
Because the man to your left
was the greater priority than yourself, right?
And that's how the unit was strong.
And we, you know, oftentimes in, you know,
in a libertarian freedom, all this sort of shit context,
we laugh at that shit.
But, you know, these micro-collectives,
these tribes are far stronger
than the individual libertarian.
Like, they are, and in my opinion,
I've sort of come to believe,
like, maybe I'm a micro-collectivist now,
but I've honestly come to believe
that it's not the individual that matters,
it's actually the tribe that matters more than individual.
And that is the organizing unit.
Like, the whole sovereign individual, libertarian, you know,
even like, I look back on some of my
uncomminous manifesto stuff and I'm like,
man, I was like too excessive
on the individual side of the spectrum.
I think the right point of sovereignty is
whatever that Wolfpack kind of tribe is.
And, you know, whether that is family,
whether there's like, you know, close-knit friends,
whatever that is, I kind of almost imagine it as
Alexander the Great and his royal guard,
like his best friends, the ones that he grew up with,
that he went to fucking war with for 15 years.
Like, they took arrows and swords
and everything for each other.
Like, that to me seems to be more important
than the individual.
So, Sonya, I just wanted to unpack what you said earlier
about obedience because, yes, it does trigger
the individualist within us,
but it is absolutely necessary in the context
that it is applied and it's arrogant of any of us
to kind of look at that stuff and laugh at it as it's like,
oh, you know, you're a stupid brute.
It's, well, no, there's actually something noble about that.
No, I agree with that completely.
And that's kind of the caveat I put out there
is that like, I realized that they're not using it
in that way, like they're actually using, you know,
and granted, it turns out that if you were in Boy Scouts
and you were in the wrong troop
and you were being obedient to the wrong troop leader,
that may not have worked out so well for you.
That's a whole different story.
We don't need to unpack.
Luckily, no funny business in my troop.
I think maybe just some embezzlement by someone,
but that's just fiat games, you know?
But no, I think it is an important point that like the,
I think there are people that excel by themselves
and there are people that excel in teams
and there are people that can do both,
but excelling by yourself while it is incredibly rewarding,
I think there is often a lot of,
like community is important.
There's a reason why people in close-knit communities
live longer.
There's a reason why people in close-knit communities
are happier.
Even when they're forced to do really unpleasant stuff,
they're going to find ways to do it
with a smile on their face.
Like community matters, we are social beings.
You can still succeed on your own,
but you're able to do a hell of a lot more
when you have a pack, a tribe around you.
Like that's human cooperation is what has allowed
us to get to where we are today,
where we're sitting across the world from each other,
using these fancy cameras, running little bits
across the internet and we can see each other
and talk in real time while we stream it live on Noster.
None of that's possible, but with one person
working by themselves, all of it requires,
and there's also a difference between a tribal mentality
and a collectivist mentality.
And I think that's kind of the key thing.
It's like, this isn't for the greater good,
you're doing it for the very immediate good of your tribe.
Like I think that's an important distinction there.
Totally, totally.
You know, so I appreciate the breakdown of the virtues
because again, I think we're at this point
where we were mentioning the NPC earlier
and you had a quote at one point in the book,
it's like, I wrote this not for the sheep or the NPC
for they can never be woken up, but for the lions,
whether you've been asleep or have woken up.
And I thought that was kind of amazing.
And it's something I've sort of come to myself
where it's like some people are,
I mean, maybe I'll ask this of you,
are some people just beyond saving?
Like are there some people that are just too broken,
lack the inquisitiveness, lack the vigor, lack the drive
to ever pull themselves out of their sorry little hole?
Yes.
It's a sad state of affairs.
It is, it is.
I mean, I don't know if it's,
it comes back to the nature nurture discussion.
I think there is just some level of nature
that is necessary for the kind of nurture
that we respect and admire to matter.
And there's, yeah, there's just no amount
of anything you can do to fix that or change that.
And yeah, man, the older I get, the more selective
I think I become because you just kind of realize that,
fuck man, time flies.
We're not getting any younger, like really.
And like why waste your time with things
that really don't matter or people
that are not gonna change or people,
like this is not gonna sound nice,
but people that don't matter.
Like not everyone can fucking matter, man.
Like, and that's okay.
So like cut them out, forget about them,
block them, ignore them, whatever.
It's like life's too short to spend it on lost causes.
And there's more lost causes than there is useful causes.
You can't save everyone.
No, you can't, no.
And I mean, I wrote about this, like it's funny
because I mean, the original remnant essay
that I did like back in 2021,
like that was the whole premise of it.
It's like the masses don't matter, like find the remnant.
And I find myself just coming back to that idea
on a regular basis and it just like proves itself out
for whatever reason, every week, every month,
every whatever, right?
It's, so we all need to find out 1% where it matters.
And this is why I've also got like a problem
with things like equality and egalitarianism
and all this sort of stuff because it pretends like,
the very act of prioritization is the act of de-equalizing things
and making something more important,
everything else not important, right?
So everything we do, like existence itself is the process
of making things unequal.
And we've been brainwashed for the last 70 years
since the end of World War II
that like everything must be democratic and egalitarian
and equal and all this kind of stuff.
And we've kind of cut the head off like excellence
and we've tried to like turn everything
into some sort of mediocre middle ground
where everything is equal.
And same and all this sort of stuff and everything.
That's where relativism lives as well, right?
Because like, nothing really matters
because everything matters and nothing matters.
So therefore nothing matters because everything matters.
And like it's the, that circular sort of like
infinite pointless logic that is illogical
but logical because both can exist at the same time.
And that's perfect.
This is exactly what I wanted to get into next
is this idea of equality versus fairness.
It seems that we've pushed more and more and more
and this isn't just like a, I'm an American obviously,
this isn't just an American thing.
This is now we see this across the world,
this idea that we're trying to level the playing field.
And that's actually not even a good example,
a playing field should be level
in the sense that it should be fair.
Both sides should be the same height.
That does not mean that you should take the fastest guy
in the field who's two times faster than anyone else
and tie weights to his legs
or give the other one a bionic exoskeleton,
give the weakest person a bionic exoskeleton
that allows them to crush even the strongest guy.
You know, like we've, for some reason,
it's like we've seen this globalized version
of the no child left behind bullshit.
It's like we just need to make everyone equal.
And then when everyone's equal and the same,
it'll all be fine.
But also at the same time, which is extremely like,
this is why none of this makes any sense.
It's like everyone's equal, but also like it's animal farms.
Some people are more equal than others.
And there's gonna build an intersectional hierarchy
of diversity so that we can tell you,
usually straight white man,
why you are at the very bottom of this
and all of us have way more grievances than you.
And they're also your fault.
And so we need to basically have reparations
of some sort for all of this
so that again, we can make us all equal.
But again, some of us are more equal than others.
Like this is just like this lunacy.
And like you've talked a lot about this.
People confuse equality with fairness.
And can you just expand on that a little bit
and why people get this so wrong?
Yeah, man.
I mean, you just summed it up perfectly.
So I think the only thing I'll add to that is
that fairness is actually contrary or counter to equality.
Like the whole point of it is that if you, for example,
forced an equal outcome in a game,
you would most likely have to do it
in a way that you created some unfairness, right?
But if you made sure that the game was fair,
the point of the game is to have an unequal outcome,
is to have a winner and a loser.
Like you don't just go and watch the games
just because everyone wins every time.
Like fucking pointless.
Like the point of winning is to get the reward
and the dopamine and the trophy or whatever it is
like you won.
And the point of losing actually is also to learn something
and to either come back better
or to just like fucking lose.
It's okay.
Like so, the fair game has an unequal outcome
and the unfair game has an equal outcome.
And this goes beyond just humans
like all of the natural world is like this.
There's, it's not equal when a lion runs out
and they take out one of the gazelles.
Like, but it's fair because that's the one they got.
And like, if it was equal,
all the gazelles would be dead
or none of the lions would eat.
But lo and behold, this is the way of the world,
is the way of life.
And trying to kind of like short-circuit that
for some unattainable ideal,
I think has done just as much damage
to civilization as money printing.
If not more.
And that's actually one of the other big points
that I made in the book.
I said, look, there's like two twin evils
that have destroyed civilization.
You know, one is money printing,
but the other one is egalitarianism and democracy.
Like kind of put those into a bucket together,
this idea that, you know, we're all created equal
and we're all equal and everything should be egalitarian
and all this sort of stuff.
It is a fucking cancer that is slowly eroded
at the sole, particularly of the West,
because like, you know, as much as, you know,
they wanna blame Western European men
for like destroying the world and all this sort of stuff.
I'm sorry, but fuck you, we came,
we conquered and we established the world.
So I'm sorry, but that didn't happen by accident.
It happened for a reason.
And, you know, like we can debate about what that reason is,
but fundamentally, like we have,
as Western men forgotten that,
and we're sort of like been asleep for a long time.
And, you know, that fire is starting to come back now,
you know, which is very encouraging,
but I'll just shut up there,
but fairness and equality, divergent.
Yeah, it's, one would think it would be easier
for people to grok, but apparently it just is not.
I mean, just building out of that,
do you think that this is just also,
this comes back to like mediocrity being average,
like that, you know, oh, you know, I'm not like,
that it comes from like a lack of drive.
Like is that where the desire for equality comes from?
Like because either you don't have the drive
to strive for excellence,
or you believe that even if you have the drive,
you don't have the innate skills to become excellent.
Some part of you acknowledges that,
whether or not explicitly or implicitly.
And that is where some of this push for equality
over fairness comes from,
just a kind of internal acknowledgement of that fact.
Hmm, how conspiratorial should we get?
As conspiratorial as you want.
Oh, shit.
Okay.
I think it all boils down to envy.
There's a deep seated, and Nietzsche talks about this a lot.
In fact, as much as I love all the Austrian writers,
and Hans-Hermann Hopper is my favorite for sure,
Nietzsche is just like some next level fucking philosophy
with a hammer, guys, brilliant, honestly.
He would have been, if he was alive today,
he'd be that troll on Twitter that just,
anything someone says would be like, dork, loser.
That would be his one-liners.
Maybe there's the spirit of Nietzsche running,
have you seen the retard finder account?
I haven't, probably.
I'll send this to you afterwards.
It's got like half a million followers already in a week.
It is the funniest thing I've seen in a while.
I digress, but maybe that's his spirit living on.
Totally, man, totally.
His spirit has infected a bunch of things,
and it's a beautiful thing to behold.
Envy, Nietzsche talks about envy a lot,
and he talks about the envy being the tool of the weak
to subvert the strong.
And what that means is that,
the strong doesn't go about looking to stomp on the weak
because the strong is more interested in climbing
and competing with the other strong.
In fact, the strong rarely recognizes the weak
because they just sort of see them there as children,
and oftentimes take care of them.
But it's kind of like a condescending love, right?
So it's like, okay, yeah, that's cute, whatever.
But my battle is with the way
or the mountain or this other fucking warrior clan here,
or this other king, I wanna fucking take his woman,
like whatever it is, right?
Like there's this like the strong wants to reach and climb.
And traditionally speaking,
throughout history, throughout the millennia,
you had these different classes of people,
and people knew the word, the surname Blacksmith
and all this sort of stuff came from these classes of people
who they were all biologically different
and they were good at doing different things.
And this is why in my opinion, feudalism worked quite well
because it was, we today have a modern form
of phantom feudalism where we still have these classes,
but we pretend like we don't have it.
Whereas at least 500 years ago,
there was like a clear feudalism where we knew we had it
and people knew which class they were in
and they would have a meritocracy
within their classes, but the classes would rarely mix,
which there's a whole argument to be made
that that's a better structure for society.
But anyway, that aside, you had this kind of like respect
from the weaker classes to the stronger classes
and you had that this was very strong
and very prevalent in Japan.
The warrior class was that strong class
and they acted as the white blood cells
to the culture and society they were in
and they acted as the protectors, right?
That was their job.
And the quote unquote weaker classes,
so the peasantry, the artisans, the merchants
and all this sort of stuff would look up to them.
And they didn't sort of like have this necessary resentment
that it's like, oh, you know, you're stronger,
you know, that you're better.
It's like, you, that's what you did.
And this is what we do.
And your job as the strong is to go and compete
and claim territory and do whatever else you do,
but also protect.
Like, so there's this kind of like two way relationship.
And, you know, our job is to grow the rice, produce the swords,
like do all the other sort of stuff
that makes things happen.
And unfortunately, there's also another class of people
who are, call it the parasitic or envious or, you know,
the trader class, the money changers of the world.
And they've existed in all sorts of civilizations
and Nietzsche calls them the priestly class,
you know, the people who didn't have the class of individual
who didn't have the vitality to go and claim
and to conquer and to create and to build and to reach.
So they would turn their drives inwards
and they would create this, these kind of like
moralities that strength is evil and oppressive
and weakness is virtuous.
And therefore, we must elevate all that is weak
and desecrate all that is strong as evil.
And this is sort of like, if I paraphrase Nietzsche here,
this is the genesis of good and evil, right?
Because prior to good and evil was strong and weak.
And strong and weak had a hierarchy.
And good and evil was the attempt to make strong evil
and weak good.
And what you end up getting over generations,
over centuries, over millennia is the erosion
of the concept of strong.
And the tool used to basically desecrate the strong is guilt.
Guilt is the tool and it comes from the source of it all
is envy.
Envy is the attempt to tear down that which is above you,
that which is more beautiful, more strong,
more prosperous, more ascendant.
And yeah, the desire for average,
the desire for equality, the desire for all of these things,
I believe is largely driven by this envy
and it's been weaponized because everybody can feel envy
in some way, but it's like, if it's particularly weaponized,
if you are particularly made to feel like you must eat
the rich, you must do this, you must do that,
all this sort of stuff.
Like, I mean, this is literally where communism comes from.
I was just gonna say, that's the playbook right there.
Exactly.
The entire fucking playbook of communism is envy, right?
It's to tear down everything that is above you,
everything that is more beautiful, everything that is more
strong, everything that is more excellent,
and bring it all down.
And the fact that,
you know, the
subconscious predisposition for envy and resentment
exists within us all is enough for the orchestrators
of that mass envy to light it up and to turn the masses
against the best of us.
And I think that's been the quote unquote conspiracy
for many centuries now.
And we've potentially reached the crescendo,
I don't know, maybe, maybe not.
But yeah, that's my little attempt at explaining why
average is so desirous.
It's also like this, to go back to the kind of the common
of the communist playbook and that like envy is used
as a tool, it's used as a means by which to create
the kind of social unrest that allows you to establish
a totalitarian state.
And it necessitates having, you know, an us versus them,
a little guys versus the big guys,
while actually obfuscating the fact that the quarrel
is not between those two groups.
Those two groups actually typically got along fine.
The quarrel is actually between both of those groups
and the parasitic class that pulls the levers.
And that's like, and you see the same playbook
used over and over again.
You see politicians in the United States,
which is not communist, thank God, doing this same thing
where it's trying to pit the red versus the blue
constantly, the Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, democracy,
always clashing with each other.
You should hate that other guy,
you should hate that other guy,
but don't pay any attention to us.
We're just your public servants, you know, don't mind us.
We're just here to tell you who the bad guys are
and take your frustration out on them,
blame them, blame the other.
Don't look for the real other,
which is not your neighbor, not your brother or sister,
but it is the parasites.
And that's what they ultimately try to hide,
that those bloodsuckers don't want you to realize
that they're draining both of you,
like they're draining both of you, you know, dry.
And I think that's the real, like,
that is the honest evil there.
Is that obfuscation of the truth?
Which is that it is the many versus the few,
but I don't mean that as the few
that are the actually strong.
I mean the few that are the parasites.
They are weak, but they have found themselves
and sucked blood all the way up to positions of power.
And now they wield that power in a very destructive way,
that ultimately only enriches themselves and the ultra few.
And that's, I think that there is a growing acknowledgement
of that, and I would say this on both sides
of the political spectrum, more so probably on the,
you know, on the new right,
but I think people are becoming increasingly disillusioned.
That's at least my feeling.
Like they're starting to realize,
and part of this is the fact that the nobody trusts the main,
or I'm not gonna say mainstream, the legacy media anymore.
So they don't have their one, you know,
one to many pipe to control the message.
People just don't trust politicians
as much as they used to.
Trust in institutions of all types is down
because they realize, people realize,
something is fundamentally broken.
And no matter what you say on the podium,
nothing materially changes, nothing gets better.
So maybe you've been lying to me.
This is what I, my sense.
Like do you see this as well?
Do you see more people that have the ability to wake up,
waking up now, versus obviously the ones
which will, they're too far gone.
Like we've already forgotten about them,
but for those that can wake up,
do you see more of them waking up now?
I mean, yeah, I guess the momentum is in our favor now,
fundamentally.
And when I say our favor, I mean,
it's definitely in the favor of like,
it's in the favor of the right.
And I mean that in every sense of the word right.
It's funny, I remember some essays,
or sorry, it's not some essays,
some publications that came out from whoever it was,
you know, daily wire or not daily wire,
but some retard publication, you know,
online news outlet or whatever saying like, you know,
working out is for right-wing extremists.
And the funny thing though,
the funny thing though, they're actually right.
So there's like, there's two funny parts about it.
It's like, okay, it's funny because,
okay, yeah, right-wing extremists,
but it's actually true.
Like working out, for example, is right-wing.
It is not fucking left-wing.
It's the left-wing conception of like,
equality and we're all equal
and everything is relative and all that sort of stuff.
It doesn't gel well with sun, steel and steak
of like, you know, carving yourself and, you know,
excelling and separating yourself from the average.
Like this, it is actually,
the funniest part about it is that they try and,
they tried to turn it into like a derogatory thing,
but they were actually fucking spot on
and it was a compliment,
which is sometimes, you know,
how I feel about when people call me a fascist.
I'm like, well, okay, I don't mind
because it's like, I'm writing an essay now
called Anaco Fascism and I kind of make out this idea
that, you know, the only true anarchists
are actually fascists and there's a whole,
man, there's a whole fucking rabbit hole there.
I'll have to, once I finish writing it
and getting it done, it's gonna trigger a bunch of people,
but-
I look forward to the triggering.
Yeah, it's, look, it's partly tongue-in-cheek,
but it's partly actually accurate
because there's,
you described it very well.
You said there's the parasites,
then sort of there's the right and then there's the left.
You know, and I would say that, you know,
most of the right is just like, you know, really centrist.
You know, they're just like normal fucking people.
Like there's a more real right wing
and the right wing is always, always, always smaller
because the real right wing is always more extreme
in their behavior and their beliefs.
And I would consider myself one of those
because I'm an extreme kind of personality.
I'm extreme in the way I eat, I'm extreme in the way I train,
I'm extreme in the way I focus on my relationship,
I'm extreme in my beliefs and opinions
and all this sort of stuff, which, you know,
extreme and excellence like trying to be in a 1%,
trying to be elite is once again,
counter to, you know, the more egalitarian centrist even
and particularly counter to the leftist ideology
over all the same and everything is equal, right?
So, and that's not a bad thing.
Like the, it would, if there's not enough room
for everybody to be on the right, you know,
the fact that the Overton window has shifted
so far to the right now makes, you know, a lot of things,
or sorry, the fact that the Overton window was so far left
made everything on this side start to feel more right.
But, you know, now that it's gonna shift
a little bit more extreme, we're gonna find that, you know,
we're gonna rebalance where centrism actually is
and, you know, we'll have a, you know,
we'll have our right wing, we'll have all that sort of stuff.
Where was I going with this?
I feel like I was gonna go somewhere with it.
Not enough room for folks, for everyone on the right,
excellence, extremism, extremism and excellence
being hand in hand.
Yep, they certainly are.
Like you have to be an absolute fucking extremist
to win a gold medal, for example.
Yes.
Which is fine, that is a very right wing thing to do.
I can't remember what my point was, but I guess ultimately,
yeah, I don't remember what the fuck we were talking
about a couple of steps back,
but I feel like I was going somewhere,
maybe it'll come back.
We'll find our way back to it.
Okay, so, you know, one, perhaps this will spark it
a little bit, the last time we talked,
it was a, last time we talked on the show,
I mean, great conversation.
And one of the things that you had thrown out there
was, you know, this idea that, you know,
like communism is the opposite of beauty.
And also, like, which I think is fantastic
in terms of a way of framing that.
And I think you're working on another book,
like in addition to the essay,
you're working on another book right now as well
that does have some, it has to do with beauty additionally,
right?
So I feel like this is something we need to unpack
a little bit because I think when people hear,
hear the word beauty,
they may think of it in a very limited sense, you know,
they may think of it in a very like conventional,
like marketing type sense,
versus like the actual truth of the word.
So can we explore that a little bit and like,
and you are working on another book right now, right?
Yeah, so let me break that down a little bit actually.
I'm gonna find the chapter here.
So, yes, there's gonna be a part two to the Bushido Bitcoin
called the Metaphysics of War and Beauty.
And that was a complete accident
because the book was getting too long.
And I had like a couple of chapters here.
So one called The Eternal Battle,
the other one called Freedom and War,
the other one called Worryhood in the 22nd Century,
Territorial Imperative, A New Heroic Age,
there was a chapter on hierarchy, feudalism,
and then one called Beauty Will Save the World,
which was one of my favorite fucking chapters that I wrote.
And I couldn't for the life of me figure out
where to insert them in the book.
And on top of that,
they were adding another fucking hundred pages to the book.
And I was like, Jesus, crash them word at 500 pages.
Like I need to chop this damn thing down.
So, yeah, I ended up pulling out a bunch from the book.
And I thought, fuck, what am I gonna do with it?
And then I kind of looked at all of the chapters
and I thought, you know what,
this is sort of like a discussion on like,
you know, the themes here are like war and struggle
and beauty.
And, you know, when I talk about war,
I talk about it in the practical, physical,
all the way through to like the metaphysical sense,
like the whole way through.
You know, if I kind of read a section here,
I wanna, okay, let me read this out to you.
It says, freedom and responsibility are in a never-ending dance
and life is only possible in the tension
between such opposites.
Conflict and war make us fertile in the same way
nature's struggle of life, death, and rebirth
makes the soil fertile.
This is the eternal battle.
It is a cosmic war raging across the entire universe.
It has and always will endure.
And despite the fact that we cannot change it,
we each play a part in the grand game.
It's in our DNA.
Nature literally seeks to prosecute life through us.
Consider the battle for biological human life.
There are hundreds of millions of sperm fighting
for the chance just to reach the female egg,
only to be faced with the enormous task
of fertilizing it successfully,
following which the DNA of your mother and father
have to match, fuse, and unite to miraculously become you,
the living, breathing, thinking being
that is sitting here reading this now.
This competition was one for the territory of existence
in which there was one winner
and many losers over many iterations.
You are literally the product
of a successful territorial conquest.
The sperm who claimed the egg
and thus changed the destiny of both progenitors.
Like, so, like I get into this whole, thank you.
I get into this whole like deep dive on like,
what is the essence of war and struggle and battle?
Like it's literally in us.
It is a part of like who and what we are
and like trying to ignore it
and imagine that we can have fucking peace internal.
You know, it doesn't work.
Like we need to have a healthier relationship
with conflict, with struggle, with war,
with battle, with all of this sort of stuff.
So that's, you know, part of what the new book
is gonna focus on.
And then there's this like section about beauty
and I, you know, there's like sort of four or five pages
in there which talk about like how beauty,
beauty is this sort of like transcendent quality.
And I wanna find a nice little passage from that
to kind of, to break this down.
So let's start with the quote
that I open up the chapter with.
It says, if you crush a cockroach, you're a hero.
If you crush a butterfly, you're a villain.
Morals have aesthetic standards.
And that is attributed to Nietzsche
but I'm not sure if he ever said that or not.
I haven't been able to find the sighting of that work
but it sounds like a very Nietzschean thing to say.
So I then follow this with,
of Nietzsche's many profound aphorisms,
this is one of my favorite because it cuts right
to a deep visceral truth that few want to admit
intellectually despite agreeing with intuitively.
So the beauty of his statement pun intended
is that the rationalist will argue with it.
The equalitarian and Democrat will be offended.
The moralist will tell you it's unethical.
The theologian will say it's wrong.
The hippie will tell you it's cruel.
The materialist or the atheist
will disagree on subjective grounds.
In fact, all of your modern, sensible, civilized conditioning
will try to tell you it's unfair.
But when push comes to shove,
you will step on the cockroach
and praise the person who does
while you are very unlikely to do the same to a butterfly.
And if you did see someone crush a butterfly,
you would be immediately intuitively enraged by it.
You might not say anything, but you will feel the anger
and that is precisely why it matters.
Visceral reactions like this reveal the deepest truths.
They go beyond the intellect and our rational psyche.
They are physio psychologically true
and reside deep in our subconscious.
These are instincts developed over thousands of years
of human experience.
The lessons learned and the heuristics developed across
generations become the intuition we store
in our blood, our bones and our bodies,
none of which can lie.
Beauty transcends dimension.
It is found in the material and the metaphysical,
the poor and the rich, the small and the large,
the young and the old, the perfect and the imperfect.
Beauty is simultaneously objective and subjective.
So that's kind of like the opening section to that.
I dig that too, man.
I'm stoked for this to come out.
I mean, because I think that's such a great example
to start with there.
That idea, like we all, again, the rationalist will say,
like, well, no, they're both insects.
So really, you know, they should be true.
But like if you are being honest with yourself
and how you feel, like, yeah,
if I saw somebody out there crush a butterfly,
I'd be like, you sick son of a bitch,
what is wrong with you?
Like what the fuck is wrong with you?
Why would you do that to a beautiful creature of the sky?
Then you see somebody do that to a cockroach.
And you're like, thank God you got that disgusting thing
out of here.
Like, few, good on you, man.
I'll buy you a beer.
Like really appreciate it.
You know, like we all know this.
And yet, like maybe that's kind of like,
do you think that that's what we've,
have we in some way taken that example
and blown it out to the whole culture
as it relates to human beings?
Is that kind of what you see as having happened?
100% man.
You know, we, you know, we,
you got these like dumb fucking kids out there
throwing paint and shit like that on, you know,
on these beautiful sculptures and statues and stuff.
Like, you know, and people like trying to pull down statues
of the people who came and like built civilization,
everything like that.
And they're like making artwork of like fat blobs
and you know, whatever that other stupidity
they're making these as it's like,
it's completely like, it's a revolt against the beautiful.
And it's, it's disgusting.
It's like, it's, it's, it's elevating the ugly
and de-elevating or, or denigrating the beauty
and the beautiful.
And that is, that also comes from,
what was the word we spoke about earlier?
Envy. It comes from the same fucking place.
And this is why, this is why coming back
to our last conversation, the opposite of communism
is not capitalism, it is beauty.
Because communism seeks to denigrate all that is beautiful,
all that is pure, all that is holy, all that is great,
all that is excellent.
It wants to bring it all down.
And like, you know, when you look at,
when you look at a mountain, right?
Like the mountain is this, you know, jagged structure
that is like unequal and, you know, fierce and sharp
and, you know, it's, it's not welcoming.
You know, the, the, even the word excellent
comes from the proto-inter-European of egg and salaire,
which means to climb a mountain.
Like the, the, the, the genesis of the word excellent
is to do with a mountain, which is an unforgiving
and unwelcoming place.
But that's what's beautiful.
Whereas, you know, the, the communists would prefer
everything just to be fucking flat forever,
because it's equal.
And you see this, if anyone who has traveled
and who has spent time in, in formerly communist countries,
you see it in the architecture.
It is, it is scarred across every city in Eastern Europe,
every city in every large city in Eastern Europe
still looks exactly the same with brutalist,
utilitarian, disgustingly awful to the eye architecture
that was put up by the communists.
And, you know, under the guise of, you know,
progress and utilitarianism.
And it will build the, yes, of course, of course.
But it's like, it's awful to look at.
And then you see that interspersed with beautiful,
old, old architecture that, you know, with, with stonework
and just in like something, a building
that makes you feel something that you can just,
that you stop outside of and you just look up for a second,
you just, you just marvel at it.
Like, can you believe some humans built this?
Like, isn't that, isn't that remarkable?
And they did it over generations as well.
They, you know, the guy who started it didn't live
to see the end of it.
See, see, do you know what?
That right there is right wing as fuck.
Like, you see what I mean?
Like, this is what I mean.
Like, imagine those cultures,
like the most right wing of modern cultures,
you'd take us back.
Like, if I went back 500 years,
I would be considered a total fucking left wing.
Like, this is what I mean.
And they were the ones who built the cathedrals and shit,
not us.
So it makes you, makes you actually think, like,
you know, the more we've drifted,
the more ugly shit we've created.
But, you know, it's, it's obviously not entirely like
as cut and dry as that.
But anyway, it's just,
I find that stuff interesting sometimes.
Now, I do too.
And like, you see, especially like to speak
of Eastern Europe as well,
like just cause I've got, you know,
Carlos, a Romanian, she was born there.
Parents, father was a defector from communism, you know,
like they know it very well.
Like they know it first hand.
They talk about what that experience was like.
And like, there's a reason that I won't say
everyone who experienced communism
goes far, far more right
because there are still a lot of people
who were very comfortable in communism.
And they actually liked just like,
and this is not me saying this,
this is from talking to people
who grew up in post-communist countries.
A lot of them.
I have talked to more than I can possibly imagine.
They liked it because they didn't have to think too much.
They didn't have to try too hard.
It was just, you know what,
wasn't it just easier when the party decided?
And yeah, maybe not everything was great,
but it made sense.
And then there's the people, you know,
like Carlos father who rejected that and said,
no, I'm like, I'm getting out of here
even if it costs me my life.
And those people are the ones that go on to build things.
Those people are the ones who were trapped
by that parasitic system of communism
and needed to get out, you know.
They were the extremists.
They were the one present.
They were the true excellent
who didn't want to be the average, 100% man.
Like I mean, my parents came from same sort of thing,
Eastern European bloc, all this kind of shit.
And I go back and I speak with, with like,
so my mom was one of the ones that got out
because she had this kind of drive.
Whereas her family stayed there
and her family are the ones who reminisce
about the good old days when, you know,
it was under communism and all this sort of stuff.
And like, I remember having this conversation with them,
like, cause I hadn't been back to Macedonia
for like 30 years practically.
And just hearing this, and this was like a couple of years
back when I was, you know, like ultra like, you know,
libertarian and shit like this.
And I was like, ah, fuck my ears hurt.
Like, what am I listening to?
What's wrong with you fucking people?
But, you know, it dawned on me that they were,
you know, happy being average.
And that's why like, I mean,
that the perfectly ties in what we said earlier is that,
you know, the true right wing is like,
it's a much smaller percentage.
And, you know, that smaller percentage of people
have always been, that's the remnant for you.
That is the tip of the spear, right?
Like, and you do, you do need the rest of the spear, right?
But you need like a small, sharp elite at the tip.
And the biggest problem I have with, you know,
egalitarianism and democracy and all this sort of stuff
is it pretends like the tip of the spear doesn't need
to exist, so you just have a stick and it's like,
fuck, I need a spear.
Like, I need to stab someone.
Like, we're going to war, we can't deal with sticks.
And it's like, no, no, no, it's all good.
The, yeah.
It's been a painful couple of years, man.
Well, hey, you know, that's the thing.
I do feel that there is a tied shift happening.
I feel like people are not as, let's say, not as afraid,
like, okay, let me say it this way.
You know that there's a shift when a guy like Mark Zuckerberg
is suddenly like trying to be, you know,
based king out here, right?
Where he's no longer like, you know, licking the balls
of the surveillance state.
He's like, actually, that was pretty bad.
And I didn't really agree with it.
And now I'm cool, guys.
Look at my hair.
I wear gold chains on the outside of my shirt, man.
I'm like, how you do, fellow kids?
Yeah.
But like, that's a vibe shift right there.
And that's just like one little microcosm of the vibe shift.
But I'm curious where you see us going from here
and how much does that like, does this framework,
this Bushido, how much does that need to factor
into where we go next?
And for Bitcoiners Forever Room,
but maybe specifically for Bitcoiners,
how do we need to set ourselves up for what is coming?
Yeah, really good question.
I think the first part is like, what happens next?
So, I mean, you know, everyone's got a different opinion
on Elon and Trump and all this sort of stuff.
And I think I've been pretty vocal about my support
of both of those guys.
I think they're phenomenal.
I think, you know, like it's very easy to be
the man in the arena and point and say,
oh, you know, why didn't you do this?
Why didn't you do that and all this sort of shit?
But I think to play at that level and to, you know,
I think people forget that, you know,
using Trump as an example, like he was, you know,
people say, oh, you know, he's an actor and a politician,
but no, no, no, he was actually a businessman first.
Like that's in his DNA first and foremost.
He's a deal maker.
The motherfucker has aura.
No matter what anyone says, like he has like...
Undeniably.
Like he's the only like silhouette.
I could show anyone in the world a silhouette of a guy
and they'd be like, yeah, that's Trump.
Like that's insane.
And, you know, nobody's perfect.
Nobody's going to make all the right decision
and all that sort of stuff.
But, you know, in my opinion, where it matters,
he has the leadership qualities and the presence
and the aura to do things that very, very, very few people
on the planet, in my opinion, could do.
Like hands down.
And, you know, I have a lot of admiration for that.
I think he represents the archetype of a leader
more than just about any...
I mean, you know, Bukele's up there
and stuff like that as well.
But still, like, as much as I love Bukele,
like in comparison to a Trump,
like Trump has a much greater aura.
Like, you know, Bukele is still a kid in comparison
to someone like Trump.
And I think that comes with, you know, age,
experience, personality and all that sort of stuff.
So he's definitely an extremely, extremely,
in my opinion, unique and timely character
in the...
I think he's gonna go down in history in a big way.
And I mean, clearly something...
God was looking out for him or whatever,
but the motherfucker dodged the bullet.
Like, that for me was like the last straw.
Yeah, quite literally.
Yeah, it's like, I think of it as we were...
That was like a moment where maybe,
maybe whoever was running the Large Hadron Collider
in Zurich or whatever, like forgot to turn it off.
And we ended up in alternate dimension or some shit like that
because like everything flipped at that fucking moment.
Like that was when, you know,
Musk got on board, like all this sort of stuff.
Like we fundamentally shifted the course of history
with that and I think it would be naive
to underestimate how significant that moment was
in my opinion.
I think it was very significant.
So that's my Trump fanboy moment over.
But I think he's an important figure.
And I think he has the deal-making capacity
and just the instinct to do things in the right way.
And I mean, we saw what he did with Ross
and all that sort of stuff, which I think was like,
he didn't even have to, he promised to commute the sentence
and he just like straight up fucking pardon,
absolute legend, you know?
Like he-
It was an amazing moment.
Totally, like, you know, he just has that,
again, that right instinct about what to do at what time.
So I also have that massive respect for Elon.
I, you know, I got into a little bit of a Twitter beef
with, I can't remember who it was,
but someone was like, oh, you know,
Elon bought Twitter for 42 billion.
You know, if he'd bought Bitcoin
with the same amount of money, he'd have 84 billion.
And I was like, are you fucking kidding me?
Do you realize like, you know,
the point of having money is not just so you
can have more money.
Like the point of it is, and this is kind of what we said
earlier about like, you know, you have capital
and it's the means, you know, so sure,
you gave the example of like people wishing they were more
with their families and doing all that sort of stuff.
But there's also the people who want to make a dent
in the universe and channeling that capital
to make a bigger and bigger and bigger impact.
Like Steve Jobs was one of these characters.
He exited Apple the first time when he got booted out
with about $55 million.
He put 50 million into Pixar because he fucking believed
in the narrative power of what they were building.
Like that's fucking 95% of your wealth.
And not like, you know, like, sure,
if I had $1,000 and I put, you know, $900 of it,
like, you know, the percentages are the same,
but that's $1,000.
It's much easier to make back $1,000
than fucking $55 million, right?
And, you know, Musk in the same sense, like came
and took this tool, which had been abused
and, you know, captured by the state
and all this kind of stuff.
And he fucking gave him a big finger
and like literally, I don't think the outcome
that happened with Trump and this whole sort of shift
in the world would have happened had Elon not done that.
And, you know, my whole point was like, dude,
that $42 billion was way better spent
in terms of like for the benefit of civilization
than any amount of fucking Bitcoin
that he could have purchased.
I don't give a flying fuck about, you know,
pumping my bags here.
Like there was something more important
than needed to happen at this point.
So I think if this sort of trajectory continues,
like it's a stellar team, you know, you got Tulsi there,
now you've got fucking IRFK,
you've got like such a good sort of lineup.
You know, there's a couple of weird eggs
and stuff like that.
Sure, again, perfection is the enemy of progress.
I think this is something that, you know,
people forget when, you know,
we sort of become like spectators and we're like, oh, you know,
but this can be better, this can be better.
It's like, okay, we'll go and do it.
And if you're not gonna do it, then like, like,
it's important to be critical.
So it's hard obviously to find that balance,
but there's also like, as I said,
perfection is the enemy of progress at times.
So I think with the Department of Government
and the National Efficiency and all this sort of stuff,
America has a chance at having a true renaissance,
like in a way that I did not expect.
When I first started riding the Besheater of Bitcoin,
I was convinced that America was at the end of the empire stage.
So 500 AD in the Rome equivalent.
I am now of the opinion that America is at the end
of the republic stage and at the beginning
of the empire stage.
So right at the midpoint, so more like 70 AD, right?
Like I think that's where America is.
And I think there's a golden age that is right before us,
which coincides perfectly with where Bitcoin is,
with where, you know, the consciousness around,
everything is moving with like,
everything from eating healthy to seat all free
to home birthing to home schooling and all this sort of stuff.
There's this massive renaissance of thought and thinking
and lifestyle and action, everything coming up.
With now, the political will and proof
that we can just do shit, right?
Like the first time Trump got in,
and I have a lot of sympathy for this,
people are like, oh, he didn't do this, right?
He didn't do this, right?
It's like, okay, wait a minute.
You've got a guy who's come from a business paradigm,
and in the business paradigm,
you do shit and shit actually happens.
Enters the political paradigm for the first time
is like stuck in a swamp,
and it's like trying to do shit, but can't do anything.
You know, the second round is gonna be better.
And so far, like he's done more in like one month
than he did in his entire fucking four years before.
Like, so that is very encouraging.
So I think the confluence of all of these things
is very, very, very encouraging.
And that leads me to the second part of your question,
which is, okay, where do these virtues and everything fit in?
I think this is obviously I'm biased
because I wrote the fucking book,
but I think this is honestly the most important thing
that those of us who have some capital
should now be thinking about.
It's like, okay, who do we become now?
And how do we take positions of power and influence
and be examples to the people around us,
to the communities around us,
and to the generations that come after us?
Because this is something I realized,
and Mark Moss and I were having a chat
just in private about this, which is,
a big part of what happened,
and I actually blame libertarianism a bit for this,
a big part of what happened over the last 20, 50 years,
call it whatever, is that good, strong, virtuous men
abdicated their responsibility and their duty
to lead and to basically represent those around them.
Like we created, we left the vacuum,
because rightly so, like to some degree,
we're like, okay, politics is all bullshit,
popularity contest, all this sort of stuff,
and we took a step back, but the problem is,
is that we left the fucking vacuum,
and who filled it?
It was the worst of the worst of the worst.
And continually, more of the worst came in and filled it,
and what sort of dawned on me in writing this book
and kind of being a little bit outside
of the libertarian circles for a little bit,
is that apathy or not participating
is basically just letting evil win,
or it's letting the opposition win.
And battling entropy requires consistent input.
Like I talk about this in the,
that eternal battle chapter of like,
where I explained like the sperm and the battle
and all this sort of stuff, it's like,
entropy is always in action.
Like there's no point of stasis, right?
It's either you're growing or you're dying.
Like it's one of the two, right?
And the midpoint is like infinitesely small,
and if you're not sort of beating back entropy,
entropy is beating you back.
And that's a difficult thing to come to terms with,
because you realize there is no rest, right?
For the good or for the wicked.
But it means that it's incumbent on those of us who,
without sounding like I got my head too much up my ass,
but like basically those of us who consider ourselves
are good in the virtuous, right?
Those who want to build an ascendant civilization,
those who want to prosper, who want to create,
who want to produce, who want to build,
who want to reach, who want to explore, to develop,
like all of that sort of stuff.
We are the ones who need to reach the goal,
we are the ones who need to rest the power,
because with power comes responsibility,
and the good, the strong,
are those who can channel power towards ends
that are meaningful and beneficial
and that produce something, right?
Those who are evil, those who choose to channel power
to ends that are destructive and ugly and equalitarian
and all this sort of stuff.
So we've actually got to rest that from them.
And I don't know, seeing what I've seen
over the last six months is very encouraging,
but it really is the tip of the iceberg,
like there's so much more that we need to do,
like there's so much more cleaning and healing
and unraveling and reconstruction and redevelopment
and all this sort of stuff.
Like what we could do as a human species is phenomenal
and we are still playing at like 5% of the game.
We need to sort of up that.
And yeah, to sort of tie it back to the book,
like the capital and character thing
is very important to me is in the next 10 years,
we Bitcoiners are gonna have a shitload of capital
to work with.
We've got to start developing this,
the necessary character to work with that because,
man, if we take on that duty,
we're gonna be the leaders of the world
when we're in our late 40s, in our 50s,
and in our 60s,
like we're gonna be the adults in the room.
And we, for the love of Christ,
cannot be like the boomer generation that came before us
and fucked everything up, right?
And I don't say that as like every boomer
fucked everything up,
you know, generationally speaking,
like that was pretty fucked up generation.
Like we've got to learn from that
and we've got to sort that out
so that we can be Beacons for the ones that come after us.
So super meandering response there, but...
I love a good meandering response.
No, I think it's important because like this idea
that we can't abdicate responsibility, right?
Because if you abdicate responsibility,
you are just, you're leaving a hole, right?
You're leaving a void, you're leaving a vacuum,
you're leaving, and like, you know,
nature abhors a vacuum.
And so do parasites.
And so much of this is like,
if I was talking of one of my,
I think my favorite new sci-fi offer,
I had him on as one of the first episodes of the show.
Yeah, you know, Devin?
Yeah, Devin's a fucking legend.
Devin Erickson is awesome.
If you haven't, if anyone listening
hasn't read his book, Theft of Fire,
I highly recommend it.
But one of the things he said
that just really stuck with me is like,
if we don't take the culture back,
and by taking the culture,
you also take the politics back
because the politics is downstream of the culture.
If we don't take that back,
then our children are going to be raised in a society
constructed by our enemies,
constructed by people that hate who we are,
that hate the success that we've had.
So what, and if you abdicate responsibility,
okay, not my problem, but it's your children's problem.
Yeah.
And it's their children's problem.
And is that really the world that you want to leave?
That'd be a very boomer thing to do, right?
To say, and again, not all boomers,
I know some amazing boomers that very much
will shit on their own boomer generation.
But a lot of the boomers,
it was like an abdication of like,
well, things worked out great for us.
So why don't you just, you know,
pick yourself up by your bootstraps.
So, you know, why don't you go get yourself a house
for two raspberries, sunny boy?
Like, you know, it's like, no,
they've thrown this world into shit
after milking it for all it was worth.
Are we gonna do the same?
Or are we going to fight?
Are we going to stand up to make sure
that the world that we leave our kids and our grandkids
is one that, yeah, that is better
and that is culturally what we want it to be.
Like that is a world that really incentivizes
and celebrates achievement and excellence and beauty.
Like that's the world I want to leave to my son.
And I think, you know, if anyone's being honest,
that's the world they'd like to leave to.
At least people that are listening to this show,
I can't speak for everyone.
It's truly that man.
And I'm really glad you brought up what Devin said.
So like, I came across Devin's work very early
because John Carter, who's the guy
who helped edit my book actually,
he did the first review for Devin.
So he kind of kicked Devin off.
And that's when I discovered his book.
And I still haven't read it yet.
I was waiting for the audio book
because I have a rule.
I read nonfiction and I listen to fiction.
So now the audio book is almost ready
so I can't wait to listen to it.
But yeah, Devin's work is fantastic.
And he's just, his fucking Twitter rants are like so good.
He's just got a real way with words.
He's like, hyper sharp, hyper intelligent.
And yeah, man, like this is why I personally moved away
from libertarianism because it is a very defensive thing.
It's more like, don't tread on me, but do whatever you want.
It's like, well, no, because do whatever you want
very quickly becomes fucking trannies in school,
indoctrinating your kids and telling them
to chop the dicks off.
Like that's not good.
Like culture needs to be actively, not just defended,
but actively instantiated.
Like it is an active thing.
And this is why, like I think people sometimes get offended
by some of the things I say, et cetera.
But like this is why I've kind of started to become
more and more right wing
because the right wing is more action oriented.
It is the recognition of, hey, there are things that are better
and there are things that are worse.
There are things that are beautiful
and there are things that are ugly.
There are things that are excellent.
There are things that are average.
And it's the recognition of those differences
and then the selection of one or the other.
And sure, it's not nice and cozy and kumbaya
and we're all in it together and all that sort of stuff.
But I'm sorry, the price of excellence
is a whole bunch of discomfort.
Like when you climb that fucking mountain,
it's not cozy, man.
It's not like cushions and shit like that.
Like if you want cushions and all that kind of stuff,
like go build yourself a fucking padded cell
and you'll be safe and you'll be comfortable
and you don't have to do anything.
And you can be like Wally, right?
Like that's your two archetypes.
You can be like the statue of David
and go and train your arse off in a gym
and do all this sort of stuff and get the scars
and go through all of that.
Or you can be the Wally character
who has a chair, Netflix and fucking soy lint
coming through your veins.
One's more comfortable, one is uncomfortable,
one is excellent, one is equal and all the same.
And coming back to where we started the entire conversation,
trade-offs.
These are the trade-offs
and the trade-offs that I have personally selected
are the ones that are a little bit more uncomfortable.
But in my opinion, pay the dividends
that are more important and more culturally
and civilizationally beneficial in the long-term.
Hey, man, man.
And I think that's a perfect note for us to wrap up on.
Cause now I'm itching just to go hit my punching bag
and do some squats.
But man, where do you want to send people?
It was great having you back on, dude.
Where should they go?
Tell them everywhere that they should go
to check out more of your stuff.
I recommend, I mean, most people here
probably gonna know me from Twitter or Nostra or whatever.
So just search for Swetski, you'll find me.
But I highly recommend people do one thing.
Go to beshitoofbitcoin.com and watch the trailer.
I promise it'll blow your ass away.
It's a banger of a trailer, man.
It really is.
Like it got me pumped up, like do spumps.
And I was like, I wanna, where's my sword?
I've got a lot of them lying around.
So I was there like, I need to go pick one up,
swing it around a bit.
Like it's sweet.
Do some Conan, Conan, the point of your insta.
Exactly.
So yeah, beshitoofbitcoin.com.
There's a couple of links there.
There's a link to Amazon, which you can get it.
It's the cheapest way to get it.
You can also buy it for Bitcoin.
It's more expensive because the only version I do
for Bitcoin is a special color edition.
So it is not printed on Amazon.
It's not available anywhere else.
It's something that I need to custom print and send out.
So that's available.
I mean, you can obviously pirate the book as well
if you want, by all means.
I'm sure it's available on some sort of pirating sites.
You can buy it digitally as well for Bitcoin if you want.
Just reach out to me and I'll send it to you.
And you can just send me some sets as a zap.
But yeah, man, other than that,
we should definitely chat again in like a month or two
when Atlantis is ready because we got a full roster.
But this is clearly not enough time in a single interview.
We'll get the next one scheduled right when we finish this
because we definitely have more to dig into there.
But I enjoyed this as always, man.
I'm fucking great catching up with you.
And yeah, it's always inspiring and motivating
to know that there are other people out there
who give a shit.
So I hope that's what, when anyone out there took away
from this is like, other people give a shit,
it's okay to give a shit.
And you can go do something with that give a shit energy
and make things a little bit better.
Beautifully put, honestly, beautifully put.
Thank you.
All right, man.
I hope we get to see each other in the flesh soon too.
I hope so, man.
All right, dude.
See you soon.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode
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