Hey, hey, welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix. I'm your host, Cedric Youngelman.
This episode is brought to you by Microseed, the Bitcoin self-custody maximalist.
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In this episode, I chat with Daniel White, the author of The Great Realignment, Power, Money,
Greed, and Bitcoin, and the CEO of MicroSeed, a Bitcoin self-custody startup.
We dive deep into the foundational structures of power and greed,
tracing their origins from tribal society through the rise of the state
and into the modern fiat era.
Dan brings a rare combination of libertarian roots,
legal scholarship, and real-world experience
to unpack how Bitcoin realigns the ancient game of resource capture.
If you've ever wondered why the world works the way it does
and how Bitcoin offers a profound shift in that dynamic,
this conversation is for you.
If you want to get in touch with me or buy some dope Bitcoin Matrix merch, head over to thebitcoinmatrix.com.
Also, please support the show by subscribing to the Bitcoin Matrix on the Fountain app and get early ad-free access to all of our new episodes.
And now, let's enter the Bitcoin Matrix with self-custody maximalist Daniel White.
What is real? How do you define real?
you can't jump into cash.
Cash is trash.
What do you do?
You get out.
Daniel White is the author of The Great Realignment,
Power, Money, Greed, and Bitcoin.
And the Grand Puba at MicroSeed,
the self-custody maximalists.
Stamp your seed phrase on a piece of titanium
the size of a washer.
Then you could hide, take, or leave that thing
in plain sight and you'll be all right. Daniel White, welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix podcast.
How are you? I'm wonderful. Thank you so much for having me, Cedric. It's great to be here,
man. Thanks. Yeah, I'm super excited to get into it. We're going to talk about Microseed.
I have mine. It's pretty dope. But first, I mean, we're going to talk about this book.
Awesome. Yeah, we're going to talk about this book. You sent me this. It's got a really
interesting uh title the great realignment and that kind of comes more at the end though
but you know power money greed and bitcoin and some things within power that i don't think we
really think about or talk about that much all these subjects kind of bring a different angle
let's maybe talk about your background first though it seems like you got a wide background
or varied experiences.
Yeah.
Maybe walk us through that a little bit.
Well, I'll do my best to not be dull.
But yeah, I would definitely say
I have a sort of unique background
when it comes to things like,
you know, the history of money
and writing about this kind of stuff.
As I've told many people in the past,
I was raised in a libertarian household.
Like my dad had literally like a picture
of Ayn Rand on the wall, you know?
And I think my mom used to get jealous about it.
Like, who's this lady?
and why, you know, nevermind if you ever saw Ayn Rand, you'd never get jealous about her.
But, but nevertheless, so I was very early on, I was exposed to like libertarian ideas
and he was like on the little mailing lists and, you know, when you'd get little like
things in the mail actually, and, and read these little libertarian handouts and stuff.
And I remember reading articles about why we need to ban the post office and, you know,
all kinds of, you know, stuff like that.
Right.
So like the sort of standard small government libertarian tropes of stuff.
but I you know by the time I was nine or ten I was talking about you know like the need to cut down
the size of the federal government I mean I'm sort of parroting just what my parents were saying and
stuff like that but that was my sort of early exposure so by the time I was in high school
I was getting exposed to people like Peter Schiff and Schiff and talking about sound money and
it's one of the reasons why even to this day like people crap on his head because he's always like
dogging on bitcoin but I'm like that guy is kind of like an OG like sound money guy like regardless
of the fact whether or not he gets Bitcoin, like he's a Bitcoin holder right now. So I go, whether
you want to say he's orange filled or not, he's, he's collecting sats and he's sitting on them,
I think. So he's just as good of a Bitcoin or as anybody else, the best I can tell,
even though he makes a career out of crapping on it. But from there, I kind of continued on. I
ended up working in the film and television industry in my twenties, but I stayed very
active in like libertarian thinking, libertarian circles and stuff like that. I actually ran for
office as a libertarian candidate in Southern California, like in the 43rd state assembly
district. Yeah, obviously I didn't do very well in that. I don't even think I should have been on
that stage. Like I wasn't a very good public speaker at the time or anything, but it was
sort of through all these little fits and trials that I finally ended up kind of in my late thirties.
I left the film industry and went and got a law degree and it was from the law degree.
like when you start studying the law, you kind of start to see some of the holes in the libertarian
logic about things. And, and when I say libertarian, by the time I was in my twenties, I was probably
more like one of these sovereign citizen kind of guys than anything else. You know, like I was
really deep down in the weeds, but when you kind of study the law and the beauty of the law is
there's, it's a, it's a history lesson, right? And it's a history that's been well documented. Like
unlike most historical accounts of things where it's like a third person relating things that
they read about or heard about or maybe saw or not and then putting their biases and things in there
the the law is a history and especially in the common law and the english common law goes back
a thousand years to the magna carta but you can read cases from you know 1400 that they talk about
like two people in conflict and how they resolve that conflict and why and so it's very very well
documented historical accounts of like how people resolve conflict is basically what it boils down
to. But it also shows you like just how deep the nuance is when it comes to these conversations.
People say, oh, you know, we need to ban this or do that or pass this law or don't pass that law.
And I go like in my mind, I always hear that sort of like there are so many ripples that flow from
this and like third order effects, fourth order effects. And I think most people kind of stop at
first or second order effects of things.
They just go, well, if we do this and this is going to fix this,
but they don't see all the unintended consequences and things like that.
But my law degree was for lack of a better term was kind of like a ding dong
degree. Like it was basically like going to like better call Saul law school,
you know, like it was, I wasn't going to Harvard or Stanford or anything like
that. And so when I finished up with that, I thought, well, you know what?
I should probably polish this degree up a little bit.
And so I went and did a master of laws down at the Thomas Jefferson school law
down in San Diego. And at the time it was at least a reputable school. Now it's even that one's sort
of falling into disrepute. So now I've got like strike one, strike two on my law school ding dong
degrees. But I was very fortunate when I got to Thomas Jefferson that like all these little
thoughts and ideas that I've been percolating around in my head for the last, you know, up to
that point, 40 years, uh, started coming out like in my legal research. And I had a law professor
that said, Hey, you know, you should consider like trying to publish like a, an article in one of
these law reviews because you're a good writer, man. I said, okay, cool. I'll give it a shot.
And he kind of told me a story. He said, you know, my first law review article I got published,
I, I submitted it to like a hundred journals and I got turned down for every single one of them.
Then I wrote another article, submitted it to a hundred journals. And then I got accepted after
like 98 rejections. And then he went back and resubmitted. So for me, I came out and like my
first article that I wrote, I submitted and I got published like two months later and I went and
told him like, Hey, they published my article. And he's like, Oh, that's, that's great. Like,
how cool for you. And then I wrote another one that got published right away. And you could kind
of see that little look of just like, you got to be shitting me, buddy. Like, where are you coming
from? So with that, I found that I had this penchant for research. And, and a lot of those
papers that I wrote, like I've wrote a four part series for the banking law journal. It was about
anti money laundering regulation, but all the articles I wrote for the law reviews were,
would always entail like a deep historical analysis. And I think that's one of the things
that made them stand out when it came to the review process. Because I would go back, you know,
like I wrote a paper on bankruptcy law. I went all the way back to like, where did bankruptcy
come from? Why are we talking about this kind of stuff? Where do these ideas come from? And that's
sort of always my basis. And it was the same thing with the money laundering series that I did for
the Banking Law Journal. And from all that publishing, I went and I thought, you know,
this is all kind of interesting, but I don't really want to be a lawyer, but I really do enjoy
this research thing. So I applied to the London School of Economics. I originally applied as a
political, international political economy student. And when I got to the school, like all these,
they were, you know, developmental economics courses, like in the third world kind of thing
that I was super, super interested in learning about. And they weren't on offer when I got there,
but there was a guy running a criminology program that was, you know, criminal justice program,
basically. And so I switched majors and then went there, but then I ended up publishing a bunch of
papers while I was at the LSE as well. So, so through it all, I just ended up with this kind
of like deep research background, uh, that I found, like I kind of took to like a duck to water.
But when it came time to write the book, I thought, man, I got all this stuff just floating
around my head, you know, and I would hear these arguments and people, and very, very brilliant
thinkers like Lynn Alden would come out and she's absolutely astonishing just in her depth of
knowledge and how she presents ideas and things like that. But even still, there's like, she'll
say stuff and I'm just like, that's just not right. And at the risk of incurring the wrath of the
gods of the brilliant people of the world, I just go, there are some things that I think people
overlook. And I was trying to kind of tackle that because at the end of all of this, my sort of
thesis about like why Bitcoin is important is I think it aligns with most people that are into
Bitcoin, but there's enough nuance in there that I think it distinguishes it. But I think that
historical analysis sort of informs that a lot and has me with a very, very deep conviction about why
Bitcoin is really, really a remarkable thing. And I think it goes far deeper than most people
give it credit for. Even people that would call themselves full on maxis and sound money advocates
and all that kind of stuff. I go, there's another layer to this that I think is very, very
pertinent to the discussion about what Bitcoin is, which is why I'm such a huge fan and such
a huge proponent of running nodes, making sure people participate in this network,
because it is a robust system and it's not foolproof. It's not perfect. And it requires
user participation. And I desperately want to see that protected for generations to come,
because I literally think it realigns a game that's been being played for 12,000 years. And
And that was sort of the impetus for the great realignment.
So hopefully I managed to get through this without being dull.
I tried to preface that it might be, but yeah, that's kind of the origin story.
No, I don't think that's dull at all.
And I think there's a lot more I want to get into about your background, but let's jump
into this.
You know, I think one of the things that's really interesting about this and, you know,
you tend to come across a piece of work at the right time.
and I think that this book is really pertinent for where we are with Bitcoin today.
And one of the things that you kind of, I think, really hammer home here is asking two questions,
like why are things the way they are and why is it acting that way?
Or why is this entity acting that way?
So let's start with power and the notion of power.
What is power?
In your book, you kind of have like the, you know, some simple categorizations of power, like political or national strength.
Like after a war, like that could change, you know, the balance of power could change in a particular area.
The possession of control or command over people, so like words have power.
Political ascendancy or control in the government of a country, they attained power, you know, by overthrowing the legal government.
legal ability, capacity, or authority, like Congress has certain authority, delegated authority,
a document or written statement conferring legal authority, a person or thing that possesses or
exercises authority or influence, a state or nation having international authority influence,
great powers hold, you know, like the G7 will hold a conference, or a military or naval force,
you know. So what, like, you know, that gets confusing.
Correct. You know, and people kind of just throw these words around. So, yeah. Yeah. Where would you take it from here in terms of sort of your exploration of power and how you see it?
I mean, I think you've summed it up really well.
People just kind of toss these terms around.
And I think they do so without really thinking about what they're saying, right?
Because there's that old saying, the biggest barrier to communication is the illusion that
it has been accomplished.
And you can have two people talking about the same thing that they think because they're
using the same words, but what they're referring to can be vastly different.
And I think power, money, greed, all of those things are all those types of terms.
Like if I say – like even the current debate with knots and core and spam and not spam and this and that, people go, Bitcoin should be a monetary network.
And I say, well, OK, define money.
And then people go, you're just being pedantic.
You're just being – this isn't a philosophy class.
Everybody knows what money is.
I go, well, the definitions are important because if you're arguing about something and you're suggesting something should be a thing, then it's probably important to understand what that thing is and what it means and why.
and you know i mean there are people like robert breedlove made an entire career off
asking what is money right so i go and i don't think he's come up with a sound answer yet because
it's a really difficult concept to unpack and that was sort of the starting point of the book
i originally started the book with money and i thought well i want to take it back even further
and go well where does power come from what does it mean to be in power what does it mean to have
power what does it mean to wield power all those kind of things are all very very nebulous terms i
I mean you can assign a lot of meaning to what that means.
Like I can say I'm powerful or she's a powerful woman or she's a powerful singer or he's a powerful bodybuilder or whatever it is.
But you obviously can't transpose those onto national power, state power, state authority, things like that.
So the purpose of that was to try and kind of strip back the ideas of like where does power come from?
Why do people ascend to power?
And to kind of give like a headline type view of it, it's like if most people cannot withstand
sustained periods of chaos, right?
Like in any, if you talk about a failed state, if you talk about like Afghanistan after the
Russians left if you talk about you know Somalia today or you know Jamaica or wherever anywhere what was that Haiti Anywhere that these social norms the power systems collapse within somebody somewhere is going to come and alleviate the chaos for people
And it's their ability to alleviate that chaos and to bring some semblance of order that ushers them into power.
And oftentimes these people are not the people that wanted to do that, right?
But the seizure of power is either opportunistic or it's because of necessity.
And oftentimes it's both.
But, you know, the the the object of capturing power in a system where there are what I call a competitive resource capture economy, that that's where power capture comes from.
But if you go back before agriculture and if you look at hunter gatherer societies and societies that consume as they go, they don't hoard things.
Right. You know, what are their power structures look like?
And they go, what are you talking about?
There is none.
It is very, very, very egalitarian.
people that come on and go, you know what? I'm the leader of this group. They just get mocked
relentlessly until they go away. Right. Like people just do not have any tolerance for anybody that
comes along and says, I'm the boss. And so they tend to be these very egalitarian social structures.
And so to my mind, I go, well, how is it that human beings managed to live for 250,000 years
without any sort of like power hierarchies at all? But then suddenly just randomly out of the blue,
everyone just decided, hey, now's a good time that we should start installing kings and having
warlords and leaders and wars and all this kind of stuff and i say that's a direct result of
sedentism basically like when people started putting down roots when they started having
assets that could be hoarded and then thus captured that's the time when power structures
start showing up and so that's the the funny thing about that game is like people that will
come in and hoard and steal resources create a lot of chaos right like if you're just a bunch
of little farming villages or a bunch of families doing little like small holds and then a group of
thugs comes in and starts stealing stuff well then you guys got a gang up and get your pit fork out
and and fight back but then some other gang comes along and if that gang takes over then another
gang's always trying to take from them and they're always fighting but it's constant chaos nobody can
get anything done so sooner or later the gangs kind of figure that out and go hey you know what
it's better if we all just kind of group up and we'll just have a coalition and you can see that
in street gangs today. You can see that in El Salvador. You can see it in Brazilian favelas.
You can see it anywhere in the world where power structures start emerging like that.
The natural inclination is for people to fight, scrabble, and grab as much as they can. But
eventually that leads to a situation where it's very costly to continue doing that. So then the
natural inclination is to gang up, group up, find like groups, and then consolidate resources and
territory. And then you start having coalitions fighting each other. And if the coalitions,
depending on how big they get, one coalition is going to squeeze another one out. They're going
to incorporate smaller coalitions. It grows and grows and grows. If you give that a couple thousand
years, you end up with a king and a castle and knights and an orderly system of like, hey,
this is how this power hierarchy works. But it starts from resource capture and chaos. Those
people just happen to group up and provide some order to that chaos. So that's kind of
maybe the long-winded trek around power hopefully that was a coherent thought that came out of my
head right now that was great and i what what really made me think about though is just sort
of the kind of people that come to power and how it's sort of not sort of by like you were saying
it's not by dictate it's sort of emergent but you'd imagine uh and maybe you could describe
better than i do like what what are the kind of people that like either become the head of a gang
like in a prison or a mob or you could even maybe include a politician like what is it about them
are they just the strongest person you know we could talk about like strength like you know what
what makes them sort of ascend and um what is sort of the life or you know being in power well that's
a great question and you know i i think there's been like endless dramatizations of this process
right uh and i mean there's like you could even just go to like game of thrones because if you
if you know anything about the game of thrones and that series and the series
of books and all that kind of stuff,
it's essentially the English war of the roses with dragons,
right?
I mean,
that guy just went,
read a bunch of history books and said,
Oh,
this might be interesting.
If I toss a couple of dragons in there and some fantasy tropes and we got
ourselves a new series.
But if you look at the leaders and if you look at even the dramatizations of
it,
they go,
they will say things like,
well,
if,
if it's just strength and how come all the nights aren't in charge,
how come this weaselly little guy in the shadows is the one that's pulling
strings.
And how come this guy,
because when you start getting to coalition building and we start getting into navigating
complex social dynamics, it's not necessarily the brute that's going to figure that out.
Brutes are pretty good at getting there, but there are guys that work angles and do things
differently and think their way through problems. And those are the people that tend to rise to
those power positions. But they also find as soon as they get there, it's a real pain in the ass,
right? Like there's nothing nice about it and you can never trust people around. It's a miserable
existence for everybody that seizes power. It's, it can be quite comfortable until you get a knife
in your back or until someone blows you up or until your kingdom gets overrun or until you make
a tactical error, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So they tend to be short-lived and they tend to be
people that are very shrewd and also very capable. I mean, especially in like prison gangs,
typical like gang type hierarchies, obviously the, the ability to wield physical violence
effectively is an asset and a tool.
But being a good coach is oftentimes better.
Like if you're good at organizing that violence and making sure that you
counter whatever tactics your enemy is bringing,
that brings a lot of prestige to you as a leader of that group.
You go, hey, man, we were outnumbered two to one by these gangs,
but old Tommy here came in and he just said, do this, do this.
And then next thing you know, we whooped those guys
and they kicked him right out of the neighborhood.
And so it's that kind of tactical thinking.
And a lot of times it just boils down to luck, right?
I mean, if you think about like what has turned the tide of battles, I don't know if you ever read War and Peace.
But there's a great little passage in there where there was a fellow, you know, I mean, it's a fictional book, obviously, but based on sort of events.
But there was a guy who was standing on a hill and some general came along and said, hey, you're not supposed to be standing on the hill.
You're supposed to be doing this.
And why are you wasting all this time?
So the guy followed his orders and did that.
what the general didn't know because he came waddling down the hill was that that guy was
there for a reason and now that he left that reason got exposed and the whole tide of the
battle changed because this one dipshit came along and said hey you shouldn't be here i know what's
best and get out of here right so but that's true of any physical combat these are these are very
very delicate competitions and they can come down to fractions of a second i mean things that can
turn the tide of battle can be you know as minuscule as a mouse fart or it can be as big as
an atom bomb, but you never know what the thing is that made that one come out victorious and the
other. The problem is, is if you are embroiled in a power hierarchy and you kind of look around the
world and go, Hey, I'm here because God willed it. I belong here. I'm the smartest one. You start
thinking like, Hey, these successes are because I am here. And you start leaving out the, well,
I mean, I'm here also because like Tom slipped and he knocked all those bombs off the roof.
And then they fell on the guys that were coming up behind us and we didn't see them.
So that was kind of a good thing because we would have got wrecked otherwise.
But I'm here because I'm a brilliant tactician.
I'm ordained by God, et cetera, et cetera.
So the type of personality that gets there, it can oftentimes be very different than the type of people that stay there and sustain it, which is why I think you see these power structures come into place, the bureaucracy come into place because they then surround themselves with layers of other things to keep them away from their own decisions and their own egos and things like that.
But it's also a way to put barriers between you and the people that are trying to seize power from you.
Right. So it's a complex bugger, as they say.
Yeah, it really made me like vacillate between.
There's the sort of the randomness of how things can happen and people can have survivor bias or success bias.
But at the same time, there might be a sense of a natural law or just order of like,
when you see someone like Tony Soprano
and there's part of me was like,
Tony, you know this is not going to end well.
Why did you even covet this role?
Why does people like you want this role
over and over and over
knowing how it usually doesn't end well on that?
You know, you seize that power
and you think you're going to be the one to hold it forever
and you're going to prevent the kind of people like yourself
who took it from you.
But it's almost inevitable.
And so it's like,
But it's like they're calling.
You know?
Yeah.
So it really made me think about that a lot.
Yeah.
Well, I think it's a great, it's an excellent analogy.
And I think Tony Soprano probably resonates really well in terms of what we're talking about.
Because, I mean, if you look at the power structures that the Italian mafia, for instance, you know, created in the United States.
And, I mean, they have state influence, right?
So if you look at that, you go, what kind of person wants to become an astronaut, right?
Like there's a select subset of human beings that just go, I really, really want to try
that.
But it's the same subset of human beings that want to be a rock star.
It's the same subset of human beings that want to be a great basketball player.
Most people just don't have the core attributes to get there to begin with, right?
Like they just don't have the aptitude, ability, or skills to be Michael Jordan or to be.
But the thing is, once you get to like the minor leagues of baseball or once you get to the little farm leagues of basketball or any of these competitive hierarchy type, these competitions for these very, very rare possibilities of success.
If you try and delineate what's the difference between this astronaut candidate that went through and this astronaut candidate that didn't, you go on paper, good luck.
You'll never find that je ne sais quoi.
And it's the same thing with the baseball hierarchy.
Like there was a guy, I can't remember his name.
He was a catcher for the Dodgers.
He was remarkable to me because he spent like 15 years in the minors as a
catcher.
So if you know anything about baseball, that guy, like by the time you're 27,
your knees are wrecked.
This guy was 35 and still duking it out and double a and, you know,
making 25 grand a year and sleeping on crappy mattresses and,
and just doing the grind.
And all the while he's got like 18 year old kids that are absolute studs
coming up right behind him.
And every voice on the planet going, dude, you're 35.
If you're not your day passed, man, it's never going to happen.
You're never going up.
You're never going to make it to the bigs.
And then one year, age 36, he got called up to the majors.
He went and like led the Dodgers and, you know, on base percentage and just absolutely
crushed it.
I mean, he's an absolute stud and he got to retire with a couple million, you know, sort
of bonus.
And he got to play in the bigs and he got, but you think about like, what kind of person
can endure that?
And you go, who knows?
Right.
So was it natural that he got there?
Maybe.
Was he just batshit crazy and got lucky?
Maybe.
I mean, did it take that long for his natural ability,
aptitude, and skills to catch up with the needs?
Maybe.
Is it how long it took him to be able to deal with the pressure
that made him choke earlier?
Maybe.
So there are guys, for every Tony Soprano that makes it,
to your point about survivorship bias,
there's 1,000 would-be Tony Sopranos that don't ever get there.
Most of them aren't qualified for the job.
and the few that are left are, you know, they're always one, you know, car bomb away from getting
offed or one backstab or one betrayal. And then they just don't get there. And the thing that
makes those stories so dramatic is, is not so much like the will of the person to survive.
It's the miracles that they do survive to get to where they are. Like, if you think about any of
those sort of dramatic characters, whether it's from Shakespeare to, to Breaking Bad or The
Sopranos or whatever, you go, what did that guy have to endure to get to that place where he
became suddenly fragile and vulnerable oh my god well there's that one time where he almost got
blown up but then you know xyz happened and that one time when the feds were closing in they did
this but then he escaped through the sewer and no one saw that coming so oh my god you know
they go is that his skill or did he just was he just really good at wiggling when he needed to and
and the thing that kept him safe was probably more a roll of the dice and you know the universe
lining up more than anything else so i think it's really difficult to kind of pin down like
what makes it, what makes anybody be successful? And that's true. If they're a corporate raider,
a CEO, you know, those same sort of hierarchies you go, how did this guy get chosen? This guy,
not, and you can look at any number of things, professional sports acting. There was a guy I
knew that was an actor. He'd been acting for 15 years. He came down to a role that would have been
life-changing for him as him and for the guys. And he didn't get it. One guy got the role and
is probably going to go on TV shows and go, yeah, man, I got here because I worked hard and I did
this and you know reasons and there's three other guys that did exactly the same thing and it could
have literally come down to like i don't know i kind of like that guy's eyebrows yeah me too like
he's got those kind of great eyebrows like these are these guys are all great but that one guy just
his eyebrows are just you know they'll never say on david letterman or whatever whoever's talking
on talk shows these days like oh well i got chosen because i had great eyebrows like these other guys
were probably way better than me but it was my eyebrows that just really put me over the line
they'll never say that kind of stuff right so it's uh i hope i'm not just rambling here but
it's interesting which sort of uh in in that respect like how even just like maybe missing
a piece of mail could change your whole life yeah oh yeah it does for everybody all the time
uh you know and how interesting that would be where you know something i saw in the book is
where does sheriff come from that's a pretty big role in the states yeah that was the shiree that
was actually a new one on me too uh i remember i first read about that in law school and the shire
reeve uh you know back when in english shires each shire would hire or elect or however you
choose a reeve and the reeve was kind of the spokesperson for the shire but part of the english
honor system back then is much like the you know the modern day gang system like you're part of my
family, if you screw up, we have to punish you. It's not, the town's not going to come and take
care of you. We're going to take care of you. And so the Shire Reeve was simultaneously like the
person that would kind of be a spokesperson for the Shire. They would be a person that would kind
of, you know, mediate disputes. They would be the sort of public, like wrangle the drunks and
maintain order kind of thing. So they became like this sort of de facto pseudo elected leader of the
Shire. And then the Shires would each send their Shire Reeves to the Shire Reeve conference every
year and they'd have, you know, swag bags or whatever. I don't know what they did back then.
But that position sort of developed out of that and became formalized. And we still call it
a Shiree to this day. It's called a sheriff. And if you kind of look at the constitutional history
of a sheriff and you'll see these like constitutional sheriffs around the world, like
they occupy a very, very unique position in the legal authority scheme because they are somewhat
but immune to like some of these constitutional mandates.
They are not immune to county budget you know allocations though So they can come out and say I a constitutionalist I never follow this law And the County board can go well we not going to fund your department So good luck being you know whatever you think you going to do So they have practical
constraints on it, mostly related to money. But in terms of like the on paper authority that they
wield within the County, it's actually a pretty powerful position. So yeah, but it's a fascinating
evolution of things, I think. And that was one of the reasons I put it in there is because it kind
of shows like how these early power structures develop and, and sort of the reasons behind why
we create these power structures. But it, it sort of advances all the way through to where you end
up with like officers of the court and, and, you know, the chancery courts and the ecclesiastical
courts all sort of merging into like the common courts we have today. And, and the way all these
power structures sort of coalesce into these very grand institutions that are by design intimidating,
right? Like, I don't know if you've ever been to a court of law, but just walking into that little
room. It's, it's, I mean, for the most part, the furniture kind of sucks. The decor isn't all that
great, but you know, if you kind of look around, you go, Oh yeah, this, these are like all the
trappings of projected soft power, like the stuff like Jason Lowery talk about, but you know, the
bigger, the higher up that ladder you go, like if you ever walked in the Supreme court, that's a
vastly different experience, you know? And, and it's like these, this sort of sense of being
hallowed ground and all this kind of stuff. And the attorneys, like the first time a guy walks in
there as an attorney is just like shaking in his boots, but that's, you know, the projection of,
of that soft power so uh yeah but that that's the sort of nutshell version of the shire reef
turning into our modern day sheriff and and at least the vestiges of it i should say it's not
quite exactly the same thing but but it's a very formalized version of the at least that's where
the name comes from how did things drastically change for sort of humans in competitive resource
acquisition with like going from a hunter-gatherer to sort of agricultural?
Well, that's the thing.
Like if you go look through the archaeological record, and it's fascinating to bring that
up.
I think it's a great question because I think that's sort of the crux of the shift that
I talk about in the book.
Because there are examples, there are historical, like anthropological and archaeological evidence
of like large-scale conflict amongst what you might call pure hunter-gatherers, hunter-gatherers
that don't practice sedentism.
and they consume as they go kind of thing.
And 99 times out of 100, it's because one group came along and said,
hey, man, this fishing hole is pretty cool.
How about we just keep the fishing hole?
Instead of moving around, we're just going to like,
this is our fishing hole now.
And then the other group that's used to coming by will go like,
hey, guys, how's it going?
We came to get some fish.
They go, no, you can't have any fish anymore.
They go, what are you talking about?
This is just like the fishing hole.
They go, yeah, but it's our fishing hole now.
And you go, what do you mean your fishing hole?
Like God gave you a fishing hole?
What are you talking about?
Like this is – it's nature's bounty.
Like you can't just keep something like you can't just have land.
What are you talking about?
And then they duke it out.
Right.
And they would turn into these really, really horrific battles.
So it's almost inevitably when someone tries to like exclude others from a shared resource
or when they have the ability to hoard a necessary resource is when you start seeing people go
like, hey, I don't, I don't like you took all the deer.
Right.
So they get mad and then they start fighting about it.
agriculture sort of accelerates that process because like if you're some 22 year old kid who
just got kicked out of your last village and you're wandering around in the forest and you're kind of
hungry and you look over and you see this little like farming village and you notice there's a
bunch of fat plump people sitting around just you know hoeing the grass and you know plucking
potatoes or whatever they're doing you go well i could go and offer to work for these people but
the last time i did that they all got pissy with me and they called me a jerk and they kicked me
out of the village or whatever.
But now I'm kind of a big, strong 22-year-old.
I'm full of piss and vinegar,
and I bet you I could just go beat the hell out of that guy
and take his potatoes.
That might work out pretty good.
You mentioned, like, tournament style in the book.
Right.
Or, you know, how does that sort of –
what was the lesson we saw there,
and how would you explain what you meant by tournament style?
Well, I mean, if you look at, like, the competitions,
these were tournaments for, you know, like, you know,
back in the day, like if you talk about the European continent in general,
right? Like they would feel these big armies, they would go,
and it was essentially a tournament. They would go out and stand in the field and go,
okay, we're going to put our guys against your guys.
I'm going to see who wins, whoever wins that tournament.
Then they go, okay, well, what's the prize? Well, you get to keep this keep,
you get to keep this castle, my goats, whatever it was. Right.
So it's, it becomes a tournament style competition,
but it also because of that tournament style,
like they wouldn't necessarily just go and lay siege to stuff. Right.
Like, I mean, that could happen. That would happen. But far more common were these battles.
I mean, there's historical accounts of these big epic battles all throughout history where two two armies march in.
And it's not till later that you start seeing wars of attrition and, you know, the kinds of wars that like World War Two was and World War One was.
World War Two was probably the penultimate version of like the war of attrition kind of thing.
Like we're going to throw massive resources and destroy everything trying to win this, whatever they're trying to win, whatever prize they're trying to capture.
But, you know, prior to that, and even there, they have tournament style competitions.
Like, and I say it's a tournament because if you look at like the way it resolves, like it's two guys in a tent sipping tea going, okay, well, I guess you won this one, Tom.
Where else does that happen?
That happens at the end of a match, right?
Like that's not, you know, one guy standing over the other guy and his face is in the money, drives a sword to the back of his head and goes, yeah, that proves we won.
You know, it's, it's guys that, that parlay and talk about things when they're done.
But there's a couple of guys in control of that and they just field their armies and whoever, you know, comes out.
But the beauty of the tournament style competition is that it breeds a lot of innovation, right?
Because if you're in a competition, you go, well, hey, you know, last time we went out there, like we sank to our knees in mud.
and maybe we should make lighter armor.
Maybe we should get something that can throw a rock further,
whatever it is.
They're always seeking advantage.
So that advantage seeking tends to foster innovation,
especially if there's a massive playing field
for these competitions to take place.
Like the innovation occurs a lot quicker
because you learn from both losing and winning
and you kind of go, oh, hey, that was a pretty good idea.
Like those guys ran off in a pack
and then they came around behind us
and just beat the hell out of us.
That was a great idea.
We should do that too, you know?
so that's kind of the development of that
and the point of that in the book was like
it tended, you know, people say, oh, it's because Europeans are more advanced
or more this and more that, but if you kind of look at the way the
Asian dynasties did things, they didn't necessarily, you know,
compete that way. They would certainly have fights
and they would certainly squabble over things, but it wasn't like, hey, you get
your armor together, I'll get my armor together, I'll meet you at 10 o'clock on Sunday
and we'll just duke it out and see who wins, you know, and so
the argument, at least that one paper that I was referencing in there
was like, well, that's why their military tactics kind of fell behind their European counterparts,
despite China having a 2,000-year head start on civilization, arguably.
So that was sort of what that was about.
But I mean, if I may, I can kind of trace back to what I was saying before
with the young men capturing resources and things like that.
If that's not too much of a diversion, we can keep going where we're headed right now if you want.
No, please.
Well, there's just an interesting thing, like the FIANA was what I was going to talk about.
And the Fiannau were like these – they're romanticized today and they said, oh, these were young men that were cast out from their homes and they would band together in the forest and they would go on adventures.
And to get accepted, you have to prove bravery in battle and write a poem or sing a song or stuff like that.
And I go, do you not see the parallel to modern gang initiation rituals?
You go, hey, we're a bunch of young men that have been cast out from our neighborhoods or homes or families, whatever.
we band together so we can capture resources ourselves on the margins of society and how do
you get in well you got to do an act of bravery and you got to prove yourself in combat well they
get jumped in and they got to go and like go rob that store and that'll prove that you're a badass
and you know do this and that and hey if you got some dope flows and some good rhymes man like
that's added bonus like you're obviously a you're obviously worth rolling with us but it's the same
process and this thing has been going on for 12,000 years like all the time there's a bunch of
young men to get disenfranchised and they run off and then they form these little gangs and they do
crazy stuff out in the forest or out in the you know city streets but if they get clever enough
and they get powerful enough and they gather enough power behind them they suddenly become
a transformative force and you can hear naive bukele to this day goes hey you know back when
ms-13 was effectively running our country all the ngos and all the political bodies were telling
them you should form a political party but what you mean the guys with the like the devil tattoo
on their face and the thing and they're you know using machetes to cut people's heads off and leave
them on the fountain square like those guys should form a party why is that because they were able to
capture sufficient resources to be a political force right so when i say in the book like all
means of power capture are valid that's what i'm talking about if you as you know the bloods or
crips or ms-13 or whoever can wield sufficient force and authority where the authorities cannot
counter you anymore then you're a power to be dealt with in the region and you can ascend
political legitimacy just by being strong enough to take power from people that are in power if
that makes sense so yeah but that was my little diversion back i wanted to kind of cover but yeah
That's important. So I really want to break, I want to get into this chapter about authority.
Oh, yeah, please.
It seems like around 12,000 years ago, prior to the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry, pure hunter gatherers were different.
They didn't create these types of social structures and rule-based systems.
So what was different? What kind of rule-based systems then get created?
and what about like because this talks about like cooperative effort is is is that the normal state
of human beings to be cooperative and are we all looking to be in competition with each other
is that the natural state well i mean that's the funny thing about it is like i think people
conflate the idea of like competition for scarce resources because that's a very common trope they
go life is a competition for scarce resources i go well not really i mean resources are abundant
But there can be competitions in the near term.
But if you look at it from a from like a broader lens, you go, well, that's just homeostasis is what we call that.
Like, hey, that wolf ate that deer.
OK, well, you know, things are in better balance because if the wolf doesn't eat the deer, then so it looks like a competition between the wolf and the deer.
But in a bigger picture, you go, well, the ecosystem is now better off because the balancing mechanism worked.
and so when human beings were part of that balancing mechanism there is no real need to
have to form a power hierarchy like like i said before they you know those societies tend to be
very egalitarian if you go down there's modern day examples like you can go visit the hazda
i think they're in tanzania or nambibia or wherever they are right now go hey can i hang
out with you guys for a little bit and go hey who's the leader what are you talking about like
what do you mean leader like there's no we just kind of do shit you know like there's nobody
telling us what to do and when we're supposed to do it. But, but there's that sort of shared,
like if a lion comes and they're all sort of saying they're, they're all going to gang up
and go, Nope, we're all, we're one right now. That thing's a problem. We're going to deal with it,
but no one has to tell them to do it. Right. They, they just work together cooperatively.
If there's old people in the village and I'll go, Hey, Tom, you're not pulling your weight anymore.
So just go die. Right. They feed the old, they feel they feed the young, but wolves do this.
So like all pack animals take care of the weak and the young and the elderly because that's how the pack survives, right?
And I think humans do the same thing.
Does that mean people don't like go, I bet you I run faster than you?
Well, of course.
You know, people enjoy competition like in gamesmanship and things like that.
But it doesn't necessarily equate to power struggles and power competitions, right?
The power competition starts showing up when one person says, hey, these are all mine.
You can't have any.
and someone else goes, well, I kind of like those things and I'm pretty sure I can take it from you.
So I'm going to try, you know, and then you've got a very different kind of competition that's
evolved from there. So I would say the natural inclination for human beings is cooperation,
almost universally, even in competitive resource capture economies, the group that cooperates the
best tends to be the one that is more successful in tournament style competitions, in combat, in,
And, you know, like the entire essence of team building and team sports like football, baseball, any of those things, soccer, those are all squad level tactics, right?
To teach squad level coordination under somewhat like a leader of that group, right?
Like the team captain or whatever it is.
And it's mimicking combat roles, right?
And the pressure of playing live in front of an audience adds to that pressure.
It's like simulated combat just without the death and destruction.
But if a team is not cooperating, if you've got two like egomaniacs on the team and they don't pass the ball to each other or whatever it is, they're always squabbling.
A team doesn't do very well. So it's cooperation is cornerstone of success, even if there are two groups in competition, if that makes sense.
yeah it seems to me like the turning point in human history and i from like the way i read the
book is that uh hunter gatherers in my mind the way i'm thinking about this is we're all out here
trying to do our our best for ourselves catch whatever food i could eat today maybe i'll eat
a little bit of it tomorrow gotta do it all over again all of us are kind of like doing it all over
again every day maybe i catch enough to grow family a little bit maybe catch enough for my
parents my kids my grandkids whatever do it all over again we're all in it together
all of a sudden uh maybe we start cooperating but for some reason uh you know we start herding
animals goats and growing corn whatever it is but you know uh we work together to do that but
kind of at the end of the day like one guy's got 200 goats and one girl's got all the corn
and all of a sudden it's like well like we're not all out here starting over every day
this guy's got all the goats
and maybe like
you know now I'm starting to think about
you know what power or authority
does he have and what
you know kind of from the book
it's like well
there's power but like
and there's rules but
there's no rules because if I can get those goats
and feed my family
they're my goats now and if I can
out you know
gun this person they're mine
Well, I think you're spot on. I mean, I think that's the shift, right? Like when it gets to a place where people are by choice or necessity need to exclude others from a resource, that's when people start fighting. When the fighting starts is when the structure starts forming, right? It's like if you put two kids in a room and go, hey, whoever gets that ball first wins, right? And go, you know, and there's no prize even. You just tell two kids go get the ball.
who were, you know, they're going to start squabbling within about 45 minutes. Like,
Hey, that wasn't fair. You did this, you did that. Oh yeah, but I got the ball. I won,
but you know, over nothing, like quite literally nothing, just a fiction that you created
by walking in a room. You can encourage these kids to fight within 30 minutes just by saying
whoever wins this is the best, you know? So when you're actually talking about survival resources,
because if you look at most like small holds back in the day like early medieval or early England let say or at least English continent or island you can look at it and go well how much were they able to store It like
oh God, almost nothing, dude. Like those guys were lucky if their potatoes came up because they
didn't understand anything. Right. But they, they kind of got by, but they're also like a mix. Like
they grow some potatoes, but they still had to go out and forage. They still had to go and hunt.
They still had to go do this stuff, but they had like a settlement going on. Right.
but the second you put down roots the second you become sedentary when you got the fiona when you
got the local gang coming by they can go well man i'm hungry too last time we tried to kill an elk
tom got gored that kind of sucked but hey look there's that plump little lady down there's got
a bag full of potatoes we can just go take potatoes that's like way easier than fighting
an elk and i think they got some elk in there like let's go get that right so the second those
guys come and do that then they've stolen something and and once you have that theft
then the natural thing is to retaliate or to try and get back or to defend or whatnot.
And you can see these power systems just evolve dynamically from just that one act of like,
I want, you have, I'm taking, you know.
So regardless of how it develops, most of them don't develop in, like Afghanistan has been ruled by warlords
for since the Soviets left.
And despite the U.S. intervention, you know, the 20 years of them just kind of trying to wrangle goats,
They never managed to overcome the tribalism in that country.
And they're right back to it.
But they have a loose coalition of warlords that all say, well, hey, we're going to use some religious doctrine to sort of normalize behavior as much as we can.
And if you combine – all your gangs are all together and now you have a godly purpose.
It gives you a lot of legitimacy in the people that you're trying to govern, so to speak.
And it also gives you a rule book to follow.
Hey, did you steal that?
Yeah, we'll cut off his hand.
Right. Like there's no like, let's talk about it. Let's bring in some evidence. Let's see if he's got some witnesses. And they just go, no, no, no. We're just going to, you know, because that brings a lot of order to the chaos that's going on. But it also tends to hinder things like how well the country can survive. Right. So those institutions help with thriving under a power system.
system, but absent the institution, the next level down is like, well, we got to prevent
the chaos.
We got to prevent people from eating each other in the streets and being batshit crazy.
We need some stability here because otherwise it's just, it's intolerable.
Like no one can stand it.
The gang leaders can't stand it.
They're just killing each other.
The people can't stand it because they're starving and you know, everybody's miserable.
Everything sucks.
And so somebody comes in to try and fix the mess is kind of what it boils down to, you
know?
Right.
We need some rules here just to get some order.
The more rules we get, the way people are going to cheat.
But it seems like the arc you're painting for me is that we've gone to a place where things could be, you could describe, you could say this is bad.
But we're in a much better place because if we're in this place like with Afghanistan warlords or in Iraq after the war, it's like there's in-group and out-groups.
And you have to be in one of them to survive.
Because if you're in no group, you're kind of going to be like just random shrapnel.
And you're going to get hit.
So now you've got to jump in a group.
But even that sucks because now you've got to do all the things the group expects of you.
And maybe in this situation, it's things you don't want to do, right?
And you've got to be lucky to survive.
You've got to be good and lucky.
Right.
Yeah.
And it's like going through – it's like being hazed or going through the meat grinder.
and if you're really good at it you get to the top where everybody wants to kill you in like an
invert like your enemies want to kill you at the bottom in a way but when you get the top now
everyone inside the group wants your job right it wants to be you and the better you are at it the
higher you go but like i feel bad for people just like i don't want to play this game and it's almost
like the game picks you um and it seems like in america a place like america it's just a more
civilized version of the game
where the outcomes
have been muted down so that people don't
die every day from
the randomness of the game.
And so you can't
maybe ascend as much, but you can't descend
as quickly either. And it's a little
more civilized in some way.
But that kind of brings us to
like our authority.
Right. And
sort of like where do you know
had like what is our authority?
Like who gets to
like how would you describe what authority is maybe in the context of like a sport or a game
well i think the authority like the way i kind of frame it in the book is like the person who's
the authority is the one that gets to make the rules right so if if two of you meet in a field
and there are no rules and you go this is our field now and you duke it out and you fight it
out and then your group comes out on top and you happen to be the leader of that group well now you
get to make the rules for what happens on the field you guys get to farm here you guys get to
do this. I'm the authority here because I took this and you can't take it from me. No one else
can. And that's the cornerstone of sovereignty. And that's the peace of Westphalia. And that's
that whole treaty that they came up with. They sort of delineated like, well, you guys have been
duking it out over here for this amount of time. And it looks like you've got pretty good control
of it. And we've been duking it out here. So let's just draw a line between the two and say,
that's yours. This is ours. And we won't argue about it anymore. They go, okay, great. But
obviously they did. So when you're in authority, you are the person that is able to make the rules
for the resources under your control, right? And when I talk about a game of competitive resource
capture, you go, well, the barest essential of that game is like, I need to capture some food.
Now I control food. And when you can control food, then you can go, well, now I'm a little
bit stronger. I'm a little bit better fed. I can get more people on my side because I got all this
extra food laying around. So now I got like 10 guys that can go. And how about we just take over
this land? We don't want to farm the land. There's already people on the land. We can just make them
keep farming and then we just keep getting food so that's a pretty good deal all right let's do
that yeah okay great and but the example i use all the time is like if you think about like little
italy and you know 1950s and the mob boss comes by and goes hey sal i see you got a nice sandwich
up here so how about you just give us like 10 sandwiches every week and we'll make sure that
nobody breaks up your shop the guy goes hey gfy man i came to america i make this from nothing
is my place you cannot do this to me and i go okay whatever you say sal and then the next day
the guy comes back and smashes up his shop,
bonks him on the head.
And,
you know,
and then the same guy comes back the day after that goes,
Hey,
so it looks like your shop got busted up.
Where are those cops that were going to come save you?
I didn't,
doesn't look like they helped you out very much.
Like I'm telling you,
you could have just given us 10 sandwiches and this would have been great.
And Sal goes,
if he has half a brain and say,
he goes,
okay,
well 10 sandwiches,
I got to make extra,
you know,
I got to charge 10 cents more per sandwich.
Okay.
I can cover the sandwiches to,
to the mobster.
But sooner or later,
the mobster is going to have plenty of sandwiches.
And he doesn't need sandwiches stored up in his fridge forever and ever and ever.
So one of the clever things a mobster can do in the absence of anything else is to go, hey, let's make people pay us the tax in, I don't know, like wampum or cowry shells or obsidian beads or silver coins or whatever.
They have to pay us this tax, but they have to accept the tax that we collect from them when we come in, you know, when we need stuff from them.
Right.
Right. So it gives them the ability to marshal their resources in a way where they can still capture the fruits of their labor without having to store the fruits of their labor on demand.
Right. And so when when we start talking about, like, where does this authority come from and the rules and all that kind of stuff, when you start coming up with rules about, like, how do I get resources out of these people that are under my control now?
how do i get them to work the farms how do i get them to keep giving me stuff how do i you know
one of the great ways to do that is to invent money you know so that that's where i kind of
get to i might be skipping ahead a little bit here but you know slipped in where money comes from
right yeah yeah yeah you know well there's yeah very different than sort of the credit-based
theory or the barter theory right yeah yeah and it kind of speaks it's more pragmatic it speaks to
just like what the need is and what the problem was and why it's a sort of a fiat or a solution
that's kind of just dictated and it's through force. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a chartalist
view. Like if you look at the chartalists and the funny thing about the chartalists is they
went on to become people like the MMT proponents and they influenced people like Maynard Keynes and
all those sort of like illustrious thinkers of like, well, the state creates money. So the state
can just create as much money as they want, which I think is a corruption or a bastardization
of the idea.
But I do agree, at least on some level, that money is a creation of the state, not the
other way around.
And there will be people, you know, the monetarists or the commodity people or the credit people
come on and go, well, so-and-so did such and such trade in Africa with this and they
didn't have a state.
And they go, yeah, but that's, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that money came
from the two randos that were working in, you know, Mesopotamia and trying to trade
beads for salt or whatever it was.
So just because someone else has figured out a way to use a medium of exchange doesn't necessarily mean that's where money – the idea of money comes from, right?
So it kind of conflates two ideas.
But I mean that would be a debate for like PBS or something.
I don't know.
But the broad point being is yes, I think that money origin story is problematic and the way you framed it where you say like it kind of makes sense, right?
I go, well, yeah, that's the part that I come to as well.
I look at it and I go, this makes more sense to me.
Like it makes more sense that a state would create money as an effort to manage resources
under their control versus like, hey, these markets just spontaneously cropped up out
of nowhere and we don't know why, despite the fact they never existed before agriculture
and they never existed before we had power hierarchies.
But somehow they just magically showed up and they just created money.
And then these kings came around and decided, hey, these peasants came up with this neat thing.
We're going to use that as a tax and a medium of exchange.
That doesn't make as much sense to me as it does for the sovereign to go, fuck, I don't need any more wheat.
What can I do instead of wheat?
Oh, I know.
Coins.
But I mean I may be in the weeds now, but yeah, that's kind of where I'm at.
Yeah, no, it's very interesting.
And I think the reason one of the reasons it's timely is if you think about sort of money being a creation of the state, we think about Bitcoin is separating money from the state.
But right now, the conversation with Tucker Carlson and the CIA and you could look at sort of, you know, the NSA created shop 256.
Like maybe Bitcoin is a creation of the state in the same way.
Maybe the state had a problem and they came up with a solution.
And that's a different debate in terms of that doesn't really affect what Bitcoin can be for people.
But what did sort of Native Americans, what did they think of land ownership or sort of authority?
What was that notion like to them?
Well, it was abhorrent to them.
I mean, it was like – and it's well documented.
Like there were all kinds of documentarians at the time that would very clearly point out to the people asking like, hey, what about land ownership?
It was a foreign concept.
like it would be just as foreign as if I walked into your room and said, Hey, uh, Cedric, I,
I bought all the air in this room. You can't use it anymore. You just feel like, what are you
talking about? You can't do that, dude. Like it doesn't work. Like this is clearly a shared
resource. You can't just own the air. Uh, and they felt the same way about the land. You go,
what do you mean? You can't, you own the land. Like, are you using this land? No. Well then how
do you own it? Like, what are you talking about? Well, I put a fence around it and I'll bash the
hell out of you trying to walk across it. So this mine, they, they just thought that was an insane
They thought of it as a literal insanity.
They go, that just doesn't make any sense to me.
So just the concept of land ownership, I mean, depending on which tribe you're talking about,
and there's all sorts of nuance to that discussion as well.
But if bared to its sort of essentials, you go, well, are you using that thing right now?
No, then it's not really yours anymore.
If you're using it, then obviously I can't come and take it out of your hand.
I can't just go, hey, you planted a garden here.
I'm just going to kick over it and put some daisies in instead.
Everyone knows, hey, that's not fair.
Like I spent a lot of time building that garden. Right. So there was a respect for the person, right, that was doing or using a thing.
But there's not necessarily this idea of like, well, Tom used to put a garden there.
But, you know, Tom's been gone for 10 years. He came back and then kicked my daisies out because he said, hey, that's my garden.
I grew a garden there 10 years ago. It's mine. What are you talking about, Tom? You've lost your mind.
That's not how the game gets played, dude. But the European Christians and the resource capture game changed that.
They said, no, this is mine. You can't be here. This is ours. And oddly, one of the first cases tried before the Supreme Court, the natives made that argument. They said, hey, you Europeans are all about title and all about ownership and who's been on the land, who occupies land. We had title to this land and you just took it. And that's not fair. You should pay us for that.
and the Supreme Court, I think it's probably their fourth or fifth decision. They came along
and said, well, you know what? You're right. You made a really good point here. You guys had title
of the land. Unfortunately you lost. So we're not going to honor any of that.
And that was it. Like, I mean, if you, and so you talk about a country that's founded on these
principles of individual liberty and respect for property rights and, you know, individual rights
and freedoms and yada, yada, yada. But the very first decision from the highest court in the land
was like, well, we won, you lost, go suck an egg. You know, like that, that was the end result of
that because there was no other way for them to do it.
They go, well, if we rule in favor of the Indians,
we've got to give all the shit back, and that's not going to work.
And we're certainly not going to do that because now we've got all these
settlements, and what are we going to pay the Indians a tax?
Not to mention they thought of them as subhuman anyway.
So you put all that together, and you go, it's kind of a no-brainer.
They're just going to go, well, we're in power now.
I'm the captain now.
You sit down.
Sorry, you lost your land.
You should have had better guns.
You guys should have been in tournament competition all along
because then maybe you would have had a fighting chance, but you didn't.
So here we are.
So that's kind of where that traces around in terms of what that looks like and why, if that answers the question.
Yeah, no, it's interesting.
You think about sort of like authority.
In my younger, more childish days, and I can't believe I'm sharing this, but we're walking out of a bar in New York City in Manhattan at like 4.30 in the morning, last call, with a full pitcher of beer, four or five empty pint glasses, and we get in a cab.
and the cab driver says, you know, I'll take you where you guys are going,
but you can't bring that full pitcher of beer in here.
You know, you can't drink beer in here.
And my friend says, well, are you going to kick us out?
And he said, no.
So he said, I guess we can.
You know, and it's just sort of, well, if you're not going to punish us,
and you get into this weird thing of, like, what is authority?
Who has it?
And if I just say no, and you could just do things, you know.
but what about uh and also with the in and out group thing it was really interesting because you
have this such odd behavior within and out groups where you're in the in group and you're supposed
to almost like advance your group and attack the other group but if you do anything sort of outside
the line or do too good of a job like you have to almost be punished by your group in front of the
other group to their uh liking satisfaction yeah yeah to this action it's this weird yin and yang
where you're against them, but like in a weird way, you have to cooperate with them to move
forward.
And their opinion matters.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's the problem with coalitions, right, is like they put this idea to an extreme test
in World War Two.
They said, how far can we push the coalitions?
thing, like where we're not going to police our in-group, we're just going to let another
out-group do whatever they, you know.
And without that self-policing mechanism, those, you, everybody in the world knows what
the outcome of World War II was, right?
Like it was just, Europe was leveled, right?
I mean, it was just absolutely devastating.
We, you know, like factories, thousands of years of history just flattened because of
this tournament competition for who's going to control the resources of Europe.
And that's the problem with not self-policing, right?
So when you talk about international law and all these kind of things and these international norms and international rules, it's because the coalitions realize and recognize to go, hey, if we just keep duking it out all the time, we all die.
Like nobody wins.
Like someone might come out on top, but all of us are decimated and that's no good.
We want to further our gains.
We want to maintain our gains, but we also want to make sure that we're not just willy-nilly duking it out because it's very, very, very expensive.
So it becomes a financial – like at its core, it's a financial decision.
I mean if you take human capitals as a financial decision, it becomes very clear.
You go, well, we shouldn't get in a war.
We shouldn't get in a gang war.
And even those gangs like imprison gangs and all that kind of stuff, those things degrade.
these aren't exactly the brightest candles in the box sort of thing or whatever,
brightest candles in the room or however you say it. I don't know. But for the most part,
they try and avoid that kind of thing because of the cost. Right. And I think I use in a book,
in the book, there's a, there's an example, Eve online, there's a video game, right?
And Eve online had this area in the video game. This is literal, like people clicking buttons on
a computer, nothing at stake here at all. Like nothing. It's just code. But there was a section
of this space area that had no rules. It was called NullSec. There was no security intervention.
If you'd wandered out there and someone came and took all your stuff, you lose. Sorry.
And guess what happened? The exact same identical process that's been repeated over and over and
over for the last 12,000 years. One guy came along and said, hey, that guy's got a pretty
juicy little spaceship. I'm going to go take spaceship stuff off of him. And then someone said,
hey, man, every time someone tries to cross here, why don't we gang up and make sure?
and while we're ganged up, you know what?
We can probably take some more stuff over.
So we'll get richer.
And then another gang forms.
Next thing you know, that entire null sec
was divided up into sectors that had policing authority
and they had people going around saying,
hey, you can't do this, you can't do that.
Don't do this here.
We're going to blow you up.
And suddenly you had rules of trade
and all this sort of like market economy
and all this kind of crazy shit going on.
And they still got in these big battles.
But those big coalitional battles
ended up costing like real world,
something like $200,000 for the participants
in this real world battle or this fictional fake video game battle.
But people in the meat space, like me and you, were sitting in front of their computers
pumping all kinds of money into this thing to make this happen.
And the losses were extraordinary, right?
So I don't know how popular that game is to this day.
I never played it, but it was such a fascinating journey because if you look at a tournament
style competition in the absence of rulers, in the absence of a rule book, what you get
is exactly the same as every single power struggle in the history of mankind going back 12,000 years.
You go, well, isn't that interesting?
I mean, it's a self-perpetuating cycle.
It has to be.
And, you know, I give myriad examples.
I go, hey, if you get two groups of guys at a picnic and go, hey, let's go kick this ball around.
And then one of them comes up with a game.
They go, hey, I got it.
Whoever can kick the ball through this part of the tree, you know, wins a point.
Okay.
if they take if they start getting serious about it and especially if they're super competitive
these guys will be duking it out within you know an hour or two hey tom that would be yeah you
shouldn't you know they're gonna fight right so if they want to keep playing the game they go okay
we gotta we gotta come up some rules like you can't stab tom in the ass with a you know a picnic
knife if he takes the ball for me that's no good dude we can't be okay okay no stabbing tom in the
i got it i got it okay what do i poke him in the eyes no no no you can't poke tom in the eyes either
But those rules become more and more intricate and more and more defined because there's more and more ways to try and cheat the rules, right?
So that's the nature of those resource capture games.
But if there's a big prize on the other side of that tree, there's going to be people going, I don't give a shit about the rules.
I'm taking the prize.
And if you can't stop me, I'm getting the prize.
And that's where these games come from.
But that's why we end up with the system we have.
The real world losses, I think, were $350,000.
Yeah, it's crazy.
I want to read a little bit from the book.
at any rate after the king's landlord collected those taxes from the peasants the landlord would
keep a share for himself the rest would go to the king in order to settle the landlord's tax
to the sovereign in this way community produced resources were redistributed up from the working
peasant class and a managerial landlord class and then on to the sovereign if you did not notice
this is much the same redistribution process in use today with the exception today of course that
is much more layered and theoretically voluntary.
It is important to the discussion at hand
to keep in mind that there's still a gun
at the end of that chain.
Nonetheless, the larger trouble with taking stuff
is that there's only so much wheat or meat or shoes
or what have you that you can store
before it rots, loses value, or gets too cumbersome.
Meaning direct taxation by theft or extortion of goods
can quickly become a basic logistics and storage problem.
Not to mention the direct taking of goods
leaves a lot of value exchange between your peasants that you cannot profit from through
the theft of stuff. Think of it from a king's perspective. If building a fence is a valuable
service, why should the king not get a cut of that too? The peasants, after all, are his property by
Devon Wright. Their labor is merely a rental, much like a plow horse tilling another man's field.
Certainly the king deserves a fee for divinely providing that rental service, right? Nevertheless,
the clever way the inventors of modern monetary systems got around these problems was to demand
and taxes be paid in species instead of stuff.
Such an arrangement makes a lot of sense if you are a king and your kingdom has grown quite large.
Forcing your population to pay taxes in species instead of stuff forces them to trade in species.
Put another way, they are now forced to make and do things in order to get species to pay their tax to you.
This arrangement does three really great things for you.
Our most honorable, wise, and divine king.
You do not have to store a bunch of stuff you do not need right away.
You force your population to be measurably productive.
no more hiding potatoes you can give your peasants the species you took from them in tax receipts to
pay them for the work you are indirectly forcing them to do or to pay for the products you are
indirectly forcing them to make which in turn incentivizes them to be even more productive
well this really made me think about though just in terms of how it's very similar to the feudal
system is that no one can even afford not to work and that's a weird concept today but like
you're almost, you're forced to work because you're going to have to pay these taxes in that
money, in those political currency units. And so now you have to be productive to afford your taxes.
But like you used to have people, you know, even a hundred years ago in America would acquire a
piece of land out West and not necessarily work. They would just exist. And if you just think
about like the psychological, the metaphysical, like notion of cost of living, you know, like I
I was going home the other day on Drive Radio.
The DJ was talking about how there was a new study.
And if moms got compensated by their husbands or their fathers for their work, they would be making or worth $165,000 a year.
It's a weird study.
And I think it's propaganda in the sense that it's embedding the notion that animals don't think about, oh, let's not have another kid.
It's going to be more cost of living to have this child.
It's another deer, a doe.
You know, it's just you just procreate and you live and you just be.
And taxes in a way like doesn't allow us to just be.
Right.
Yeah.
It's kind of interesting.
I agree.
I think it's super interesting.
Like the British actually imposed a hut tax in Africa.
They went down.
I can't remember the country.
They were trying to modernize or conquer or colonize or whatever it was.
but they came along and said, Hey, we got all this labor just standing around.
We need to build a train, like a rail line and a road and some dams and stuff like that.
But we can't get these people to work.
I'll just charge them a hut tax.
What? Yeah. If you own a hut, you have to pay tax.
Well, how do I get the money to pay the tax?
Well, you got to come work for us and we'll pay you some money.
Then you can pay your hut tax.
So you go, what did they do there?
They go, well, we've got a valuable resource that we're not exploiting.
We have all this idle labor and these people don't give a shit because they're just like,
I'm just going to go like, you know, kill a badger and, you know, skin it.
And then I'll make myself some shoes and I'll have some badger meat that week.
Then I'm going to go find a honey hive and I'm going to go eat some honey and pick some fruit.
And otherwise I'm just going to chill and do what I've been doing for the last, you know, generations after generation after generation.
I don't care what flag you're carrying.
They go, yeah, but you got to work.
You go, why?
Like, what are you talking about?
Well, there's a hut tax now.
What do you mean a hut tax?
Well, if you don't pay your hut tax, we're going to come through you in jail.
You go, wait, what?
you're not going to pay to live in the thing that I've been living in for the last 40 years that I
built by my, by my own hand. Yeah. Yeah. You owe us money for that now. So, but that that's,
you know, it's kind of a very stark illustration of what we're talking about, but I remember very
clearly, like the first time I got a job, I said, well, what happened to my paycheck? Right. I
thought I was supposed to get, you know, $240 this week. I've only got 200 go. Yeah. Well,
there's tax and go, what's that for? Well, that's just what you pay to exist. It's like, wait a
That hardly seems fair.
Like I just existed anyway, didn't I?
And the sort of clever thing that these rulers do, by the time you – if you take all the valuable resources and hoard them and then say these are all mine now and you only get access to resources by my permission, therefore I can tax you to have access to my resources.
What you've basically done is cut humanity off from humanity's purpose in the world.
just like you said with the doe and the deer like you go well i have a financial decision to make
now you know like we need to have a lot of babies because that's how we can do more labor right but
once your baby starts surviving you go well god we it would be great to have another kid bouncing
around and we could you know clean up puke and but i don't know we're trying to save for susie's
college so let's think about it oh it's an accident you know but but these are all very
very strange decisions in the history of humankind the thing you'll notice is like the hunter gatherer
tribes don't ever like go like hey let's just have like 50 kids that only shows up after agriculture
where you go like hey man we need extra labor here well how do we get extra labor well let me just keep
making babies and sooner or later we can put them to work and that's going to help us half of them
are going to die so their financial calculation is very different but it's still a financial
calculation at least i mean they might not think so right out of the gate but you certainly don't
see like one guy cruising around the the hosda tribe going like yeah i knocked her up i knocked
her up i got 10 out of that one you know i mean they just don't do it because it doesn't make any
sense to the tribe right they just go oh that's like a lot of miles to feed and knock that off
quit doing that but the gal herself will just pick no get off me go away like we're not doing
this tonight i don't know what you're you're drunk get out of here whatever right so so these
calculus is all changed just from the exclusion of resources, right? It changes everything about
the world and how people interact with the world. The thing I used to say to people is like,
the earth provides everything you need to survive as a human being. The fact that people prevent you
from doing that is, it should be the thing that angers you more than the fact you're being taxed
or that, you know, you don't get paid as much or you're being diluted because of this, that,
and the other thing. It's like, you can just go grow a garden and you can, you know, hunt things
and you can live.
It's not quite as convenient.
It's not quite as comfortable.
But, you know, you've been separated from your humanity.
You've been separated from the earth, you know.
And that's one of the reasons why I think Bitcoin is such a big deal.
Because if you're talking about a game that has no rules
and is ruled by people in power
and their ability to exclude people from resources,
but suddenly you have a resource that gets introduced to this game
that's been being played for 12,000 years.
And you go, hey, no one can take this resource from you.
Oh, that's an interesting wrinkle.
Well, what do we do about that?
Well, it forces you to trade.
You have to trade for this resource.
You can't just come and seize it.
I can't just look at you and go, hey, Cedric's got, you know, one Bitcoin, 50 Bitcoin, a
thousand Bitcoin.
I'm just going to bonk him on the head and take his Bitcoin.
I can try and coerce you to do it.
But if you set things up in a way you go like it doesn't, you can beat me and tell him purple,
dude, I can't get to that without X, Y, Z things happening first.
And that's never going to happen.
so we can negotiate or you can just kill me, but I, I can't give you the big, I can't get it. Sorry.
I'm excluded from my own resource, but I have sovereign control over it. Right. That's a very,
very different rule in the game because there's, there's a game without rules. If I had an army
behind me and a wall of nukes, and I just happened to be in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
and just sitting here doing my thing. And I go, you know what? I'm going to take over the United
States of America. Who's going to stop me? The cops. I go, Hey man, like I got a nuke and I got
a 5,000 strong army. Like how many cops you got on the beat right now? 40. All right, let's go,
dude. You know, like, okay, now I guess I'm the ruler of Albuquerque. Yeah. Okay, cool. I am the
mayor of Albuquerque. Well, I'm going to branch out. Now I've conscripted a bunch of people from
the city of Albuquerque. I've armed them to the teeth and I got nukes behind me. So if you try
and invade Albuquerque, I'm going to blow up Washington, DC. Let's go. Like, could I take over
over texas yeah could i how much how much property in the united states could i take over
if i had 10 000 strong army and a bunch of nukes at my disposal you know that's a problem right
because who's going to stop you those guys in malheer county in oregon took over a reserve
prior to the malheer county thing they they got in a big fight outside of elco nevada i think it
was with the cops they said hey we're grazing our cattle we've been grazing our cattle you're not
change the rules. Cops said, you can't do that. We're here to stop you. And then a bunch of guys
in trucks showed up with rifles and said, go ahead and try. And the cops went, oh,
well, that's a problem. Uh, okay. We're going to leave. Like that was it. Like the cops,
the ultimate authority, they have all the state power behind them. Just went, nope,
not doing that. Cause we're way outgunned. We're going to lose bad. So let's not lose bad. Let's
regroup and figure out a different way to, you know, so they went to the negotiating table.
Bitcoin circumvents all of that stuff. You just go, well, it's mine. Okay, well, we're here to
take it. Good luck. Okay. Wow. Well, you got a lot of it. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I'm super powerful.
So it changes the game. It gives people access to a thing that no pleb, no peasant, no what I call
like the human farm animal has ever had access to for the last 12,000 years. I have something you
can't take. King, president, govern, government, whatever. It doesn't matter how many guns you
have. It doesn't matter how many nukes. You just can't take it. You can kill me, but you can't take
this thing. And it's valuable now. The second it became valuable and widely accepted, you go,
oh, all right. That fundamentally changed the game forever. And that's why I'm such a huge
proponent of Bitcoin is because it comes from that understanding of money the origins of money the origins of power the origins of state power and all those sorts of things which circles me all the way to like oh there this really neat thing that changes this resource capture game rule forever you know and it fundamentally
realigns those sort of resource capture game rules. Well, I do want to backtrack a little bit
because you brought up there, but like, what do you think about stock to flow as far as the
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uh yeah i you know it's got its its merits in terms of like it sort of makes intuitive sense
if you don't think about it too hard um but the examples they always use like i think lynn alden
uses wampum and they talk about most people that promote this theory talk about things like um
you know whether it's cowrie shells or obsidian beads or you know whatever it is the the notion
says like, well, hey, the stock to flow characteristics of gold are lower than cowry
shells or wampum or, you know, obsidian beads or rye stones of yap or whatever. That's why they
succeeded as money. And I go, well, but that that's assuming that all those other things were
money to begin with. And they weren't. Not one of those examples is something where you go,
this is money. And the example I've been using recently, I don't know if you're familiar with
a challenge coin. Do you know what a challenge coin is? Like military law enforcement people,
military and law enforcement people carry these little things called challenge coins,
and they usually get issued from their unit because of something they did or something they
participated in. It's called a challenge coin because you have to produce it upon a challenge.
You go, hey, you got your challenge coin on you. If you don't have it, you got to buy a round of
drinks or something like that. Right. So it's got all these like social characteristics embedded in
it. It's a cultural artifact of military and law enforcement circles. Right. And the thing is,
there are some challenge coins that are now very valuable to the holder.
They go, Oh, I got a challenge coin from the CIA special ops team. Ooh,
wow. Wow. Where'd you get that? Like, you know,
I've got a challenge going from the department of corrections in Oregon.
You go, eh, so you and 5,000 other guys, big whoop. Right.
But not very many people have a challenge coin from like the Los Angeles SWAT
team or the, you know, FBI hostage rescue team or things like that. Right.
So, so those things become kind of valuable and they can become tradable.
Now, if you're a space alien that comes down and you show up at the local law enforcement, you know, symposium, and you just look around and go look at these hairless apes, these baboons, these backwards monkeys.
And, huh, all these guys are trading these little coins they call challenge coins.
That must be their money.
OK, so we're going to use this as money.
So it turns out the FBI, HRT, the hostage rescue team challenge coins are worth a lot.
So we're going to go make a bunch of those in our spaceship and bring them down here and start doling them out.
because we noticed that this guy came to this guy and said,
hey, I have an HRT token.
I'll trade you for that jacket.
And the guy goes, oh, yeah, hell yeah, I'll give you this jacket for that coin.
Oh, it's obviously money.
They use that to transact value.
Okay, so that's their money.
So then they flood the market with challenge coins.
Everybody, all the law enforcement cops and everybody go,
oh, these things aren't worth anything anymore
because these stupid aliens came down and just ruined everything.
Like now we don't even know what a real challenge coin is or not.
We don't use them anymore.
It's worthless.
They go, well, the stock-to-flow characteristics of challenge coins made it so it was replaced as money because our superior alien doodad widgets are much harder to produce because they're produced in a quantum vacuum in a different galaxy.
And that's why it's rare and that's why that – the stock-to-flow characteristics of our quantum black dark matter units obviously defeated challenge coins because challenge coins were so easy to make.
The stock to flow characteristics dominated. That's why quantum dark matter units replaced challenge coins.
You could hear that, and especially if you're the space aliens, you go, oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Of course, yeah, stock to flow, right.
These backwards morons didn't know what real money was.
They didn't understand sound money. They didn't understand scarcity, morons.
But that's the same attitude that the European Christians had when they encountered all these native tribes that were trading in these native things.
And they would come in, and they had a resource capture mentality.
They go, we use money. These people must be using money because that's the only way humans interact, because that's what Adam Smith said. We understand this to be true because God's divine purpose and our divine purpose is to capture as much land as possible for God because we're Christians. That's our mandate in the world. And these heathens don't even get that. They're obviously backwards. They don't have a bath. They don't have a king. They don't know anything. These guys are morons. And they trade this wampum thing. What? Hell yeah. Let's. Yeah, we can.
here have some wampum dude well can we have this entire island of manhattan they go yeah sure i
don't know it's pretty cool wampum i never had seen this one before but it gets diluted right so
the the bigger problem with wampum is that it actually did get adopted as a currency in the
colonies but that wasn't because of the native trade that was because of the colonists didn't
have access to coins the spanish and the portuguese were like dominating the gold trade
all throughout north america so when it came time to like the colonies getting coins you know king
George is going, no, no, no. We need that stuff here. You guys figure something else out. And I
go, well, this wampum thing seems to work. Let's just trade that for a while. We'll just use this
as our unit of account and our medium of exchange, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The fact that the
wampum trade collapsed because of the characteristics of wampum being inferior to gold and silver have
nothing to do with the fact that stock to flow replaced it. If given a choice, none of them would
have been using wampum. They would have been using gold or they would have been using silver because
That's what they wanted to use.
They just didn't have it.
So because they were in a trading system that required the use of currency and species and
money and things like that, that's what they adopted.
But just because they misallocated a cultural artifact doesn't make it money, which doesn't
make it subject to a stock to flow thesis, I think.
So that's where I think the argument kind of falls apart.
And same thing for the Rhystones of Yap and all that kind of stuff.
There are characteristics of it that are reminiscent of money to us coming from a money idea like
this is how trade happens kind of idea.
but if you look at the cultural significance of the rhinestones and why they were valuable and what
you know what significance was placed on them it's far closer to the challenge coin than it was to
you know i mean just the fact you get the thing across the water it's like wow you know tom's
amazing he brought this whole thing over dude yeah like hell yeah he's rich but uh you know the guy
that i think it was a dutch explorer was down there he said man i can't get these guys to do
nothing but they'll work like crazy for these rhinestones and we can just put those things on
ship, dude. We can get that shit anytime we want. So yeah, let's like, let's put them to work, dude,
money. But then gold and silver replaced it as money. No, that wasn't the purpose of Rhystones
to begin with, you know? So that's kind of where I land on the stock to flow theory. I'm sure
somebody that was really immersed in it would dicker with me on the, you know, finer points
or whatnot, but I kind of liken it to geocentrism anymore. I just go like the idea of like money
replace the inefficiencies of barter or, you know, credit systems evolved because of this
and that.
And I go, well, that's kind of like, well, the earth is the center of the universe and
all these things, you know, revolve around us.
And we have to come up with all these different little add-ons to make it work, but it all
kind of works if you don't look too hard.
But if you start looking a little deeper, you go, well, maybe, just maybe, the origin
story is wrong.
Maybe you're just starting from the wrong starting assumption.
And then you're piling all these ideas on top of it.
like stock to flow is kind of like the, you know, whatever, whatever,
the guy before Copernicus was putting up Ptolemy, Ptolemy,
I don't know what it is, P-T-O-L-M-E-M-Y, whatever.
That guy was coming up with all kinds of theories about like, well, you know,
in this thing, this rotates this way because of this one little wrinkle.
And that's why the geocentric model still works. Well,
or maybe it's just wrong model. Like maybe just maybe,
But it's got a lot of academic momentum, I guess, for lack of a better term.
So it's hard to disrupt that idea.
But I think once you see it, you can't unsee it, I think.
And once you kind of look around and go, oh, yeah, that kind of doesn't make sense.
Like none of this stuff really makes sense if you start boiling it down to its essentials.
But it makes a lot of sense if you start your analysis 5,000 years too late.
Right.
It feels intuitive.
Yeah, yeah.
And it does help, I think, kind of frame things up or compare things, especially as a Bitcoin or comparing it to gold and other commodities.
It doesn't necessarily maybe explain the origin or whether it was emergent or top down, I guess.
What about free riding?
What is free riding?
Well, free riding is the thing that crops up in most resource captured economies, right?
Like you can't free ride in an egalitarian hunter gatherer society because everyone knows.
right like they just and they'll mock you they just go hey come on you didn't do anything what
are you gonna lay under a tree again if you got good reasons but the guy would never do it right
because just he would just go oh that's not fair like i gotta go help you know but they would
certainly recognize like if you got a lame foot they don't just go hey you're not you're not pulling
your weight pal they're got a bad foot well you're ostracized from the group they just they accept
because it's it's based on communal sharing right and it's based on community thriving
like everyone goes well we all got to kind of work together to get along right we all got to
work together to kind of make this work and we all got to respect each other and each other's
individuality and we can't like nick things from each other and we can't make one guy go do all the
work and someone else doesn't and stuff like that so free writing doesn't really show up very much
just like leadership doesn't show up like both get dealt with almost the same way they just mock
them relentlessly and shame them into doing it or they kick them out of the group right
and that's pretty easy but you know when you get to a place where it's like there's a bunch of stuff
laying around you can free ride like you can kind of go like oh yeah i'm helping with farming this
week doesn't look like it to me well i got all these potatoes so somehow that worked you know
and you can kind of beggar your way around things and it's really hard that's why i like all those
hippie communes always collapse right because there's always free riders there's always some
guy that goes yeah man i i want to help in the field but like i'm kind of ripping a bong load
right now and I want to be chill bro it was like why aren't you respecting my individuality you
know they go because we're feeding you asshole but that's not the communist way right so so they
kind of mistake like hey we're gonna apply communal thinking to a market process and that's why those
collapse but it's the same thing that happened in the libertarian communities like my my podcast
partner Fritz was talking about like a libertarian walked into the woods and met a bear or something
like that there's a book there's like some libertarian community that kind of cropped up
and it just sort of collapsed and didn't work because, hey, guess what?
Like this voluntary, like we're all going to agree to these unspoken rules
that everyone is just magically supposed to follow without any enforcement mechanism.
Okay, well, good luck with that.
That's not how human games get played, right?
And what we are playing is a game.
It's just a game with lethal consequences.
So that's the sort of free riding thing.
It's where you can kind of come in, get things for not doing anything, right?
And if you have to pay in specie, that kind of, you know, then it's either you're stealing or you're free riding.
But, you know, it elevates you to you have to do something to get the resources to keep going, which is why there's so much free riding going on in the United States right now.
Like if you just look around every city in America that's in especially in the blue states, it's just a run with people like sleeping on the street.
They go, they're homeless.
They go, they're bums.
There's a difference.
Like none of these people are like involuntarily homeless where they go, oh, I can't find a house and I was working it.
There are lethal consequences to the game.
And it seems like the game gets much more complex, which actually like leads to less sort of lethal outcomes, I think, for random players.
Yeah.
Or these and the game's gotten a little bit more refined and you kind of have to less people could kind of have leverage over the system.
Right.
Maybe fiat affects that and warps that a little differently than if the system or the game, the way it's designed, had leak-free money.
But where I wanted to go with this is I wanted to get into greed.
You're going for the deep dive, man.
Yeah, no, this is interesting stuff.
Oh, thank you.
So when you think about greed, maybe you use Elon Musk as a great foil in the book, so maybe we could talk about Elon.
I mean, is Elon greedy?
You know, I'll ask it like that.
Well, I think it's a great question to ask, right?
Because that's one of the problems with the notion of greed is you kind of go, well, what does it mean to be greedy?
And I kind of provide dictionary definitions like, well, taking more than you need and this and that and the other thing.
Okay, well, define need.
And I think it sounds very pedantic and I think it sounds very academic.
And yet it matters if you're going to say, well, that person's greedy.
And when you start talking, when you add in like the Randian sense of like, you know,
rational self-interest and then what is this and what is that?
It becomes a very convoluted topic.
But like if you looked at Elon Musk and you say, well, what's that guy worth?
You go, you know, $100 billion, $200 billion.
Does he need all that?
Well, based on who?
I mean, he thinks he needs it, right?
But how much of that is like liquid net worth?
I don't know.
But what game is he playing? Because that's an argument.
Like if someone being greedy is a value judgment that you that you as an NPC and me as an NPC or what I call resources.
Like if there are two chickens on the chicken farm and they go, hey, that chicken's taking way too much feed.
That chicken's greedy. The farmer's looking at it goes, he doesn't.
Yeah, that chicken's smarter than you are, whatever. I mean that he's not going to care.
The farmer is there to get resources from you. The farmer wants you to produce eggs and meat.
And if you don't produce eggs and meat, he just kind of goes, ah, you're not really worth anything to me. So he's going to chop you up and turn you into feed for the other chickens, or he's going to feed you the hogs or however that works, right?
But, you know, so with Elon Musk, my sort of takeaway from whether or not he's greedy as I go, if you look at what the guy's doing in a competitive resource capture game where the idea of the game, the concept of the game, the core purpose of the game is capturing control as much resources as you can.
He controls a constellation of low-Earth satellites.
He controls the largest fleet of launch-capable vehicles like gravity escape velocity vehicles on planet Earth, and it's all under private control.
He controls an infrastructure project in the boring machine.
He controls an energy grid project in the solar company, whatever it's called, Tesla Energy.
He also is a major auto manufacturer, so he controls light industry and potentially getting into heavy industry if you count SpaceX.
So what kind of resources are under this guy's control?
Oh, my God.
Defense, communications, public and private infrastructure, light and heavy industry.
Huh.
Well, is he greedy or is he rich?
No, he's just playing the game.
He's capturing resources as quick as he can.
He's pretty clever at it, and he's really, really good at it.
But at the end of it you go well I hope this guy is benevolent because good grief he got a lot of power He wields extraordinary power And I don think people have quite realized what he amassed yet There are huge fans of Elon Musk
I was talking to Dominic Frisbee in BTC Prague, and he's a big Elon Musk fan.
I think Frisbee is hilarious.
I mean he's a really brilliant thinker.
And I was talking to him about Musk, and I go, well, you've got to understand.
The guy controls the internet now effectively.
He will.
Within five to ten years, like all network communications are going to route through Starlink.
Now, that couldn't happen.
Why would that?
You know, Verizon's got all these cables and this, that, and the other thing.
Okay, well, Starlink, for them to upgrade, they have to do a software upgrade.
They have to launch a few more satellites.
They're launching a few hundred a week.
Pretty soon, there's going to be 50,000 of those things floating around.
And if you're Verizon and you look at your balance sheet and you say, well, we've got to do, I don't know, $4.6 billion in infrastructure upgrades.
just to keep up with Starlink.
But then they patch a new upgrade and go,
oh shit, now we got to do another 10 billion
just to keep up with his speeds
and we'll never reach most of his customers.
What are we going to do?
Well, Elon called and said,
you guys can just lease access to Starlink
and you can keep selling Verizon as a service
and you can still be collecting checks.
You just have to do a premium.
We'll give you a network access
and you just route all your traffic through me.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense.
Like we don't have to lay any cable.
We just make money.
Yep.
Cool.
And AT&T, same thing. And, you know, whoever else, T-Mobile and every single telecommunications, anybody that's passing data around the planet.
If you have to do terrestrial infrastructure, that doesn't make any sense.
If there's a pipeline right above your head, that's like just as fast, just as quick and upgrades faster than you can even come up with a proposal for the board.
So pretty soon, unless you're just a baboon that is just dead set on creating fiber lines all around the world, you just eventually drift to Starlink.
And I think Elon Musk is aware of this.
I mean, because once you see it, you can't unsee it.
You go, oh, yeah, of course that makes sense, right?
But that also puts one guy in charge of all global telecommunications.
Is that powerful?
Ooh.
Yeah, I think so.
I think that's probably a pretty big effing deal.
And he happens to also reside in a country where he's rabble-rousing like crazy and pushing for all kinds of America first stuff.
And I go, of course, because this is your power base.
And if you can acquire power within the power structure that is currently dominating the global monetary network, wow, you got a powerful one-two punch there.
We control all communications and the money.
So welcome to America, suckers.
Plus, he's got military capabilities.
He's deeply embedded with the military industrial complex.
Like if you Cedric tomorrow wanted to build a launch capable vehicle,
like a earth,
like an escape velocity vehicle in your backyard and then go send it up in
space.
There's going to be some people coming by in suits going like,
hi Cedric,
we're here from all sorts of places that are going to talk to you about your
little project here and what you think you're trying to do.
And we're,
yeah,
no.
So somehow he's managed to just be launching these all the time.
and he's kind of navigated all that weird regulatory hurdles and things like that.
So now he is very much a player on the board.
We are NPCs.
We are resources.
We are things that are being extracted from.
He is a guy that is doing the extracting.
So he's one of the sovereigns in the world right now that controls vast amounts of resources
and is becoming increasingly powerful.
So part of the point of that little treatise on Elon Musk is to go,
hey, it's fun to talk about greed and who's being greedy, who's not being greedy,
and capitalism drives greed and this, that, and the other thing.
But that's not the purpose of the game is to like just randomly hoard things.
There are people that exhibit those traits and peacock around with Lamborghinis
and yo, I'm crypto bro, whatever.
And I got, look, check out my rings, check out my stuff, you know,
but those guys aren't there.
They're just like peacocking.
That's like a chicken running around the chicken farm with, you know,
really brilliant feathers and the farmer still doesn't care.
He goes, well, you're going to give me meat and eggs sooner or later, dude.
It doesn't matter what you dress like.
You're still meat and eggs to me.
But right now, like if Elon Musk started as one of the chickens, now he's standing there
in overalls with a pitchfork and he holds a bunch of land.
He's going, well, not a chicken anymore, guys.
I'm one of you now.
So that's kind of where part of that was going.
But a lot of it just traces back to like even the old, you know, like the English hierarchies.
And it was touching a little bit on the idea of natural law.
Like this is in accordance with the laws of nature.
And I think people say that a lot.
Like, oh, it's just the law of nature, right?
Well, what does that mean?
Well, back in the day, that actually had a meaning in the 1800s.
They said, well, the laws of nature say that each object has an essence, a character, and that object has to adhere to its character.
A rock has to be a rock because that's its nature.
And obviously that sounds absurd and preposterous to anybody today.
What are you talking about? A rock is because of chemicals and chemical bonds and spooky interference at a distance and whatever physics that are coming into play, what makes a rock a rock.
They certainly wouldn't say it has a characteristic ordained by God that it's trying to live up to as a rock.
But if you start extrapolating that out to like, well, how come there are people that are like the gentry that control like vast tracts of land in England, but there are peasants that work that field?
Well, that's the laws of nature.
You know, the laws of nature dictate that there are some people that are born to be leaders
and they're just doing leadership things because that's their nature.
That's in their nature.
That's ordained by God.
You can't change it.
They just have to do leader things.
And there are some people that are just born to be workers.
So those people are just adhering to the laws of nature.
And it's a toxic idea if you allow it to propagate.
But people still say it to this day.
Oh, it's just the laws of nature.
They don't even think about what they're saying.
Because it sounds intuitive.
It sounds, oh, yeah, of course.
We all understand nature.
We all understand what the law of nature is.
The law of nature says it, but they don't.
Because you ask them to define it.
It's the same problem.
I can't remember what psychologist wrote the paper and said, hey, ask anybody, do you know how a zipper works?
They go, of course, yeah.
Okay, describe it.
They go, well, there's a thing.
It's like a tab, and then the things go together.
I go, yeah, but how does it work?
I guess I don't know how the zipper works, right?
But it sounds absurd until you try and spell it out.
I think it's the same thing is true with the law of nature or money or power or greed or any of this stuff.
I go, okay, well, how does that work?
And they go, well, you know, they just end up stumped.
And so they might reach for their first thing that they heard in their college textbook back in 1976 or whatever.
But I think these concepts deserve unpacking just because if we're going to try and understand the world we're in, and especially if we are truly a bunch of NPCs or just resources, and we all have access to this amazing property right called Bitcoin, it might behoove us to understand the game that we're actually playing and what that thing means and why it's important and why we should preserve it and cherish it and all those sort of things I think come out.
I think they're less so if you stay in the matrix or at least most of the time in the matrix because you want to eat your steak.
And, you know, I just I just want to have a steak, you know, like that kind of that kind of attitude, I think, permeates the Bitcoin space.
And I'd like to see that sort of shift a little bit more to the tangible meat space of the game we're actually playing and where it's headed and why.
Yeah. And maybe what is good about the game and what is the game holding together?
Maybe we don't want to get rid of the whole game.
I just maybe put different water through the pipes.
So then, you know, what is, let's look at free will and choice,
but let's look at it through the lens of the Federal Reserve.
And sort of like, you know, good and evil.
I mean, do you think, did you subscribe to the Jekyll Island theory that, you know,
a few people got together with all the power they've amassed and were like,
we're just going to bend all the rules to our will so that we can hoard and collect resources
and put everyone under our spell?
I do not.
I mean it puts me at odds with like a lot of Bitcoin sort of dogma for lack of a better term right but like I see a lot of Bitcoin oh you got to read Jekyll Island this will change your mind and you know but I also know the history of the Federal Reserve right and I cite a paper in there and you can actually like the guy that wrote that paper was there when the Federal Reserve was being created and so were there powerful people that got together and tried to figure out a problem yes absolutely 100% were they an evil cabal lizard people that were secretly trying to figure out how to control everything from their
a little retreat on Jekyll Island to go, yeah, that's more of a stretch than otherwise.
There was a big problem with like, how do we redeem greenbacks back in the day?
Why don't we just go back to a silver standard?
Why don't we have a bimetal standard?
And this was a Republican talking point back then.
And they would just never pull the trigger because it implicated too many other problems.
So they had all these problems of like, how do we pay for the war debts?
How do we get this thing working?
Our banking system is absolute and utter chaos.
It's a complete shitshow.
Like we've got wildcat banks showing up all the time.
They just go bankrupt.
Like it wrecks all these people.
Like nobody knows what the hell they're doing.
But it kind of reminds me like the banking system in the United States in the 1800s was a lot like the crypto ecosystem today.
It's just like, yeah, we just do shit.
And we, you know, and we're worth a billion dollars.
Okay, cool.
Okay, we're zero.
Like, wait, what?
How did that happen?
Well, because like, you know, math and things and other things happen.
And this guy did this and then this.
But it was all vapor to begin with.
That was like every wildcat bank back in the day.
So you never knew what was like a quality project or a not quality project.
And all of them were trash.
It was just like they're all shit coins now.
So they're trying to solve that problem because you can't run like you can't have this sort of bifurcated federalist system or not even bifurcated, but just like fractured federalist system with all these different people pulling all these different directions and not have like a uniform currency.
But you can't do that with the fractured federal system because of reasons and problems there.
and you've got this collective war debt that you're trying to figure out how to redeem and
make it so the whole country doesn't go bankrupt and we don't want another banking crisis and yada
yada how do we weave this little thing i've got it that's what if we did xyz we peg gold to these
pieces of paper but we're going to back it from this thing that's a separate entity from the feds
because we can't really do it under the constitution because that wouldn't really work
but i think we can pull this off what are you guys saying yeah that sounds like a pretty good
idea but we'll make sure it's like independent from the political body yeah yeah yeah so there's
no so there's no chance of manipulation yeah it's a great idea tom good good job you know
but they they're they're always throughout all of these like how do you manage your resources right
the chicken will look at the farmer and go this farmer's doing these things because he's part of
the evil cabal of farmers that all do farmer things because they want to just they want to
squeeze more eggs out of us but the farmer has very different point of view the farmer's like
oh shit man like all tom's chickens had to get cold last year and that kind of sucked and we want
to avoid that here so we got to give all these chickens a shot but the chickens get really pissy
and they don't make enough eggs so if we give them another shot they'll make more eggs they go see
what they're doing you see what they're doing to us they're trying to control us and go well yeah
they're kind of they're trying to make sure you keep producing eggs like that's all they care
about they don't care about like you're like is this fair you know like that those are rules for
the npcs to interact but just like a player running through a game with npcs you don't like
if you bowl an NPC over with your car in Grand Theft Auto,
you're going to go, oh my God, the poor NPC.
But if there was an NPC coalition, it was like, this is unfair.
The guy that's playing the game is always running us down.
We need to come up with a rule that he can't run us down anymore.
But the player is just going to, like,
if the player really likes running down, you know, NPCs, he's just,
oh, I found a hack around that.
I'm just going to squish you this way.
So that's kind of my analogy there.
It might be a loose, terrible analogy.
But if you're talking about people that are in control of resources
and how they're extracting value from those resources.
How are they maximizing the productivity of those resources?
I think through trial and error, they figured out,
hey, if we get these people to trade
and we get these people kind of fat and happy,
they get way more productive,
which means we control way more stuff.
That's pretty neat.
Like that gives us more power because we have more things.
So let's keep encouraging that.
And if we screw that up, then well, shoot,
we'll try and figure out a different way
to keep that resource capture game going,
but it also provides a new surface area for attack
because in the maximization of resources,
there's this other group of people who goes,
hey, you see this is unfair, right?
We can fix that.
We have the solution.
It's called communism or socialism or whatever.
So all they do is provide a new lever
for a new resource capture guy to come in.
So the people that are running the thing goes,
hey, we make people super productive
by keeping them busy
and making them make widgets and ding-dongs and things.
And making them fat and happy, that makes us rich.
But now they're so rich that they're really pissed off about how they don't have more widgets and ding-dongs because they feel like they're just working way too much by pushing email at the office this week.
So this other group of people is now trying to take power from us.
So how about we just adopt some of the things those power-capturing guys are trying to do?
Well, okay, we'll give you Social Security.
So there's just like this iterative process where people are just weaving the halls of power, trying to maintain their structural control over the resources under their domain.
The trouble with communism is it doesn't work because it's based on a market system, right?
So you can't come in and do communal – just like the hippie communes didn't work.
It doesn't work on a nation-state level.
It doesn't work any better with scale.
And it just misallocates things.
It collapses.
And then it devolves right back down to, guess what, gangs, chaos.
The gangs come into power.
They seize control of the resources.
If they're benevolent and smart, they marshal those resources effectively.
They start funneling those resources back down so they can make their people fat and happy again, so they can make them more productive.
That's Russia, right?
I mean it's like you can just – it was painted right in front of everybody.
They can see it unfold right in front of them.
They go, what happened?
Well, they were this sort of pseudo-peasant market economy with a legacy monarch.
The communists came in and seized power, and then they drove everything into the ground and starved like 40 million people.
and that kind of sucked ass.
And so, of course, that collapsed
because nobody wants to keep doing that.
So who took over?
Well, all the people that were amassing power
behind the scenes in communist land
because that's what happens with any power seizure.
It doesn't matter if you're capitalist,
communist, socialist, whatever.
Power's going to flow up.
Resources flow up, period.
Capitalism is kind of neat in a way
because it also allows resources
to flow back down and around.
So everyone gets a little more fat and happy,
but the people at the top get really fabulously rich.
The communists come in
and they just get fabulously rich
by extracting what's left amongst the plebs.
And then they starve and get pissed.
And then somebody else comes in
and starts the game over again.
They come in and go,
hey, this thing's all broken now.
Everyone's rioting in the streets.
There's bread lines.
Nobody has anything.
It's fucking chaos.
Everybody hates it.
I'm here to fix that.
How are you going to do that?
Well, all my thugs are going to go around
and bash the shit out of anybody
that does anything we don't like.
And then we're going to, you know,
iron fist this thing back into coherence.
If that happens in Cuba,
you end up with Fidel Castro.
If it happens in Russia,
a nuclear armed peer,
it turns into Russia.
right where you go hey we kind of got the vestiges of a market economy we've kind of got some
semblance of like the order and has been restored for the most part throughout russia it's not quite
as advanced as like if you went to vienna austria or something like that but it's not nearly as
backwards as if you went to albania so it it kind of works but they're also a nuclear-owned peer so
that that gives them a lot more latitude to effectuate actual changes that benefit the populace and now we right back to the power structure power games power plays And right now those little trade things like the trade deal with India and cutting off India
you can trade with us and we'll cut all the tariffs as long as you don't buy Russian oil.
It's all power plays.
They're just going right back to the levers they can pull because they can't go and just make Russia do stuff
because Russia will blow us up.
They have nukes.
They just go, hey, you need to stop invading Ukraine, or what?
just like your buddy in the cab you're gonna kick us out no well i guess we can be here then right
like hey russia you need to knock that off or what well we're gonna make it so you can't use
our money that's fine we'll go around it uh are you gonna invade no then go fuck yourself right
like they don't care because they have nukes so that's that's the sort of game that's getting
played and i think bitcoin changes it all you know yeah we'll get to that i want to read a little
bit more from the book of course ultimately understanding the process of making a decision
is arguably far less impactful than the results of the decisions that are made.
Nevertheless, the biggest problem with all the various and varied economic theories
is the niggling little problem of falsifiability.
For those unfamiliar, the idea revolves around the criterion for scientific inquiry
put forth by Sir Karl Popper that says a theory can only truly be scientific
if it is possible to prove false.
It would be a near impossibility to, for instance,
falsify the concept of subjective, expected utility.
It would be impossible because there would always be an observable instance of someone behaving according to that criteria in no objective way to disprove the cause of the behavior.
Put in a more disparaging light, it seems to me the entire field of economics more appropriately belongs in the realm of the metaphysical inquiry rather than any scientific one.
What is readily observable, however, is the ability for an actor to be able to reliably and repeatably modify the behavior of another actor by altering their incentives.
Give me one of your pigs or I will bash your head in.
is a brutish but simple example of incentive modification.
Of course, one could fritter about extolling the process of this economic actor,
determining the subjective, expected utility of not getting conked on the head versus giving up a pig.
The observable reality is there is a high likelihood of compliance with that demand,
which only increases with the credibility of the threat.
Moreover, there is also an observable reality that says a select few will resist,
perhaps to their serious detriment, and then again, perhaps not.
Indeed, it is quite possible they will prevail.
The broad point being much of the behavior explored by the economists and philosophers is likely closer to gambling than anything else.
As a gambler finds in a casino, the house has a number of incentives they can use to encourage or retard the behavior of their patrons.
Indeed, many of those incentive structures have been well documented and researched.
An infamous and related example even ended up as the subject of a Nevada Gaming Commission court case.
The core structure of the casino environment is one that is constructed entirely with gambler incentives in mind.
Everything from the decor to the food to the floor design and lighting and everything in between,
they are all crafted to incentivize gamblers to stay as long as possible,
even when they are broke or tired or indeed spending their next month's rent.
Keeping in mind, of course, that this environment is built within the confines of enormous structures
that clearly cost a lot of money to build and maintain,
meaning everyone who walks through the door is or should be immediately unnoticed
that the profit margins are clearly high enough to warrant these exorbitant expenses
and that the money in their pocket is the only possible source of those profits.
Within the discussion at hand, when we were talking about greed and the human structures of power and money,
there is a distinct line of scholarship devoted to the idea that the entire pseudo-capitalist structure
underpinning the global political economy is really nothing more than a giant casino.
Unlike a walk-in casino, however, the global political economy casino is not one we can simply leave.
Rather, the opposite is true.
And the sovereign, your sovereign, demands that we all both play and pay under penalty of death.
As Susan Strange writes in Casino Capitalism,
the Western financial system is rapidly coming to resemble nothing as much as a vast casino.
Everyday games are played in this casino that involve sums of money so large that they cannot be imagined.
At night, the games go on at the other side of the world.
In the towering office blocks that dominate all the great cities of the world,
rooms are full of chain-smoking young men all playing these games.
Their eyes are fixed on computer screens flickering with changing prices.
They play by intercontinental telephone or by tapping electronic machines.
They are just like the gamblers in casinos watching the clicking spin of a silver ball on a roulette wheel.
It is perhaps disingenuous to relegate the entirety of the global political economy to the ranks of a vast 24-hour casino,
but the underlying logic may certainly help explain some of the madness that is otherwise attributed to the nefarious secret cabals of lizard people.
The reason this underlying logic may prove helpful relates to a notion many find quite troubling,
the notion that much of what passes for success may in fact be more attributable to simply getting lucky.
Yeah, I thought that was really fascinating and a really great way to sum up sort of how we're all trying to operate within the game,
but there's so much we can't see.
It reminds me a lot of Fight Club in a way, you know, and everyone's trying to like figure out their way.
But there's just so much unknown and you can only play by the rules that you know.
You try to break the rules.
You try to figure out what you can get away with, what you can't get away with, how much power you have in the system.
And it's really interesting the people that just kind of intuit this and live it out and find themselves in these positions of power almost unbeknownst to themselves, how they got there.
Well, it's a fascinating world just in the regard that we've relegated the success of combat down to things like the success of the spoken word, right?
And one of the things I would point out to people, I used to work in the prison system briefly, and I've talked to some of the young people and I say, you have to understand, like, it's your ability to convey an idea that can grant you enormous power in this world.
And it's just the same thing as the shot caller at the top of your gang that you're rolling with, as it is for the shot caller at the, you know, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, right?
That guy didn't walk in and go, look how hard I can work.
Look how many holes I can dig.
Look how many, you know, buttons I can push.
that guy comes in and goes hey i can put people together i can convince people to give us money
and i can convince other people to help us make that into more money that's it can you do that
effectively yeah well you go up the ranks can you not do it effectively then you're going to toil
right so it's your ability to orate anymore that kind of grants you access to a lot of power in a
fiat system which is a sort of unfortunate disconnect from on one level of like well
back in the day, you would have had to
survive at least a couple of tournaments and maybe
chop a guy's leg off in combat
before you could actually even get a chance to
sit at the table. Now you just gotta go chop a guy's
head off in the back office by
spreading a bad rumor about him or something.
I don't know. But
it kind of relegates
us to the world of slimes and
people that are really Machiavellian
in a lot of ways. And it rewards
that kind of behavior. But that's the problem
of an extractive system that is so
sort of concretely manifested now.
I mean, it's really, really,
in a way, it's super easy to navigate this system
and you can make bloody fortune from chaos.
But in other ways, it limits a lot of people
who just don't think that way
or don't want to operate that way.
And while the United States may have been predicated
on the idea of the human farmer,
that idea went out the window
like the year after the country was born, right?
They started recognizing the problems there already.
And people come in and start going,
hey, there's a bunch of cool shit here
I want to try and control.
because that's my job i'm a player in the game of competitive resource capture there are no rules
to this game so i'm going to try and capture these resources they can have a little piece
of paper that says there's this that and the other thing i don't give a shit about your piece of
paper i'm not playing according to your piece of paper i'm playing according to the games of
resource capture resource capture says if you can do it it's valid if you can't do it you lose
right but that's straight out of game of thrones it's either it's a game you play and either you
win or you die right and that's sort of the game of competitive resource capture it always has been
you you have to risk a little bit you have to be conniving you have to be cunning and if you can
figure out how to wield enough force or leverage or power then you get to control resources you get
to play the game and you get to become vulnerable to the people that are trying to take the resources
from you so round and round you go i don't know why people want to play this game it kind of
doesn't make sense to me i mean i kind of i get it on some level like well i don't have to deal
with the plebs all the time but on the other level it's like you said you go from here are my enemies
i'm fighting to get somewhere what by the time you get there now all the enemies are right behind you
you're oh shit now what now i gotta stay here ah this is a pain in the ass can i just retire no
that doesn't work there are a handful of people who get to ride off into the sunset but not many
you know and most end up so when it comes to the cabals of lizard people there there is some
semblance of an idea of like well there are people that have been playing this game for so long for so
many generations that they've got it refined to such a point that they go well we're not
really exposing ourselves to any of the dangers and the risks of resource capture we're still
funding things we still pull levers here and there we still kind of maneuver in the background
but to give them so much agency that they just control things i think overstates their ability
right because there's still people that take a dump they got to put their socks on every day
you know they get a head cold and they make dumb decisions and and they have layers of decisions
underneath them that prevent them from catastrophically screwing up but they're still
influencing the game but no more than elon musk is right or no more than the public figures that
you know about to say that somehow elon musk has got puffs strings behind him and that's some
shadowy person with lizard blood that you know drinks baby juice or i don't know what the hell
these people are accused of anymore, I think provides too much, you know,
weight to their ability, which I'm kind of being repetitive now, but yeah.
No, that's great. And all right. So let's, uh,
there is a really interesting anecdote here about a sort of particular court
case versus the long Island railroad system.
And that's kind of my neck of the wood,
but it really kind of gets into sort of causality versus causation and what
really like, you know, so, and so like that, it's a wild case, you know,
a couple of people are getting on a train, second person, like,
lunges to get on the train. He's getting pushed from a guard
behind who's trying to help him on. He's getting pulled
on. He drops his package.
Fireworks go off. They were in the package.
People get hurt.
What really caused this? Was it the person who pushed him
on the train? The person who pulled him on the train?
Was it his efforts to get on the train?
Was it that he was late to the train?
And really,
that was kind of interesting.
But I want to get into the title of the book,
The Great Alignment and Bitcoin
here. So, what
What problem do you see Bitcoin trying to solve?
Well, you know, oddly enough, I think Bitcoin is neutral in what it is trying to do, right?
Like, I don't provide any agency to Bitcoin.
I just recognize what it has become.
And so Michael Saylor used to talk a lot about, like, Bitcoin is property and it alleviates the problems of calling it money.
I think.
I don't know.
I've never really asked.
I haven't sat down for a coffee with Michael Saylor to go, hey, what do you think about it?
Was this what you meant by that?
But I think he's speaking from a financial standpoint.
I think from a purely like we exist in a fiat system, it's a recognition of the reality of the situation that all of us find ourselves in.
We don't live in a system where you can just opt out, right?
Like that's not a possibility.
Maybe on some very limited scale, but even the people that quote unquote opt out are not truly opting out because they go and I'm going to go build a bunker in the woods in Montana.
Okay, well, what happens when your tractor breaks?
I'm just going to go on Amazon real quick and get some.
You didn't really opt out of the system, did you?
I mean, are you building your own parts?
And there is a guy out there that's got open source parts to how to build a
tractor and all this crazy shit.
But even that guy, you go, well, where'd you get the steel?
Oh, scrap steel.
So that just magically appeared.
Was there a scrap steel tree that you harvested that from,
or was that something that came from the Fiat system?
Well, yeah, of course.
But I mean, you have to go, well, of course, but you have to.
And that, so those are all these qualifiers about like I've opted out,
but I'm really part of the system.
I just, I don't have to do the parts.
I don't like as well.
That's really sort of saying,
And they kind of miss out on all the kind of cool things.
Like it's kind of cool to be able to just go to a store and walk around and go, Hey,
that's, that's a pretty fresh looking piece of fruit.
Neat.
I'm just gonna eat that, you know?
But there was a guy that I'm going to deviate just a little bit here, but there was a guy
that went to live with the Hasda for a few months.
He was talking to Joe Rogan.
So these guys are like animals, dude.
Like these guys can just like run all day.
Like I'm out there just dying, you know?
And like, and they go, Hey, we're going to go hunt.
And he said, well, what do you, what do I do?
what do you mean you don't know how to hunt are you going to skin that i don't know how to skin a
badger whatever it is you just killed and so the translators go no you don't understand where he
comes from there's people that kill his meat for him and cut it off like what this guy's a grown
man like how does that happen you know so i apologize for the deviation there we were talking
about the great realignment what problem is it's all thank you thank you for getting me back on
track. What I look at when he says it's property, Michael Saylor, that is, rather than money,
I look at the problem from a different point of view. I say, well, money, if my thesis proves
correct, if it is predatory monetarism that started the money to begin with, that's the
origin story of money, then why would we want, quote unquote, sound money? Well, that implies
that you want to continue being a farm animal. You just want your taxes to be fair so you can't
get diluted well that's an outcome that's probably not that bad in the grand scheme of things
when i hear the ancaps the anarcho-capitalists or whatever say i was smashed the state we're just
going to do voluntary contracts i go good luck with that dude like have you never played a game
of softball on the weekend with a bunch of competitive bros that are drinking beer because
that's a kind of resource capture game you know it's all a fiction right you got to run around
home pace, but those guys will duke it out. Like I've seen guys getting fistfights at company
softball games because like they're breaking the rules and doing all that kind of stuff.
So you think you're going to somehow magically create a society that everyone's just going to
agree on your unspoken honor code system and you're not going to end up in a power hierarchy
somehow. It's impossible, right? So those things devolve. When states collapse, it's ugly. And,
you know, to any anarcho-capitalists that are going to poo-poo on my idea, I go, well,
Somalia is wide open dude you can just move
there anytime you want and go set up your
anarcho-capitalist utopia
see how far it goes he goes no no no no well
we're only going to set it up when there's a state there
to make sure that everything's peaceful so we can come
in and do our thing well then
you're not you're just LARPing
at that point right okay we're going
to go amass an arm well as soon as we convince
enough people that we want to move to Somalia
to create the libertarian anarcho-capitalist
utopia we're all going to move to Somalia
and invade good luck with that dude
Like you got all kinds of problems on the road down there.
So, so I think there is some role for the state.
That was what I'm kind of ultimately getting to.
And the idea that we get to keep all the benefits of the fiat system.
We get to keep all the trappings.
We get to keep all the comforts, the creature comforts, the, the thing that makes the has to laugh at us and go, wait, there's people that cut your meat for you.
Like, what are you talking about?
That's crazy for us to continue enjoying those things.
They come from a fiat system.
They didn't come from just automagically, you know, they didn't just get created out of thin air.
They were created under state control, sovereign authority, and people competing for power and control of resources, and then managing those resources and trying to extract from them.
That's how we ended up with iPhones and this thing that we're talking on right now and all that kind of stuff.
But I think if you treat Bitcoin as property, it's a very different conversation because that is the cornerstone of the resource capture game.
You are trying to capture resources.
That's...
property, that's land, oil, trees, people. Those are things that you want in the resource capture
game. If there is a resource that you can't capture, that changes how you play that game.
And I say that because it gives an opportunity now for you as an individual to take a semblance
of sovereignty unto yourself, meaning that you have a property that can't be debased,
It can't be taken. It can't be stolen. And it allows you to integrate into the sovereign system, benefit from the sovereign luxuries that we all get from this and the sovereign conveniences and the sovereign comforts.
Well, Bitcoin as property, I think, adds a neat layer because it allows people, whether it's a company, a person, all the way up to the sovereign.
It gives them a vehicle by which they can survive in a system that is dependent upon continual debasement.
The system doesn't survive.
We don't get all this neat stuff without continual debasement.
And there is some academic literature that says, hey, there is a preferred rate of debasement of 2% or 3%.
And people that would otherwise be considered like sound money people have been accused of saying things like, well, 2% debasement is a pretty good idea, 3% debasement.
They kind of dicker on how much debasement is good or not good.
The chart lists that branched off into the MMT world say, well, like unlimited debasement is fine.
But I think they're kind of missing the point as well.
So what Bitcoin does is it kind of gives you an opportunity to sort of allow the fiat system to kind of gradually reorient itself, if that makes sense.
So, yeah, I mean, I really think that it really changes the way you think about Bitcoin. I'm really trying to digest sort of this idea of money sort of coming from top down and the problem it's solved.
and just that the way this game is structured
and how we operate within the game
and the confines,
not the confines in terms of power or authority,
but in sort of knowledge
and understanding where we are in the game
and who knows what
and what is actual sort of what we don't know.
That's the struggle in the game in a lot of ways.
It's sort of the unpredictability of our actions
than mixing with unknown happenstance around us.
Yeah.
So to wrap it up, though, I do also want to touch on micro seed.
Yeah, we can chat about it a little bit.
Well, thinking about everything we've talked about,
you've decided to channel your energy into securing the seed phrase.
So sort of where did you come up with the idea of tackling that?
Well, that was sort of a selfish invention.
For those who aren't aware, MicroSeed lets you record all 24 hours of your Bitcoin seed phrase on a single one inch titanium or stainless steel washer.
At the time when I was making it, it was right after I had used a competitor's product and I kind of banged my fingers and it took me a long time to do it.
And I screwed up the text a couple of times and I was really frustrated with the whole process.
And it was also a thing that kind of sat on my coffee table for like three weeks.
And I was just like, oh, I should really do that.
I just wouldn't do it. Right.
So when I finally banged the thing out, I was like sitting on a concrete floor in the garage because it didn't work on my kitchen table.
I wasn't able to make deep enough impressions on the thing.
So my girlfriend's coming out looking at me like, you look like an orangutan, dude.
Like, what are you doing?
I've got to get the seat face and the titanium.
So it was a little – and like I said, I bashed my finger.
I hadn't hit myself with a hammer in 20 years, right?
So it was a little frustrating there.
I mean it wasn't like I didn't get injured or anything, but it was just like one of those like kind of like when you bite your cheek kind of thing.
So, but when I was all done with the whole thing, I looked at it and well, what if I
wanted to take this on a plane?
Like, what if I had to like flee the country?
What am I going to do with this damn thing?
Like, am I going to put that in my checked luggage?
Like, that's a terrible idea.
Like some TSA guy snooping through there goes, oh, I know what that is.
Sweet.
Yoink Mine now you know so I end up in you know I flee to Paraguay or whatever and I go where my where my seed phrase I don know But there a big piece of tape around your bag that says inspected by TSA Like shit Am I going to put it in my pocket I don think that going to pass security Maybe I get through But you know they brought me through the little millimeter wave thing I go hey what that in your pocket I go you don need to see that Yeah I think I do sir
and you know they might let you pass you know and who knows maybe they don't notice maybe you put it
in your little carry-on bag and the tsa guys just sleep that day and it just lets it go by i mean
they let guns go by all the time so why not your seed phrase but i don't want to roll the dice on
it right and i always sort of was not fond of the stack of diy washers kind of thing where you just
oh i'm gonna go to home depot i'm gonna get a screw and a bolt or a bolt and a wing nut and
And I'm going to buy a bunch of washers.
I'm going to bang this thing out like a chimp on the floor.
Partly because you just end up with a roll of quarters in your pocket everywhere you go.
And I go, well, good luck taking that on a plane too.
And I mean, yeah, you can divide up your seat phrase into like 40 different, you can spread it around through your bag.
Or maybe no one's going to notice a big bag of washers in the bottom of your bag or any number of ideas, right?
And you could probably get it through.
But again, it was one of those things like, well, what if the security is really tight at the border?
Like, let's say there really was some sort of financial collapse.
and hey, heaven forbid, the banks are all shut and you can't get anything going.
You go, that's a problem.
Well, I want to leave the country and I want to walk to Paraguay.
So I'd kind of like to be able to go to the airport and I got a passport and I got enough
on this card that they'll still let me buy a ticket because I have a passport already,
even though the government shut down.
So you can't get a new one.
So if you're thinking about leaving, now you're kind of stuck.
But me, I was super smart and I had my passport ready and I just packed a little bag and said,
oh, it's just a business trip.
I'll be right back as soon as you guys figure out this mess that you created.
sorry but what if they're going well we just want to make sure you're not taking any crypto out of
the country you know just in case i mean you're coming back anyway right mr white so no worries
there but uh just in case you're not got like a trezor or anything on you because we're gonna
check real hard not me what about like a stack of washers no i would never do that so if i got a
my seed phrase stamped into a nylon washer which we also offer and i sew that into my clothes
or I swallow it or I, you know, bolt it to the handle of my bag,
they go, can you find that little one-inch nylon washer?
No.
Zero chance.
I mean, potentially if they, like, decided we're going to cut every thread
of everything that you're carrying down to its fundamentals,
maybe they'll find the washer, and then maybe they'll decipher
that there's words on it, and then maybe they'll decipher
that that's a Bitcoin seed phrase.
I think that's pretty unlikely.
not saying it's impossible but you know but the thing is if you literally went wow they're cutting
people's clothes off and they're cutting them down to the threads i should probably swallow this
washer and now i'm going to get on the plane can they find it then well if they're willing to follow
you around for three days with a bucket maybe otherwise no that's that's going to pass body
scan like they're going to get you in a body scanner look and they're going to go nope i don't
see any metal. I don't see anything that very clearly stands out as something that shouldn't
be in a human body right now. There's like this little blurry thing, but that could be a turd for
all I know. I've used a body scanner. I know what they look like. I know what the scans look like,
and I know the limitations, and I know that that thing is not going to show up. I mean,
it's possible, but even then, you go, what's that? Oh my God, it was so stupid. I was at a bar the
other night. My buddies bet me I wouldn't swallow the washer. So I said, hell yeah, I'll swallow the
washer. The guy said, give me a hundred bucks if I swallowed this washer. So I swallowed it. It's
rusty what you swallowed a rusty washer yeah oh moron okay well don't that's pretty dumb you know
see you later tom have a nice flight whatever so the point being is i wanted a way to like
easily conceal this thing easily carry it easily take it around with me and with the micro seed you
can do things like you can cover up the one washer you stamped with like plastidiv which is like a
tool handle coating you can put it in a wax stamp you can i mean you can hide that washer anywhere
where a washer can go.
And I think that probably a better way to like hide very valuable information is like make it super small and very very discreet And that was the impetus and birth of Microseed was very selfish innovation
Yeah, I love it. What I really like about it, the transportability is great, but the really discreet nature of it.
So there's a lot of discussion about, you know, should you put in metal? Should you leave it on paper?
A lot of people say no to paper. Paper almost becomes like kind of like counterintuitive.
And so it's kind of good in a way like, oh, you would never leave your phrase right in this piece of paper right in the top drawer of your desk.
Right. Right. Where this kind of is a happy marriage is because it's one washer.
The washer could be in your refrigerator. Right.
You know, it could be the washer holding your, you know, the the handle to your bag on your suitcase.
So it's it could be in places so conspicuous, so right in front of everybody that it's it's hidden in plain sight.
in a lot of ways yeah so that's what i really love about it well thank you um and you're not buying
just to clarify you're not getting a washer uh you're getting the thing that makes the the gives
you the ability to stamp the washer correct uh and endless amounts of washers yes uh so what i like
about that too is you can have in all those discrete places because again it's back to like
well if you have your seed phrase on a very like uh obvious piece of metal in your uh safe deposit
box that is a form of a an attack vector oh yeah it'd be a lot more discreet if you had a box in
your safe deposit box with a bunch of feathers in it and the box had a washer in it holding it
together and so why are there a bunch of feathers here and no one would have any you know further
well i guess he likes feathers and they're really important his family yeah this guy's got nothing
yeah you know he's a bummer yeah so it i love the discreet nature of it and sort of how much
you can just hide it in plate sight.
So I really appreciate your contributions to the scene.
And, you know, it comes down to,
now a lot of people are calling it,
it's usually called buy spot Bitcoin, but real Bitcoin.
I think the reason we say spot Bitcoin
is we don't want to scare people off
and it's real and fake, whatever,
but just go get you some real Bitcoin.
Put it in self-custody and secure your seed phrase
for generations.
Absolutely.
So however you can do that.
I'm a huge proponent of the self-custody model.
precisely because of my understanding of Bitcoin as property, right? If you can control some sum of
money, I think that makes you a powerful person or can make you a powerful person. But that's not
the ultimate sign of sovereignty, right? Like, the King of England didn't come to the new world and
say, hey, capture all the wampum you can. He said, capture the land, capture the valuable thing,
the property. And if you have valuable property that people can't access, I think that's a huge
thing. My corollary to that and my sort of secondary purpose, and I would actually argue
it's my primary purpose. I'm pleased as punch that people like the micro seed and that it's
becoming a popular device. And I'm excited as all get out to be part of the journey of people
actually taking self-custody of their Bitcoin. But the far more important thing to me is that
people run nodes. And I can't stress this enough. If you are a person like me that looks at Bitcoin
and goes, hey, this is a novel invention. This is the first thing that's ever been invented by
mankind in 12,000 years that is valuable and can't be stolen. Like that, that fundamentally
changes the game of that. We've all been collectively playing or not being part of being
party two for the last 12,000 years. It's a game of competitive resource capture, powerful people
come and try and control resources. Other powerful people try and take those resources back and round
and round they go. We are resources. So all we are good for to them is what can they extract from us?
If we suddenly become people that control properties they want, that changes us fundamentally.
that puts us, it doesn't necessarily elevate us to the same level as like a guy who controls all
the low earth constellation satellites, but it certainly puts us in a position of like, well,
he has something we want and he controls property. That's a, that's a big deal. We become that human
farmer model that the United States is predicated on. We're just a small holder. We have a little
chunk of property but you can really dominate us anymore because it ours You can take it So that a big deal And in order for that vision to be realized the network has to remain decentralized and secure This is a Jeff Booth point He hammers it home all the time Provided Bitcoin remains decentralized and secure Bitcoin is going to transform the world
I agree with Jeff Booth 1,000%. As long as Bitcoin remains decentralized and secure, it's going to transform humanity for the better, whether you hold some or not.
I think it's going to radically improve the world in a very short amount of time.
But it's incumbent upon us to understand that to make sure that it stays decentralized and secure.
Easiest, most powerful way to do that is to fire up a node and provide that nudge effect,
provide that thing that is a bulwark against software changes you don't agree with.
Provide that bulwark against being co-opted by powerful financial interests.
And BlackRock says in their perspectives, hey, we get to say what Bitcoin is.
I go, not if there's 24 million nodes you don't.
You might be able to wield that influence with 3,000 nodes, and most of them are controlled by corporations and exchanges.
And most of the people that have Bitcoin, it's just another thing on their balance sheet.
They go, gosh, I hope this goes up so I can buy a Lamborghini next year.
But if there are 24 million plebs that go, nope, we decide what Bitcoin is, not you.
You can route your Kraken and your Coinbase nodes or whatever you want.
We're going to tell you what Bitcoin is because we are the protocol.
We are the people that decentralized this.
We created it.
We gave it value.
and now we are going to make sure that you don't co-opt it.
That's what the power of node running does.
Not one, but collectively in the millions,
in the tens of millions, in the hundreds of millions.
If every person that has financial exposure to Bitcoin ran a node,
and especially in the global south
where we got some geographic diversity of the node location,
Bitcoin quite literally is unstoppable.
And once it's unstoppable,
it fundamentally transforms the world for the better.
So if you're hearing this, please, for the love of God,
and you like Bitcoin, please, please, please consider running a node.
It's not as hard as you think, and it absolutely helps defend the network.
So that's my sales pitch.
Buy a MicroSeed if you want.
I don't care, but run a node, please.
Yeah, I really appreciate you hammering that home.
Thank you.
I think we're getting into dicey times here,
and I think it's going to come down to running a node
and holding your own keys and securing them.
So I'll leave it to you for any parting words.
I'll let people know where they can find you and your work in MicroSeed.
and I'll definitely have to have you come back
because I'd love to hear your take on some of how things are
developing in the world and where we're going
oh yeah well Cedric
I would just say thank you so much I mean you've been
such an incredibly generous host I like
we said in that little kind of interruption
I didn't expect that we'd have like a deep
dive on this so it's been really
fun for me I hope I didn't bore you to tears
through all this kind of stuff
in terms of being able to find me you can find me at
Daniel21E15 on X
I rarely post there or you can find me
at Microseed underscore IO
and that's our sort of official Twitter account, which is also just me.
But I interact a lot more there just because I'm running the company now.
So yeah, if you have an opportunity, please check out the MicroSeed.
Check out the book.
I'm not here to peddle a book.
You can read it for free on Noster.
You can just follow the link from my homepage on Twitter
or you can get a paperback if you like.
I think it's an interesting read.
I'm working on a new book now, so hopefully that will be coming pretty soon
and I can tack on to some of the ideas I started in that one.
Thank you so much, Cedric. I feel incredibly blessed to be part of your show. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Daniel. It's been so dope.
about bitcoin and let's keep growing this community together stay curious keep stacking and i'll catch
you in the next one