Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin could mean
for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you so
much for listening. Hello everybody, welcome to this episode of the Once Bitten podcast. Joining
me today is author Neil Flesher, who has written a book, Modern Chains, The Invisible Shackles of
Economic Slavery. Now that might trigger a few people, that word slavery, and Neil is very
careful to define. What I loved about this book was the definition of all the words and
getting things straight and to the point and trying to clear up the nuance and with brilliant
references and citations as well and he comes at this with the viewpoint that our financial system
functions as a silent mechanism of enslavement and he draws on centuries of history philosophy
moral reasoning
ethical decision making
how
how everything that
fiat money is touching
is corroding
dignity
and
the civilization
the social fabric
absolutely everything
and he's done a brilliant job
he's done an incredible job
and I honestly think this is going to be one of those books
that you can just hand to your mum, your dad, your auntie, your uncle, your cousin,
your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your normie friends.
And just say, look, dig into this.
It's a really, really interesting read,
especially if you know someone who loves history or loves philosophy
or just loves a good read because this is a great read.
It takes you through the stages and the epiphanies that drop in each chapter.
It does a brilliant job.
and obviously weaves Bitcoin into it and offers that as the solution to the problems.
But it's very low touch with the Bitcoin stuff.
So it is one of these books that honestly is going to make a difference to the people in your life
that have yet to take a look into the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
Before we get into the interview, please make sure you're stacking your sats.
and the show support is coming at you from Relay Across Europe, R-E-L-A-I.ch forward slash Bitson.
You can download that app and be stacking sats today and be safe in the knowledge that these guys,
Relay have been around for a long time.
They've got your best interest at heart.
They're a Bitcoin-only company.
They want you to stack.
They want you to take self-custody.
They even have a partnership with Bitbox.
Bitbox are also a Swiss-based team.
Bitbox O2 or the Bitbox Nova are Bitcoin-only hardware wallets.
Please take this very seriously.
Just this week, a friend has lost his Bitcoin because he was hacked via a link
and he had some words, so a seed phrase, on the computer.
So the people that hack in, they can find that stuff.
They can find it if it's on your phone.
Don't take a picture of your seed words. Don't even write them down then take a picture of them.
Don't even put them in a file that you think is encrypted. Don't even ever type them in to a
computer. And even if the Wi-Fi is off and you think you're just putting into a Word document,
so then you can print it out. And then like, I've heard it all now. Stop doing this, please.
People, get yourself a hardware wallet. Just write down the words. Keep them separately. Keep them
safe stamp them into seal steel excuse me do all of that stuff and you'll be fine you'll be able to
sleep at night so bitbox are there for you they've been in the game for a long time and you get a five
percent discount using the code bitten so hit the link in the show notes get over to pay with flash
dot com if you want to learn how you can start accepting bitcoin for your goods and services
We have to take Bitcoin into the next level of being a medium of exchange.
If not you, then who?
We have to get the sats flowing.
And once the sats are in other people's hands, just tiny amount, they start to understand the power of Bitcoin.
So paywithflash.com.
Easy.
Get over to the website.
Go check it out.
See what they can offer you.
Now, Orange Pill app.
18,000 Bitcoiners around the world.
Yes, I know that is very few, but that is the coolest thing.
We are few.
We're not the 3 billion a month users on Facebook, like that hell pit of noise.
Orange pill app, you have to pay for it.
Yes, and you can pay for it each month or you can pay for it lifetime membership or yearly,
whatever you want to do via the Lightning Network.
You can start zapping people on there.
You can geo zap.
You can chat privately with people.
you can even find out where your nearest local events are going to be there's a bunch of new
features coming soon so go and check it out orange pill app and reach out to your nearest bitcoiners
go out and meet people finally please listen on fountain app if you're not listening on fountain
app press pause right now download it and create your account and start supporting the bitcoin
parallel economy there's a few conferences coming up i know i've run out of music here but bear with
me you have in october the bitcoin balkans is coming at you in sofia from bulgaria the guys are
putting this one on again this year they're offering you a 10 discount using the code bitten
after that you have in manchester bit fest and nostashire or nostashire however you want to
pronounce that uh again use the code bitten link in the show notes come and visit us in manchester
and japan btc japan is going down in tokyo 23rd to the 24th of november they have offered you guys
10 discount if anybody wants to go just use the link in the show notes i really appreciate all of
the conference organizers offering these discounts to you guys so go ahead make use of it and meanwhile
sit back relax and enjoy this show with neil flesher all right neil we are recording great
to have you on the show. Incredible book. Well done. Congratulations. This is the book for those
watching. Modern Chains, the Invisible Shackles of Economic Slavery. It's an incredible read. I
can't wait to pass it to my wife and to my oldest daughter. I think it's going to be great for her
because she's studying kind of international relations and economics at a university, but at
the same time falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And it's all beginning to click and it's
just wonderful to see but enough blabble from me because lauren now has to take over the show and
ask you the first question say i'm back i haven't been on in a while yeah well you're busy now
you know yeah yeah all right so in um in your opinion what is the biggest modern chain
the biggest modern chain i mean it's just debasement i would say uh just the fact that
they debased the money, that's the driving engine of this economic slavery, followed up by usury.
That's a second engine. But I think just the debasement of the money, that's the single biggest
driving factor that creates this dynamic of extracting the value that people create in the
world coercively from them i don't know i got a question for lauren do you understand what he
means by debasement of the money debasement is basically i think i know what it go on yeah just
take a step if i can explain it properly okay debasing means like um
i don't know how to explain it i don't know what the word is
so maybe uh it's kind of like a dilution it's taking uh you know one glass of milk
and pouring it into five and then saying that you 5x the milk
that's uh that's kind of what we're doing so it's like for example you have like apple juice but you
pour water into the apple juice so it's just a mix of water yeah yep yeah the the concentration
of the actual juice is diluted.
It's worth less.
Like the money is not getting worth more.
The value of each dollar or pound or whatever
is getting less and less.
So we're making this distinction
between this monetary object
and the real value created in the world.
And money is this object that we put and we store
and we save the value that we create
in the world into these monetary objects. And when they print money, when they're debasing
the currency, what they're doing is they're creating these empty monetary objects. They're
just putting more glasses out on the table. And then since they're not actually creating more
value in the world, and we treat each dollar the same, we say it's fungible. So this new printed
dollar that has nothing in it is treated the exact same as the dollars that you saved, you worked
hard for, created value in the world, and then you put that value into that dollar. Well, that value
that you put, that you created gets extracted from that dollar and goes into the empty dollar.
It's like the value equalizes between all the monetary objects. So when they increase the money
supply from nothing, but when there's a zero cost to, to increasing the number of monetary objects,
that's just pulling out all the value that's created in the world. And that's like the, the,
the mechanism of the extraction. That's the mechanism that takes, you know, your life,
your work, your, you know, like we, people like abstract away value. It's like, it's like,
no value is a real thing in the world. Like when you go and you, uh, you do work, you achieve ends,
you create, you know, you, you create something real with your life. And, uh, money is this, uh,
this interesting, you know, uh, emergent phenomenon that it's the, it's the way that
human beings uh connect with each other it's how at a societal level um so it's just like i don't
know it's a yeah but that's debasement it's that diluting it's the water and the apple juice it's
the it's just pouring the same amount of milk between empty glasses um i mean unless you're
unless you're creating something in the world um you know you're i don't know i'll just land it
Yeah. So like every time they print money, basically they debase.
Yeah So that they not adding any value They haven built any tools or offering any goods or offering any services They just flooding money into the system which debases the purchasing power of the pounds that you worked
for. And even with gold, you still have to go dig it up. You still are expending energy. You're
expending work. There's costs associated with that. So even though the gold supply increases,
that's an inflation but it's not really a debasement because like they're still creating
like having to do work like it's it's grounded in natural law there's nothing wrong there's
nothing morally wrong with saying people want gold people need more monetary objects to store
all the value that they're creating i'm gonna go dig that up and and bring it to the marketplace
like that's you know uh that's an inflation but it's still grounded in natural law it's still
morally right and just um you know it's there's nothing wrong with that but when you just snap
your fingers and create it from nothing like that's the that's when we've lost we've left the
reservation you know like that is a it's a proposition that we can create something from
nothing you know and and that's just logically that doesn't make sense it's kind of like it just
it breaks everything um yeah right cool any further questions
not that i've okay well here's your homework have this finished by the end of the podcast
and then i'll come out and talk to you about it over dinner yeah but okay well thank you yeah
thank you thank you so much for answering my question oh no worries bye bye all right
Neil, let's wind back the clock a little bit because interesting, really interesting past.
Obviously, philosophy, you studied very deeply from what I can ascertain from reading your work.
Military as well.
You served in the military.
You've got the Apache over your right shoulder there.
Preston, another Apache pilot, Bitcoiner, and Bitcoin as well.
so that's a real mix you know that the deep thought being part of the military industrial
complex and then finding bitcoin and realizing you know this is a tool to end war what where did
this all start for you what what came first was it the philosophy then military or military then
philosophy what what was kind of the the pathway yes i mean so i mean even even as a little kid
i've always loved the idea of philosophy and i was always interested with the critical thinking and
and trying to understand things you know i want to understand the world that uh i inhabit you know
i want to understand how to how to navigate through my life and uh you know so that's always
been kind of i've been drawn towards that um but i mean growing up i i mean we didn't really come
for money or anything. I mean, we had what we needed day to day and I'm grateful for that. But
I mean, money was just never something that we had to even think about. So
as I come into adolescence and being an adult, it's like, okay, well, what am I going to do?
And I knew I needed to probably go to college, right? Because you have to go to college if you
want to have a good life, right? And it's like, well, how am I going to pay for that? So it's
like, that's my solution. Like, that's why I enlisted. I enlisted in the, in the army. Cause
I was like, I'll go do my time. They'll give me the GI bill and that'll pay for my school. And then
I can get on the right path. Um, but I mean, I was a good little, uh, little infantry dude and
was doing what I, they would tell me and worked real hard. And, uh, you know, I got kind of
college fell into my lap when, uh, I got the opportunity to go to West Point. Um, and that's
kind of where I was like, oh, well, now I'm at college and I'll just study philosophy because
like that's the thing that I want to learn how to do. So I started studying philosophy there,
you know, went to flight school, learned how to fly, which is super cool and awesome.
But kind of when I got out of the military, you know, I went back and used the GI Bill to go get
my master's, you know, in philosophy, you know, really concentrating on ethics because that really
tied in with leadership. And I just thought like, hey, I don't know what exactly I'm going to do
with this. But I just felt like that was the thing to, that was the direction to run. I didn't know
exactly where I was, what the goal was at the end, but I knew like that was where I needed to go.
But getting, stepping out of the military where, you know, I still didn't have to think about money
because they just take care of everything for me. I started to notice that, okay,
my do you know now I have a wife a family and kids you know I have more responsibilities I have
greater duties as a leader of my family and my understanding of money just I was like it felt
you know like a fifth grader understanding of that and like I knew I needed to learn about money
to protect them and to help give my kids you know give them what I didn't have you know
it's kind of like the time preference you know when you're just day-to-day subsistence living
you don't really care what happens five ten years you know down the road but you know having that
family starts it forces you to start looking ahead and uh thinking a little more diligently
about where you're going um so that's how i got to the whole money thing you know like i basically
a domain I ignored for all of my life, you know, and then having now studied philosophy at undergrad
and grad school, taking kind of those skills and applying it to the to that task. And I don't know,
it's a it's really it just blew my mind. So like I didn't get to Bitcoin until I basically just
was doing my analysis of our monetary system and like you know being a moral philosopher
and and examining our monetary system and realizing like holy like this is this is really bad like
the entire system is is rests on on an immoral you know illogical and valid structure and it uh
And you get to that idea where, you know, once I put the two to two together, like, okay, formal slavery is literally our monetary system.
It was like, I have to do something about it.
What do you do?
And it's at that moment, having, you know, clearly defined the problem that that was the first time I really saw Bitcoin.
And what I thought was so profound for me was that once I saw Bitcoin, I recognized what it was. I recognized it for the solution that it was because I understood the problem.
I did not calculate my way to Bitcoin. I didn't come at it from the economic side. I didn't come
at Bitcoin from like, well, how do I, you know, oh my gosh, this CAGR this and these rates that
and the rates of return. Like I didn't do any of that. I came at it from the moral side and I got
it like that. So this book is my contribution to try to share that. Like that is an asymmetry.
You know, people get scared. Like you talk to people and we talk about orange pilling people and getting them to Bitcoin.
And it's hard. You know, most often when you bring up Bitcoin to someone that doesn't know what it is, they have like a prey response.
They stop. They don't move. They get real scared because it's like in this in this like a extractive system.
It makes sense. You would expect that someone's preying on you.
you're expecting oh they're telling me to buy something they're probably going to rip me off
they're probably setting me up so i'm just not going to do anything and like like that's how
the deer in the headlight like so how do you break through that you know and it's like well
i didn't have that response because i recognized it morally for what it was so that's kind of uh
that's kind of the whole uh how i came to this is just like uh all right i got bitcoin i got it
quick because I recognized it for what it is. I recognize the problem. And I just, in a sense,
I think when we're talking about, you know, because how do we, how do we, sorry, it's kind of,
you like, you start your Bitcoin journey, you know, and you're like, okay, well, I got to get
some Bitcoin. I got a stack and I'll do that. And that will save me. But like, when you start
looking for it out and I'm like, okay, well, do I just want to hand my kids some sats when I die?
Or do I want to actually remove the problem? You know, this is a mess. Am I going to pass
along some sats and a mess to them? Or am I going to clean the mess up and then pass them the sats?
Like, that's how I started to think about this. And the only way that we clean this mess up when
we end central banking, we end fiat, you know, we have to bring people on board, we have to advocate
and show people what Bitcoin does.
It's a tool and it is a powerful tool.
And how do you wield it?
And so I started thinking about this
from the military side.
It's like, okay, well, let's strategize.
I have a tool.
I have a weapon.
I have an enemy.
I have a lay of the land.
What's the battlefield?
How am I going to...
What's the tactics?
What's the strategy?
and just like spitting macro at people just seems so stupid.
Like, because you're just going to elicit that same prey response.
And it's like, I don't want to elicit that.
I don't want to ask somebody to spend a thousand hours
to learn something they know nothing about
to get to the point where they're like,
maybe I should have a little Bitcoin, you know,
because you're already there.
You don't have to go like the thousand hour journey is a circle.
You are already in it.
You already know the problem.
you're already feeling the abuses. So like, why don't you just start there, recognize that,
get the moral case, and then you can learn and go, you know, complete your journey after you've
already kind of got it. That was kind of my assessment of it. So it's like, okay, well,
that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to run to the front lines because this is an important thing.
I want to clean this up, but I'm not going to run to the front lines empty-handed. I need
something to bring. I need something to do. So it's like this book is my attempt to help
arm people with the moral language to talk about and understand the reality that is before us.
So I don't know. Sorry. I'm just kind of. No, that's perfect. It's that's the way it's
written, too. It's almost like following you down your rabbit hole journey, you know, chapter by
chapter, epiphany by epiphany, question by question. And I like the way that you interweave the
philosophical quotes from different philosophers over the years really rounds it out very very nicely and puts the onus on the reader to think morally and think ethically and in fact when you sent me the book right here in the very beginning you uh
you've handwritten uh ethics before economics and signed it for me and i think that's so profound
it's it's something missing uh right now it's in in our in our space right now we're we're having
a lot of economics before ethics going on with all of these Bitcoin treasury companies being
spun up every other day or Bitcoin loan products being spun up. We'll get into usury a little bit
later on. So were you deployed when you were serving? Yeah. So I did two deployments in Iraq.
I was in Baghdad both times.
Damn.
So you've seen like the sharp end of...
Once on the ground as a little enlisted dude and once in the air flying.
So different perspectives.
Yeah, truly different perspectives.
But at war, nonetheless, you know, seeing humanity at its worst and a direct descendant of the fiat monetary system.
because what have these wars been for?
You know, the British Empire was built on, you know,
plundering foreign nations for their own wealth
and using fiat currency to do that.
Large parts of Europe, the Dutch, the Portuguese,
I think it was the Portuguese that sent across the marbles, right,
to Africa so they could flood the,
this is what Breedlove wrote about in his article, Masters of Slaves and Money.
They could flood the local economy because they had the technology,
the glassblowing technology,
and they realized they were using these little marvels as currency,
and they could use that to buy people
and then start the transatlantic slave trade.
And it's all directly linked to being able to print money, basically.
All of these wars.
yeah i think the the question that you say why do we have the wars and my you know the answer
that i have today is like it's one thing to print the money but you have to inject it into the
economy you have to get people using it and exchanging it like i you can print you can print
all the money you want but if you don't put it into the economy it's never going to get out like
So that's kind of like all the, what is it, $8 trillion I think we spent, you know, basically on these forever wars, just America.
It's like, well, how do you inject that into the economy?
It's like you give it to contractors, you give it to actual companies, and then they pay their employees.
So that's the way that they're able to move some money, you know, and put it in there.
And also goes all the entitlements and benefits and all that stuff.
But they need an actual syringe.
They need something, a mechanism to actually put it into the economy.
And I think you can buy the justifications.
Oh, we need to do this, or we need to do that, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But it's like, for 20 years, it's like, no.
I don't buy it.
I just don't buy it.
That's the real reason.
I think it's the money.
so you you liken uh our the world in which we live today you you liken it to like the plantation
perfect analogy and how we are and that's why it's called modern chains uh because we are
chained by these invisible chains nobody can really figure out what what is what is shackling
them uh and um you you give some some good examples of kind of like the hierarchy of the
plantation and what keeps people completely chained there you know like the the slightly
softer bed for the the leader of do you want to get into that and try and help people understand
why they're not thinking deeper about the questions that we're going to get into yeah so
the what's really important is that when i say slavery i do not mean it metaphorically i don't
mean it as an analogy. I'm not equivocating anything. Like this is a formal definition
of like a, like the, the essence of slavery, you know? So, um, as a philosopher, you know,
this is going back to Aristotle. Like that's the interesting thing, why I tied it into like
Aristotle and Aquinas and all these other things. It's like, this isn't me. I'm not coming up with
a theory, right? I'm recognizing the reality of human existence today. And these truths are,
they're a part, they're an emergent property of our humanity. So Aristotle was a human being
and recognized these same truths, you know, that we recognize today. So it's like by tying it,
by tying in Aristotle, I'm not trying to say, oh, look, it's not an appeal to an authority.
So because he said it, it's true. It's just saying, look, you recognize this in your own life. I recognize it in my life. Aristotle recognized it in his life. You know, this is something true about, you know, the human condition.
And like, that's kind of what, so when we talk about a definition or the essence of something, you know, we're stripping away all the accidents. We're saying, what is this thing necessarily? What is the singular thread that remains constant throughout all time, throughout all place and circumstance?
And when we're talking about slavery and you strip all those accidents, wait, it's the extraction of someone's productive work, their productive energy from one to another for the other's benefit.
You know, like, so once you do that, like, that's formal slavery, right? It's really easy to see that in historical slavery with chattel slavery. Like, okay, I literally physically dominate you and make you work to my ends, and I take all the fruit. Like, that's very clear cut and dry.
but like the the physical domination part is an accident so as a philosopher I take that and I
throw it off the table I don't care about the physical manifestation I don't care about the
accident of you know I care about the function what is what is happening and it's like that's
that's the click was like today with the basement that extraction from the value you created and you
put into your dollar, when they extract that out and put it into these empty dollars and take it
for their benefit, for their ends, it's like, okay, that's why it's literally slavery. It's
formal slavery. You can't call it anything else. I reject when we say, I understand the trap.
They're like, oh, it's like stealing. They're like stealing your money. It's like, they're not
actually stealing your money. You know, the, when we're kind of looking at and identifying
like moral crimes, it's like, we're looking at the object being taken. And it's like,
if you check your wallet, it has the exact amount of dollars in it, you know, before and after they
print money, like they're not removing any physical property from you. So they're not like
theft is, is the removal of property. It's like, you know, murder is the removal of your life.
You know, it's like, what are the, what's the object being taken?
And it's like, with slavery, it's that productive work.
It's that productive energy.
It's the value of your life.
And that's what's being taken.
And it's like, if my neighbor had slaves, I would be repulsed.
I would instantly recognize that as evil and would, you know, call attention to it, get
other people to like, I would do something about it.
Like it wouldn't be something I just shrug my shoulders at, but that's exactly what we
do with the monetary system.
even though the exact same thing is happening, you know, uh, the, the same function is occurring.
And, uh, it's just kind of like, you know, if it's that obvious, once you see it that way,
you know, it, it really is like, everybody can recognize that it's just, you have to name the
category. You have to just draw, connect the right dots to actually see it, you know? Uh,
sorry i'm just gonna no you're very good i mean and i was looking at the uh the sentence you got
in here this is why coerced extraction of productive energy stands at the formal essence
of slavery so like coerced extraction uh because it is yeah yeah there's there's like when you talk
about you no one's consenting so you know coercion isn't just have to be me like pummeling you you
You know, it's force.
It's non-consensual.
They're not persuading us, you know, to print.
They're just doing it.
And we have to take it.
Like, that's the, you know, because again, it's really easy to get tripped up on the
accidents, you know?
You're like, oh, well, they don't actually have a gun to my head.
It's like, well, they kind of do.
But even if you want to push that aside, like, you are not consenting to that.
Like, you just have to take it.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
Like, I don't know.
But now we can do something about it, you know,
which is why Bitcoin is so important and, you know,
not something to just brush off.
But the trap we find ourselves in is, you know,
you might have a slightly nicer house than your neighbor
or a slightly better looking car than your neighbor.
So therefore, you don't want to look at, like,
the state of the monetary system and realize.
Go ahead.
I was going to say, what you said, like, how does this kind of go on?
And since it is slavery, I started like, okay, well, I found Frederick Douglass so, I don't know, profound and impactful to me because he was a...
Can you just let us know who he was?
And then we'll get into him because it's an interesting part of the book.
Yeah.
So Frederick Douglass was an American slave and he was literate and could write.
So he actually wrote about his life as a literal slave.
and he what what i i like so much about him because he's describing the the conditions of
slavery and he's describing like how life on the plantation and the day the human dynamics of you
know master and between master and slaves and the and the different slaves themselves and he uh he
talks about this kind of like psychological divergence between like the field slave and the
house slave. And, you know, I can't remember the exact line, but he basically is like, you know,
the slave that knows the lash knows the truth about their condition more so than the house
slave who has the comfy bed, who has, you know, sits closest to the master at the table and gets
his scraps and all this stuff. Like there's this kind of this divergence between these two types
of slaves. And he talks about how it's the house slave that were like the worst. They were the
enforcers They were the first to quell any uprising They were the ones that wanted to keep it going because they they kind of saw like i have it better than them
and i don't i'll take this like known status quo versus you know potentially risking that and having
to go out and you know endure the endure the lash and it's like we see that exact same thing playing
out like are that like the proximity from the master is kind of like kind of what you can think
of that house slave field slave dynamic and it's like we have the same thing to the money printer
you know dollars are not fungible you know the the dollar as it as soon as it leaves the printing
press it is not the same as once it reaches its way all the way out into the economy and you know
you get it in your hand like so the people that are closest to the printer they get the comfort
of the house slate they they get you know they get access to cheap interest they get access
you know if i want to just swipe my credit card that's like 25 interest okay but if you're a
business you got you know access to capital markets or you're a bank or anything like that
you get access to basically free money you know you could even get it at zero or one percent it's
just like that's the that's the dynamic there so you know people people will mistake that comfort
as not coercive as not enslavement as not you know i'm not being abused but it's like we're all
we're all in the same category of being extracted from so even if you've got your nice little 401k
and you own some appreciating assets and you feel protected from it like you are still getting
debased too um and that's just uh i don't know for me as a leader as someone who stands up and
like i can't just like be like well i'm it's not hurting me as much as it is you
so i'm just gonna go along with this immoral uh moral practice because i'm benefiting from it it's
like that's it's not gonna fly so like the canteen effect at work at the plantation you know you you
get the uh you get the slightly warm food scraps and uh the people in the field get none of that
uh they're defending for themselves you get the uh the warm bed the people in the field they get
none of that you get the um you don't get the lash uh because you're you know closest to the master
the you know those closest to the spigot right and um yeah it's just a perfect analogy and then
so tie into all of that you you've got that at play this is the system everybody is trapped within
this fiat monetary system and um you know using that analogy of just being chattel
because you you're coer you're having your energy coercively taken away from you your productive
energy and then you tie in usury and i'm i'm so glad you you you wrote about usury in your book
I've given a talk about you, Sari, at a couple of conferences.
It came across my radar when I read this book, Red Symphony.
And what you had to say was very interesting.
But I'll just read you a little bit from this book.
Have you ever heard of it, Red Symphony?
I have not.
Okay.
So it's not a book in the strictest sense.
It is actually a transcript of a conversation that took place in 1938 between Gavril Kuzmin, who was the chief NKVD officer for Stalin at the time, who was leading all of the torture trials to get as much, extract as much information as they possibly could out of the Trotskyites before they just hung them the next day.
And he was interviewing a guy named Rakowski, and he was the Russian ambassador to France.
So they sit down and it wasn't a torture session.
And it was more of just a little bit of red wine by the fire and a highly intelligent conversation.
And there was another person in the room, the doctor who was there to just make sure he had enough
to keep his lips loose.
And he was tasked with then translating it into Russian
because the conversation was held in French.
He hid all of these documents,
and then they were found on his dead body in a gulag
when he was finally disposed of by Spanish soldiers that found him,
took it back to a university professor
who then started having these all translated into as many different languages as possible.
And I really push people to pick up a copy of it.
Now, I wanted to read a little bit about Usuri.
Here we go.
Right.
So, something I did and give it a speed of sound.
So he's talking about the Russian ambassador is talking about he's giving him the information of how money is controlled by a financial elite, the they, as we might call them.
And he's laying that out and he's explaining to how it's, you know, you have to understand that their basic, what these people believe is that their basic axiom is money is power.
That's where they're coming from.
So when you put your mindset there, you understand all of the means that they've put in place and, you know, to get to where we've got to today.
So he's, he's, he asks him, what do you think of money?
picture money. And he says something along the lines of, I see you, a smile comes across your
face, you see coins, you see notes, and what you would think of as money. So he says, you're
thinking of fraud, you're thinking of forced monies, given a legal standing, using other
terminology so that you should understand me, banks, the stock exchanges, and the whole world
financial system is a gigantic machine for the purpose of bringing about unnatural scandals.
According to Aristotle's expression, to force money to produce money. That is something that
if it is a crime in economics, then in relations to finances, it is a crime against the criminal
code since it is usury to produce something from nothing usury so in in my talk i i quote aristotle
and um you know lots of religious uh texts as well from different religions talking about usury
but i'll i'll hand over the ball to you now and so if you want to pick up on on usury we can start
explaining to people what it is and what it isn't and the nuances in between it because I think it's
a pretty big misunderstood topic. Yeah, no, it really is. And when I was doing the research part
on the usury, because it's like, it's not completely separate from debasement, but in the
monetary system with how the fiat is created and lent into existence, that's really like the big
overlap between debasement and usury, even though they're separate things, they're highly
overlapping. But that's something from nothing. That's really the teasing that out and understanding
that it's human beings creating value in the world that's important, never losing sight of
that principle. If you can hold on to that principle, it will help you analyze any situation.
you're like what's being created and what's not and uh i said it since it is such a slippery thing
because we conflate it all oftentimes you hear people well it's an exorbitant interest rate or
oh it's this or that like you know like it it's uh it's it's it's all lending you know or it's
it's just like any lending at interest or this or that like uh there's it's almost like i would
It's like a purposefully obfuscated term because no one wants to nail it down.
So kind of in prep for talking about usury, I didn't really trust myself to pin it down exactly just live.
So I kind of prepared just some remarks here to put out the principles and how they connect in plain language so people can understand what it is.
So I'll just go ahead and read that here right now.
So basically, in one sentence, a claim to profit without contribution is usury.
And when we unpack that, we say, okay, so profit, rightly understood, it's not immoral.
It is the natural fruit of value creation.
It's an abundant harvest.
So when you work, when you bear risk, when you expend effort, you're contributing something
real to an endeavor.
And when that endeavor bears fruit, you deserve a return.
So like, that's what aligns it with natural law.
You know, a subject creating value through their work to move an object to achieve an
end.
Like those who contribute value have a justified claim to their share in the excess value produced.
And that's, that's what profit is.
So lending perfectly fits into this framework.
A lender contributes value, not through the holding of the capital, but the bearing of the risk.
So if I lend you money, if the venture fails, we both lose.
Like that's what I'm risking that capital that makes sure on your success or failure.
So that's real risk and it carries weight and it requires work to actually bear that.
And that's why lending can be justly compensated with profit.
Like that's lending in harmony with natural law.
And another layer to that, sorry to interrupt, but another layer to that.
So let's say in this example, you are lending some money to a business and that business
is going to take that money and try and expand and is going to give you interest back and
what you've loaned them.
The money that you've put at risk is money you've already expended energy to get in the
first place.
right it's real yes yep you worked you created value and then you put that month you put that
value into a monetary object people need to really grab onto that like yes that money didn't just come
from thin air correct if i just print if i just print up these empty dollars and lend that to you
there's no value in there. I'm not risking anything like that. Yeah, that is the key,
you know, pound the table like concept to understand. So I'll continue here. So, you know,
so with usury, this is different. Usury,
eliminates the risk, but it still keeps that claim to profit. It creates a legal arrangement
where repayment is guaranteed regardless of the outcome of the venture. So you can think of student
loans that cannot be discharged. You can think of banks getting bailed out by a government decree.
You can think of central banks conjuring money out of nothing and lending it at interest.
Like in all these cases, there's no real work being done to bear real risk.
Like so no value was created in this exchange.
But yet profit is still demanded through that interest.
And like that's not lending in any just way.
That's just straight up extraction.
And it's like, but there's also a twofold kind of like evil to this, where usury also
dehumanizes both sides of the equation.
So like the borrower is reduced to a tool, a means of repayment.
It's a human being collateralized and mortgaged like their life.
And the lender is elevated above their humanity, above honest work with this claim to profit without ever sharing the human journey.
So it's like that's not cooperation.
You know, that's domination.
Aristotle recognized money as barren, you know, unlike the land that yields crops or labor that creates a good, you know,
like you were saying, the money doesn't just reproduce itself.
You know, so usury is that lie that we can create something from nothing,
that money can just multiply by its existence.
And when we as a society accept that, we end up with exactly what we see today.
Central banks printing money and lending it out of interest.
It's institutionalized usury at scale.
It's extracting endlessly from those who produce and create real value in the world
while we're rewarding those that create nothing.
So like that distinction between a just loan,
which shares risk,
and usury, which eliminates that risk,
is very simple and clear.
And if someone is trying to obfuscate that clarity,
that should really prick your ears.
One is a partnership,
the other is literal enslavement.
One preserves human dignity,
the other desecrates it.
um so like that that's why usury is such an important thing to the hard reject but and this
is where like so you you kind of you set this whole conversation up here like you have two ends
of the scale right um usury uh is bad and uh therefore we should have no lending at all
which is the wrong way to think about it because it as you've so rightly put here um
if you are taking the risk you are and you're using money that you have you know used your
skills and your knowledge to to gain it might have taken you 10 years to to to like amass that
amount of money before you're willing to uh to go into a partnership with someone to help them
grow their business or whatever it is uh that they're trying to achieve and you take on that
risk. Whereas, and let's take, and here's the sick part, Neil, this is the sickest part of all.
You've got thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people out there that are working
for banking institutions that are like in the loan division, for example. And their whole
marketing strategy, the bank's marketing strategy is at small to medium-sized enterprises,
small business owners, mom and pop stores, whatever it is, you know, we are here to help
the small businesses. We want to, you know, help create a better community. Let's get the high
street back up and running, come to us and get a small business loan. And the person that is
sitting there behind the computer running all these checks and doing whatever else, they don't
realize that they are literally lending nothing like the the money came from nowhere
it's pure usury when you take a business loan a holiday loan a car loan buy a sofa loan
a mortgage on your house all of this is usury in its purest form and people being used
to promote it, to market it.
And I might be triggering a few people here,
and I'm very, very sorry if you are head of a loan department
or a mortgage broker or something.
But this is where the moral question comes in, right?
What you were talking about.
And it's not like I'm saying rage quit and resign,
but it's time to have the conversation.
Yeah, you need to actually look in the mirror, reflect upon what's actually happening, because we create the world which we deserve. And, you know, if you're sitting here complaining about the state of, you know, oh, man, the politics are this and oh, my gosh, the government's that. And like, you're doing this, too. Like, these are all connected, you know.
But yeah, that was one of the biggest realizations that I had was like, when you look at the mechanics of a mortgage, you know, and it's like, as soon as you sign, like the bank doesn't have real money that they're sitting on.
And like, we would just love to loan this to you so you could buy this house.
Like, they don't have that.
It's as soon as you sign and they click, that's when those dollars are created.
So it's like, it just blew my mind, you know, from, because like, it's really simple because we project kind of like our own self.
You're like, well, I have $20 in my pocket.
And if Bill needs 20 bucks and I loan it to him, well, I hand it, I pick it up and I give it to him.
And it's like, hey, you go, you know, hit me back, you know, give me whatever, you know, either pay me back the 20 with no interest or pay me back 25.
Like whatever you agree to, you know, consensually, non-coercively, like you could say, hey, I'll give you this 20 bucks, but you got to give me 40 back next week.
You know, if he if he needs that money and he agrees to those terms and like I don't have I don't think there's a you could say that's unwise or something like that.
But I don't think that's immoral.
You know, like the interest rate is not what makes that arrangement immoral if it's consensual and all that stuff.
but like the creation of that like i don't have 20 bucks but i just pretend like i gave it to you
and now you owe me it's like what well what what but that's our monetary system and and we just
pretend like that's normal because we don't think about we just we i don't know it's it's not good
and and the the interest rates are arbitrary like i i know it's a little bit different in the states
I think you can get like a 30-year fixed.
But over here in Europe, some countries in Europe,
you might be able to get like longer term.
But in the UK and many other countries in Europe,
you might be looking at like five years max.
And in that time, interest rates, that's another lever
that these fuckers can pull, for want of a better word,
to grease the wheels of this fiat absolute nightmare
of a system in which we're trapped.
and you are counterparty risk to not just the bank,
but also that you've taken the mortgage out with,
but to the central bank
and their psychopathic tendencies
to do whatever, whenever.
And here's the big thing that dropped for me.
It's like, well, okay, so people go in,
they want the dream house,
they want the bigger house or whatever.
They've saved, let's say $50,000 or pounds or euros
through work yeah five seven ten years hard work using a skill set using their knowledge
using their graft using their you know physical strength whatever job you've been doing
and saving for maybe working 10 12 hours a day to get to that point and that 50 000 pounds
represents the last 10 years of what you have been studying to do and put into use actual value
into the economic system. That £50,000, euros or dollars doesn't buy you anything other than
the right to cross the line into this gilded building to then say, can you loan me the other
£400,000 I need so I can buy this house? And they say, yeah, sure. Do a few checks on you,
make sure you feel belittled just enough and uh then they'll just drop that four hundred thousand
dollars digitally into your account and what's happened you don't have the fifty thousand pounds
anymore and you have well you don't have the house either it's still the bank's house
and you have to be paying back this interest rate that's just pulled out of someone's butt
there wasn't yeah there was it's even if you think you've got a good deal even if it's like
yeah man i got like uh 0.75 over 30 years it's still usury because the money didn't exist
and you're paying it back yep and you can't like that's that's the again this is like
i think people get lost with this peer-to-peer aspect like we are human beings
We are not, you know, we're on the same plane, you know, we're equals in dignity.
And the people at the money printer, they're not peers.
They're above.
And like you said, you get access, you pay that, you work your life, you save up that
real, those real 50,000.
And that just gives you access to that thing.
And like with the debasement is also kind of a, it fuels that too, because everybody knows that saving is bad.
Like if you just kept saving, you're like, I'm going to work 40 more years to get that house, you know, and pay for it in cash.
Like if you're just saving that in your mattress, you're just, it's losing and losing and losing value.
All the value you put into it is getting extracted out as they print more and more money.
So that's why you're just like, well, yeah, if I have access to this interest, if I can
buy any appreciating asset, appreciating, I'll put in quotes, any hard asset that's
not cash, that's not a dollar, you want that.
That's why we have no middle class.
The middle class has been hollowed out and we just have those with appreciating assets
and those without.
out. And like, it's crazy when you think that the house is just a utility, your house should
actually probably depreciate like your car, the more you use it, the more it wears down and this
and that. But it's like, oh, man, in the last five years, my house has doubled in value. It's like,
no, no, the dollars are just worth half as much your when you when you dive into all the economic
charts and stuff, and you realize that, you know, the housing market just literally tracks the
basement and that treading it like i i told one of my wife friends that and like i could tell that it hit and it clicked it just clicked in her head because like i saw all the life like like she saw a ghost and she like she
realized like she thought oh well we're getting ahead on our house it's going up in value and
it's like no all the money is just worth less and it's like it's a it is a shocking thing you know
to realize your house isn't more valuable it's just the dollars and that's what happens every
times it's happening every second of every day like people think when we talk about the basement
and they're talking about oh that once a quarter where the government announces oh the 150 billion
dollars injected into the economy to kickstart and blah blah blah it's like no guys it's happening
every second of every day just happened now some guy just took out a car loan some person just took
out a loan for a sofa somebody's just bought something on finance in the store click they
finance the burrito right that's what they do now finance a burrito oh my god oh so like you have
this debt which is just creeping up and up and up and up and up and up and the reason they have to
inject money into the system every now and then is just to kind of close that gap like this idea
that we're ever going to cap the debt ceiling is absolute freaking pantomime it's just theater
like you know it's just politics that's all it is and people get the thing no one will say
is that it's an expansionary system.
Like without the principle of expanding the money supply,
it will fall.
Like, so it's just like,
that's why it's,
you can say that it will always continue.
Like this isn't,
it's not mismanagement,
you know,
and it's like,
it's not like,
oh, we just,
every time,
you know,
the Fed chair goes to the podium,
the entire world waits with,
you know,
bated breath.
Like, what's he going to say? Oh, a quarter point up. Oh, a half a point down. Like, if we just get it just right, we'll, you know, we'll create abundance and utopia. It's like, no, you, this is, we are not, that's not, that's not reality.
You know, you're asking in the book. That's why I talk about like this, this modern, this monetary Gnosticism, this idea that the secret sauce that only I possess, the elites that they can bring about, you know, salvation and utopia.
It's like that's what our monetary, monetary, our monetary system is. You know, we have to trust this Gnostic elites with the secret sauce.
but it's just like I'm not going to step into the bubble like when you step into their little
sphere of enchantment you're already in the game and there's no there's no fixing it from within
there you know it's it's literally only the removal the stepping away from and say I'm not
coming in and that's kind of the that's what Bitcoin does Bitcoin is just I'm stepping out
I'm done I'm out of it I'm not playing the fiat game and it's like as this transition you
know, the transition between fiat to Bitcoin, you know, it's going to take a lot longer than I would
hope, you know, it's not a switch, you know, and it's going to get messy probably, but I'm okay
with that. You know, like I, if I know the principles, if I know what's, you know, driving
these things, like, I guess that's what, when you look at the Bitcoin price chart and, you know,
Like it's, oh, volatility, it's crazy.
And it's like that if you come at it from the economic lens, you're like, I don't understand it.
This doesn't make sense.
Like, why is this thing just, you know, appreciating over time?
But like day to day, it's crazy.
And it's like, well, like what I wrote in that book, like that's not my idea.
Aristotle recognized that ethics comes before economics and that it's literally the ethical foundation that drives economics.
So like economic activity, people exchanging anything with this presupposes fairness, justice, like all this.
So it's just when you understand, like, I don't talk about ethics and morality because it's just like fun.
It's like a different way. It's like, no, no, it's literally the engine that drives the economics.
So if you understand why, it's real simple.
Ethical money is more valuable than unethical money.
Like, that's it.
If you understand that singular line, that explains Bitcoin's price.
And you're like, oh, but it's up and it's down.
It's up.
Yeah, but over time, it's just like it's an energy transfer from the immoral to the moral.
And like, that's not going to change.
That's an immutable human, you know, that's part of our humanity.
So as long as we're still human beings engaged in economic activity, that transfer of energy is only one way.
It is a ratchet. And that's why I like I want people to, you know, to understand that.
So because that takes the risk out of it. And, you know, like.
I'm okay. Like I care so much about not handing off fiat and central banking to my children,
like that. This is the fight. This is my, what I'm going to dedicate my life to. And this is
what I'm trying to do and what I'm doing with the book and coming on podcasts and talking to people
and talking to the local communities and my neighbors. Like I care about them. I love them.
and I want them to not be abused. I want them to not be debased. And, you know, so it's just like
pushing that forward. Like, you don't have to be scared. Like that deer in the headlight look,
you don't have to, like, you can actually flip it around because we have the power.
Like, it's just like, because we have the ethics, we have the morals. Like, and as long as we stay
on that moral high ground, there's no, there's no way that it can, you know, sure, could it all
fall off the track and like the entire world, you know, be destroyed? It's like, sure, I totally
understand that. Like, but if it fails like that, I mean, I don't know, it's worth the risk to me
that like pushing for that, knowing that we have this asymmetrical moral advantage,
than just like, I don't know,
trying to just extract from other people
and redistribute and come out.
That's why I hate about just trading.
When we're just trading,
it's just like the gains are always somebody's losses.
But when we come together,
you have to create value,
I have to create value,
and we come together in an economic exchange
where we both benefit.
That's what abundance is.
That's how it's created.
Like it's both of our worlds are better.
Like abundance is just everybody's world getting better all the time.
But like, if I have to trade you something like, oh, I got in here and I think this is
overvalued and this and that, and I'm going to play all these games and buy and sell like
horizontally, it's like no more value is created in the world.
We're not both better off.
One of us will be and one of us won't be.
And it's just like, that's not the world I want.
I don't want to I don't want that world I want the world where we all can like win and to to
really drive home this point that you're trying to make about how immoral and unethical the whole
system is we just looked at um on the ground kind of taking out a mortgage taking out a loan for
holiday or whatever uh that side of things but then on the other side of things you do have the
central banks at play and you have the governments and a lot of people might not even if you're new
to the show uh you might not even realize the central bank is a private entity it is not part
of the government it makes its own decisions and they have their own stakeholders and therefore
they are working in their interests uh not for the people and never for the government and the way
that the government might raise money from the central bank is to sell them uh like a 10-year
a bond or something at a certain interest rate.
So the central bank would then, okay, yeah, sure.
We will buy that for a hundred billion dollars, pounds, euros, whatever.
So they give, they give that money, but where does that money come from?
It's just printed out of thin air.
And it's so like one thing extending me a mortgage for a hundred thousand pounds, a
different thing extended $100 billion to the government and then charged them interest on it,
which they can't pay back unless they extract it from you because they don't offer any value or
goods or services into the economy. They have to extract it through you through taxation.
But here's the darkest bit. They're doing that to pay back Central Bank that gave them the money.
but if the central bank can create 100 billion dollars whenever it wants why would it ever want
the money back even with interest so what does it want well it wants and this is where we come back
to the beginning where we talked about forever wars it wants mineral rich lands it wants assets
it wants real estate it wants forests it wants rivers it wants mountains it wants whatever it
is an insatiable beast that will extract everything at whatever means necessary.
And if we go back to it in the book, the quote, the axiom that money is power, this is what
they're going to keep using.
They use the power to get what they want.
And this is why we have whole continents being given the moniker of developing nations that
have been completely destroyed by the IMF and the World Bank,
which are just separate arms of the same beast.
It's just so disgusting and unethical.
And forces people like yourself to end up in situations
where you're on the front lines of an actual war,
where people are fighting over oil fields or gold mines
or whatever it might be.
It's just disgusting.
Yeah.
No, it is.
I think the other interesting thing, kind of like, when capital is raised in this manner, you know, we'll put capital in quotes, you know, but it makes, like, pain is actually a really good thing.
You know, I forget whatever the condition is for the people that can't feel pain, but like they don't have a very long lifespan.
It's like that feedback about how you are navigating through reality is really important.
Like that's high signal.
And when you feel the pain of loss, I'm risking, you know, I'm investing my money in you and you fail and that means I lose.
it like it means that i have to actually be careful and and discern what's like discern the
risk get a real good grasp and understanding about what the endeavor i'm trying to invest
into is you know like i i i don't people say oh if we can't print money then then no one will ever
invest and then business will stagnate and blah blah blah blah blah and it's like no they just
won't, you can't afford to invest recklessly.
You know like that what that what the no pain thing lets you do It lets you be reckless with your lending And it like in the book I think the stats what I quote I mean it like 95 of all startups fail within five years
And people will say like, oh, that just means it's really hard and it's super competitive.
And I'm like, I don't take it that.
I think that means that 95% of businesses shouldn't be invested in.
the people, the idea, like whatever they're trying to create isn't needed and, or they can't execute
it. Or they just like that. You're it's the, those distortions, like you can't understand,
you can't see the market. So you don't actually know where to allocate your capital to when
everything's just so crazy. You know, it's like, so you're, it kind of comes at us from all these
different angles. It's like, well, if you sit on your cash, you're going to get debased.
so you like it's the it's a shove into the speculation so you have to do something with
it well what should i do with it well i need to invest it in something i don't know what to invest
in but uh i'll just throw it everywhere i'm a i'm a vc i just will you know the whole idea is like
you you invest in like 20 different things and the one pays out and it's like that's really bad
batting average like maybe it's a better way is to allocate the capital and more you know use your
brain and and actually discern where it needs to go and what like i don't know that's just like the
i don't know the the dgen speculative thing like that's why people like vcs do it with businesses
you know people do it with the shit coins people do it you know betting on sports like it's just
like if your life has so little meaning that there's nothing to worth to look further ahead
in and you're just going on that day to day and you're like well if i hit the if i hit the power
ball that'll change my life it's like okay well that's not again that like that's is that the best
way to allocate your capital is that the best way to like you know actually create meaning and value
in the world in your life and it's like no like that's that's you've led us this is the perfect
segue into Bitcoin treasury companies right here. And I'm talking about the pure play Bitcoin
treasury companies. I'm not talking about... I'm a small business and I'm saving in Bitcoin.
Yeah, that's completely different. Tahini's is a perfect example. A company that started out of
Canada and using a monthly profit to buy Bitcoin.
Ali, who was running the restaurants, was listening to podcasts while he was doing the
washing up for like five hours a night, just listening, downloading, downloading, download.
Oh, click.
Right.
Let's take some of our profit, which we have spent energy and expertise.
Created value.
Creating value.
And we have abundance.
creating food, engaging with our customers, getting the feedback, giving them what they want,
and working hard, let's just take that profit and buy Bitcoin and put it on the balance sheet of the
company to protect us from the monetary policies of today, which we've just been discussing.
And Saylor even quoted Tahini's as an example, as an inspiration. And that was his original play,
$500 million sitting on the balance sheet, losing value every single day because of the reasons we were just discussing.
That was then put onto the balance sheet.
Every month, profit would follow.
Now, five years later, it's a lot more sophisticated than that over at Strategy.
Now, fast forward to today, we have pure play Bitcoin treasury companies being spun up out of nowhere,
using venture capital money to buy an existing company,
a shell company that's already listed on a stock exchange
so they can get to IPO very quickly
and then start offering stocks and shares to retail,
which is always the last to get there.
Even if you are part of like the first tranche,
there's always a huge amount of money,
money in air quotes,
this VC money that is being just thrown at these things.
Now, my question to you would be around this, because I've been thinking about it a lot.
And I'm sure people have seen my tweets.
A lot of the way it's been explained to me, almost like the cope method, is they've built a bridge for the trapped fiat money in the traditional system to bridge across to the Bitcoin rails.
And this is how we win.
We're Trojan horsing the whole fiat, and they're coming for it.
And I don't think we're really asking the right questions.
First of all, financial engineers built that bridge,
not structural or civil engineers.
Financial engineers, people on Wall Street are building these bridges,
and they know what they're doing far better than anybody
that's spinning up these companies does.
Who's the bridge built for?
Who's using it?
Who's charging the tolls on that bridge?
And finally, my thought is, well, are we Trojan horsing this fiat monetary system?
Or are we validating it?
Where do you fall on that?
So I think that that, so like most things, like if you pick up from the book, I think it's a little both, you know.
and it it really comes down to the individual and how what their intention and what they're
trying to do what like what is the purpose and the function that you're trying to achieve
um for for my own uh you know when when i was talking to my broker you know i have you know
some small little you know retirement stuff and it was just like uh you know like well what can i
do with this? You know, that was kind of when, uh, like, uh, MSTR was, you know, kind of coming
around and I was looking at that and I was like, okay, well, they're doing things like, I can't,
what can I do with this money? I can't do anything with it. Well, could I buy MSTR with that? You
know? And I asked them at my brokers like, oh no, we can't do that. You know, what do you mean you
can't do that? Like, uh, just our, uh, you know, not named companies or whatever, but they're just
like we don't do it we won't we won't touch it it's like it's just a ticker you can't buy the
ticker like nope we won't do it so it's just like you know that's trapped capital you know that's
money that i couldn't even put there if i wanted to and it's just like so like that is a a real
thing like a person is trying like legitimately has trapped capital like putting it into a uh
a bitcoin treasury company to get exposure to bitcoin i think that's fine that's a perfectly
valid play um but if you're trying to trade like that it's a it's are you are you trying to save
are you trying to get bitcoin exposure because like you don't want it sitting in just fiat
like if if that's what you're trying to do i think that's a perfectly valid play but if you're trying
to win a trade where you're going to necessarily like where there will be a winner and a loser i'm
going to rug i'm going to dump on somebody i just want this thing to i have a sale price i have a
strike price or whatever you know like if this thing two and a half x's i'm out and i'm just
taking my fiat you know like you're playing you're playing an extractive game and that's that's just
degen so if you're going to degen under the bitcoin logo i have uh even more like i i have a
little if you're going to degen on shitcoin or fartcoin or whatever you know stupid coin you're
going to do that's fine are you going to pump apple stock or tesla stock or this like that's a
that's a little different but like trying to do that under the flag of bitcoin i think is a little
uh even more it's a little more degen to me because it's playing off of the association like
Like it's slipping in unethical things and you're trying to camouflage it in ethics.
You know, the reason Bitcoin is valuable and does what it does is because it's moral.
So then you're going to say, look at this moral thing and I'm going to degen underneath it.
Like that I have a problem with.
Like I and if you I feel bad for the people that that do that, that get into these.
Well, I'm going to go buy a whole bunch of this or I'm going to go all in on that.
It's like, well, do you actually know what you're doing?
You know, like, because if you think about it for a second, like, you're still thinking
in fiat terms.
If you're going to get rich by selling your stock, by selling for your fiat, like, that's
not what Bitcoin is about at all.
You know, Bitcoin is about stepping outside of that, that Gnostic bubble, not playing
fiat game.
Like, if you're going to play a fiat game, I don't have any sympathy or empathy for you
when when you you get crushed you know uh and i mean the thing is as well like you highlighted a
point here it's trapped capital um but trapped capital for who like that again that the big
marketing idea behind it is like the x amount of trillion dollars in the bond market so yeah well
you got all the pensioners over here that are getting their out you know that their faces
ripped off for like a half or one and a half percent on a 10 year 20 year 30 year bond blah
blah, blah, blah. So now you offer them this opportunity where they can get 10% with preferred
stocks. Hang on a minute. I don't think a pensioner is sitting there thinking, damn,
I need some exposure to Bitcoin right now. The only people that are thinking that way
are the existing Bitcoiners and are probably using the pensions. By the way, the pensions that they
have saved over decades of work is now being put at risk. Sure, they're taking the risk on,
but this seems to be the dumping ground. So you've got the initial pump, the VC money is in,
and the best dumping ground in this whole territory is plebs pensions. And that's where I'm really
kind of really struggling to and any and if even if like the bond theory is correct then pensioners
bond like you're just dumping on them because oh yeah but that's fine bro because now they're
getting six percent rather than the you know net rather than what they were getting before and
they don't have the appetite for this kind of stuff that's why they buy bonds like you know
it's uh i don't know man it's it's a very very strange landscape out there right now and like
you it's all i i it feels icky to me that it's all going on under like the so-called bitcoin banner
yeah i mean the the the economic side is not something that i'm i'm like vaguely familiar
but i care about the principles like when i did dip my toe into that i'm trying to focus on the
principles and what's driving these things.
And, you know, is X company doing good or bad as a BTC company?
I don know I don have it I don know what they doing or what they actually offering But in my head it just like it really what is their denominator If they a business that is creating a product offering value creating value in the world and they saving the value that they create in Bitcoin I think that totally above the board
just like you're talking about the guy, he runs his restaurant, creates value, creates an abundance,
puts that value, that abundant value into a monetary object that is Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin is
the best. That's one of the other things people talk about. Am I too late or am I too that? Like
even if Bitcoin was 10 billion fiat dollars, you know, a coin, what better monetary object is there
to save in none like so that that's that's the reason that's the principled reason why the fiat
price is irrelevant it doesn't matter like yes number go up catches people's eyes and they're
like oh that's a great like that's a symptom of the moral money outperforming the immoral money
but like it's just if you just ask if you're thinking about monetary objects and where do i
put the value i create it's like well where are you going to put it you know and right now the
answer is well put it in the house put it in an appreciate like any real asset it's like or you
have this this literally this maximally potent monetary object like that's where i'm gonna that's
where i'm gonna put the value that i create in my life i'm gonna put it in that because i want to
preserve it i want to keep it i want to be able to use it and uh you know just step away step out
um so now we get we're gonna move on to uh something as well um that i think people will
find very interesting everybody knows this maxim hat tip marty bent fix the money fix the world
uh but after reading uh your book uh and i tweeted this and i tagged you in on it uh you know the
epiphany uh that you had and that helped me get to is we're using the word fix in kind of the wrong
context here because the money's not broken right people it's been designed this way it's not broken
that's that's one big wake-up call there's nothing to fix because it isn't broken you don't fix what
isn't broken and this money system is working perfectly as it was designed by and again get
back to red symphony go read it because it's all in there how they did it uh and by what mechanisms
and by what uh disgusting and evil ways that they brought this in um you know that's where you get
It led down very dark rabbit holes.
But look, it's working.
It's working, designed by the people that wanted to extract as much value and human energy as they possibly could.
They couldn't have formed a better system.
And hats off, Paul Wahlberg.
You pulled it off on Jekyll Island in 1910.
but when we say fix the money fix the world uh i now think of like the word fixed to begin with
there is fix the money to 21 million fix it and you know no mission schedule
yeah yeah no i i that's a the word fix you know fix the money fix the world it's like people only
think of it as meaning repair because we often use broken. When you just say, hey, fix it,
we're going to nail it down. It's immovable. It's not going to move. It's going to remain the same.
It's immutable. That's what fix means in that context. But when you throw around the rhetoric
of broken, that's what invites this idea of like, oh, it just needs repair. If we just get the
interest rates right, if we get the right people in the Fed chair, if we get the right politicians,
if we get this or that, we can repair this monetary system. So where it functions for us,
and it's like, that's, that's, that abandons the morality of, of the monetary system. And when you
realize that its function is to control people, its function is to extract from people. Like,
that's why i i don't like like i understand why the the rhetoric of broken money like caught on
because it does like it grasped at this like surface level truth where you're like something's
kind of off like isn't money supposed to be working for us isn't it supposed to help us
isn't it supposed to like but this is aristotle's great like insight when he's you know the way he
breaks down money and he's like, what is money's final end? What's its ultimate function? You know,
like beyond medium of exchange, like, can I give this to you? Yes. Okay. It works. You know, like
that that's like, it's final end is, uh, what it ultimately does is it connects human beings
socially at scale. You know, like right now you and I are talking with words, you know,
we're communicating, we're connected through these words, but you don't talk to society at large,
but you do with money. You like money is how we communicate at scale. So it's like,
it's money's ultimate function is to, is, is to, to dictate the manner of how we're connected.
We're either in cooperative, persuasive consent, you know, like we're either connecting through
that or we're connecting through uh uh uh coercion and we're extracting and it's like that's uh those
are the two different ways we connect you know like like i said uh i made like the little image
but it's just like you know when you see a man chained to a plow you know would you say oh those
chains are broken they're not working for him like that it's like no those chains are doing exactly
what they're supposed to do. They are harnessing his productive energy to put it into the plow
to the dude driving it. Like the chains aren't broken. So don't say like, that's what the money
is. The money is how we connect. So you have the guy that's chained and the guy that's driving him.
It's like, they're connected through that money. And it's like, I don't, I want to, that's an
immoral system and we got to reject it. So when we say the money's not broken, or I guess to say
the money's broken, we're abdicating or we're surrendering or we're leaving the moral realm.
And we're saying it's just some like amoral neutral tool that we're just, you know,
and that's like completely misses the point. It's a rejection or denial of money's final
ultimate end. So it's like, that's, I like, I 100% agree with you when we talk about fixing
in that like nail it down type of thing.
But like to think about it as repair is just, is this wrong?
It's not true.
And that's kind of what I want to push back
because it's out in the binocular.
You know, everybody says it.
You scroll through your tweets and you'll be like,
the money's broken, this and that.
But they say it's broken and we need to fix it.
It's like, okay, well, what do we mean by that?
And like, how about let's not surrender the moral high ground?
Because if we keep, if we put it into this like,
oh, it's just a technical problem. We can solve it. That actually lets our opponents off the hook.
Morally, they have to justify debasement. Hey, Mr. Politician, why did we hand the keys to the
central bank? Hey, central bank, who are you to debate, to print the money? Who are you? Are you
not just a human being like me? Are you some God? What are you? Make them make that case.
Make them justify why they're debasing the money.
You know, like, because we win that battle.
Hey, justify enslavement.
You know, you can't do it.
Like you win that fight 100 times out of 100.
So it's just like, why don't we play to our strengths?
You know, as a tactician in the military, you would never abandon the high ground.
You know, when you're planning an engagement, you're looking at the terrain and you're trying
to create the biggest asymmetrical advantage for yourself. Like I would never walk off the high
ground and then go meet my opponent on level footing. Like that's just, that's dumb. You know,
like I don't want to, to do a 12, 12 round boxing match that we win by decision. I just want to
knock you out in the first round like that. And the justified debasement question is that like,
So, you know, in a weird way, I'm asking people to sacrifice the macro for the moral.
You know, I go on Twitter spaces, I look on Twitter, and I think people, if macro is what got you to Bitcoin, I'm all for it.
Like, there is that angle.
I don't care how you get to Bitcoin.
But oftentimes, when people are talking about charts and all this stuff, it's like, look how smart I am.
You know, it's not about actually being effective.
It's not about how do you convince the people that don't get it?
You know, like, I guess my hypothesis is everybody that could have gotten Bitcoin through the
macro has already got it.
So let's stop beating the dead horse.
You know, let's go to meet the people where they're at, the people that need it the most,
you know, the people that don't understand all this stuff.
Like, how do we talk to them in a way that they can understand what's going on before
them?
Because they're important to bringing them into the fold.
getting them into this fight like that's how we take down central banking that's how we do it we
need everybody to to come on board with this so i don't know that's i mean you're not day trading
the m nav neil i mean come on that's what i am not to do isn't it i mean came for the came for
the austrian economics and philosophy and state the day trade the m nav bro like what the fuck
is going on i just don't know and bitcoin per share all of this new freaking vernacular that's
being thrown around just to like woo wall street in a little bit more and it uh it's and all now we
have derivatives all over all over bitcoin and um because wall street shuts down at weekends
you know that there's a market gap on a monday morning when all the order books are coming in
trying to catch up because Bitcoin trades 24-7.
It's just wild.
And to your point about communicating value,
I had this discussion the other day with,
we've made friends with our local beef farmer here,
grass-fed beef, and we can just buy direct from him.
And that's great.
And I've been, I give him cash and I tell him like,
this doesn't feel right.
This is not a fair exchange.
You have worked so hard.
And you've put so much love, energy and care into that animal.
And I know what that animal meant to you.
And I know what it's going to mean to me and my family and how it's going to give us nutrition and sit around, enjoy the meal and whatever else.
And I'm handing you debt discharging instruments as payment.
That doesn't feel morally or philosophically right to me.
I would...
much rather pay you in the best money that humanity has ever discovered and start moving
forward and communicating like this value across space and time and across like the rest of the
community. But it's a slow, slow creep, people. Keep at it. That's all I'll keep saying. Just
keep at it. Just keep delivering the touch points. I think that a good litmus test, you know,
to ask every Bitcoiner, do you care more about million dollar Bitcoin or onboarding a million
new families? You know, I think the answer to that question-
Number of people go up, Neil. That's the metric.
That is the metric.
Not number go up. Number of people go up. That's all that matters.
Because like how you answer that question will tell you whether or not you're looking in the
right direction or not. And in a weird way too, you know, it's like the whole node.
I have a hard time believing that we only have 20,000 some nodes.
You know, like if you onboard a million families and you tell them, hey, this is how you become sovereign.
This is how you protect yourself from debasement.
You know, get the Bitcoin, run your node, do whatever, like home mine, whatever, like be an active.
Like if you teach people how to actually use Bitcoin in the way that protects them, like add a million nodes, you know,
like that then it dilutes the the whole like who cares if one person's running this or that like
you got a million more nodes you know like to me that kind of just like it doesn't make the
i i like the friction i think it's good to have pushback and like because that's what
i mean that's what this this that's what bitcoin is you know consensus people working through ideas
Like, I think this, but I think that like, and pushing on each other.
And like, I think that's all healthy and good.
But like what one person says shouldn't really matter that much, you know?
And if you 20 X, 50 X, a hundred X, the amount of nodes, you know, like it doesn't really
like each individual node doesn't really matter as much in that sense of like, what is the
actual consensus and what, like, and in a weird way, it gives everybody more of, so it's
like it's diminutive, but it's also makes you more important because you're like, hey, I am
actually, you know, contributing to this. I don't know. It's kind of a kind of a weird thing. But I
just I think the more people, the better, you know, like that's that's what I'm focused on.
And that's why I wrote this book. And that's why I'm like, I'm not a real public person. I don't
like being out and doing stuff like that. But this is the fight. And, you know, to be a leader,
you have to actually get in front of people and you have to sacrifice a little bit of privacy
to be seen to be heard and uh you know those are risks that i'm i'm think are well worth it so
yeah for sure and with you on the notes yeah more notes and hopefully if anything that's going on
right now this this whole debate that's been going on for like almost three years at this point uh
like February 2023 was when it really started.
So two and a half years,
that's when it started in earnest.
But like heating up now to the,
coming up to October when you're going to release version 30.
Yeah, I'm, again, regardless of what software people run,
we're always accused in a Bitcoin space of,
yeah, you fucking guys, you just live in an echo chamber.
what really bring an opinion and i want to see it put it on twitter see what happens
it's the loudest echo chamber i've ever heard and it shouts back opposing opinions pretty much
every single time so it is that does build a healthy ecosystem um yes you have far edges of
it where people can be you know very hurtful vitriolic and uh you know unhinged to to to say
the least but it is a debate that needed to happen and it is happening and goodness knows where we'll
be in two years time uh but anyway that's enough of that i wanted to get on to the last thing about
But you kind of touched on it earlier about people do engage with politicians.
Again, I find that, you know, that's not for me.
I cannot go and engage with those people in good faith because I just know, like, the whole system behind it, how rotten that is and how that's orchestrated and how you have the invisible hand, whether you call them the lobbyists or the internationalists.
elite, whatever, it doesn't matter. There's a layer there that none of us have ever been exposed
to or can put our finger on. And there's stuff going on behind the scenes. And the people that
we think are in charge certainly are not in charge. And to go and debate them in any way,
I just find a huge waste of my time and energy. Other people will push back and say, well,
they're the very people that we need to change and blah, blah, blah, and push for regulations.
And again, we're not here for regulations, right?
We're here for natural law and to build a whole new world on a sound money, a good money standard.
You literally got good versus bad there, right?
You've got good money, bad money.
Fiat money is bad.
Bitcoin is good.
So people can read religious kind of connotations into that as well, good versus evil.
so with the questions that you have
that you said like if you're going to go face down
a politician let's say you're at your local
town hall or you want
everybody can see you falling across the floor
there
you just stand up now
there'll be no edits listeners
so
So you've got a list of questions here.
Have you ever tweeted them your list of questions to like the political class Because if not I love for you to do it and i certainly retweet it and and hopefully get people thinking about it but so it actually funny my my tasks
what i did once i published the book was i tweeted at every single house representative and senator
uh trump vance like everyone i'm just a nobody but i tweeted at every single one of the american
politicians all of our officials and ask them essentially in some way shape or form hey justify
debasement um and it's really weird i had to vary up the the question so uh x didn't like think i
was a bot and all that so it's just like you know but the the idea is this like i'm i'm one person
and no one responded all right and i didn't i i knew no one would i knew i would be brushed away
But I wanted to at least say and show like I can put it to you.
I will put that question to you.
You are supposed to be representing me.
Justify these things and you can push me aside.
That's fine.
But when enough people ask these questions, you know, you can't push us all away.
And that's what I think wakes people up the most when they like everyone assumes.
that the government has my best interests at heart.
And it's like, that's not true at all, but it should be.
And it goes back to this idea,
like there is a dynamic relationship,
a necessary relation between individuals and the collective.
And we actually can't exist.
Like individuals don't exist, you know, without social connection.
Like we're social creatures and we exist in reality together,
which is uh i didn't choose to do i didn't choose to exist now and neither did you uh so those are
in a sense non-voluntary relations that we exist in reality together uh even though we can choose
to talk and all that but like we exist in reality together um so it's like we have to mediate that
you know and and some of us are stronger and more powerful than others you know adults are more
powerful than children. So again, like society's task is to mediate those dynamics and, uh,
starting from your family is important. You know, how you lead your kid, like what you're doing with
your children is amazing. And as a, an exemplary, uh, example or whatever, uh, for people to look
at and say like, look, you can raise your children up in this and you don't have to push them,
you know, like they have inquisitive minds and they want to learn about the world, like
teach them teach them how to be uh like start with your family and then you know those as we
go bigger and bigger layers you know of your community your neighbors your local municipalities
like those are opportunities for leadership too and there's nothing stopping you know uh a city
from saying like wait what okay we're individually protecting ourselves from debasement but like what
do we want to do collectively? Like this city, like we can, we can move ourselves to a Bitcoin
standard. We can do these other, like we can grow this up. Like that's how grassroots things happen.
And, you know, Hey, in, in America, at least, you know, those cities and those counties and the
state, like you can make that happen. You can generate momentum. And it's like, when the,
since we do exist in that reality, what I think is really cool is so number, number go up might
catch people's eyes, but prosperity and abundance catches people's eyes too. You know, if you get a
group of people living on a Bitcoin standard, working together, creating abundance, having
families and life and filling their lives full of meaning, like, and you're sitting over here in like
fiat land where you're just getting hollowed out and you feel empty. You're like, what are they
doing over there? You know, and we're sitting here saying, hey, the water's warm. Come on. Like,
Like, like that's how that can happen.
Like it, I have hope.
Like, do I think it's likely that we can save or fix the entire political structure to make
it, you know, like, I don't know, but I know in principle that it could happen.
You know, the principles are aligned so that at least people can like assert themselves.
Like you are really powerful.
Like being a human being, being a moral agent is, is very powerful.
like you're not this diminished husk of a of a of a man like you you you can assert yourself and
stand for something and uh i think that that is contagious you know like we see this with the
bitcoin community like people saying oh i'm full of meaning and it activates me and i go do and i
start building all this stuff and it's like when we build the life that attracts people to want to
come and build to like i i think that's how this thing takes off you know i'm gonna read i'm gonna
read the list of questions, but the quick paragraph before it, for those people that are
getting inspired and they do want to tweet at their politicians or send emails or whatever,
you've got a great little template here. So forget party lines, forget red and blue,
forget hollow promises, rehearsed soundbites and a polished deceit of career politicians.
If they cannot answer the bell, they are unworthy of our support, our votes and our attention.
If they dodge, deflect or regurgitate the same tired economic platitudes, they reveal themselves what they are, complicit.
The fundamental truth is not complicated. Our politicians are no better than us.
They owe us answers. And here's the list of questions.
Listeners, jot these down. You can just fire this off straight at them.
How do they justify blind trust in unelected bureaucrats?
How do they defend the invalid logic of debt money How do they explain the fraud of fractional reserve banking How do they justify usury against their people How do they rationalize the need for non dollars Who are they to debase our money Who are they to enslave us Who are they to enslave our children Why should we tolerate an unjust monetary system I mean fire those off to Christine Lagarde guys See if she gets back to you because she won Or Augustin Carstens at the
BIS. You think he's going to get back to you? No. These people are so far gone. But if you want to
go grassroots, take that list of questions to your town hall and just even print it out and hand it
around to everybody that walks in and then ask them stand up at the mic and if that's if if you
feel empowered to go and do that neil here has given you like the it's perfect yeah like in the
military you know leaders are held accountable you know you make decisions you're held accountable
and when you know what those questions do is they make the m they make the implicit explicit
it, they have answers to those questions. They just won't say it to you. And when you ask them
that, you get, you get a, you, you know, they'll either recognize like, I don't know this. I need
to figure it out. Those are good points. Or like they can answer it in that way, or they'll answer
it like, Oh, uh, blah, blah, blah. I I'm just slipping around, you know, paint them in the
corner, you know, you paint a leader in the corner. And because a leader really should,
a good leader doesn't need to be painted in the corner. They actually are accountable to you
up front, you know, but we don't live in that system. So I don't know. I don't place my faith
in like, you know, in any particular people, any particular man. But I think I have faith
in us as a people, like the abstract people, like we are human beings and we can see these things.
And like, uh, the, the idea that you don't have to fight, you know, for what's right is not like
that, that has not born history at all. You know, it's constantly, you know, a struggle to,
to stand up and to, uh, protect, you know, and, and live the values that you want to live. Um,
That idea of living for something greater than yourself is really powerful.
That's kind of like that whole dynamic of the speculative, my life's meaningless, so I might as well gamble it away because it doesn't matter at the end of the day.
It's like, well, no, your life actually has great significance and your actions impact not only you, but others.
And I think that's what makes the family actualize people a lot because they realize like, oh, my actions impact my children.
My actions impact my spouse.
My actions impact my community and my children's friends.
And Bitcoin, it does that.
Your actions as a node runner impact the community.
Your actions as a user, as a holder, as a stacker impact the community.
like and that just makes you something so much more like it actualizes all that latent potential
that is inside you right now and uh i don't know i just you know i'm well we don't need the
politicians but i think you know you got to hold them to account one way or the other and because
like uh we uh well we didn't even touch on the family but um you know we know that the the attack
on the family comes from you know different fronts obviously the monetary system is one of
them taxation is another pushing both parents out into work and uh like the constant worry about
money is always at the forefront of every family's mind so you can't think soundly you can't spend as
much time with each other as possible uh seb bunny does a great job in his book the healing cost of
money going into all of that it's um so if people have been and i should say the education system is
an attack on the family as well taking children away from the family from as young as you possibly
can into state indoctrination camps. Let's call them what they are. So yeah, we're up against it.
But I want to leave it on a positive note. You know, I think we both share a faith in the human
spirit. And we we know, you know, there's something much bigger at play here, rather than just,
you know, stacking as much Bitcoin as you possibly can for your Lambos. Like that, that's,
that's not what anybody's here to do and you know think think much deeper um about the questions that
that you raised there that we just went through and you know i've got to throw the the final
question at you and if you had one last orange pill left to give to somebody who would you give
it to and why oh my i don't know one one orange pill to give
I don't know who the most influential person in the world would be but that that would be the
the print the principle would be I would want to give it to the most the most whoever had the most
reach the most connection so I don't know maybe that's like a pope I don't know like even non
non-catholic people know who the pope is like I don't know I I wouldn't give it to the president
I wouldn't give it to Trump because he's not as influential as we would like to think,
or at least as he would like to think.
Like all those other, like it would be somebody kind of on the outside that connects and touches all.
But I mean, people in South America, Africa, Asia, everywhere, they know the Pope.
They might not know Trump.
So maybe him.
I don't know.
All right.
Cool.
Well, there's no wrong answer, my friend.
So don't worry.
Don't sweat it.
Really appreciate it.
important thing is that you take it as an individual yes yeah exactly neil modern chains
uh where can people find the book what's the best way to interact with you and will you be
give us the handoff are you going to be on any other podcast people can go check you out and
uh will you be at any conferences giving speeches what what's what's next um so anything and
everything that I do is just going to be at modern chains.com.
It that that'll have links to, to the book. You can contact me too.
I don have it set up yet to where like through through any service that you can get the book with Bitcoin But if you message me I will hook you up and we make it happen I go out of my way to help anybody make a transaction
you know, value for value. I'll do anything to make that happen. So if someone's interested in
that, just hit me up and I will make it work. But, you know, I mean, I've done a couple podcasts,
the Robert Breedlove he was the the first thing that I did and like uh I was really uh really
grateful to to have that opportunity um because like when you just come out on the scene from
literally a nobody you know it's like I I don't have a platform but I have a message and I want to
to like I'm not important but the message is um so it's just like pushing that message I'll talk
I will talk to anybody. I will do anything just to help get this message out because I think it's that important.
I went to our little local Bitcoin meetup and gave a speech there.
And that might be on the it's probably the most it's probably the most me.
You know, like I'm not really a fire from the hip type of guy.
I really like precision and making the logic and the principles and getting all my ducks lined up before sending it out.
And the speech was kind of what I was able to do that and condense the entire message in a really impassioned, rhetorically powerful and simple to that.
Like my whole thing is I'm trying to make everything easily digestible for anybody.
I don't want to use jargon if I can help it.
I don't want to use technical language if I can help it. I want it just like anybody can understand because, you know, moral recognition is greater than economic calculation.
You know, we like if I ask you to pick out, you know, your mother's face in a lineup, you don't think about it.
You just know that that's mom, you know, and that's what I want people.
I want to leverage that recognition so that people can just say Bitcoin.
there you go um so yeah i don't know i'm i'm here for the fight and i don't i don't i don't care what
what what form it takes uh or how bad i get whacked down um that's what i'm here for so thank
you thank you for having me yeah my place uh thanks for coming on thanks for everything that
uh you've done for bitcoin and uh we'll continue to do i'm pretty sure you're gonna hit the podcast
scene and just get this message out to as many people as possible and uh yeah thanks for coming
on really appreciate it thanks for having me well there you go guys thank you so much for listening
and thank you again neil for coming on we went down some rabbit holes there i think like the
most difficult one we tried to tackle was uh usury uh this one is quite
people get a little bit caught up on it because uh you know in true in a true capitalist market
and a free capital market where actual capital is being used and loaned out and you've got skin in
the game as the loaner uh yeah there would be an interest rate on that but it wouldn't be controlled
it wouldn't be chosen by someone else it would be down to you and you would be able to look at
the the the free market interest rates uh around you like what are your peers doing
what are other companies doing and other founders and entrepreneurs and deals that are being cut
you'll be able to use whatever information is available to you at that time to come to some
agreement privately not wait for for somebody to tell you what the interest rate is going to be
And not only that, as we discussed here, everything is under coercion in its current state.
Nobody signed up to be part of this monetary order that we find ourselves under,
all of these policies and rule changes and whatever else.
So you have coercion at play and that completely negates any kind of free thought or open market.
It just doesn't exist because everything is built on this foundation of pure bullshit.
it and finally uh you know the the money the money's coming out of nowhere as neil and i were
discussing it's coming out of nowhere like you go in and you get a a loan for a new car that money
is just turns up in your bank account like the bank is legally allowed to do that legally not
lawfully that's where people get tripped up they're legally allowed to do it under the jurisdiction
of that set of rules but it's not lawful and that's why it's usury because the money didn't
exist in the first place there was no energy tied to that money at all even if you've got half percent
on this incredible loan deal you think you've got it's usurious it's criminal it's disgusting
it's vile there's no other word for it because the money didn't exist
and that person that under is underwriting that loan is just just
they're just getting money for nothing out of you because you're the one spending the time and the
energy uh so yeah i i hope this one hits home thanks again neil for coming on please support
the show sponsors you got relay you can stack your sats with across europe r-e-l-a-i dot c-h
paywithflash.com get over there and check them out you can start accepting bitcoin
please take self-custody very seriously get over and get the bitbox02 and come join us on orange
pill app i shield the conferences at the beginning of the show but if you've never been to a conference
it's a life-changing honestly it's a life-changing momentous occasion being in front and around a
bunch of other bitcoiners so there's a bunch of local events you don't need to do the big
international ones anymore there's a lot of local events popping up so yeah Orange Pill App will
have all that information for you so get over there hit the link in the show notes
catch on the next show thank you so much for listening