All right, we are live. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Thank God for Bitcoin
podcast. My name is Jordan Bush. I'm the executive director of TGFB Media, which exists to help
Christians understand and use Bitcoin for the glory of God and the good of people everywhere.
Today, I have the immense privilege of hosting Eric Sammons on the podcast today. Eric, welcome.
Thank you very much for having me, Jordan.
This is exciting.
Yeah, this is, I mean, there's just a number of different things that I,
different ways that I found your work over the past few months
and then just happened to get reached out to, you know, by your,
I don't know if it's your publicist or somebody who's helping you,
you know, advertise the book that you're, that we're going to speak about at length.
So maybe for those who don't know,
maybe you can kind of introduce yourself and what you do.
Sure.
So, I mean, as you mentioned, I wrote the book Moral Money.
And basically right now I am the editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine, which is a 43-year-old magazine that comes from a Catholic perspective.
And it talks about politics.
It talks about what's going on in the Catholic Church, about culture, things like that.
It's a very conservative Catholic magazine.
I've been doing that for about four years.
For a number of years, so my background, undergrad, was actually in systems analysis with a concentration in economics.
And I worked as a computer programmer and my own software development company for 15 years.
But then I decided to get a master's degree in theology.
And since I'm Catholic, I can't be a priest because I'm married.
So I was like, okay, well, I did want to put that knowledge to work.
So I actually ended up working directly for a bishop as his director of evangelization for five years down in Florida.
And so that was just a matter of trying to evangelize.
I mean, in the Catholic world, a lot of times evangelization means trying to evangelize the people in the pews.
I mean, a little bit sad, but it's true that sometimes people who are in the pews don't really, I don't want to say don't know Jesus, but like, you know, I kind of, sometimes you kind of feel like that.
And so I was trying to help them do that.
So I've done a number of things, as you can tell, over the years.
But I start off in technology, move to more theology and working for the church.
And that's kind of what I'm doing now with Crisis Magazine is trying to help our readers to really understand what's going on in the wider culture, in politics, in the church, and just kind of help them along with that.
Love it. Yeah. And I'm here on your website, ericsamons.com. You can go find it there. You also got your master's degree in theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville. You know, you got your regular degree from Miami University.
You've written for a bunch of websites, including OnePeter5, Catholic Answers, CrisisMagazine, AntiWar.com, TheFederist, CatholicVote, and Bitcoin.com.
So you've had articles kind of all over the place, ranging a variety of topics.
Again, you are one of the few, the proud, the people willing to discuss Bitcoin and theology.
So we are friends in that regard.
So I guess kind of I want to know, first of all, how did you get into Bitcoin?
what was your initial level of interest in Bitcoin and has that you know the interest in it changed
over time deepened lessened what kind of has that process looked like for you yeah I really I had
like my backstory before I heard about Bitcoin even predates Bitcoin itself because in the early
2000s I was just I was working like I said as a software developer back then but I really had a
real interest in economics and I was reading a lot of Austrian economics uh Tom Woods I was reading
him. He's written a lot of good stuff about this and some others, Peter Schiff, others.
And I really came to the conclusion that our fiat money system was immoral. Like that was like a
big deal to me. That was like, when I realized, oh my goodness, this is not just like, it's not
just bad or whatever. It's actually fundamentally immoral. And so when I, and I, and I thought,
okay, gold is moral. And I was like, this is great. I found a moral system, a moral monetary
system. The problem though, of course, was Amazon didn't take gold. Nobody got it. And so I was like,
and I kind of felt like in my mind, and this was probably like in the 2000s, maybe early 2010s,
I was like, this is too bad that we have a fiat system that's very efficient, very useful,
but it's completely immoral. And then we have a gold that is very moral, but honestly, in today's
world, it just doesn't work. And so I just was like, oh my, I thought maybe we should go back
the gold center, whatever. And then I was listening in, uh, 2013 to a podcast. Tom Woods was
substituting for Peter Schiff. Yes, there is irony in this, that Peter Schiff show. And he was
interviewing Eric Voorhees, Bitcoin OG. And they were talking about Bitcoin. First I had heard about,
I might've, I can't remember for sure. I might've heard of it, like read kind of glance at, but
that's the first time I was like, I listened to the podcast. This was like December, I think of
2013. And I immediately was like, this is it. And I immediately, okay, this is what I'm looking for.
I bought some Bitcoin at Coinbase. I set up an account at Coinbase. I was like,
I'm a conservative kind of fuddy-duddy. I'm a boring guy. Mt. Gox is a little too much for me.
I mean, thank God, because two months later it went down. So I was like, I did not want to give
my money, send my money to Mt. Gox. And even then I was like, you know, Magic the Gathering,
I don't know what that is, but it sounds kind of shady. So I'm like, give me Coinbase. It seems
that brian armstrong seems like a legitimate guy i'll give my money to them and so i i bought a
little bit of uh bitcoin and i kind of this is funny i bought my first bitcoin a couple days
for the infamous hodl post at bitcoin forums no way because he posted his hodl you know the drunk
you know hodl thing and i saw that live i remember seeing that come up because bitcoin's price is
going down and everything so i got some and i really though i didn't fully understand bitcoin
at the time. And I really saw it much more as a medium of exchange than a store of value.
And I spent a lot of Bitcoin. I have spent far more Bitcoin than I own today. I mean,
just because I got a Coinbase, like they had a Coinbase card back then, debit card that would
spend Bitcoin. I had a couple of those. I would buy, this is my most kind of infamous purchase
in my family. My daughter was graduating from high school, I think it was 2015.
and I wanted to get her a beater car
just because she needed something to drive around.
So I went and I got like this $2,000 car
and I sold two Bitcoin to buy it.
And so like, and the car broke down in a month
and it was just completely,
I got completely scammed basically.
And I got, so like it was two Bitcoin
for a car that lasted a month.
And so, you know, but, and I got really into like,
until I was 15, 16, I got into a lot of altcoins
because I was, and I was definitely on the big block side of the block size war at that time.
I got very involved with Dash. I'm not sure how many people are familiar with that one. It's kind
of fallen off, but it was the number three cryptocurrency for a while behind Bitcoin and
Ethereum. I was like very involved in that. I was a master node owner. I was a trust protector,
which is like an official, their official organization. So I was one of the leaders
of the Dash community.
And just over, and I was like,
and I love Dash because it was very fast
and you could buy coffee with it,
you know, the whole thing and all that.
And so-
I remember, just to interrupt you,
I remember Ben Swan, I think,
was advertising Dash back in the day.
Yep, I remember.
I remember working with him.
Yeah, exactly.
So, and you know, I was writing for Bitcoin.com
at the time for Roger Ver,
and you know, very much on that side.
and i never i never though thank god i never just i never got rid of all my bitcoin i did sell a lot
of it for uh crypto altcoins uh you know ethereum dash all that stuff and honestly i didn't do i
didn't do badly on those coins or anything like that but i always kept some bitcoin because it
was kind of like it's your first love you can't have like it's the whole reason i'm here i'm not
going to get rid of it. We lost Eric. I'm back. So that 2017, you know, it was a good year for
everybody who was involved. It was a good year for me and everything. Uh, but I kind of waned
in my interest between like about 18 and 20, just because the old coins, I just started realizing
there's some problems. I had not yet really, you know, re-embraced Bitcoin as a, as a true,
what it really was. And then I read, uh, you know, the Bitcoin standard. Um, I get, I can't remember
what year it was me, 1920, whenever that was. And then I started saying, Oh, things started coming
together in my mind a little bit more like, Oh, I wasn't really fully understanding Bitcoin
completely. I got the basics, but I understand really what it is. It's, it's real value proposition.
And so it all clicked in me. And I really kind of went back all in Bitcoin sold most of my, I think
I sold all of them eventually in the next couple of years. So all my altcoins for Bitcoin. And so
it really was just a matter of, okay, now I understand. I became a Bitcoin maximalist. I
hopefully consider myself not a toxic Bitcoin maximalist, but you never know. We all are on
some level probably. But yeah, so that's kind of how I got here was understanding like it took years.
I mean, so 2013, I started, kind of went off the path. I think a lot of Bitcoiners do this. You get
started then you start seeing the alts they sound they look a little more sexy they look a little
more interesting the siren song yeah exactly you fought for it you know and maybe you get wrecked
maybe you don't but either way you realize oh man what and the funny thing is my son he got involved
with me in bitcoin he was only like how old was he nine i think when he first got you know i first
got him into it and he went into the altcoins with me as well and i i had to tell him finally
like, dude, we got to get out of this. And so he's like, yeah. And so I think he, he might,
you know, he's a young guy. He might still be hoping for a hit on one of them, but he kind of
is with me on that. So it's been kind of fun to do it together with them.
Now that dad wrote a book called Moral Money, you know, it's going to be kind of one of those
things where he was just, he was just home. He just got married a month ago and he was just home.
He's eating those out of town and he's like, dad, I got to get a copy of your book. Right.
He goes, I get a free one. I said, dude, you're like an OG. You get a free copy of
the books. So, so yeah, so he's, he's actually orange pulled a bunch of people when he was at
school. He went to Franciscan university as well. And, uh, I remember the first time I went to go
visit him there, people, all his friends would come up and he asked me about Bitcoin. Cause he
had orange pilled them early on, you know, to get them and they knew I knew about it. So that was
pretty fun. That's funny. So yeah, we are, we're actually recording the morning, uh, that it came
out. It was a release that BlackRock announced that they have made more money from their Bitcoin
ETF than from their S&P 500.
Wow.
I had not heard that.
It is absolutely nuts what's going on right now.
So kind of, I mean, where did your, again, I haven't read the book yet, full disclosure.
I've heard good things and would love to read it at some point.
I think there's actually a copy in route to me based on talking to you.
I hope you're so.
But kind of, why don't you kind of give me a background on where, you know, what was the
impetus for the book?
And then kind of what are some of the sources that you're building on to kind of make your
Yeah. So I actually wrote a self-published book in 2015 called Bitcoin Basics, 101 Questions and Answers.
And it basically just was like, OK, this is an intro for Bitcoin. People don't know about 2015.
Of course, nobody knew anything about it. And so I was like about a year ago, I thought, you know, I really want to update that.
The technical information is still correct, but obviously it's 2015. Like I just explained my own journey.
And so, like, you know, I definitely wanted to change a number of things about it.
And so I kind of thought that my wife and I were kind of working on making it a little bit different.
And I thought, you know, I don't think this is what I want to do because there's plenty of books out there that explain Bitcoin now.
It's not 2015.
I mean, literally 2015, the only thing we had was Andreas's book, which is Mastering Bitcoin, which is like real high level.
So I was like, I'm trying to make it lower level.
And I was like, what is the, and it kind of came coming back to the fact that the morality of Bitcoin was very important to me.
and it's not something that's often talked about in the Bitcoin world.
I think it's talked about way more now than it used to be.
And I just thought this is something I really want to,
I don't think anybody's written a book on this, that the, the morality,
and there's, there's a book on the, I have it sitting right over here,
the on ethics and it, I can't remember what that one's called, but the,
is that the ethics of money production?
No, that I'm rereading that now. It's a Bitcoin book, but anyway,
I felt like there's not one that really tackles the idea of Bitcoin being more money. Here's the
thing. I have found a lot of resistance in the Catholic world to Bitcoin. And I imagine it's
probably true in the broader evangelical and other Christian world about the morality issue.
It comes from a couple of different angles, but ultimately a lot of it's misunderstandings,
But I've gotten, that's been probably my biggest pushback from my non-Bitcoin friends who are devoted to their faith. They love Jesus. They're good people and stuff like that. But they immediately kind of associate Bitcoin with drug dealers, with crime, or to just think it's like somehow not fair.
and or like you know you you make all this money you don't do anything you know all lots of different
and i was like okay i want to tackle this and i was like i just want to be bold and say bitcoin's
the most moral money ever created because that would get and and i do believe it i'm not just
saying it and so i that's kind of what was the genesis of why i was like i need to write i want
to write about this because i just don't think this is a uh angle that you see as much um and i
think it's needed for the christian world and in fact originally i was going to name it moral
money the catholic case for bitcoin but my publisher which is actually a catholic publisher
like wait a minute what you're saying in here isn't just cat isn't catholic it's not like
it's natural law it's like basic morality that we that we share even obviously all christians but
even non-christians like you know jews and muslims we share this and so my catholic publisher actually
said no drop the catholic from it i had catholic references in it that were like the catholic i
I was like, they said, no, make it because really this is not something that is, you know, the moral views that you're proposing aren't limited to Catholics.
So my audience for Crisis is mostly Catholic.
That's why I was thinking that.
I was thinking of them.
But they're like, no, let's make this a little broader because really it's not just limited.
Obviously, we share, you know, so much.
It particularly when it comes to basic morality.
We all believe thou shalt not steal.
Oh, it's like, you know, I think that was,
that's kind of how it ended up being just the case for Bitcoin
instead of the Catholic case for Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Yeah, this, I mean, I've greatly benefited
from some Roman Catholic authors on these topics.
I mean, your Guido Holzman,
who's the author of The Ethics of Money Production,
you know, obviously is a Roman Catholic.
And again, we were, I mean,
blessed to have him come speak at our conference.
Oh, really? I didn't know that.
Oh, wow. I would take on to that.
He's incredible.
Yeah, he came in. Yeah, the timing was crazy because he was going to be in the country anyhow.
He teaches at a university in France.
It was going to be in the country up in Boston teaching at the American Economic Institute for Research or something like that.
And so he was going to be there.
And so we just actually shared the expense of getting him here and was just, I mean, blown away.
to, you know, four years after we wrote
Thank God for Bitcoin to have him at our conference
and talking about the topic that, you know,
so impacted us in writing our book.
What's great about reading, I'm rereading,
I'm reading, you know, Ethics of Money Production right now.
And it was published in April 2008.
So just six months before Bitcoin released.
It's crazy.
And the best part is the line
where he's talking about electronic, electric money.
And he says, I don't think in a free market
it will spontaneously be a money
that's based on bits and bytes.
And I just started cracking up with that.
I'm like, this is great.
He literally wrote that months before Bitcoin was released.
And you wonder if Satoshi read that because he was very well read in the literature and everything.
And you kind of wonder because you know he was working on it already when it came out.
And you wonder if he picked that up at some point either before Bitcoin came out or during and just kind of chuckled like, well, now we have one.
Well, yeah.
Well, I mean, there's just – there's so many things, right?
I mean, are you familiar with Buckminster Fuller?
I don't think so, no.
So Buckminster Fuller was a futurist, and he talked about how ideal it would be to have a money that was backed by energy.
Somebody like, are you familiar with Wendell Berry?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
So Wendell Berry in his book, Home Economics, I have a first edition.
I started trying to accumulate first editions and signed ones as well.
So I have a first edition of his book, Home Economics.
And one of the, I think it's chapter three, he's talking, he's describing this back and forth letter writing that him and one of his friends, other farmer friends were doing.
And they were discussing the nature of currency and what the ideal currency would be.
And Barry's contention is that the ideal currency would be one that was backed by energy.
And I just, and that book was written, I think in 87.
And so I just was floored to think about, I'm like, there are so many brilliant people here who are not associated as economists or not, you know, at least nominally aren't economists, but who are thinking about these things and thinking rightly about them.
And so, yeah, it's just fascinating.
Okay.
So in terms of, you know, some of the, what approaches does your book take?
I don't have like a chapter.
What I do is I understand that most people don't understand money.
They just, nobody knows what money is.
still don't know how it works. So I really start off very much like, okay, what is money? I talk
about how money comes to be used. And I'm trying to basically, I'm thinking about the myths out
there of like state, the state production of money, things like that. So I'm talking about how
it happens naturally. And, and what happens is certain goods have certain properties to make
them better money than others. And so then I just basically am trying to introduce, and I introduced
the properties of money,
the seven properties of money I list.
But what I do is, and this is something
I haven't seen anybody else do this before,
maybe they have, but I haven't seen it.
I don just say there seven properties of money I say there two categories of properties There the usefulness efficiency category Then there the moral category So we have durability divisibility portability fungibility
There's our usefulness.
Good money has all four of those things on some level.
And then there's the other ones, which is scarcity, verifiability, and independence.
And I haven't really seen a lot of people talk about independence,
but I kind of feel like independence is one of the most important properties of money, of good money.
But those are moral properties, really.
They make a money more or less moral.
And so by kind of, I break all that down.
I'm leaving the reader on to say, okay, fiat money,
it just crushes those four usefulness efficiency.
It just is great at that.
Gold, it crushes those moral properties.
But if you look at it, gold's not so good on portability.
It's not even that great on divisibility.
I mean, you know, in modern times it isn't.
And then if you look at fiat, it's just completely fails miserably on the moral properties fiat.
So I'm leading them to, okay, guess what?
There is now a form of money that crushes all seven of those properties.
I even have a chart where I'm kind of listing and I give them like little rankings, each property.
And so it's kind of leading the reader to say, okay, you first have to understand what money is.
Because I know, I'm sure you get this all the time.
when you talk to somebody about Bitcoin for the first time,
you realize they have no idea what money is.
And if they have no idea what money is,
they're not going to understand Bitcoin.
And so that's kind of where I lead them to it.
And then I do have a chapter too,
just like how Bitcoin works.
I go through the technical on a high level.
I'm not trying, you know, I'm expecting them,
they could go research it more.
But, you know, so I explained what it is.
And then one of the biggest chapters I have in the book is,
I think it is the biggest chapters,
objections to Bitcoin.
And I just list, I don't know how many,
is like a dozen or more objections
and I just list it and then I answer it.
And I just go through it.
And I do have another chapter on other cryptocurrencies
because that's, I don't know how many times I'll mention,
somebody knows I'm Bitcoin,
like, oh, what do you think about Solana?
What do you think about that?
What do you think?
You know, what do they think about Trump coin or whatever?
I'm just like, oh my gosh.
So I just want to put it out there right at the beginning.
And I don't have quite as harsh of a view
of other cryptocurrencies.
Like my basic view is that 99.9% of them are just crap.
I mean, they're just, you know, either scams or just failures.
But there are some that might be interesting technical projects.
So if you want to judge them like you would a tech stock, I think that's fine.
I don't have a problem with that.
Personally, I think the blockchain is actually not that great of a technical thing for anything other than money.
That's the thing.
Yeah.
I talk to people all the time, and one of the ways that you can figure out that somebody doesn't know what they're talking about
is if somebody gives you the whole blockchain, not Bitcoin thing.
And thankfully, that is really kind of starting to disappear.
And again, I attribute that to Bitcoiners.
I think of guys like Jack Mallers.
I just had a tweet about this this morning.
The educational work that has been done by Bitcoiners,
whether it's Jack Mallers on CNBC or Jack Dorsey or Max and Stacey,
you know, like those guys, like just to educate people about their own monetary system, much less
Bitcoin itself and how it works and why it prioritizes the things that it does is astounding
to me. Like the level of discourse has been raised so far by Bitcoiners in just the popular
discussion. We're talking more about inflation. We're talking about monetary debasement. Like
these are all things that have entered into the national discourse that just were not being
discussed with any level of seriousness before Bitcoin. It is amazing. Honestly, I really credit
Seyfried Dean because of his Bitcoin standard. I feel like that was the, that was, it was for me
personally, but I also feel like that was a threshold. I remember a before that book and
after that book, as far as the discussion in Bitcoin world, because like, I remember the whole
blockchain, not Bitcoin. It was just because Bitcoin had a bad reputation on Wall Street and
in the business world.
So like if I say blockchain, not Bitcoin,
I sound like I'm really tech savvy,
but like I'm not looking at those weird libertarian types
or anything like that.
So I think that's very true.
Like I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt
to founders of other cryptocurrencies
that they're just not well informed.
And so they might be trying to do something
and it's like, okay, God bless you.
You can try that.
But my own personal, like my own investment is,
I'm not going to invest in any of them,
but maybe, you know, maybe one of them will work. Maybe somebody will find some usage
of cryptocurrency outside of just as money that does something. But I mean, we've seen what's
happened. I mean, like Ethereum in terms of Bitcoin is just like, oh my gosh, that's a death
spiral. And I got a buddy who's still super Ethereum. He's a good devout Catholic guy and
he's a great guy. I love him, but he is still super into Ethereum. And I just am like, dude,
what are you doing? Yeah. Well, and this is, again, this is, I'm totally willing to grant the
same, you know, the same thing is like, you know, Hey, some of these might be interested as technology
projects or something, but that none of them require a token. Like the point of the token
is to allow you to have unaccountable wealth. Like that's like, so if you had to go out into the,
if you had to go out into the market and raise VC funds, like on the basis of the, you know,
people having interest in the product, that's one thing. But what a token allows you to do is just
get all of like way more money than you'd be able to get under normal, normal constraints
with none of the oversight. And so it just, it presents and creates a horrible incentive cycle,
uh, instead of incentives for, for the people who are doing it. So one of the ways that we
describe it is just basically the idea that like the fundamentally though people, you know,
founders of these projects that, that have tokens, their objection to the federal reserve is not that
it exists it's that they're not on the federal exactly they're not able to create the money
i mean the truth is there's a certain beauty with meme coins because they don't they're not trying
to fake anybody out it's a clear cash grab and like everybody knows it's a cash grab and everybody's
just trying to be one of the people who get some of the cash but or the the the music stops and so
okay i mean i i personally think there's a certain level of immorality in that but like at the same
time at least it's honest it's out there at least it's saying i mean i saw so many of those projects
back in 17, the ICO craze and all that.
And the truth, the reason I'm a little bit,
I'm not quite as anti because my work with Dash,
they were legitimate, sincere people who really believed,
and I was one of them,
who believed Dash was a good technical project
that could really change how we do internet commerce
and things like that.
Now, I look back on, I know we were fundamentally wrong,
but there's been something wrong and being a scammer.
Like, you know, we were, we were wrong and, and, you know, and, you know, we found out we were wrong.
I mean, I think Dash is like a 300th highest now or something like that.
They were like third.
So you just find, you can be, yeah.
Like there's, there's earnestly wrong.
So you could, you could think about them.
I mean, here's an example, right?
You could think about them like disciples of John the Baptist, right?
Like disciples of John the Baptist were following John, you know, you meet, uh, who's the guy, uh, oh gosh.
in the book of acts he like worships 30 he follows john the baptist until he kind of was it simeon
uh simon the magician no that's not simon no it's not simon yeah we're showing our biblical
illiteracy here it's no yeah it's the guy and his wife oh yeah i didn't know if they were both
struck dead yeah right oh i'm forgetting the name after yeah no no but no no it's no that's the way
it's the one where he's like a powerful speaker oh yeah i can't think of what it is anyhow that's
going to kill me. But yeah, it's just the idea of like, you can, you can have a certain amount
of information that's true. And like what you guys had, like you guys had a real understanding,
real desire, but it was a partial understanding. And so that just led you to do certain things and
to prioritize certain things. And so, yeah, I think you definitely have to have, I definitely
think it's easy for, again, you can have the same type of thing happen on a theological level as
well, right? There are people who hold theological positions innocently, earnestly, because they've
but they've been told them by people they trust.
And so they're holding them.
And so just to absolutely blast them
as if they're, you know,
the worst heretic who ever lived,
that's probably not, you know, warranted
and probably isn't the most helpful way.
You have to learn some humility
because that was me
because I remember I hated the Bitcoin.
There wasn't a lot of them back then,
but the Bitcoin Max was back then.
I hated them, hated them all.
And I just thought they were the worst people.
Like in the black says words,
all the small blockers,
they were just toxic and the worst people.
and it was a humbling experience to finally say,
well, they were right though.
I'm not going to endorse every action that somebody does.
It shouldn't be certain ways,
but the point is that they were right and I was wrong.
And you just, the evidence just starts building up
and building up for filing.
It took me a long time, but eventually I was like,
okay, they were right, I was wrong.
I just need to move forward with that.
Yeah, and again, I mean, good on you for having the humility
because again, it is so hard.
And you get people, especially, I mean, especially somebody like Roger.
I don't know Roger personally, but like, I just can imagine it would be so difficult
when you have built your reputation, built businesses, you know, based on your firm belief
that things are a certain way.
And like the reputational hit, the pride hit to have to come back and be willing to say,
hey, I was wrong.
Again, like that, you'd want to think that, you know, people would still be willing to
do it but the reality is that it's the thing is like the personality of roger that led him to be
bitcoin jesus early on is the same personality it's like a it's like a greek tragedy that is
leading on where he is now because early on he had to go up against everybody the whole world was
like you're you're crazy you're an idiot and he had to say no i'm gonna stand right here i am right
you all are wrong and he was right yeah but then high disagreeableness is can be both that's right
And then he kept doing it, though.
I read hijacking Bitcoin not that long ago.
Yeah.
And it just was kind of sad because I remember living through it.
Like I said, I worked for Bitcoin.com briefly,
and so I was working for Roger and stuff.
Not direct as a middleman I worked for,
but Roger, his Bitcoin was being sent to me to pay me.
And just reading that, just seeing how he basically is taking everything
the small blocker said in the worst possible light.
The worst possible light.
And it's like, come on.
I know some of them were kind of jerks about things, but like you're acting like every single one was a bad actor who was who was like working for the CIA and stuff like that.
That's just not that is not what happened.
They were sincere people who believe me.
There's some people who are infiltrated.
I don't know.
Sure.
They were sincere people who believe what they believe.
And you're a sincere person who believes you believe.
And you just simply disagree.
It's as simple as that.
And you ended up being the market has said you were wrong, if nothing else.
And that's kind of what it was for me was the market.
that really told me because i didn't want to believe that they were right and by 2020 i think
it was around there i was like yeah the market's telling me something i just gotta listen to it
because bitcoin keeps going up and these other all these other coins are not bitcoin cash is just
dying and and it's not like the market's always right in the short term but in the long term it
does figure things out pretty well it's true yep so um so i guess kind of what what has been
some of the, I mean, I know it's early days in terms of getting response, but like, what has
been some of the response to the book so far? And kind of what are there other things that you've,
that have come out of it where you're like, oh man, I wish I would have addressed that,
or I wish I would have. I feel pretty good about what I address, but it is funny because, you know,
when you release a book, you go kind of on the interview circuit. And like I said, my publisher
is a Catholic publisher. So they publish, they're the biggest Catholic publisher in America, in fact,
and they, and that's, what's that? Do you know Matt Pinnett? Oh yeah, I know Matt.
Yeah.
You're with Matt?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Matt, I met him at the, we were, I was like, he was, we were interacting about his, the
Catholic.
Yeah.
I wish I meant to go to that, but I wasn't able to.
But like the point is they're, they're very tuned into the Catholic world.
And so all the Catholic radio stations, Catholic podcasts, stuff like that, they reach out
to, Hey, would you like to interview this guy?
And, you know, and so I've gotten literally interviews from like, I just last week, God
bless them.
There's this old, older couple, they're probably in their sixties or something.
and they didn't even know what Bitcoin was hardly,
but they wanted to interview me.
And so they literally start off like,
can you explain Bitcoin to me?
And I have no idea what it is.
And so there's a real challenge there, of course,
because it's like a 20 minute interview.
Like, what am I going to say?
And so like, I found what I-
You feel like the mosquito in the Judas colony.
You're like, where do I start?
Exactly.
And so like, I'm just like,
what I've learned to do is I just kind of tease it.
I don't actually explain it.
I am like, if I tease it,
if they're interested, they'll get the book or they'll go online, whatever. I don't care.
You know, they'll find out more. And so that's why I kind of tease it by starting off with the
idea of the money you're using is actually deeply immoral from a, and if it's a Catholic station,
from a Catholic point of view, it's deeply immoral. You don't hear this because most people
don't understand it, but it is. And Bitcoin is a replacement, a way to have a moral form of money.
And I almost just stopped there and I just wait for their follow-up questions. Cause then they say
like, wait a minute, can you actually hold the Bitcoin? Is it physical? All those type of
questions. So that's been very interesting. It's kind of like shifting gears on these interviews
because then I come on Tom Wood's show or on your show. It's like, okay, I got an audience that
understands money already, but I've enjoyed it a lot. My sister, I got her into Bitcoin a couple
years ago. She gets mad at me. She goes, why didn't you tell me this beforehand? I'm like,
Beth, I wrote a book about in 2015. What are you talking about? I said, well, yeah, but you should
have pushed me more. I'm like, oh, come on. And she, she and her husband, they're a great Christian
family and, uh, you know, evangelical Christians and they're great people. And like, I finally got
them to orange pill a couple of years ago. And so, but she just, and she hasn't, and she just
listened to my, uh, the Tom Woods one. I told her about that and she doesn't listen to anything I do
or anything like that. Cause she's my older sister. Why would she listen to her little brother?
She goes, she goes, Eric, you actually sound intelligent.
like that's the best compliment again my older sister said i found intelligence so
so it's been enjoyable um it's it's a tough cracking into this world of like yeah i knew
and like here's the great thing so the the publisher the head of the sophia institute
which is the publisher he's a big coiner okay and so i knew he was and so i proposed this book to him
and he is he's got a talent he knows a book if it's gonna hit or not i proposed books before and
He said, nope, that won't work.
And he always knows ahead of time,
okay, is this book going to sell or not?
And he literally said to me, this one was,
I have no idea if this one's going to sell,
but I don't care.
I think it needs to be out there.
And so there we go.
And so I feel like it's doing well so far,
but this is the most challenging one for me
because the Bitcoin world is got,
they don't really look at always that way.
I mean, other than you, there's not many.
And in the Catholic world,
they're not thinking about Bitcoin.
So literally it's like a book with no audience.
It's just like, you know, so I'm trying to, I'm working hard to try to bring it together to make it.
In fact, I was, I told the publicist at Sophia, she was like, oh, where's some Bitcoin podcasts you could get on?
And I was trying to think of ones I said, and I listed you first.
I was like, okay, this one is a 100% fit.
I'm like, these are going to be stretch goals.
You know, let's try to get them because I can kind of, sometimes you can gather from what a host says.
Like, I think they're probably Christian.
Like, they don't say it necessarily, but you're like, I think they might.
So I, you know, reach out to them.
So it's been good.
I feel like it's something,
it's trying to break into a world
that, you know, isn't really that tapped yet
for Bitcoiners.
And so I, and the big thing I'm getting back
is a lot of, I mean, a lot of people who read it
are like, I don't even know how to get started.
What do I buy?
I mean, what do I do?
So I got, I'm thinking about making some videos on that.
But another thing is they want to get their church
to accept Bitcoin.
I got my parish, you know, years ago to accept it.
We have a young pastor.
So, you know, he was open to it and stuff like that.
Although, yeah, I set it up.
I want to change how he set up.
I'll just put it that way.
But the point is, is that like, and so they're asking like, what can we do?
And honestly, it's like, you know, it's just like Wall Street trying to get a company.
You know, there's a reason why when Microsoft proposed it to the shareholders, it was like 98% or whatever said no.
it's going to be even higher percentage at most you know uh churches out there it just yeah and
so like trying to get people and then there is real issues and i'm talking to some people about
this like okay what kind of custody are you going to do because if it's self-custody you can't have
the pastor owning the keys you know you got to have some type of multi-sig type of thing
is it maybe better just to do a custodial like with river or something like that which isn't
that's ideal, but like river is like set up for that. And so like, there's all these issues that,
you know, you really got, and I don't think there's a clear cut way. I know river has accepted a lot
of churches. Like I see Alexander talk about that a lot. Yeah. We, we, I mean, we, that's who we
recommend for the, for especially people who are just getting started, who, again, they, they're
like, they recognize that they need Bitcoin and they're, they're really just trying to help their
church get started. Like in their case, again, it's kind of like the, there's what they're asking.
And then there's like what they really will ask in six months once they have a better idea.
And so we just recommend people use River to start out with because, again, they get you like the tax help.
All the handholding.
It's like enough handholding to get you down the road to help you if you need it.
And then, again, River is going to also – they're going to want you to take custody once you're ready.
And so there's educational resources.
Yeah, and that's – for years I recommended Coinbase just because that's what I was used as familiar with.
but I was getting more and more.
I felt more like I needed a shower
after going my Coinbase account
because it's like a casino.
It's like,
I just was like getting more and more.
And finally,
I just cut ties with them about a year ago
and went all in with River because,
and I like some other companies,
not just River,
but I like the proof of reserves of River.
I like the fact that they clearly,
they are advocating for self-custody.
And so like they're real Bitcoiners,
in other words.
And so like,
that's who I've been recommending more and more
because it's just like,
and so,
But that a real challenge of getting your church to accept Bitcoin donations because there are real issues involved real usability issues because you don know The pastor might know nothing about anything Maybe he knows something but like you can you don want it to be that a that a major scandal waiting to happen if a pastor is the only one who has access to it You got to have
like some type of shared, I don't, it depends on the church, if they have a finance community,
whatever they have, elders or whatever, something needs to be so that there's multiple ways in which
the Bitcoin can be accessed securely. So yeah, it's, that, those are the kinds of things that
I like these conversations coming up because it's, you know, it's, we weren't talking about
that 10 years ago. I know that. A hundred percent. Yeah. The other thing with river, again, we're
just, it's becoming a river podcast. We're just showing river. Uh, but, uh, but no, Alex Leishman
had a tweet, I believe it was a little over a year ago where it was something, something to the
effect of, uh, diversity is not our strength. We are a company that's built on like name three
things. And one of the last things it said was in on Christian values and just within the, within
the tech sector to invoke Christ in any way. Oh yeah. I just, I, my eyes bugged out of my head.
And so I was like, all right, all right, we have to, we're going to exclusively recommend.
I just assumed, this is one of those guys I assume was Christian based. I didn't see that
tweet, but I've seen that, you know, I've been following him for a while now. And like, I just,
I just kind of gathered, okay, he's got to, you know, but I didn't know that for a fact. And I do
know some guys who are at river and they are so it's kind of like okay it's got obviously it's
friendly if nothing else so yeah exactly and that's i mean yeah i really am just grateful we
could say a whole bunch more so i mean yeah we we do work with them if you're if you're listening
you can use uh promo code tgfb so river.com slash tgfb and that will help you get on boarded there
and help support what we're doing as well um i want to kind of just i don't know if there's is
there any other things or you're like hey i've been i know of somebody who's written books like
there's things where you're like, oh, I wish they would have asked me about this. Or is there
anything that comes to mind where you're like, I haven't, I've done a few interviews. I haven't
gotten to talk about this aspect of it that I think for either from the book or just even just
from the, on the topic of Bitcoin and morality more broadly. One of the things that I think is
a real moral question that I hear sometimes is the, the idea, the struggle a lot of people have
the hurdle that Bitcoin isn't real because as Christians, our faith is very incarnational.
God became a physical man. We're not like Gnostics who believe that he kind of appeared as man or
anything like that. We actually think he became flesh and blood in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
He was actually died on the cross. It wasn't just a fake thing. And so reality, you know,
this physical world is very important for Christians. We're, you know, that's a lot of
the heresies over time deny that. They try to make it look, we're just souls that just happen to
have a body. No, we're body and soul. That's how God made us. And so we're not like the angels in
that way. I mean, we really are, the body isn't like a periphery. And so, and that's all true.
We all believe that as Christians, or at least we should. And so like, then we talk about Bitcoin.
There's nothing to hold. There's nothing like gold. There's a beauty in it. And I'm still a
gold fan. I've never like went away from gold. There's a certain beauty in that it has this
value of like, you know, as money has this usefulness and it's morality, but it's also,
oh, I can hold it. I actually have in my hands gold. And you and I both know we can hold Bitcoin,
but we do kind of, for most people, I had to put that in parentheses. We hold Bitcoin.
I can't put it in my hands. You know, my book, you know, I kind of was questioning whether or not
we should do the whole coin on the cover because I knew the audience might not realize that that's
just a metaphor or whatever. But like at the same time, it's like, and so that I think a lot of
people struggle with that. And so I, and I, and I do address it in one of the objections in the book
about that because I have to hurt, I've heard Christians tell me that they're just against
Bitcoin for that reason alone, because they can't trust it. And so like, I do think that first of
all, the more time it goes on, the less it's going to be true. Cause usually the older you are, I'm
out, I'm kind of an old guy. I'm in my fifties, but like I've been a computer programmer. So like
the digital world has been very real to me for a very long time. But I think honestly, like one of
my tax I go on this one is simply that, again, think about what money is. Money is simply that
lubricant so that you can live in the physical world. So you can buy your house, your physical
house. You can buy physical clothes. You can buy food. You can do things like that. You need a
lubricant to make that happen. So you're not trading your bananas for somebody else's cows
or anything like that. And so ultimately, does that lubricant have to be a physical thing if in
the world, the best way to buy those physical goods is online digitally. And so really, I,
that's kind of been my, because I've struggled with answering that for a long time. And so
in writing this book, I was thinking, okay, what is it? And it's kind of to say like,
there's no, there's no intrinsic need for money to be physical. There is a need for us to live in
the physical world. I mean, we had, in fact, I'm, as somebody who is online a lot, I'm often
advocating to myself and others, go outside, walk on the trails, go out and do whatever it is you do
to get outside. That's very important that we experience God's creation directly and we appreciate
it. But money doesn't have to be quote unquote real in the sense that it doesn't have to be
physical. And so I think that's one of the things that I know is a hurdle for a lot. They might not
me express it like that clearly, but I can just tell their real problem is that they can't hold
it. And so they don't really trust it. Yeah. Yeah. One of the, and again, I, we encounter this
objection a lot as well, uh, for a lot of the same reasons. And I think one of the, again,
just some neat, some like helpful context that I, I often add that I found to be helpful in terms of
reframing the, the discussions, cause like there's this, there's this perception that physical equals
better, uh, or it's a more advantageous. And one of the things that we talked about was, so I,
and we didn't get to address this beforehand before the call. Uh, but I was a missionary
and church planter for almost seven years in Uruguay in South America. And half of our church
members were Venezuelan immigrants who had to flee the country on foot, uh, in order to,
to try to get to a place where the government hadn't destroyed the money and, and, you know,
try to make, save money and send home, send some home to their families who stayed in country.
And so in their case, the tangibility of something like gold or silver or even cash would have actually worked against them because they were both government sanctioned thieves in the form of soldiers waiting on the borders who knew that people were leaving with their valuables.
And then also just run of the mill common thieves who were doing the same thing.
And so, you know, the fact that you would have, if somebody would have had a bag of silver or gold that actually would have worked against them in helping them accomplish the goal that they needed, which was to move and start over.
And so I think that just adding some of that more global looking context is something that because of the Christian heart for evangelism and for international missions, I found that something that really appeals to people and that really kind of resonates with their desire.
And so if they see this as something that, if they see Bitcoin as something that enables the spreading of the gospel or just humanitarian aid to move in ways that other things that are, that is limited by other currencies, I found that to be a helpful thing.
Yeah. And I also think, honestly, I think this is more subconscious, but I honestly think people,
they think of like intrinsic value and they literally think in their mind's eye of something
inside the physical thing. Like they think of it as like, I'm not saying they consciously think
that, but I honestly think it's like, okay, this has intrinsic value because I can hold it. It's
like inside it's intrinsic value. Well, there's nothing inside Bitcoin and there's nothing, you
know, so like it must not have intrinsic value. And of course there's the whole problem of intrinsic
value in the first place. But, but the point is like, when people think of, is this valuable,
they think of the physical like aspects of it that makes it valuable. And it's really that,
that's not what money is though, of course. So that I think is, is one of the biggest hurdles
I've seen among Christians. And it comes from a very legitimate view of the world,
the importance of the physical. So I'm not, I don't want to like discount that,
but just explain why in this case, we're talking about money. It's not, it's not the same as what
talking about whether or not, you know, we should value God's creation.
Yeah. Well, the other thing, the other thing that you, you get people who,
they kind of react against the idea of the thing that motivates them to bring up the inherent value
or intrinsic value is just, some of it is just pushing back against the idea of like moral
relativism where like all, everything is relative. And I'm just like, okay, I agree with you.
people have intrinsic value like people because they bear god's image like they have intrinsic
value independent of what they do independent of all these other things but in terms of things
under the sun that don't bear the image of god like the value of anything is is subjective given
the the circumstances even something i have a footnote in my book where i'm i'm talking about
in the book about how basically values 100 subjective is determined by the person and i put
a footnote and I say, of course, I'm talking about things you can legitimately buy and sell.
People have an intrinsic value of images of God. And because that's why you can't,
you should not be allowed to buy and sell them. So it's funny you said that because I was like,
when I was writing the book, I was saying anything subject to value. I was like, oh,
there's going to be at least one Christian reading this. And I'm like, wait a minute.
Are you saying like, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. People have intrinsic value.
That's the only thing. We're kindred spirits in that regard, Eric.
Eric. Okay. So Eric, if you don't have anything else, do we have other things to talk about?
One other thing. So I just happened to be on the internet the other day. I found an article
and I'll just share. Let me see if we can share the thing here. Let's see here.
There it is right there. Okay. So I happened to be on there and I came across this article that
said Catholics are rapidly losing ground. And then the other day when I was preparing for this,
uh, oh, can you see it? There we go. Okay. Uh, I was preparing for this interview and I saw, wait,
this article is written by Eric Sammons. And I thought, what are the odds of that? Uh, and
basically the big kind of takeaway from the article, uh, is based on a Pew survey was that,
uh, basically, uh, for every, let me see if I can find the number. There you go. For every
a hundred people who joined the Roman Catholic church, uh, 840 people are leaving. Um, so that,
Again, those numbers shocked me.
They shocked me in part because I'm someone who probably is as frequently online.
Oh, no.
I lost Eric.
I don't know what's happening.
I apologize.
There you are.
Yeah, you pulled up my article.
Oh, you're good.
How much did you?
You just pulled up my article and said,
cats are losing ground.
So, yeah.
It's kind of the big signal or the big takeaway from the article is that
Basically, according to Pew, for every 100 people who are joining the Catholic Church, there's 840 leaving.
I've thought about this issue a lot.
First of all, I was surprised by the article because as somebody who, I wouldn't say terminally online, but someone who's online probably more than the average person, I see voices like Michael Knowles, who I actually had the privilege to go on his show to talk about Thank God for Bitcoin a few months ago, around a year ago.
I see guys like Matt Fradd. I see a number of guys who have increasingly large platforms. And so if one were to only judge by some of these online platforms, you would assume that the Roman Catholic Church is growing significantly.
You would also assume based on guys like Jonathan Peugeot that orthodoxy would also be growing like crazy.
And yet when you actually look at the numbers, despite these one or two outliers, what's really going on in terms of the large numbers is actually telling a far different story.
So I would kind of love to kind of hear your perspective on that article, what motivated you to write it other than the obvious.
It's something I've been studying for years now.
Like I said, I was a director of evangelization for five years for a diocese, which, you know,
what a bishop rules in the Catholic Church overseas.
And so, like, I very much have been studying these numbers for over a decade now, about
15, 20 years now.
And I've seen that they've all been going the same direction, which is down for a very
long time.
Since, like, before, really 2000, they started.
And what I noticed was, like, in America, it's most, it's all religions.
It's not just Catholicism, but the one I'm concerned about, because that's what I am, is Catholicism.
And so I saw this piece today.
I was like, I want to write about this as well.
And I will tell you, I got a lot of pushback in the Catholic world because of what you just said.
Like, wait a minute, things are looking good for us.
And the truth is, they're right and I'm right.
In the sense that, okay, we have in the Catholic Church, we've had for a long time a real, what's the word?
like weakness at our church level, what we call our parishes, in that there's a lot of just not a
lot of enthusiasm for the faith. There's like poor education of our young people. And so what happens
is like your average Catholic parish, when you go to it, it just is not something that's attractive
to people. It does not really preach the gospel strongly. It doesn't like stand out. It basically,
a lot of times the sermon each week is, okay, go out there and be nice. Well, that's not going to
attract anybody. It's like the same problem with mainline Protestantism. It really is the same
thing where it started, we didn't go quite as woke as they did, but we did do the same problem of
let's go ahead and conform to the world, not say anything controversial, not push people.
And that's still very widespread. It was very, it started in the seventies really and eighties,
and it's still kind of widespread, particularly with, because, you know, priests were older and
things like that. That's the case. And so that's why, think about if you're growing up as a Catholic
and that's your experience of Catholicism, yes, so you're a young man. Once you get out of the house,
you have no desire to go back to that. Because why would you? You don't, I mean, I would say as a
Catholic, like the underlying truth is so important and all that. Okay, fine. But it doesn't mean it
got to them. It doesn't mean they understand it because all they heard was to be Catholic means
you be nice. And it's like, well, I can be nice without being Catholic, with all the rules and
all the, you know, the obligations. Let me just go ahead and just be nice on my own. So it really
was this kind of like relativism of you can be Catholic if you want or you don't have to be,
you can be wherever you want. You know, it doesn't matter if you're atheist, as long as you're nice.
And so that really kind of crept in. However, I will say over the past few years, particularly
since COVID it's happened. There has been a real resurgence in the Catholic church of a lot of
voices, a lot of people. And so what's happened is a lot of the more traditional and conservative
parishes, they have grown like crazy. Like my parish is like super traditional. We actually
celebrate the mass in Latin. That's how traditional we are. And so we have grown like wildfire in the
past five years. So it's funny, I'm writing this article about how everybody's leading the Catholic
church. And at the same time, my own parish is growing like crazy. And so I think people sometimes
have a hard time accepting both those things, but I think they're both true. And so my personal
opinion is, my prediction, I should say, is over the next 10 to 20 years in the Catholic church,
we will see the overall numbers going down, continue to go down. But what we will see is
the fervency, the faithfulness of those who are in the church, the percentage will go up a lot.
And I personally think, I don't want anybody to leave. I'm not like trying to claim, I think it's
always a sad thing. But ultimately, I feel like that's a base for future evangelization, because
now you have your members where they are committed, and they're really serious about it. And this goes
from the bishops, the priests, and the people in the pews. That, I think, is a better step
towards getting to where we want to be. So I think both are true. But I do think I want to wake up
Catholics to this idea that if you're online a lot, you might think, oh, Catholic Church is going
crazy growing but no there are a lot of people still leaving out the door and we got to remember
that because they're not known like when a parish brings we the way we do it in the church is when
somebody becomes catholic they go through a process and in the easter they're received into
the church and what what we see that every easter it's like exciting oh we just had like our our
parish had like 12 this year we had like about 20 the year before and so and we're not that big of
a parish so it was good enough get you all excited and they tell their stories like oh this is great
we had this one guy he was an atheist and he became
Catholic and now his sister who's an atheist is coming in next year and so
you get excited you didn't see though there was no party there's no
like news about the fact that all of a sudden people who've been going just
don't aren't going anymore their kid went off to college and he
never he just left the faith those are things you don't hear
and so like I think and those numbers are a lot greater still so that that's
kind of in a nutshell what I was talking about there was
And the Pew numbers coincide with everything else I've read.
There's no, some people were trying to dispute the numbers.
They weren't accurate.
I'm like, ballpark at least, it's what I've seen for 15 years.
So I don't see any reason to doubt their numbers at this point.
I think another one of the things that I see is, and I just have been astounded because,
I mean, you look at, you think about what we've heard for a long time is,
And it comes from like, there's a healthy seed of truth in it is we want to create like a, we want the faith to be accessible to anybody.
And like, that's a good desire.
Jesus used agrarian, you know, parables like that were made to be understood.
And at the same time, you know, and so a lot of pastors, a lot of churches have gone that route where we're trying to make things very practical, very easy to understand, very short sermons.
Yes, very new person or very visitor friendly.
But then what you also see is you see Joe Rogan, who has three-hour, four-hour podcasts.
And you see Netflix streaming where you have eight-hour series and you have all these things.
And so there clearly an appetite for people and an appetite and a willingness to to engage with very difficult nuanced content that basically over the course of hours weeks whatever
and there's an appetite for it and a willingness and a demand for it that's there, I feel like, more than ever before in some days.
And so it's kind of flying in the face of a lot of these, you know, of like one true, again, it's true that like you ought to want to do this
for the sake of children and for the sake of new people.
But the reality is that people won't always be new.
And if you always treat people,
if you dumb things down always,
then there's not going to be that same sort of intellectual challenge
that is demanded within the call to discipleship.
Yeah, I mean, if you look at Jesus too,
like he used these parables and everything that anybody can understand.
But there were times people went away from him and he was just like, okay.
like he was very challenging and i mean obviously they end up killing him for it and so like you
know we have to there's a story that i i tell that happened to me the years ago it kind of made it
all click in my mind my daughter was in uh she did fast pitch softball and she's very involved
then she was on like a good team stuff like that and we we were i remember we were out of turn at
one point i saw a sign that was saying how uh tryouts for this new travel team and we were never
like super crazy into that because i just felt like it took away from our family i was having
kids i can't like be doing that crazy stuff but the flyer was super intense about like okay you're
gonna you gotta make a huge commitment it's gonna be all this stuff you're gonna do this
we're gonna take the best and it was like very much like hardcore telling you this is a huge deal
at the same weekend of this tournament we saw this flyer we were at we're at this church it
wasn't ours because we were traveling you know we were like out of town for this term whatever
and it was a Catholic parish.
And we have altar servers,
the kids who kind of help out at the altar
during the mass.
And it was like an ad for they needed more altar servers.
And it was completely like,
oh, no experience needed.
You had to make much commitment.
It's super easy.
It was completely downplaying how easy it was.
I guarantee, and I know this from checking on,
I guarantee I know which one attracted me.
Apparently Eric's having a little bit
of technical difficulties.
We'll see if we can get him back here.
i'm really sorry it must be i must have a bad connection today or something
yeah i don't know what's wrong what's the deal but no worries so uh continue yeah you said you
knew which one of the which one was going to get more and it was just it's it's the one that
demands more and i really feel like that's where we dropped the ball because we're so much trying
to be relevant to be seeker friendly all whatever term you want to use and really jesus was very
demanding. And so we have to be demanding and you do in a charitable way. I mean, Jesus was never a
jerk, but he was very demanding. Um, and so I just feel like that's, that's something that,
and we've seen that because like I said, in, in, at least for in the Catholic church,
the churches, the parishes that are the most demanding are the ones that are the most successful
now. And I think that's true also in the Protestant world. Um, it just like, because the main line,
that's what killed them. They're just like, okay, we're going to be like everybody else. We're not
going to demand anything. And now nobody wants, I grew up, I actually grew up Methodist. Uh, so I
saw that happen, um, before I became Catholic. And so, yeah, it just is, uh, so I think that
definitely is part of the equation. And, and that's why, because especially young people,
why would a, you know, 20 year old guy who's deciding, what am I going to do with my life?
Be like, okay, I can just like waste my time over here where they just tell me to be nice.
And they don't really, they're just like trying to make, they're, they're constantly trying to
appease me or like you see, like I like running and I love watching like ultra running and stuff
like that. Those guys, I mean, it's like, they're so admirable because they're like, I am going to
sacrifice everything to try to achieve this goal. I mean, the Bible talks about this, you know,
run the race to win. And so I think the same thing here where it's like, I really feel like
our churches need to be much more forthright of like, it's not easy to be a Christian. It's a
It's a hurdle. You're going to have to work at this. There's going to be days you make sacrifices, i.e. take up your cross and follow me. And when you don't do that, I think you lose people.
Yeah. And I think also, I mean, just theologically, I think that, I mean, the scriptures, like the scriptures, the more that I, I mean, you would think I've been interacting with the scriptures basically my entire life, but seriously, since I was probably 17 or 18.
and I went to Bible college at age 18. My parents were going to make me go for at least one year.
But by the time I got around to it, I was thrilled. And so we spent, we studied the Bible from,
it was a Bible Institute. So it was just the Bible we were studying from like 7am to 1pm.
And I went in thinking, you know what? I know the Bible pretty well. I've been going to church
every Sunday, my whole life, most Wednesdays as well. And then I get there and I just was
absolutely floored by how much of the Bible I was completely A. And so, and so I just think like,
that's another thing that, I mean, I just think that theologically, there's so much depth,
there's so much wisdom to speak to all kinds of areas of life that aren't, that aren't intuitive.
And that we just, the average person just doesn't realize you are there. I would ask, I would just,
again, this won't be like hostile at all, but like, I would like, I mean, as somebody who's
at a church that, you know, teaches in Latin, I mean, that would be something where I'm like,
man, if I was at a church where I didn't understand the language, like that would be
really challenging for me. So kind of how do you think about the role of the Latin mass?
Again, I know all of the Catholic, Roman Catholic Church don't do Latin masses, but yeah.
Well, the first thing though is we actually don't teach in Latin. The sermon is in English.
So, but the service, the whole mass service is all in Latin. And really it's a matter of,
in the Catholic world, it's a high hurdle to try to explain this quickly, you know,
to a mostly Protestant audience. I understand that. But like we have a belief in like,
you know, what St. Paul says when he says, I give to you what has been handed on to me.
And that word handed on in Greek is really the Latin term for it would be traditionus,
meaning to hand it on the tradition. Obviously there's bad traditions. Jesus condemned,
you know, traditions of men. But basically the idea is we look at the mass primarily not as a
teaching vehicle, we look at as glorifying and worshiping God. And so what we say is,
what we're saying is we want to do the best thing we possibly can do to glorify God. And so all the
different actions we have, like the incense and the bells and all that stuff, the statues,
everything that is all like, we want to glorify God. And Latin is how the Catholics before us have
all done this. And so we're going to continue to do this. And like, there's a certain beauty in
night and because there's this precision that it's no longer about the priest who's celebrating.
It's no longer about him. He kind of disappears. And what he's doing is he's just simply repeating
the prayers of the church to glorify God. So he kind of disappears when, if it's in English,
a lot of times he will want to be a little more spontaneous and it becomes too much about him.
So to be clear, the sermon is in English. So the teaching part of it is in English,
but that really, it's a whole different way of looking at kind of purpose.
Like we're not seeing as primordial teaching much more as glorifying God.
And so the Latin isn't, and the truth is, here's the thing. You,
I do not know Latin. Like my wife knows Latin.
She actually teaches Latin to our kids and stuff like that.
I've never been good at languages. I'm not even that great English,
to be honest. But like, but with Latin,
once you start going for enough time,
I've been going down Latin mass for 15 years.
I know exactly what's going on at all times.
and i don't even like and i and i could not speak a word of latin to maybe a couple words but like
and i know because of like and that's the other reason why most people when you go to mass it's
again it's kind of like the anti what you just said we're not you know uh going after visitors
like you know obviously want visitors come but the point is like yeah we assume when you're there
you've been there and so like you've grown up with it probably you you you know what's going on
And then what happens, like at our parish, if we see somebody new, almost, you know, we have about 500 people at our service.
So we can tell often if somebody's new.
Somebody's going up to them afterwards or even beforehand, just saying, hey, just, you know, like sometimes we have like these missiles that there are these little booklets that give the English translation of the Latin.
And they'll be fun with it.
They don't even know where it is.
Usually what we tell them is we just kind of say, don't worry about this time.
Just kind of experience it.
And then we'll like, you know, we'll help you out.
So we do those things, but like, yeah.
I'm at a, just, yeah, just so you know,
I'm at a higher liturgy like in church.
So like we do a lot.
So you understand the language I don't speak.
Motivations, yeah, yeah.
And it's, and in terms of a lot of the motivation,
like recognizing God's, like this,
we're not just, we're not just here as a group
to, you know, to talk with ourselves.
Like we're acknowledging like God is actually here.
Yeah.
Like he's taking part.
Like I would, I mean, it is interesting though,
because I mean, you mentioned the traditions of men.
And that's obviously something that, again, I think there's real issues, and yet the overreaction of that can just be, oh, we just get rid of everything.
We just decide, every individual church or pastor decides what service is going to look like, and there's no regulating principle or something, no regulation of what's going on.
I think that's obviously something bad that can happen.
At the same time, I'm just thinking of like, it's interesting to me. I would love to know, you're my captive, Rory Capricere. But if you're, I mean, we look at the goal of passing down the traditions that were received.
Like part of the language thing I get, like when, you know, the great schism happened, like all this kind of stuff, you start going in Latin, but like in probably even before that.
But like the interesting thing would be like, I mean, Paul was presumably speaking like Greek.
So why, like why, why Latin instead of Greek?
So if you look at it, you know, very early on the church kind of divided, not in a schism way, but just kind of in a cultural way between the Greek East and the Latin West.
And so very soon in the West, the liturgies were in Latin because that was the language of the people. And in the East, they were in Greek. And so what happened is as the church continued to grow in the West, it just was like Latin continued to be language.
And then you would have a breakup, like all of a sudden in different areas of Europe, Western Europe and England, things like that, different languages are developing.
But it was very common.
It's happened in the East as well of like, okay, there's a liturgical language and then there's the common language.
And so the liturgical language in the East was Greek or maybe church Slavonic.
Like, for example, a lot of Greek Orthodox, I'm sorry, Eastern Orthodox churches, they are not in a modern language or in like church Slavonic or something like that.
And this idea became very common among Christians that like, oh, there's this language.
It allows us like psychologically, if nothing else, to realize how sacred this is.
Because you and I talking here, I mean, there's a certain sacredness to it because we're talking about our Lord and things like that.
So I'm not trying to act like it's not.
But like as soon as you go into a service that's in Latin, you're like, oh, I need to like, you know, kind of sit up a little straighter maybe.
I need to recognize this is something, because like, you know, since the priest is talking to
God, not you. And so like, and God can understand Latin even if you can't. And so there's this idea
of like the sacredness of the importance of we're in, we're on holy ground right here when we come
into church. Obviously when you leave, you're still, you know, all the things that are true
about, you're still following Christ, being a disciple, all that. But there is a place for this.
like, you know, Moses at the burning bush, there is a place for certain times and places that are
more sacred. And so that's kind of the Latin is just part of that. Now, I want to make it clear
that in the Catholic church today, the vast majority of churches are in the vernacular in
English or whatever. But this was like certain parishes maintain this with this belief that like,
we really think this, and I feel it, I honestly, I feel it like when I walk in because of the
architecture because of the smell with the incense, you know, it's kind of baked into our church is
about 175 years old. And so the physical building, it smells like incense when you walk in and then
the Latin and the chant, and we have this beautiful music that's a Gregorian chant and things like
that. I personally, I feel a little bit like, okay, I'm leaving earth for a moment. I'm entering
into the heavenly liturgy. I'm becoming part of the liturgy that we all will be part of that he
talks about in Revelation, in heaven, at least we all hope to be part of. And so I feel like that.
And so I escape from the worldly cares. Trust me, I get distracted as much as the next guy.
But the point is, is that it keeps bringing me back to, okay, this is different. This is sacred.
And so it helps me focus on, okay, I'm here to worship God. And so I think that's kind of the,
and that over time just happened. And so the Latin was basically fixed in the liturgy by about
the third or fourth century in the West.
Time of St. Gregory the Great, 600 AD,
is when it became fully fixed.
And really, the liturgy itself
hasn't really changed substantially at all
since about the seventh century, so.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, that totally makes sense.
And again, you also get some of the,
again, because of the politics
between the Eastern and the Western churches,
I'm sure the language as well,
that probably plays a role as well.
I do just think it is one of these things
where again, it's like, and this has been true of a lot of the things that I've observed. I mean,
yeah, I've observed within like the higher liturgy churches is like, there is so much thought that
goes into why they do what they do. The thing that it's easy to neglect is communicating the
rye and rather than just leaving it at the level of this is just what we do. And I think like that,
that education process is probably also contributing to like some of the walking away,
you know, as well as like, if, if this, if there's all of this, especially when you're,
you know, adding the extra, extra element of this being all done in a different language on top of
the, you know, the seemingly like strange things that again, even our church would do things that
would look strange to the average American who just steps in there. I think that, you know, if,
if you're not doing a good job of explaining, you know, the why and the why, like there,
we didn't always do it this way. We, we did, we've done this thing before. And then here's
some other things. I think like explaining the why we're, we're in this moment where,
uh, nobody knows why anything that nobody, we are on like an existential crisis, uh,
like an ontological crisis of like, what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman?
What is, what is marriage? Uh, what is government? What is money? Like all of these are very live
issues and, and just, it's not going to cut it anymore, uh, to just not explain the why of a lot
of these things. And so I think. I thought you have to be right. And I think I have a love hate
relationship with the internet. I admit it because like I've lived on it for so long. I mean, I've
worked on it. I've got so much, I mean, my whole job is on it now, but of course I hate it too,
because we know all the dangers of the internet, but I really believe one of the most beautiful
things about the internet is how much it's allowed us to educate and bring people to knowledge of
christ and knowledge of the church and things like that like one of the most popular videos i ever did
i was on somebody else's video guy named taylor marshall and we literally this we literally did a
step-by-step walk through the latin mass and it's got hundreds of thousands of views and people to
this day we did this six years ago i think people say still come up to me and say they saw that
because really what we did i think it was like a two-hour podcast and we literally just walked
through. Okay. You walk in a Latin mass. What do you do? Okay. The priest comes out, he does this.
What does that mean? And we just go step-by-step through it. And there was a real hunger because
people are like, okay. And so people can share that now. I know a woman, we have a religious
or of nuns that's connected to our parish. And there's a traditional nuns. And one of them
during COVID, she wasn't really, her family wasn't believers or anything. And she just went online
and she ended up becoming Catholic through it.
Bishop Barron, Robert Barron is a popular bishop
in our church and she watched some of that
and she became, now she's a religious nun.
And so it's like, I think there's a lot of ability now
that we really can explain the why.
There's really no excuse, in other words,
not to explain the why.
We know sometimes people will walk into our parish
and it's just like, it's like an alien experience
and we know that.
And so we try to be very much,
try to help them out and things like that.
But honestly, a lot of them, they come to us
because what happened was they watched a video or something online and they're like, hey, this
sounds interesting. They go and want to experience it. And so they're very open to it already.
They're already kind of primed to say, okay, I understand it's going to be very different.
And I want to take it back also to something we were talking about earlier about like people
leaving the church and things like that. I'm convinced that the church needs the zag whenever
everybody says zigging. Like when everybody, the culture is going this way and trying to be more
more like it is just dumb.
It's not faithful to Christ, which is the most important thing.
But really, I like the fact that, like, the traditional at Mass that I could, we're leaning
into the fact that we are different.
Yeah, when you come here, it's going to be a challenge.
We know that.
You're not going to understand what's going on.
In fact, we always tell people when you first start coming for the first few weeks, don't
even try to follow along.
You're just kind of soak it in, soak it in.
Then maybe you can pick up the missal and start saying, oh, what do these prayers actually
mean in English?
What are they saying?
And then you can learn more and more. And over time, you'll eventually, you know, hopefully learn to love it. But like we don't shy away from that barrier to entry, so to speak, because we think what it does is it reminds people that the surrounding culture is awful. It's anti-Christian. It's anti-human. And so like going against that grain.
And it's the same challenge we have with Bitcoin,
trying to explain people.
Like we had this high hurdle to explain Bitcoin to somebody
because they start off with just this idea of like money.
They think money is, they think their money is at the bank.
I mean, for example, they think there's literally dollar bills
sitting in a bank vault somewhere with their name attached to it.
And it's like all of a sudden you got this huge high barrier
of trying to get them to embrace Bitcoin.
I feel the same way when I'm trying to explain
the Latin mass to people.
It's like who know nothing about it.
It's like, okay, I know I got to start at the beginning
and kind of work my way up.
Thank you.
Definitely. Yeah. And that's, I mean, I, one of the things I talk to when I talk to people about
Bitcoin, uh, the verse that comes to mind is where Jesus says, those who are well, have no need of a
physician. It's those who are sick. And so there's so many people who like in the United States,
they don't feel the visceral need to look for something alternative to their national currency,
local currency, whatever it is. But there's still, there's millions and hundreds of millions of
people around the world who definitely are in that situation. And so some of it is just helping
people to look at and recognize, you know, the shortfalls and the weaknesses of fiat currency
relative to the history of, you know, basically historically, and then just even in relation to
the last 50 years, the kind of the, a lot of the differences that have taken place.
I mean, I have one more question and now it's escaping me. I'm trying to think.
It's going to come to me in just a minute. I guess I'll give you kind of a, we've been going
for like an hour and 15 minutes. I'll give you kind of the last word. Is there anything else?
where can people find more of your work?
Where can they get the book?
Is there,
obviously it's on Amazon,
but are there a play?
Is there a place where you'll get more of the money?
Well,
okay.
If you go to ericsamis.com,
my website,
you can buy it directly from there.
And I will not only get more of the money,
you can buy it in Bitcoin there.
So you can pay me in Bitcoin at the,
at there,
but you can also do fiat if you want to I understand that if I can So but yeah so you can buy it there and Amazon fine too but like i i do get more of the money but more and i will sign it if you buy it directly for me that the that the the and all if you pay in bitcoin you get 10 off on my website too
so like yeah yeah so i i try to run your bitcoiners because uh the funny thing is is like i've had the
ability to buy with bitcoin at my website for years and nobody ever used it because it was just
a catholic books and nobody got i sell i all of a sudden i sell this book and now i'm getting the
bitcoin orders everybody's taking advantage that 10 so i'm like there we go now we're talking i get
so excited too when i get a bitcoin or i admit it i get a little email when an order comes in
and i honestly the first thing i do now i look to see if they pay with credit card bitcoin and i
just get more excited when it's in bitcoins and i'm like oh yes so yeah so here here's a question
what what did you what's your payment it's all i knew you were gonna ask me it goes straight to my
hard wallet actually um what is that called oh i switched over about a year ago and they they have
it set up i think i'm gonna get i'm gonna reach the limit of free like right now it's free because
i don't have that many transactions but i'm starting to get more and more um but i can't
remember the name of it though because switch i used coinbase for a while and i would accept the
altcoin and stuff like that years ago but and i never got any words but yeah so um bitcoin economy
i can remember the name of it but anyway but yeah so if you go to ericsamons you also find my other links to my other books and other stuff and crisismagazine is is what I run And so I most of my writings are found there Like I said it a conservative
Catholic site. A lot of things that we would have shared with, uh, you know, non-Catholic Christians
as well, but you know, obviously some very Catholic stuff as well. Um, I, in fact, I just did a
podcast this week on, uh, not will non-Catholics, you know, be saved and because it's, you know,
Exactly.
So anyway, so like, you know, we have all that, you know, we address all the issues and the controversial stuff.
We don't shy away from it.
So that's good.
Love it.
Man.
Eric, thank you so much.
And again, hopefully this won't be the last time.
Again, these writers of books tend to keep writing books.
So maybe we'll have you back and can chat about future stuff in the major.
And I'll be sure to keep my list of Catholic questions.
Yes, yes.
And shoot them to me anytime.
Exactly.
I'm happy to join you.
That'd be great.
I was just thinking, I'm going to shoot you.
Have you reached out to Pierre Rochard?
He actually endorsed my book.
Yeah.
Oh, look.
Awesome.
Okay, yeah.
Pierre's a friend.
Yeah, oh, yeah.
I'm trying to figure out who other Bitcoin...
Yes, we have definitely been in contact.
He endorsed the book.
Bitstein, you know, Michael Goldstein, he endorsed the book.
I don't know if you know, but he recently became Catholic, actually.
Yeah.
I did.
Yeah, so great guys.
Just great guys.
Giacomo Zucco is another one Okay I don think I knew that Yep yep So he from Italy So he but yeah So yeah I love to connect you and do it all the way I can to help you get on some other podcasts
But all right, Eric.
And then for the rest of the audience,
go get Eric's book, Pay in Bitcoin, ericsammons.com.
And on top of that, just as a final reminder,
we have 12 days left on the Kickstarter
and Geyser campaign for our kids book,
our Bitcoin kids book called The Orange Umbrella.
it basically gives like a high level overview of an introduction to Bitcoin. We don't use the
B word a single time in the book. You can find more information at tou.tgfb.com. That'll just
redirect you to the Kickstarter. You can also look on geyser.fund if you want to fund it in Bitcoin.
We'd really appreciate it. We are like just, I think, 82% funded. We're super close and we'd
love your help in getting over the line to get this thing printed. So again, thank you for
listening to this episode of Thank God for Bitcoin Podcast, and we'll be back next week.
Actually, we'll be back tomorrow with another episode of To the Unknown Pod
with our Presby friends, and we'll be talking about a bunch of different things.
So grateful for you all, and we'll talk to you again soon.