12:00

So it's a universal language

12:02

system or universal category

12:04

system, if you will. Very

12:08

useful for mapping and describing reality,

12:10

right? To the point where we

12:12

discover things in mathematics prior

12:15

to observation, right? Einstein

12:19

discovered, in quotation marks,

12:21

the existence of black holes in

12:25

mathematical abstract space before we

12:27

ever quote unquote observed one.

12:29

We still haven't technically observed it. We've just

12:31

seen stars go around the core of

12:33

a galaxy and they go so fast and they're

12:36

going around one common center of gravity that we

12:38

infer the existence of a black hole. You can't

12:40

observe it because light doesn't escape, obviously, but

12:43

Einstein again mathematically observed,

12:47

these, I don't know if observed is the right term,

12:49

discovered black holes, you know,

12:51

40, 50 years prior to our physical

12:53

observation of them. So

12:55

obviously- Just based on the theory. Just

12:57

based on mathematical theory. And

13:00

also, Neptune also was discovered

13:02

that way, just via pure

13:05

mathematics. And the reason I

13:07

interrupted you is because I

13:09

think that Bitcoin, there's

13:11

a connection to mathematics, which you can

13:13

make is the language of the universe,

13:16

right? Yes. And the

13:18

connection is via, I would say,

13:20

that proof of work anchors Bitcoin

13:22

to the universe. It anchors Bitcoin

13:25

to where we are

13:29

in this life. And

13:31

I would say that is a

13:33

complete and utter contradiction or the

13:37

polar opposite to what fiat money

13:40

represents, which is it

13:42

brings all the flaws of

13:44

humanity alongside it. Right?

13:49

It starts morally and ethically and

13:51

then progressively over time, it starts

13:53

to degrade. And so only

13:56

this, this only didn't just happen here

13:58

in the United States. happen in

14:00

the Roman Empire as well. So it's very kind of

14:04

interesting phenomenon. Anyways, I didn't want to interrupt

14:06

your thoughts. Yeah, so to finish the thought

14:08

on money, right,

14:10

is we, I

14:13

think it's a metaphorical system because we are

14:15

looking at the world, specifically

14:19

the world of socioeconomic activity,

14:21

right? So people in

14:23

terms of their net worth or particular

14:25

goods, businesses,

14:28

right? The

14:30

example I like to give is, you

14:32

know, if you're an entrepreneur and you

14:35

run a business for an entire year,

14:37

well, there's a great deal of complex

14:39

action, interaction, buying, selling, hiring, firing, planning,

14:42

executing, right? There's all of this kind

14:44

of maelstrom of human action, if you

14:47

will, right? By both

14:49

the entrepreneur, their employees, their vendors, et cetera,

14:51

all these interconnections and relations. But

14:53

at the end of the day, or the end of

14:55

the year, rather, we just compress all of that activity

14:59

into this statement, right? It's a profit

15:01

and loss statement, a balance sheet, a statement of

15:03

cash flows. And so this is just a mathematical

15:06

data compression via money, right? Other

15:09

financial statements only make sense in

15:11

terms of money, obviously. And

15:14

so then you get this highly

15:17

compressed piece of data, this

15:20

artifact that tells you a lot

15:23

of what you need to know about all of that

15:25

business activity, and then it makes it comparable over

15:28

time, right? You can look at your profit and loss statement year

15:30

to year. You can also look at

15:32

it across businesses. And you

15:34

get this apples to apples comparisons among

15:36

all of this apples

15:38

to oranges activity that takes place in the actual

15:41

world, right? But we compress it via

15:43

money, via the metaphor of money into

15:45

a mathematical statement that is comparable and

15:50

relevant to the aims of the entrepreneur, right?

15:52

You need to know if you're being profitable

15:54

or not, because if you're not,

15:56

well, then eventually you're gonna consume all your resources and you're

15:58

gonna be dead in the water. so to speak. So

16:01

it's, in

16:03

that sense, it is a measuring tool. Like

16:05

money doesn't measure value per se, but it

16:07

is measuring inputs and outputs in that way.

16:10

And so I think what we're doing

16:12

with money, to bring this to the answer,

16:14

like what is money is, money

16:17

is something like a tool that lets

16:19

us metaphorize

16:24

the complexities of human action in

16:26

terms of mathematics, something that's very,

16:29

something that's very wet code, as Nixaba would

16:31

say, hard to measure, hard to

16:33

quantify, et cetera, into something that's

16:36

very dry code, right? It's very

16:38

quantifiable, algorithmic, you can

16:40

perform operations on it, you can perform

16:42

arithmetic, et cetera. And

16:45

so that, we need that, right? We need

16:47

to convert all of this kind of messy,

16:49

fluid, complex reality that we're dealing with all

16:51

the time into something that is linguistic

16:55

and in a common language

16:57

so we can communicate,

16:59

negotiate, execute trades, et cetera, all of

17:02

this is necessary. And

17:04

then there's a feedback, right? Like the more

17:06

clear your data is about yourself and your

17:08

business, the more adequately you

17:10

can make decisions in that messy business process

17:14

that guide you towards desired

17:16

outcomes, right? Profitability, business growth,

17:18

acquisitions, hiring, firing, whatever it

17:20

may be. And then

17:22

all that activity, feeds back into the financial

17:24

statements. And this seems to be

17:26

kind of the feedback loop of human rationality that

17:28

we have, or

17:31

ideas about how the thing works and then

17:33

there's how the thing actually works and

17:37

both inform one another. And

17:40

so in the

17:42

same way that language is this metaphorical system

17:45

for de-complexifying, mapping

17:47

the world, if you will, but

17:50

it can never contain the whole thing, right? The map

17:52

cannot be the territory. If the map contained every detail

17:54

of the territory, it would no longer be the map,

17:56

it would be the territory. And

17:58

so you need to be able to... to

18:00

kind of ignore certain aspects and

18:03

emphasize other aspects to get the,

18:05

to make salient the data you

18:07

need to act basically. So

18:10

language is a very important tool for human action in

18:12

that way, right? That we can, I

18:14

can talk to you about that. I can draw your attention

18:16

to specific things with words and then, you

18:19

know, we're sharing this open source software that is

18:21

English, so we can connect our minds basically. Money

18:24

is performing a similar function, but

18:27

in a way, like a more, in

18:31

like a higher signal way, and at

18:33

a much larger scale, right? We're talking

18:35

about coordinating entrepreneurial activities

18:38

across the globe, right? Then you could

18:40

get into things like the price signal,

18:42

which are also denominated in money. You

18:45

know, you don't need people

18:47

that are participating in the copper industry don't need

18:49

to know that there was an

18:51

earthquake in Chile that caused the mine to collapse, that

18:53

made the price go up. Like they just need to

18:56

see the number go up. And then it's like producers

18:58

are incentivized to produce more, consumers are incentivized to consume

19:00

less, and via this

19:02

mechanism, the market rectifies the shortage of

19:04

copper. So it's this, money

19:07

is like this extremely powerful tool

19:11

for scaling human rationality

19:14

and also integrating

19:17

human rationality into the material world, right?

19:19

We start to think about the

19:22

actual supply of goods and

19:25

the demand for those goods in terms of

19:27

mathematics, right, this is the price. And

19:30

the price I think is one of the most, I

19:33

think it is the primary instrument for commanding human attention

19:36

in the world, right? On

19:38

people's net worth, the prices of assets,

19:40

Bitcoin, right? What draws everyone into Bitcoin?

19:42

When they go up. Everyone.

19:46

I mean, maybe there's a few people that are like, oh, I've studied the

19:48

tech first, and that's what made me excited. Maybe,

19:51

but 99 plus percent of people

19:53

are drawn in by the price. And

19:55

the price is only possible because of money.

19:57

Money is only possible because of mathematics. only

20:00

possible because of metaphor. So

20:03

you buried the

20:05

lead there, which is, and I think

20:07

that's the part where I really

20:10

want to emphasize and I really want

20:12

to talk about and explore. You

20:16

just described the importance of

20:18

money within

20:20

the human condition, in the human

20:22

condition, in society, how vital this

20:25

is for society to run. The

20:28

vast majority of people, and I'm sure that

20:30

you've had a very similar experience, do

20:33

not see this. They

20:36

do not understand how vital

20:40

money plays, how vital of a

20:42

role money plays in their lives. They're

20:45

completely oblivious to it. I

20:47

had a conversation with my

20:50

barber yesterday and I said, you spend

20:52

hours and hours and hours working to

20:55

earn this money that is fundamentally

20:57

corrupted. So that's the topic that

20:59

I want to explore. If money

21:01

is this instrumental

21:03

tool that humans need

21:06

in order to organize

21:09

a society in a

21:11

non-coercive way, what

21:13

happens when that money is corrupted?

21:16

What happens when you introduce fiat

21:18

to the mix? I'll

21:20

end it with this and I'll pass it on to you. One

21:23

of the most powerful quotes that I've seen you

21:27

say, and it was, I believe, in McCormack's

21:29

show, is that

21:31

if a country has a central bank, it

21:34

is already 50% communist. So

21:38

what are your thoughts on that, Robert?

21:40

Yeah, so if we're going to continue

21:42

with this

21:44

definition of money, again, this is not the

21:46

only definition of money, there's several, but it's

21:48

one I'm working with lately, that

21:50

it's a mathematical metaphor for

21:53

human action. We're

21:55

understanding human action and the consequences of

21:57

human action in terms of mathematics. and

22:00

this is a money facilitated process.

22:06

Math is obviously, as we've already said,

22:08

it's a universal language, right? We

22:11

all speak the Hindu-Arabic numeral

22:13

system today. There was a

22:15

time where that wasn't true. I went through some

22:17

of that in the number zero in Bitcoin, the history of

22:19

mathematics and how it developed. But

22:22

ultimately, a zero-based numeral

22:24

system is the most useful

22:26

numeral system. You can perform

22:29

calculation faster,

22:31

less prone to error, and

22:34

therefore it's more useful for merchants

22:36

that are conducting trade, basically. So

22:39

in that sense, it's

22:41

an open source software, right? Mathematics

22:45

is an open source software. You're free to

22:47

use it. Anyone's free to inspect it, modify

22:49

it. You can propose changes

22:51

to it even, right? You can develop

22:53

new mathematical theorems. And

22:56

if they are basically approved by

22:58

other users of

23:00

mathematics, then that theorem may get

23:03

incorporated into the corpus of mathematical

23:05

knowledge. Most likely

23:07

it will get rejected, as most proposed

23:09

changes do. But it is

23:11

this open source software system that

23:13

is very fundamental to really

23:17

everything, right? Again, in that essay,

23:21

prior to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, non-zero-based

23:25

numeral systems could not support

23:28

calculus, and calculus supports

23:30

basically every modern science. So everything

23:32

that we do in modernity requires

23:34

calculus, calculus requires zero. So

23:39

math's an open source software.

23:43

Language as well, you mentioned. English, every

23:45

basically natural language, another form of open

23:47

source software. Now corruption, right? This is

23:49

a term we use a lot. We

23:51

talk about the corruption of money. We

23:54

talk about Bitcoin as incorruptible money, but

23:58

we have to define corruption. do we mean

24:00

when we say this? I

24:03

had a guest on here the other day who

24:06

identified corruption as a

24:08

lie, as a deception, fundamentally a deception.

24:12

And there was some truth to that. I would

24:14

say it's entropy. I

24:17

would say it's entropy over

24:21

a long period of time. And

24:23

the reason I'm saying that is

24:26

from a historical perspective,

24:29

empires rise and fall. Over time, what

24:34

happened in Rome is very similar to what

24:36

is happening here in the United States. And

24:39

you have timeless examples over and

24:41

over and over again where if

24:44

you were at the height, if you lived in

24:46

the height of the Roman Empire, you would have never

24:48

have imagined this thing was going

24:50

to collapse over time. There

24:53

was entropy involved as a

24:56

degradation over time. Now,

24:59

I don't know if that's part of

25:02

the human condition. I don't know if that's

25:04

part of humanity, the

25:06

very famous saying that Bitcoiners talk about.

25:09

Strong men create good times, good times

25:12

create weak men, weak men create bad

25:15

times. But I

25:17

guess what I'm trying to say with all this

25:19

is that is Bitcoin

25:22

the uncorruptible system that we

25:24

need in order for

25:26

humanity not to repeat

25:29

this endless cycle that I believe it's

25:31

been stuck in for

25:34

a millennia, really? Is it

25:38

the solution? And

25:41

the reason that, and you were just describing

25:43

about how important the role of money

25:47

is in society, what

25:51

happens if we have, to

25:54

allude to your math references, what

25:56

happens if we've been missing an

25:59

entire. right,

32:00

that the rules are

32:02

not fixed and there is a

32:04

power, there's a rulemaking authority, which

32:07

is I would call generalized to the central bank.

32:10

It's an institution that cannot lose because

32:13

they actually print themselves new

32:15

units of money to extract purchasing power

32:17

from the savers in that currency. That

32:20

is equivalent to changing the rules of the

32:22

game, right? People, there's an

32:24

implicit agreement that people

32:28

sacrifice labor, energy,

32:30

and time to obtain the money. And

32:33

there's an implicit expectation that that money

32:35

can be later redeemed for similar sacrifices

32:37

from others. But

32:39

if there's an institution that can counterfeit the

32:41

currency, well, then they can siphon

32:44

purchasing power out of that money without

32:46

performing any work, right? That's an asymmetry

32:48

of rules. That is rules for

32:50

the citizens, not for

32:52

me, the central bank. Therefore,

32:54

it's an asymmetric mechanism

32:58

for extracting wealth and

33:02

basically perpetrating theft. And so what does that

33:04

do to society? Well, you

33:06

are rewarding in that case,

33:08

nonproductive political action,

33:11

deception, even warfare, right,

33:14

you need deception and warfare to

33:16

maintain the authority

33:19

to own that rulemaking apparatus that everyone

33:21

else is forced to play by. And

33:24

there's also a big incentive to keep people ignorant about

33:26

the nature of money and how the system works. I

33:29

myself have a master's degree in accounting and finance. I'm

33:31

not saying that to name drop or

33:33

brag. I say that because

33:35

I wasn't taught anything about the nature of

33:38

money, nothing about Austrian economics, not one peep,

33:40

not one sentence, not one word that

33:43

tells you something, right? Like it was a top

33:45

12, my school was like number 12 in the

33:47

country for accounting and finance, like one of the

33:49

best top programs in the country. You

33:51

don't learn anything about how money works. And

33:54

that's on purpose. It has to be, what else could it be?

33:56

I mean, how could you teach, have

33:59

a curriculum. on accounting and finance and you get

34:01

a master's degree which is the highest degree you

34:04

can get next to a PhD. I don't think

34:06

they teach you anything in PhD about Austrian economics

34:08

either. I know a few people have gone through

34:10

the program. How else

34:12

could that be? They may not teach you

34:14

the most fundamental thing. You know what it

34:16

reminds me of and I'm sure you saw

34:19

this it went pretty viral on Twitter the

34:22

commencement speech. Yeah. Where they

34:24

mentioned Bitcoin

34:26

and you have you know all

34:28

these college students right have agreed to

34:31

go hundreds of thousands of dollars in

34:33

debt. Yeah. And they're booing this thing.

34:35

Yeah. Where you know Bitcoin can

34:37

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but I kind of want to

36:54

double back to the reason I use the

36:56

word entropy and the reason because

36:58

the way you described it chaos, right?

37:02

But I think it starts with order, right?

37:04

In the case of Rome, right? I

37:07

believe their currency was called the the the

37:09

Norris. It started with a

37:11

certain silver percentage and it was quite

37:13

high. Over time it

37:15

degraded. Over time, you know,

37:17

they they were coin clipping,

37:19

so to speak, and

37:22

you could make the very same case here in the United

37:24

States in the case of the Federal Reserve 1913, you know,

37:26

it was backed

37:28

by gold. Supposedly they broke that promise

37:30

the 6102 order, then you know

37:33

the Nixon shock, all of that stuff.

37:36

So it's almost as if human beings

37:38

have a tendency, if they have the

37:40

capability, to degrade the

37:42

system and it might come

37:44

from a place of of

37:47

good, you know, the

37:49

road to hell is paved

37:51

in good intentions, right? It

37:53

might come from a place

37:55

of goodwill, but over time

37:57

it has severe unintended consequences,

37:59

which which leads us to where

38:01

we are now, which I believe is,

38:04

you know, a lot of people call

38:06

it late stage capitalism. That's BS. This

38:09

is late stage fiat. The

38:11

tragedy of all this Robert that I see

38:13

though, is a lot

38:16

of these people, I would

38:18

say the masses. And

38:20

this is actually something that worries me. And

38:23

it's actually a perfect segue to the next part

38:25

of the conversation is the vast

38:27

majority of people, as you

38:29

saw with that, you know, the commencement speech,

38:31

the boo from the audience, and just my

38:33

interactions with people around me, people that I

38:36

went to high school with, they

38:39

are still asleep to

38:41

that question, what is money? They

38:43

work, you know, they

38:46

spend their entire lives working

38:48

for this. They, you know,

38:50

do whatever it takes, but

38:53

they're not interested in knowing what it

38:55

is. Just like you

38:57

just said that you got a master's degree

39:00

in something that you would think would

39:02

teach you about what this

39:04

thing is. So

39:06

what can we do as Bitcoiners

39:11

to really break this echo chamber,

39:13

to really move this Overton window

39:16

to the point that people really

39:18

do start asking the question, what

39:21

is money? Because I believe if we do

39:23

not get to that point, we

39:26

are already entering into the political

39:28

sphere, right? Where you

39:30

have candidates like, you

39:32

know, the leading Republican candidate, Donald

39:35

Trump, mentioning he's anti-CBDC. Of

39:37

course you have RFK Jr. Who's

39:39

taking an anti-CBDC pro Bitcoin

39:41

stance. I believe the next

39:44

four to 10, five to 10 years

39:46

really, this

39:49

is gonna be a very contentious issue

39:51

in the United States. Not to mention

39:53

all the hostility coming out of the

39:56

current administration, the proposed 30% tax on

39:58

Bitcoin. on

40:00

Bitcoin miners, the FinCEN

40:03

proposals, the legislation that's currently

40:05

in the Senate introduced by Elizabeth Warren

40:07

that has 20 senators that would

40:10

be a de facto ban on

40:12

Bitcoin mining in the United States,

40:14

not my words, Pierre Richard's words.

40:16

So clearly, we're entering into the

40:18

political discussion where rubber meets the

40:21

road. And now it gets to

40:23

the point where we essentially have

40:25

to convince or

40:27

wake enough people up

40:29

in the population to the reality the

40:31

money's broken, the reality of the money

40:34

is not working for them. And

40:37

they're getting completely distracted by

40:39

the whole left-right narrative, the

40:41

whole Democrat versus Republican, which

40:43

I call the divide and

40:45

conquer strategy. So what

40:47

can we do, Robert? What can we do

40:49

to accelerate that? Well,

40:53

I mean, first I would say it's

40:56

probably best to just be humble, right?

40:58

That we can do our part. We

41:01

can beat the

41:03

drum. We can shout from the hilltops.

41:05

We can educate, right, as many

41:08

of us tried to do. And

41:12

I do think all of these

41:15

things that you've said, like we're witnessing

41:17

the fact that I'm increasingly convinced of,

41:19

and I feel very fortunate to have

41:22

stumbled upon this as the namesake of

41:24

the show. But I do think this

41:28

era will be regarded as a time in which

41:31

the question, what is money, was

41:34

the defining question. We

41:37

put a pen tweet on my Twitter

41:39

about this. Short

41:42

three-minute clip, many different people talking about this,

41:44

arguing about this. Everyone's trying to define it

41:47

in terms. Everyone's talking their own book, right?

41:50

What suits them best, including us Bit corners, by

41:52

the way. But we're also talking about something that

41:54

suits humanity best. That's the difference is,

41:57

uh, I'll stop you right there. We're advocating

41:59

for the money that no. one can counterfeit

42:01

ever, right? So yes, it's beneficial to us

42:03

to figure this out first, and

42:06

that we benefit in anticipation

42:08

of later adoption, but it

42:10

does not put us in a position to

42:12

bend, twist, or break that rule set. So

42:15

we're moving into the ultimate moral and

42:17

technological high ground in Bitcoin, and that

42:19

is the incorruptible position to be in.

42:22

Whereas other people like Trump for instance, oh,

42:24

he's pro-dollar. Why is he pro-dollar? Because

42:27

that's a corruptible rule set, right? He can control

42:29

that. He can externalize inflation. He can put more

42:31

money to wage war, et cetera, et cetera. So

42:35

the central bankers are going

42:37

to say exactly what you just said, right?

42:39

Which is, you know, we know our system

42:42

is superior. We know our system is the

42:44

best one. Yeah, but what they're not going

42:46

to say is that our system is not

42:48

one in which you cannot counterfeit currency. They'll

42:50

never say that. They won't call it that.

42:53

They'll say inflation, and they'll say, oh, well,

42:55

that inflation's healthy and necessary for a continued

42:57

economy. But the reality is,

42:59

as I've said many times, inflation

43:01

is legal counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is criminal

43:03

inflation. There is no

43:06

substantive economic difference whatsoever. There's just

43:08

a legal distinction, which

43:10

is inherently corrupt because there are rules for

43:12

thee, not for me, right? The Fed can

43:14

counterfeit by the trillion. You or

43:18

I do it. We go to jail, right? That

43:21

is fundamentally corrupt. That's a bifurcated

43:23

rule set that is apartheid in

43:25

an economic sense. It's a

43:27

two tiered legal system, right? We

43:29

are recognized by the legal system in

43:32

a different way than central bank shareholders.

43:35

They can print money, externalize the costs, and benefit.

43:38

You or I do it, we go to jail, right? So

43:40

that, this is, it's fundamentally

43:42

at odds with the

43:45

principle of Western civilization that says we are intended to

43:47

be equal in front of the eyes of the law.

43:50

That's not true in the case of central banking.

43:52

It is a legal monopoly. So

43:54

the question was, what can we do

43:57

about this? Well,

44:03

for better or worse, this is another theme we

44:05

hit on the show often, and

44:09

this pertains to entropy as well, right? Pain

44:12

is information, right? So it is

44:14

much more cost effective to

44:17

learn through the pain of others, to learn from

44:19

the mistakes of others. This is why it's so

44:21

useful to be a student of history, right? If

44:23

you study the history of money, you'll

44:26

see how all of these fiat currency experiments

44:28

end, and you can preempt the

44:30

coming end to the current fiat currency experiment.

44:34

You can learn about how inflation works, where it

44:36

ends up, you know, all the problems, the attendant

44:38

problems that come with it, like

44:42

more urge to gamble, more

44:44

risk taking in the economy, more scamming in

44:46

the economy, gender fluidity even in the Weimar

44:48

Republic. I don't exactly know the connection there,

44:50

but for some reason there was a lot

44:52

of gender fluidity going on. At the same

44:55

time, there were counterfeiting currency like crazy. You

44:58

know, is that a direct linkage? I'm not sure,

45:00

but obviously we're seeing it today. At the same

45:02

time, we're counterfeiting currency like crazy. So

45:05

that's one way to learn, right? Be a

45:07

student, study, learn through the pain of others,

45:10

much more cost effective because you don't have

45:12

to incur the pain yourself. But

45:15

the more likely scenario

45:17

for most people being the

45:19

hard-headed, forgetful animal that we are

45:22

is that we have to learn

45:24

through our own pain typically, right? People

45:27

booing at that commencement speech, those

45:29

kids have never experienced the pain of

45:31

broken money, right? These are kids in

45:34

an, was it an Ivy League institution? What was

45:37

it? I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure it was a

45:39

top college. Literally grew up in the ivory tower.

45:42

They've had the proverbial silver spoon up their ass their

45:44

whole life. Money has always worked.

45:46

They've never been locked out of a bank account.

45:48

They've never suffered capital controls. They've never seen a

45:51

hyperinflation. They've probably never opened a history book about

45:53

all of these things because again, it's not taught

45:55

in college at all,

45:57

like at all. It was zero. even

46:00

when you specialize in that subject, as I said. So

46:03

these kids have no idea, right? They've

46:05

never felt the pain. They've never felt

46:07

the entropy of broken money

46:09

and what it can do, or really

46:12

the entropy of state oppression more

46:14

generally, right, like in China, you cannot take out more

46:16

than, I think $50,000 a year. The

46:20

capital controls are that tight, right? Which is

46:22

not much at all, right? If the government

46:25

is getting excessively oppressive, you

46:27

can't even cast a vote of no confidence

46:29

by moving your purchasing power offshore. You don't

46:31

have that option available to you. Again,

46:34

that's corruption, right? There's rules that are

46:36

applied to citizens to keep them locked

46:38

in. I'm sure those rules

46:40

don't apply to the bureaucrats inside the

46:42

CCP that probably have carte blanche

46:44

to do what they want. So

46:48

this touching of the proverbial

46:50

hot stove, right? The feeling

46:52

of the pain, the experience

46:54

of the entropy is

46:57

the source of information for most

46:59

people that don't want to do

47:01

the work of studying the painful

47:03

experiences of others. And

47:06

even if you study the painful experiences of others,

47:08

it's not as visceral as going through your own

47:10

pain, right? Like I

47:12

don't think you can, it's

47:15

hard to obtain or cultivate wisdom

47:18

through the reading about the pain of others, but if

47:21

you go through painful experiences yourself, you could bet your

47:23

ass you're gonna gain some wisdom from it. So

47:27

this is the experienced pain

47:30

of going through hyperinflation, whatever

47:32

it may be, where

47:34

you're experiencing the problems that

47:36

Bitcoin actually solves directly in

47:38

your life. This

47:41

is what will cause you to put

47:43

yourself into a new formation, physically,

47:46

economically, cognitively, right? As you relate

47:48

to and understand the world. So

47:50

when I say pain is in

47:52

formation, it is literally the phenomenon

47:54

that puts you in new formation.

47:57

And if you actually look at the etymology of the word pain,

48:00

It comes from something like the price paid

48:03

funny enough. So it is like actually you pay

48:05

a price not necessarily a

48:07

monetary price, but you've Something

48:10

that you valued was taken from

48:12

you or lost or destroyed by

48:15

virtue of this experience And that is what

48:17

we call pain and pain

48:19

is the you know, this is fundamental

48:21

to life, right? It's almost like the

48:24

inarguable basis of being itself if

48:26

you're suffering It doesn't matter

48:28

what propositions you have or what arguments you

48:30

make like the pain is so real It

48:33

is overwhelming and that's why I think

48:35

it Tears apart,

48:38

you know, you might be anti Bitcoin today then

48:40

all of a sudden if the currency starts to hyperinflate

48:42

or if your bank account gets frozen or you're subjected

48:45

to capital controls or whatever the thing is that

48:47

pain is gonna tear apart your previous

48:49

worldview and Force

48:52

you to put it into a new formation

48:54

that says oh shit. Actually this thing is

48:56

helping me circumvent whatever problem I'm dealing with

48:59

Then you'll see the value of Bitcoin and

49:02

you'll start, you know down this this journey

49:04

into the rabbit hole most likely so

49:08

There's all of that taking place. So what can

49:10

we do? I mean we

49:12

can continue to educate But you also have to

49:14

be humble and accept that this

49:16

is how people work in general Like they tend to have

49:18

to go through the pain first and

49:20

then the last point I want to get to was Because

49:23

you asked about Communism,

49:26

right? Yes. And so it's your

49:28

line specifically. Yeah, and these these

49:30

definitions matter a lot Right because

49:32

the isms especially I see

49:35

people talking past one another so frequently.

49:38

All right, let's let's Individualism

49:40

collectivism because that's really what it is So

49:44

yes, you're right. There's the

49:46

reality is there's individualism and everything else

49:48

is Collectivism and I think collectivism

49:50

is too nice of a term. I would

49:52

like to call it individualism Which

49:55

is the respect for life liberty and property

49:57

and coercive ism. Everything else is

49:59

a violation of life, liberty, or property. However,

50:03

we have to kind of meet the audience

50:05

where the audience is. So we can't say

50:08

individualism, coercivism, because that excludes the

50:10

terminology they are familiar with, like

50:12

fascism, communism, socialism,

50:15

even democracy, right? So I

50:18

really like Hoppe's definitions

50:21

for these terms. And on

50:23

one end of the spectrum, you

50:25

have communism, right? And Marx defined

50:27

this himself, actually. That

50:29

you could sum up communism in one

50:32

sentence, it was the

50:34

abolition of private property. And

50:37

this gets to your question too about like, what

50:39

can we do as Bitcoiners? It's like, I think

50:41

taking the education to the deepest, most fundamental place

50:44

and mounting really strong rational arguments,

50:47

the people that do choose to learn through the pain

50:49

of others, these are the arguments that will win them

50:51

over, ultimately, I think. I mean, because the people that

50:53

are doing the work and seeking truth, when

50:55

you build an argument on like an

50:57

unassailable foundation, this

51:00

is your best hope for helping

51:03

other people see the truth that

51:05

you feel that you've seen. I don't want

51:07

to say, I don't want to be presumptuous

51:09

and say that we found the truth, but I think

51:11

many Bitcoiners have come to a common conclusion

51:14

that is centered on the truth

51:16

of private property, the

51:18

importance of private property. We

51:21

even saw the UFC fighter the other day, right? He

51:23

won the fight and at the end of the thing,

51:25

he says, I fucking love private property. Read

51:28

Mises' Six Lessons. The

51:30

Overton window is shifting, right? This

51:32

abstract notion of private property

51:34

is coming into popular parlance

51:37

and conversation. I think that's an excellent thing

51:39

because we really need to think about the

51:41

world in terms of private property. And

51:44

this is what Hoppe does, right? Communism,

51:47

the abolition of private property. The

51:49

state owns everything, individuals

51:51

own nothing, right? It's pure

51:53

coerciveism. So

51:55

that's one end of the spectrum. The

51:57

opposite end of the spectrum. capitalism

52:00

or individualism, right? Universalized

52:03

respect for private property and

52:06

the possibility of consensual transfers of

52:10

titles to private property by contract. So

52:12

individuals own everything and they

52:15

can trade with one another consensually,

52:17

right? There is no non-consensual

52:19

exchange. There's no stealing. It's

52:22

all, do you agree? Do I agree?

52:24

We both agree, then we can trade,

52:26

right? Then there's been, we're

52:28

maximizing value creation because only at

52:30

the point that you value what

52:33

you're receiving more than what you're giving up and

52:35

I do the reverse, I value more what

52:37

I'm receiving more than what I'm giving up that

52:39

we both enter into a consensual trade. So

52:42

we both leave the trade psychologically better off

52:44

than we otherwise would have been. So value

52:46

has been created on both sides of the

52:49

transaction by virtue of consent. Only

52:51

possible in a world that

52:53

honors life, liberty and property in

52:55

a world of individualism or capitalism,

52:58

right? That ends up the

53:00

spectrum. Communism, state owns everything, you own nothing. Individualism,

53:03

individuals own everything. State is

53:06

next to non-existent. In

53:08

this world, by the way, government only exists

53:10

to preserve life, liberty and property. Nothing

53:13

else, right? No healthcare, no

53:15

fucking social safety nets. No,

53:17

it's just all of

53:19

that is justifications for theft.

53:22

The preservation of life, liberty, property is

53:24

the exclusive philosophical scope of government. Anything

53:27

beyond that, I think is just a

53:29

scam. Between these

53:31

two poles is socialism,

53:34

which Hoppe defined as an institutionalized

53:36

policy of aggression against private property.

53:40

So you could think about this as what

53:42

is the effective, the average effective tax rate

53:44

of citizens in that country, right, if it's

53:46

30%, well, then they're 30% socialist, right?

53:52

Which is they're 30% on the way

53:54

away from capitalism towards

53:56

communism, right? Communism is like 100%

53:58

socialist. tax rate,

54:02

you keep none of the fruits of your labor, individualism,

54:04

capitalism, zero percent tax rate, you

54:06

keep a hundred percent of the fruits of your labor. And when

54:09

I say tax, I'm including inflation too,

54:11

right? So no currency counterfeiting, no taxation,

54:14

no fiat regulation, which

54:16

gets a little tricky to quantify because

54:19

inflation is actually impossible to quantify because

54:22

it's as subjective as the value values

54:24

of the person doing the buying.

54:26

But that

54:28

notwithstanding, this is

54:31

the spectrum essentially. And so the quote

54:34

that you cited of mine was

54:38

that in a world that is

54:40

run by central banks and

54:44

you consider that the money can be

54:46

printed at any time, no democratic

54:49

process, you know, it is just literally

54:52

arbitrarily, we don't even know actually the

54:54

criteria. We don't know, there's

54:57

something like seven governors of the Federal Reserve, you know,

54:59

we know who they are, but we don't know who

55:01

the shareholders are, you don't really know who owns the

55:03

bank. If you don't know who owns the bank, you

55:05

don't really know who runs the bank. These

55:09

are closed door meetings, so we don't know

55:11

the criteria by which they're deciding when to

55:13

print money. We don't know even

55:15

the dividend that they're receiving for the printing of

55:17

money, we don't know the seniorage, which is like

55:20

the difference in the face value of

55:22

the production and the cost of actual production. We

55:24

don't know how much they're stealing on that. And

55:28

we don't know how many US dollars are in existence, we don't

55:30

know how many will come into existence, we don't know how many

55:32

are going out of existence. We get

55:34

data published, but it's changing all the

55:36

time, it can be audited, the Fed's

55:38

never been audited. So it's just a

55:40

black box basically, right? It's just totally

55:43

opaque, corrupt

55:46

nonsense. I tweeted this the

55:48

other day, the Fed is trust me bro. Basically,

55:51

and Bitcoin is trust math. So it's like that's

55:54

the dichotomy essentially.

55:56

So if money is

55:58

one half of every transaction, and

56:01

money can be printed arbitrarily at any time

56:03

for any reason to violate the

56:05

private property of savers, then

56:08

the money itself is inherently

56:10

socialistic, right? Socialism

56:12

is built directly into the money because

56:14

it can aggress against the private property

56:16

of savers at any time for any

56:18

reason without any explanation or justification whatsoever.

56:21

So if money is one half of every transaction, then

56:24

out of the gate you are at best 50%

56:27

socialist, right? The money can even be

56:29

deauthorized by the way. They don't even need to print it.

56:31

We, you know, we saw like India

56:34

did with a 500 rupee bank note. They just turn it

56:36

off overnight. They just say this is no longer a bill.

56:38

They just do it's off. The

56:41

central bank can do that with anything. So you think you've

56:43

got cash under the mattress and you're safe, you're a fucking

56:45

fool. Not only can

56:47

they inflate it, but they can also just turn it off or

56:50

they can just suspend physical cash. They just say we don't take

56:52

physical bills anymore. So out

56:55

of the gate, you're 50% socialist if one

56:57

half of every transaction is money and that

56:59

money is designed to

57:01

steal from you, basically. So

57:04

when you hear people talk about late-stage

57:06

capitalism, it's nonsense. We're not, we've

57:08

never been more than, we can't possibly be more than

57:11

50% capitalist because the money is

57:13

100% socialist. And it's

57:15

one half of every trade. So

57:17

and the reality is obviously once you

57:21

monopolize money in that way, other

57:23

industries close to the money spigots

57:25

start to become more socialized, right?

57:27

Health care, insurance, banking. These are

57:29

not free market institutions, right? This

57:31

is, these are areas specifically in finance

57:33

where you have too big to fail. Too

57:36

big to fail is not capitalist. Too

57:38

big to fail says the

57:41

political power has decided that stolen proceeds

57:43

will be funded, funneled into

57:45

these organizations to keep them alive

57:47

no matter the level of economic

57:49

losses they produce. Whereas

57:52

a purely capitalistic world would say if it's

57:54

producing losses, then that's a

57:56

signal that the capital inside of that organization

57:58

or organizations can be put to higher and

58:00

better use elsewhere. So

58:03

we're interrupting the adaptive signal

58:05

of the market economy itself

58:09

by politicizing and socializing the money in

58:11

this way. And so

58:13

we're not in late stage capitalism. We're

58:15

in late stage central banking, which

58:18

is another way of saying late stage monetary

58:20

socialism. So for the people that really want

58:22

to understand all of this shit,

58:25

the best metaphor to compress it down

58:27

into is look at it in terms

58:29

of private property. This

58:31

is the most fundamental pre,

58:34

you know, this is the essence. This

58:37

is the unifying principle of civilization itself.

58:40

All you want to know is that you can

58:42

go into the world, delay

58:44

your gratification, earn

58:46

more than you spend and

58:49

save that residual in something that can't

58:51

be compromised or stolen, right? That you

58:53

have a relationship between the assets you

58:56

create that cannot be violated.

58:58

This is the essence of civilization. This is why

59:00

we don't have to kill each other over every sandwich,

59:03

right? We can handle disputes

59:06

non-violently via the rule of law or via

59:08

a bid ask process in the marketplace. And

59:11

we can allocate scarce resources in a

59:13

peaceful way via private property. When

59:15

you start to violate the principle of private property,

59:18

you go into the domain of force and

59:20

violence. And this is

59:22

the situation, right? So

59:24

if you want people to really understand

59:26

this, you have

59:28

to build your arguments on the foundation,

59:30

the unshakable foundation of private property and

59:33

look at things in the world in

59:35

terms of private property. Is

59:38

this reinforcing private

59:40

property? Is this attacking private

59:42

property? And that, that

59:45

is justice. That is the essence of

59:47

justice. If justice is

59:50

people getting what they deserve or not getting

59:52

what they don't deserve, private

59:54

property is people keeping what they earn

59:57

and not getting what they didn't

59:59

earn. This is the essence

1:00:01

of justice itself. So

1:00:03

if you want to understand how the world needs to be

1:00:05

organized, you have to look at it through the lens of

1:00:07

private property. It is the only way

1:00:09

to understand what's actually going on. Absolutely.

1:00:12

And you know, it's

1:00:14

interesting too. And shout out to you

1:00:16

Svetsky and Mark Moss about this, right?

1:00:20

It was Karl Marx that originally wrote

1:00:22

that basically the necessity

1:00:24

of a central bank

1:00:26

in order for communism to even exist. Measure number

1:00:28

five in the 1848 manifested at

1:00:31

the communist party. So the state needs a

1:00:33

central monopoly on cash and credit to perpetrate

1:00:35

Marxism, basically. A hundred percent. Of course it

1:00:37

does. How else, how else are you going

1:00:39

to abolish private property if you don't monopolize

1:00:41

the currency? A hundred percent. And I also,

1:00:44

another component is the, in

1:00:47

that whole type of the, what

1:00:51

was the term that you said? I love that

1:00:53

term. We're going to start using it instead of

1:00:55

collectivism. You call that. Coversivism. Coversivism. Okay. So I

1:00:58

don't think that political

1:01:00

ideology, that political way of

1:01:03

thinking is possible without effective

1:01:05

redistribution mechanisms.

1:01:08

So we have direct taxation,

1:01:11

but the most insidious one is

1:01:15

taxation via inflation, which people are just

1:01:17

not aware of for whatever reason. If

1:01:20

you get rid of just the

1:01:23

inflation component, they're in trouble.

1:01:25

Like that, that, that,

1:01:27

it's a, you know, I

1:01:30

don't know how they're going to be offering these free

1:01:32

things. I don't know how they're going to be able

1:01:34

to buy those votes. Stolen things. Correct.

1:01:37

I don't know how they're going to be

1:01:39

able to offer those stolen things to someone

1:01:41

else in order to remain in power. So

1:01:43

it's a very interesting subject. And

1:01:45

I kind of want to go back and

1:01:47

you buried the lead there. And I think

1:01:49

it's a very interesting topic, Robert, because I've

1:01:52

seen this happen. I've

1:01:54

seen this happen within myself. I've

1:01:56

seen this happen within my family. And.

1:02:00

the topic that you brought up

1:02:02

in regards to the

1:02:04

why my republic in

1:02:06

Germany and how they

1:02:08

were kind of going down this

1:02:11

they were you know exploring gender

1:02:13

fluidity and I would make the

1:02:15

case that that is a further example

1:02:18

of just the degradation of

1:02:20

society and now where I'm trying to

1:02:22

connect the dots and I think they

1:02:24

do exist is that

1:02:26

I think that the further money gets

1:02:29

disconnected from reality I

1:02:31

think it brings people along with

1:02:33

it yeah I think that if

1:02:35

people are not aware that the

1:02:39

only way to really create values create

1:02:41

a business of course but

1:02:43

you know there's a proof of work component

1:02:45

to it like you can't just create money

1:02:47

out of thin air I think

1:02:49

that if you have

1:02:51

the ability to do that and people

1:02:54

believe in that it's almost

1:02:56

and this is perhaps too deep but

1:02:58

it's almost as if it corrupts the

1:03:00

soul yeah and what I've seen with

1:03:02

people is that they

1:03:05

get closer to

1:03:09

and I don't know what your I

1:03:11

don't know what your your spiritual beliefs

1:03:13

Robert are but I'm a Christian right

1:03:15

I've seen people get closer

1:03:18

to God as

1:03:20

they've adopted a sound money standard

1:03:23

and I've seen people get farther

1:03:26

away from you know

1:03:28

the spiritual component the more

1:03:30

they believe in this

1:03:32

fiat you know system I

1:03:35

think there's something there I've

1:03:37

seen this pattern I've been in the space for

1:03:39

eight years now and it's something

1:03:41

that I'm seeing over and over and over and

1:03:44

over again and I'll leave it with this final

1:03:46

thought I don't

1:03:48

think it's a coincidence that

1:03:50

the country that first made

1:03:52

Bitcoin legal tender therefore fixing

1:03:55

the incentive structure of society

1:03:58

is the country with the most popular

1:04:01

president in the Americas. I

1:04:03

do not think that's a coincidence. I

1:04:05

think they're connected. Yeah,

1:04:09

it is incredible, right, to see Bitcoiners.

1:04:13

I mean, the common pattern is

1:04:16

something like, and

1:04:19

it's not just buying Bitcoin, when I

1:04:21

say Bitcoiner, this doesn't mean someone who

1:04:23

bought Bitcoin. This means people that are

1:04:27

assiduously, purposefully going

1:04:29

down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, right,

1:04:31

trying to learn about the world

1:04:34

around them, how

1:04:36

it is broken, how Bitcoin fixes these

1:04:38

things, and then incorporating

1:04:41

those principles that Bitcoin instantiates

1:04:43

into their own life, right?

1:04:46

Proof of work, radical

1:04:48

honesty, self-sovereignty,

1:04:53

even radical transparency, which is related to

1:04:55

radical truth, but is not exactly the

1:04:57

same. I

1:05:00

think these are the

1:05:03

people that I would call Bitcoiners, and it's

1:05:05

something that I'm striving for

1:05:07

in my own life. Like, I think if

1:05:09

you really take it seriously, Bitcoin can make

1:05:12

you a better person. Why? This

1:05:14

is the strangest question of them all. I don't

1:05:16

know exactly why. I don't know exactly why. That's

1:05:18

why I asked you about the spiritual component. Okay,

1:05:20

so the definition of

1:05:23

spirit that I like most, I

1:05:26

think this is Heidegger, but maybe someone could check me on it.

1:05:29

The I that is in we and the

1:05:31

we that is in I. So

1:05:34

we talked earlier about language, right, that it's

1:05:38

this indispensable, yet insufficient

1:05:40

mapping tool for dealing

1:05:42

with reality. Well, reality

1:05:44

is continuous,

1:05:47

right? It is, we

1:05:50

are interconnected right now, right? We're breathing

1:05:52

the same air, right? We're speaking the

1:05:54

same language. We're using the same

1:05:56

light, right? Everything is

1:05:58

connected to everything. else, right? Chaos

1:06:02

theory has captured this as well, right?

1:06:04

The butterfly flaps its wings in Japan

1:06:06

and creates a hurricane in Florida, right?

1:06:08

That everything, complex systems are

1:06:11

absolutely and totally interconnected in a way

1:06:13

that is beyond comprehension in a way,

1:06:15

right? No one can see the butterfly

1:06:17

flapping its wings and make an observation

1:06:19

and tell you in advance there's gonna

1:06:21

be a hurricane in Florida. The

1:06:24

initial conditions, small changes in

1:06:26

the initial conditions, can have

1:06:28

giant outsized

1:06:32

impact on outcomes, right? Because there's

1:06:34

a nonlinear connection between these systems,

1:06:36

but this is the nature of

1:06:38

complex systems themselves. So

1:06:42

when we talk about the spiritual domain

1:06:44

I think that's what those words are

1:06:46

intended to emphasize, right? The

1:06:49

I that is an we and the we that is an I.

1:06:51

We know this about human maturity as well, that children

1:06:54

mature by internalizing representations of

1:06:56

other people. So that the

1:06:59

two-year-old for instance might just recklessly go into

1:07:01

the cookie jar, but maybe

1:07:03

the four-year-old has sufficiently internalized the representation of

1:07:06

their mother that says, hey you can't just

1:07:08

go in the cookie jar, you need to

1:07:10

ask permission, whatever the thing is, and they

1:07:12

can start to have

1:07:15

that conversation internally, right? Or at least that avatar

1:07:17

of their mother is kind of, you know, the

1:07:19

angel on their shoulder telling them not to go

1:07:21

into the cookie jar. And we

1:07:23

would, from the outside, look at that child and

1:07:25

say, oh that child is more mature than the

1:07:27

two-year-old that just can't help

1:07:30

but abandon themselves to their carnal desires to

1:07:32

eat the cookies, right? So

1:07:34

that is the process of maturity actually. As we

1:07:37

internalize more accurate and robust representations

1:07:39

of other people around us, we

1:07:41

become more mature individually. So the

1:07:43

more we, that is an I,

1:07:45

the more mature and

1:07:47

spiritually developed we become. And then

1:07:49

in turn we step

1:07:52

into our individual role in history, right?

1:07:54

We realize that history is not some

1:07:57

abstract flow of events which we

1:07:59

are regarding. separately, we are an

1:08:02

active participant in this game, in

1:08:05

this flow of events that is human history.

1:08:07

And then the I starts to step more

1:08:09

into the we, right? And this seems to

1:08:11

be something like

1:08:13

the essence of spirituality, right? So it's

1:08:15

not this, you know, oftentimes when people

1:08:17

say the word spirituality, they think, you

1:08:20

know, all praying to some abstract

1:08:22

domain, hoping I get into heaven, or maybe

1:08:24

I'm trying to tap into some other world

1:08:27

supernatural thing, but I don't think it's that

1:08:29

at all. I think

1:08:31

it's this actually infinite, infinitely

1:08:33

continuous, fluid, complex reality

1:08:35

that we inhabit. And

1:08:38

it's deeply psychological. It's also

1:08:41

procedural, you know, perspectival. There's all these

1:08:43

different levels of knowing that were Vicky

1:08:45

highlights. And language

1:08:49

is something like language is not that

1:08:51

basically, right? Language is instead

1:08:54

of being continuous and fluid, language is relatively

1:08:56

discreet, right? We have little boxes of meaning

1:08:58

and we try to arrange them in different

1:09:00

ways to adapt it

1:09:02

to describe the different contours of

1:09:05

reality, but it's limited and

1:09:07

its ability to do so. So I say

1:09:10

all this to set up, okay, why is

1:09:12

Bitcoin spiritual? Why

1:09:15

is it invoking spiritual change

1:09:17

in people? And

1:09:21

it's a very difficult question to answer,

1:09:23

but it's something like

1:09:25

it begs the question to me of how,

1:09:28

because we ourselves are also

1:09:31

complex adaptive systems, right? Just the individual

1:09:33

organism, in addition to participating in the

1:09:36

complex adaptive systems of the

1:09:38

global economy, the global climate, right? Like

1:09:40

we are all, everything we do, like

1:09:42

we're participating in that ecosystem or those

1:09:45

ecosystems, if you will. And

1:09:47

so it begs the question to me, if how

1:09:52

much are we integrated

1:09:56

to both, you know, all

1:09:58

these systems, right? economic

1:10:00

systems, which is another way

1:10:02

of maybe saying like how much are

1:10:06

the pathways of individual character

1:10:08

and moral development influenced by the

1:10:10

incentive systems they inhabit? You

1:10:12

know, this is one area I think that

1:10:15

Bitcoiners would agree strongly on that incentives really

1:10:17

matter and they really shape who we are

1:10:19

and they really determine the

1:10:21

shape of society and the way

1:10:23

societies operate. It

1:10:26

also kind of begs the question to

1:10:28

what extent are human beings core operating

1:10:31

components of Bitcoin itself? So

1:10:33

as you plug into Bitcoin, you know, not

1:10:36

just buying it and holding it, but really

1:10:38

start to study it

1:10:40

and try to live out the

1:10:42

principles, you know, as

1:10:45

you start to study Bitcoin, we conjecture

1:10:49

where it's going to go, right, towards this

1:10:51

world of the sovereign individual, less

1:10:54

nation-state-ism, less coercive-ism, more individualism. Well then

1:10:56

in that act of extrapolating where things

1:10:58

are going, we start to try and

1:11:00

embody that in the present, right, because,

1:11:02

oh, this is where I want to

1:11:04

go, this is what I want to

1:11:07

go towards. You start to enact that

1:11:09

life and when

1:11:11

you start to enact that life, it seems

1:11:13

like it takes you towards traditional

1:11:16

value systems and

1:11:18

a lot of those are captured

1:11:21

in things like Christianity, but not just

1:11:23

Christianity, right, like you could also be

1:11:25

Buddhist, you could also be

1:11:28

Islamic, I mean, these

1:11:32

older religions that have a lot

1:11:34

of, let's say, Lindy principles for

1:11:36

living well with your fellow man,

1:11:39

right, and living

1:11:41

moral lives, they

1:11:43

seem to contain a lot of the lessons

1:11:45

that Bitcoiners are kind of rediscovering by

1:11:49

becoming adherence

1:11:51

to the principles that Bitcoin

1:11:53

embodies. So I

1:11:55

don't exactly know the causal

1:11:57

mechanism, but it is... the

1:12:01

common pattern with people is Bitcoiners

1:12:04

start to identify, they take inventory

1:12:06

of their lives, and

1:12:09

they say, you know, okay, I do these

1:12:11

few things good. And maybe

1:12:13

this is something like, it's humbling, right? When you

1:12:15

lower your time preference, right? You start to step

1:12:17

out of yourself. You look

1:12:19

at yourself in context of a larger whole,

1:12:21

right? The whole of human history. Again,

1:12:24

how humans are influenced by incentives. So you start

1:12:27

to get more of an objective lens on yourself

1:12:29

to some extent. And then you

1:12:31

start to take an honest inventory, like, okay, well, here's some things

1:12:33

I'm good at. Here's some areas of my life that are going

1:12:35

well. Here's some other areas of my

1:12:37

life that aren't so good that I think there's room

1:12:39

for improvement. And

1:12:42

then the theme is people just start working

1:12:44

on that, right? They start, okay,

1:12:46

I'm not in good shape or I'm not, I

1:12:49

don't have a good community church

1:12:52

practice, whatever the thing is, or I'm not eating

1:12:54

well, or I'm not, I don't

1:12:56

like my job. I want to go start this business.

1:12:59

And people just start like marking those things

1:13:01

out that they don't like. And

1:13:04

they start adding to the list about the things of

1:13:06

themselves they do like. So somehow

1:13:08

Bitcoin encourages you as

1:13:10

this sound savings instrument

1:13:13

to just become more

1:13:16

serious about self development. Is

1:13:19

that a product of just the freedom

1:13:21

that Bitcoin is affording you by virtue

1:13:23

of giving people more purchasing power and

1:13:25

economic liberty? Maybe, but

1:13:28

there's a lot of rich people in the world

1:13:30

that aren't doing this, right? There's plenty of people,

1:13:33

plenty of financial freedom that aren't following

1:13:35

the same pattern. So what

1:13:38

is it about Bitcoiners? Why are they having more kids?

1:13:40

Why are they getting in shape? Why are they going

1:13:42

back to church? Why are they adopting

1:13:44

ancestral diets? And again, I don't,

1:13:46

it's something very interesting to think

1:13:49

about. I don't have the bright

1:13:51

answer for it, but it is

1:13:53

probably the most fascinating aspect of

1:13:55

Bitcoin, especially at a time where

1:13:58

people like Elon Musk are trying to- sound

1:14:00

the alarm about population decline. You

1:14:03

know, it's like, oh, people aren't having enough babies. This

1:14:05

is going to be the biggest issue we ever face

1:14:07

in the next few decades, you know, sounding the alarm.

1:14:11

And then, you know, obviously there's this big

1:14:13

trend worldwide where people are, they

1:14:16

call them, John Vervecki calls

1:14:18

them the nuns, I think,

1:14:20

that people just, they profess

1:14:22

no religious affiliation or belief

1:14:24

whatsoever, right? They're either agnostic

1:14:26

or atheistic, basically. Yet

1:14:29

you see Bitcoiners kind of going the other way. And

1:14:31

I don't know,

1:14:33

it's really fascinating. And then for me

1:14:35

personally, I don't call

1:14:39

myself a Christian because that comes with a

1:14:41

lot of maybe expectations

1:14:43

that I don't think I'm ready to

1:14:46

accept or live up to. But

1:14:48

for me, what it is, one

1:14:51

of the areas I've gotten into by

1:14:53

studying Bitcoin is this area of mimetic

1:14:56

desire by reading the book by

1:14:58

René Girard. And

1:15:00

the essence is that, you know, humans

1:15:02

are very imitative creatures. And

1:15:05

so this is why we're the product of our

1:15:07

environments. This is why we become like the five

1:15:09

people we spend the most time with, you know,

1:15:11

this is why we're so incentive responsive. Like we

1:15:13

just, we're very, human

1:15:15

nature is very fluid. And

1:15:18

so for me, holding

1:15:21

out the figure of Christ as

1:15:23

a role model, holding out the

1:15:25

figure of Socrates as a role model

1:15:27

and just studying these individuals, reading

1:15:30

about how they lived and trying to emulate

1:15:33

or imitate, trying

1:15:36

to internalize them, right? I'm trying to create that

1:15:38

avatar of the inner Christ or the inner Socrates

1:15:40

so that when I face situations in the world,

1:15:42

I can try to look at it through their

1:15:44

eyes, right? What I know about them, how would

1:15:46

they deal with this situation? And

1:15:49

that's a way that I've learned

1:15:51

or am learning or am

1:15:53

trying to learn to try

1:15:55

and cultivate my own wisdom.

1:15:57

And develop myself. in

1:16:00

a less foolish way, basically, right? And

1:16:02

so I don't know

1:16:04

that you would, I wouldn't say that Bitcoin's taken me

1:16:06

to God necessarily. I talk a lot about God on

1:16:08

the show, but it's not, I'm

1:16:11

not preaching to people. I'm not

1:16:13

coming at it from a purely Christian standpoint.

1:16:15

I think the

1:16:17

word God is probably the most loaded word

1:16:20

in the world. You could

1:16:22

say, what is money? Yeah. And

1:16:24

these big words, right? So it's like, what

1:16:26

is truth? What is beauty? What is justice?

1:16:28

What is goodness? What

1:16:30

is freedom? Right? These are all gigantic words.

1:16:32

They're very fundamental, but when you try to

1:16:35

dig into them, I mean, there's just tomes

1:16:37

of philosophy books written about these things, arguing

1:16:39

about what they are. And at the pinnacle

1:16:42

of that list is the word God. And

1:16:45

so for me, it

1:16:47

represents something like the word for

1:16:49

all that is beyond words, which

1:16:51

is most of reality, by the

1:16:53

way. It's also the word.

1:16:56

So if it's for everything that's beyond words, it

1:16:58

is that domain that's

1:17:01

unknowable, right? Knowledge

1:17:03

cannot capture it. And

1:17:05

in that way, as we said earlier, the

1:17:07

belief that knowledge can capture and contain everything

1:17:09

is totalitarianism. I think

1:17:11

that's the reason having a philosophical conception

1:17:14

of God is a bulwark against totalitarianism.

1:17:16

You have this reverence

1:17:18

and respect for the reality that

1:17:20

is beyond propositional capture, right?

1:17:23

And you understand that language is indispensable

1:17:26

yet insufficient, right? It cannot be

1:17:28

totalizing. And that's a very important

1:17:31

concept to internalize. Also,

1:17:34

as the place of the unknown,

1:17:36

it's what all creativity depends on,

1:17:39

right? So all creation depends on.

1:17:41

All of creation is authored by

1:17:43

God in this sense. This doesn't

1:17:45

mean there's a

1:17:47

guy in the sky writing a book

1:17:50

that determines your life. Just this principle

1:17:52

of that which is beyond propositional knowing

1:17:55

is the source of all creation, right? Anytime you create a new

1:17:57

business or a new person, you can't do that. And that's what

1:17:59

we're talking about. or do anything

1:18:01

novel whatsoever. Well, it was unknown before

1:18:03

you did it, right? So it came

1:18:05

from the unknown. But

1:18:09

it's also the force by which things

1:18:11

are known, right? And this is where

1:18:13

you get into the Neo-Platonic tradition, which

1:18:16

talked about, you know, you look at the work

1:18:18

of Plotinus, he called it the one. And

1:18:21

this is the, kind of like the

1:18:23

metaphysical basis of all beings. So it's

1:18:26

not what is known, but

1:18:29

it's the way by

1:18:31

which things are known. So he says something

1:18:33

like, just

1:18:35

like the eye does not see light, but

1:18:37

sees by way of light. So

1:18:40

the mind cannot see the one,

1:18:42

we cannot propositionally capture it, but

1:18:44

we see, the mind sees by the

1:18:46

way of the one. So

1:18:49

it is the actual mechanism through which

1:18:51

we have the

1:18:54

ability to know things or to understand

1:18:56

things. And so when you

1:18:58

combine all of these things together about God, like it's

1:19:00

that which is beyond words, which is a lot, it's

1:19:03

the essence of all creativity. It's

1:19:06

the essence that we participate in as creators,

1:19:09

right? As we create things, this is the

1:19:11

spark of divinity or God within all

1:19:13

of us. These are all philosophical

1:19:15

notions to me. I'm not here, people

1:19:18

say crazy shit to me and like, I'm happy for

1:19:20

them. So we're like, hey, thank you, I love

1:19:23

your work. Thanks

1:19:25

to your work, I was able to discover Christ now I'm

1:19:27

like a born again Christian. And I'm like,

1:19:29

wow, I'm just very happy for

1:19:31

you, but I'm not intending

1:19:34

to do that. I'm not trying to witness

1:19:36

to anyone. I love

1:19:38

Jordan Peterson's answer to this. When they say, they

1:19:40

ask him, do you believe in God? And

1:19:43

he says, no, but I act

1:19:45

as if he exists. And

1:19:48

the fact that he's putting the primacy on

1:19:50

human action rather than human proposition or belief,

1:19:52

I often say that I don't believe in

1:19:54

belief. If you believe

1:19:56

belief is just this set of propositions that you

1:19:58

claim to have, like I don't. think that matters.

1:20:01

What matters to me is how you act. I don't

1:20:04

care if you're Buddhist, Christian, like whatever

1:20:06

your religion you profess, do

1:20:08

you honor life, liberty, and property? Do

1:20:11

you put human freedom and love

1:20:13

and truth, the pinnacle of your

1:20:15

value system? Then

1:20:17

we're good. We're good. Whatever God you

1:20:19

believe in, whatever philosophy you want to

1:20:21

embody, as

1:20:24

long as you honor and respect your fellow

1:20:27

humans, then I think that's that is the

1:20:29

way, so to speak. Absolutely, and I think

1:20:32

Bitcoin brings that

1:20:34

out. Yeah, it energizes it. It

1:20:36

does. I'd

1:20:40

like to thank my friends at Swann Bitcoin for

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1:22:42

would say perhaps maybe

1:22:45

it's the act

1:22:47

of self-custody, and then

1:22:49

that leads to the rabbit hole

1:22:52

of self-reliance. I

1:22:55

think if you have fiat in a

1:22:57

bank account, it removes

1:22:59

the element of personal responsibility.

1:23:02

The idea that you can write down a

1:23:04

12 to 24 word seed

1:23:06

phrase and you can store

1:23:09

your entire life, I'm going to call it

1:23:11

energy, within

1:23:13

that. There's

1:23:16

an element of responsibility there where before

1:23:18

you were outsourcing that, and

1:23:20

perhaps maybe that is the

1:23:22

mindset shift of people, and then they

1:23:25

start to feel empowered in

1:23:27

the sense that like, I

1:23:29

don't want healthcare from... Not only do

1:23:31

I not want healthcare from the state,

1:23:34

they do it horrifically. They

1:23:36

do it horribly. So is

1:23:38

it the self-reliance element perhaps?

1:23:42

Certainly makes you grow up, right? Yes.

1:23:46

Yeah, self-reliance is a good framing

1:23:50

for the difference between being an adolescent or

1:23:52

a child and being a full grown adult,

1:23:54

right? You're relying on your parents when

1:23:57

you're a juvenile to a greater or lesser

1:23:59

age. extent at different points in your life.

1:24:03

Even after you fly the nest and you go

1:24:05

to college, you start your early job, many people

1:24:07

still, you know, the old joke like,

1:24:09

oh they come home on the weekends with their laundry, you

1:24:11

know, mom do my laundry, like you're still relying on your

1:24:13

family. Obviously this is a generality, not

1:24:15

everyone's like this, but the

1:24:18

extent to which you become self-reliant is

1:24:20

the extent to which you become a

1:24:22

mature, fully grown adult. Okay,

1:24:25

if that's true, then

1:24:28

the self,

1:24:30

the radical self-reliance that

1:24:32

we take by self-custody in

1:24:35

Bitcoin stands

1:24:37

to reason, I think, that that might be

1:24:40

another step in

1:24:43

the process of growing up, right? You

1:24:47

reduce your dependency on the

1:24:49

state, you take

1:24:51

on more self-responsibility, and

1:24:54

in doing so you become more

1:24:57

of a sovereign individual, right?

1:24:59

You gain the ability to

1:25:01

act as you see fit

1:25:03

without dependence on others. And,

1:25:06

you know, the

1:25:08

language is tricky here because we're

1:25:11

all dependent on one another to some

1:25:13

extent, but you, Bitcoin at least, gives

1:25:15

you the capacity to be more selective

1:25:17

about who you're dependent on, right? Instead

1:25:19

of just being dependent on some abstract

1:25:21

and anti-state to hopefully send you a

1:25:23

Social Security check or pay for

1:25:25

your health care or whatever the thing is you're depending

1:25:27

on them for, you can

1:25:29

reduce reliance on this abstract institutional

1:25:32

other and you can start establishing

1:25:34

more dependence on those that you

1:25:36

actually know, love, or trust in

1:25:38

your immediate circle, right? Or

1:25:41

not even know or love, like just people you

1:25:43

want to work with, right? Instead

1:25:45

of getting state-paid health care, you can go

1:25:48

and select actual health care providers and you

1:25:50

decide, oh, this is the guy, I've vetted

1:25:52

three, five guys, women, this is the one

1:25:54

I like, this is the one I'm gonna

1:25:56

work with, this is the one I'm gonna

1:25:58

give my energy to. not I'm

1:26:00

gonna have my economic energy stolen from

1:26:02

me by the state and then they're

1:26:05

gonna tell me what options I get

1:26:07

and I get to pick whatever they

1:26:09

chose for me right there's an abdication

1:26:11

of responsibility in that process that Bitcoin

1:26:13

lets you reclaim so

1:26:16

yeah maybe it is as I don't

1:26:19

think it's as simple as that but that's definitely another way

1:26:21

to look at it is that you know we are the

1:26:25

truth is individuals are

1:26:28

self-owned self-controlling entities

1:26:31

right and this is fundamental

1:26:33

to the libertarian argument that ultimately

1:26:36

people act right

1:26:38

you people control themselves they choose

1:26:40

means to pursue ends and

1:26:44

Bitcoin acknowledges

1:26:46

and honors that reality

1:26:48

that by letting people

1:26:51

control the fruits of their actions

1:26:54

over time right and making them

1:26:57

resistant to the coercive actions

1:27:00

of others whether those others

1:27:02

be criminals or institutionalized

1:27:05

criminals the state or the

1:27:07

central bank and so

1:27:09

that's empowering right this is this is

1:27:12

this is why that word sovereignty is so important

1:27:14

you know it's where we get the word rain

1:27:16

r e i g n like when I hope

1:27:19

I spelled that right I like when

1:27:22

a king reigns over his people right

1:27:25

this this idea of having political authority

1:27:27

over others well this Bitcoin lets you

1:27:29

have political authority over yourself and

1:27:32

it creates this new incentive system where individuals

1:27:36

have political authority over themselves

1:27:39

and by virtue of having political authority only

1:27:41

over yourself then you can really only engage

1:27:44

with these other self-sovereign actors in

1:27:46

terms of consent because

1:27:48

coercion becomes a less profitable strategy for

1:27:50

dealing with people in a world where

1:27:53

people can preserve their purchasing power in

1:27:55

an unconfiscatable medium that's

1:27:58

a beautiful thing right That means more

1:28:00

peace, means more

1:28:03

productivity. Proseperity. Means higher standards

1:28:05

of living, more political freedom, more

1:28:08

trade, more innovation, more

1:28:11

options, less war, less

1:28:13

criminality. I mean, all

1:28:15

of these things that we want, Bitcoin

1:28:18

seems to be a gateway to

1:28:21

that world and hence

1:28:23

the oft repeated mantra in Bitcoin, fix the

1:28:25

money, fix the world. And

1:28:28

again, begs that question, back

1:28:30

to money, it's like to what extent, money's

1:28:34

not just a technology, it's not just a

1:28:36

social construct, it's kind of like a little

1:28:38

bit of both, right? It typically has a

1:28:40

physical instantiation, but it also has this sort

1:28:43

of software, linguistic element. So

1:28:45

to what extent are we components

1:28:47

of monetary networks? That

1:28:50

might explain why there's so much positive

1:28:53

feedback when we move on to

1:28:55

an ethical monetary standard that we become

1:28:58

more ethical creatures. One

1:29:00

of my favorite quotes is that, human nature is like

1:29:02

water, it takes the shape of its container. I

1:29:05

think those containers are incentive systems basically,

1:29:08

whatever we pour human nature into in

1:29:10

terms of the incentive schema, that's

1:29:13

how we start to act, right? We

1:29:15

see people respond to incentives basically. And

1:29:18

Bitcoin is a radically new incentive

1:29:20

schema that energizes

1:29:23

ethical action, right? It's

1:29:26

promoting and

1:29:28

incentivizing respect for

1:29:30

life, liberty and property. And I don't

1:29:32

know that there's ever been anything like

1:29:35

that. We've had constitutions,

1:29:37

which sort of outline

1:29:39

the rights individuals have and what

1:29:41

governments can't do. And

1:29:43

here the penalty is if the government violates those things.

1:29:45

Okay, great, we write this all down on a sheet

1:29:47

of paper. We try to adhere to

1:29:49

it. But there's never been this economic

1:29:53

engine driving that action. It's

1:29:56

just always been an agreement and it's worked pretty

1:29:58

well, like probably as good as a... sheet of

1:30:00

paper can, but Bitcoin

1:30:02

is a new format of that

1:30:04

technology and it seems to give

1:30:06

us a lot more material

1:30:09

incentive motivation for adopting

1:30:11

these ethical principles and

1:30:14

universalizing respect for life, liberty and property. And

1:30:17

that's why it's such a big

1:30:19

deal for the human race. Absolutely. It's

1:30:21

the first and you hit the nail on the head.

1:30:24

It's truly the first incentive

1:30:26

structure that is aligned. And

1:30:29

you don't see that, right? A

1:30:32

minor pursuing profit

1:30:35

benefits everyone else. A node operator, because they

1:30:37

don't want to trust someone else's copy of

1:30:39

the blockchain, benefits everyone

1:30:41

else. You and me, right? Making

1:30:43

content in different ways. But

1:30:46

what are we doing, right? We're

1:30:48

pursuing our own incentives. Exactly. And

1:30:50

in the process, what are we

1:30:52

doing? We're furthering Bitcoin

1:30:55

and we're furthering the separation

1:30:58

of money and state. And then when you extrapolate

1:31:00

that to a world that runs on a Bitcoin

1:31:02

standard, you

1:31:04

will actually start to root for everyone's

1:31:07

economic success. Yes. Because every time someone

1:31:09

builds a business that advances the productivity

1:31:11

of the human race, your

1:31:13

savings purchasing power just went up. Absolutely.

1:31:15

So there will be, there's an incentive

1:31:18

changes. Like I don't want to go

1:31:21

to war or steal your stuff or do

1:31:23

this. Like you actually want people to still

1:31:25

be competition in business, peaceful competition, but

1:31:28

violent competition becomes much

1:31:32

less attractive because

1:31:34

that would actually decrement productivity, which is

1:31:36

going to decrement my purchasing power. So

1:31:38

to get everyone on a common saving

1:31:41

standard where

1:31:43

each economic success story increases

1:31:45

my savings, like you're talking about

1:31:47

the ultimate alignment of the self-interested

1:31:50

motivations of entrepreneurs and

1:31:52

the selfless motivation of the

1:31:54

greater good, world peace, productivity,

1:31:57

harmony, et cetera. Absolutely.

1:32:00

100% and you

1:32:03

see this too because you know

1:32:05

it's so interesting that the

1:32:08

hostility that you've seen come out

1:32:10

of the the IMF

1:32:13

and the World Bank which you know they

1:32:15

they tout that they want to

1:32:17

help these developing countries and

1:32:20

you know their vitriol

1:32:22

reaction towards El Salvador

1:32:26

one of the conditions that they gave Argentina

1:32:28

to give them another loan was

1:32:30

that they had to de-incentivize the adoption of

1:32:32

Bitcoin within the country exposes

1:32:35

their incentives right were

1:32:37

they really about you know bettering

1:32:40

these countries right or

1:32:42

were they corrupted you know

1:32:44

by the the fiat system

1:32:46

itself now I think

1:32:48

Robert we are entering into a moment

1:32:51

in history where we're there

1:32:53

at the movie like we're at that

1:32:55

point in the movie where

1:32:58

Bitcoin is entering into

1:33:00

the political sphere and

1:33:02

the political discussion and

1:33:05

I truly believe that in you

1:33:08

know the next couple

1:33:10

of years this is something

1:33:12

that is going to be not

1:33:14

only talked about but

1:33:16

it's going to become a major

1:33:19

electoral issue we saw

1:33:21

a little bit of it with Vivek with

1:33:24

RFK with Ron DeSantis they all

1:33:26

mentioned it saw

1:33:28

a tiny little bit it with with Trump

1:33:30

we definitely are seeing it with Biden in

1:33:32

terms of his his

1:33:34

his stance towards the industry and his

1:33:36

hostility towards the industry so

1:33:39

I guess my question to you

1:33:41

is how do you

1:33:43

see the geopolitical landscape in the

1:33:45

next coming years and I really

1:33:48

want to kind of include the the

1:33:50

sovereign individual thesis into this and I

1:33:52

love that book I think I've read

1:33:54

it like five times where

1:33:56

you know he's talking about the

1:33:58

United States being one of the

1:34:01

worst countries to potentially set up

1:34:03

shop because they're gonna

1:34:05

be one of the countries that are going

1:34:07

to fight tooth and nail to

1:34:10

protect their ability to create money for free that

1:34:12

everyone else has to work for. And

1:34:14

you're already starting to see little inklings of that.

1:34:16

So what do I mean by that? First,

1:34:19

you had the Roger Ver, I'm not exactly

1:34:21

a fan of Roger Ver, the whole Bitcoin

1:34:23

cash thing that happened, but his

1:34:25

arrest in Spain after

1:34:29

he gave up his citizenship and

1:34:31

the US government said, look, you owe

1:34:33

us an exit tax. In Canada, they

1:34:35

just announced that they're thinking about doubling

1:34:38

the exit tax and doubling the penalties.

1:34:40

Like the psychology of

1:34:42

that, we're talking about theft, right?

1:34:45

Has been a major theme of our conversation, is

1:34:48

absolutely insane. So, I'm

1:34:52

a, I just became a

1:34:54

father, three or

1:34:56

four months ago. I know you are a father yourself.

1:34:59

So this is definitely something that I know you've

1:35:01

thought about. I've put a tremendous amount of thought

1:35:03

into it. I

1:35:06

think we do believe that the sovereign

1:35:08

individual thesis will play out, but

1:35:10

what keeps me up at night is the

1:35:13

transition. And I think we

1:35:15

are in the first inklings of

1:35:17

that transition. I think we have

1:35:19

been seeing the great disintermediation of

1:35:21

information with peer-to-peer mass

1:35:23

communication, like podcasts. And the

1:35:25

biggest broadcasters in the world

1:35:27

right now are Joe Rogan

1:35:29

and Tucker Carlson. They're not

1:35:31

on legacy media. I'm

1:35:34

sure you saw the interview with Mike Benz and

1:35:36

Tucker, basically saying that

1:35:38

the government was not prepared for social

1:35:40

media. It completely hampered their ability to

1:35:42

control their narrative on a massive scale.

1:35:45

And what I believe we're entering into

1:35:47

right now is truly

1:35:49

the disintermediation of money and

1:35:52

state. But unlike the

1:35:54

disintermediation of information and state,

1:35:57

we are now going after their

1:35:59

source of power. Right? And this

1:36:02

is where I think things will

1:36:05

start to become nasty. So

1:36:08

what's your take on the geopolitical landscape? Where

1:36:10

do you see all of this going in

1:36:12

the next five, ten years? I

1:36:17

was very hesitant to make predictions, especially

1:36:19

on given time scales,

1:36:22

because nothing like this

1:36:24

has ever happened in the history of

1:36:26

humanity. I've never had a

1:36:31

monetary asset emerge that

1:36:33

is disrupting. We've

1:36:35

never had a technology emerge. So far

1:36:37

as I'm aware, oh, you know, we're

1:36:40

15 years into Bitcoin. It's

1:36:42

disrupting a 5,000 plus

1:36:44

year old technology gold.

1:36:49

So far as I'm aware, we've never

1:36:51

had anything at that scale,

1:36:53

right? And the world is emerging this quickly

1:36:55

that is disrupting something that ancient. And

1:36:59

the entire world, this is

1:37:01

another thing, this dawning realization

1:37:03

you get by going into the

1:37:05

Bitcoin rabbit hole is you come to understand how

1:37:08

the entire global

1:37:10

order is built on

1:37:12

top of and around gold, basically, right?

1:37:14

Whatever country has the most gold is

1:37:17

the global superpower, right?

1:37:19

The conclusion of World War II, the fact that

1:37:21

most of the gold ended up in North America.

1:37:24

I think that was the tipping point that brought the

1:37:26

US into World War II to

1:37:31

finish it and declare itself victorious. And

1:37:34

then the first thing we do after World War II is hold

1:37:36

the Bretton Woods conference to rewrite the

1:37:38

global banking order in which the dollars

1:37:40

pegged to gold, all of the currencies are pegged to

1:37:42

the dollar, giving us the exorbitant privilege

1:37:44

to print money at infinite

1:37:47

item, basically. Obviously, it was checked by gold, but

1:37:49

in 1971, we removed that check and

1:37:53

we could externalize inflation, right? The world sends us goods

1:37:55

and services, we send them pieces of paper we can

1:37:57

print. basically

1:38:00

putting the US on top of the game,

1:38:02

right? That we get to be, and

1:38:06

this is what, I mean every superpower has basically always

1:38:08

tried to monopolize the currency in this way. So it's

1:38:10

not like something new. It's

1:38:13

again just a testament to the fact that money is

1:38:15

power. Well, that's

1:38:17

been kind of the way it's gone, right? You had

1:38:20

the Dutch world

1:38:22

power, they had the currency. There

1:38:24

was also, there was more use

1:38:27

of the gold standard in that time because we didn't

1:38:29

have the electronic age, right, so it was much more

1:38:31

difficult to implement and

1:38:33

operate a global fiat standard. Then

1:38:36

you had the British, and

1:38:40

I think it was Isaac Newton that actually put the

1:38:42

world onto a gold standard. Effectively we got put in

1:38:44

Britain onto a gold standard and then forced the rest

1:38:46

of the world to adapt. And

1:38:49

gold was the best money, and then obviously in

1:38:52

the wake of the British Empire, we now have

1:38:54

the US Empire. That

1:38:56

was also dollar-based gold-backed

1:39:00

currency that then became a fiat currency in 1971.

1:39:04

And that's what we're living through now, is kind of the decline

1:39:06

of the US Empire. That

1:39:09

is probably being

1:39:11

accelerated by Bitcoin. Again,

1:39:13

in the

1:39:15

lens of the sovereign individual thesis, books

1:39:18

written in 1997 predicted the emergence

1:39:20

of social media, predicted

1:39:22

the emergence of anonymous digital cyber cash, I

1:39:24

think is what they called it, and

1:39:27

it basically said once people realized

1:39:30

that they could opt into a

1:39:32

non-predatory monetary policy, you could opt

1:39:34

into money that doesn't steal from

1:39:36

you, that

1:39:39

there would eventually be an awakening, a

1:39:41

gradual then sudden awakening, that people would

1:39:43

stampede into that money

1:39:46

so they could stop getting robbed by

1:39:48

inflation. And the numbers are berserk, right?

1:39:51

If you start looking at, there's

1:39:54

a table somewhere in that book, or

1:39:56

maybe it was just written in the book and I made a

1:39:58

table out of it, but if you talk about... about

1:40:01

reducing your inflation rate at 10% per year over

1:40:06

a period of, I wanna say 20, maybe it

1:40:08

was 40 years, and

1:40:11

you're looking at earnings of like 10,000, or

1:40:15

I forget the exact numbers, but I'm gonna guess, someone

1:40:20

have to check me. I think it's $100,000

1:40:22

of earnings per year if you could shield

1:40:24

it 10% from taxation or inflation and you

1:40:26

could compound that for 40 years. It ends

1:40:28

up being like a $44 million decision. So

1:40:31

it's not like, oh, I'm trying to skirt inflation and

1:40:35

save a few bucks. It's like, no, this is

1:40:37

tens of millions of dollars over a lifetime of

1:40:39

earnings. If you can opt

1:40:41

out of predatory money and opt into predation

1:40:45

resistant money, which is Bitcoin. So

1:40:47

the thesis of the book is saying this

1:40:49

calculus is just too, like

1:40:52

you can't, there's

1:40:55

an osmotic pressure basically. No

1:40:58

one's ever forced into Bitcoin, but any

1:41:00

rational economic actor that wakes up to

1:41:02

this reality, especially as inflation gets worse,

1:41:05

they have more of an incentive to figure out what they can

1:41:07

do to avoid it. They'll basically be

1:41:10

osmotically pressured into Bitcoin.

1:41:14

And so what does that do? Well,

1:41:16

then you have people in an uninflatable

1:41:18

currency, holding a lot of purchasing power

1:41:20

in an uninflatable currency, and

1:41:23

this would then sunset or

1:41:25

eliminate inflation as a

1:41:27

revenue option for the state. Now

1:41:30

in 2020, the revenue mix of the

1:41:32

US government was roughly 50 50. We

1:41:34

printed roughly four plus trillion, I think it

1:41:36

was more like six, and

1:41:38

we collected via taxation, direct explicit

1:41:41

taxation in the neighborhood of 4

1:41:43

trillion. So you could say inflation

1:41:45

was, to be conservative, call it 50% of revenue, when

1:41:48

direct taxation was 50% of revenue. Granted,

1:41:52

that was somewhat of an anomalous year because we printed a

1:41:54

bunch of money, but also

1:41:56

I would say the US tends

1:41:59

to be... less dependent on inflation

1:42:01

for revenue than other states because

1:42:04

we have, we externalize

1:42:06

a lot of that inflation. So we don't need

1:42:08

to print as much money to get as much

1:42:10

juice, whereas other states actually need to print more

1:42:12

money and they collect less in taxes. So

1:42:15

if inflation

1:42:17

goes away as a revenue option, that's basically

1:42:20

half of the US government's revenues. Okay,

1:42:23

if you cut a business's revenues in half, what happens

1:42:25

with the business? Business

1:42:28

tends to get cut in half, right?

1:42:30

So this is what the

1:42:32

sovereign individual talks about, that the monetization

1:42:34

and emergence of Bitcoin would shrink the state

1:42:36

over time. And if

1:42:39

you run this all the way forward, their

1:42:41

thesis is we move from a world of 200 nation

1:42:43

states to one of maybe

1:42:46

20,000 free city states, right? People

1:42:48

have a lot of options and

1:42:51

you get a lot more experimentation at

1:42:53

the governance layer. So I'm

1:42:56

not telling you anything you don't know, you've read the book five times,

1:42:58

but I'm just kind of running through it for the audience. What

1:43:01

does that mean for the years ahead? This

1:43:07

is a staggering colossal

1:43:10

transition, right? It completely changes the

1:43:12

relationship between the individual and the

1:43:14

state, 100%. It

1:43:18

is radical. What you

1:43:20

mentioned it earlier, this has never happened

1:43:22

in human history. No. And

1:43:25

it's crazy. And I

1:43:28

guess the comparison, Robert, would

1:43:30

be the separation of

1:43:32

church and state and

1:43:34

the French Revolution and the Napoleonic

1:43:37

Wars that were after it. But

1:43:40

it's not a very, it's a different, and you could

1:43:43

actually make the state that that would, you could actually

1:43:45

make the statement that that was the beginning of the

1:43:47

nation state in that era. So

1:43:50

I guess that would be a comparison, but

1:43:52

it's not a comparison. I'd say like the

1:43:54

Protestant Reformation is somewhat of a comparison. Why

1:43:56

not? Because, well, after the

1:43:58

invention of the printing press, the

1:44:01

medieval church lost its monopoly on

1:44:03

book production via the scriptorium. And

1:44:06

this broke its monopoly on knowledge basically, right?

1:44:08

So then people, books went from being a

1:44:10

luxury item to something that anyone could afford.

1:44:14

And with that, people became,

1:44:16

developed higher degrees of literacy and

1:44:18

numeracy, and they became

1:44:21

smarter basically. And so

1:44:23

the church had depended on kind

1:44:25

of being this gateway between people

1:44:27

and knowledge of people and God.

1:44:30

And then once bookmaking became

1:44:32

widespread and cheap, all

1:44:34

the people started to become more intelligent.

1:44:37

This was a precursor to the scientific

1:44:39

revolution, the enlightenment, the

1:44:41

industrial age, was

1:44:43

really this cognitive software update. Like

1:44:46

people were becoming more literate,

1:44:48

more numerate. And so

1:44:50

the Protestant, eventually Luther

1:44:52

pins a nine to five theses on

1:44:55

the church and it starts this whole Protestant Reformation.

1:45:01

And that leads to the decline of the

1:45:03

medieval church as the dominant institution in the

1:45:05

world and paves the

1:45:07

way for the nation state, which paradoxically, the

1:45:10

printing press that brought down the church, the

1:45:12

same printing press that ultimately enables arbitrary

1:45:16

expansion of the money supply, which expands

1:45:18

the nation state, especially in times of

1:45:20

war. So one of those

1:45:22

weird ironies of history through

1:45:25

the lens of technology. And

1:45:28

in the Reformation, there was a counter Reformation. The

1:45:34

church fought back. The church tried to

1:45:36

cling on to the vestiges of

1:45:39

power that it still had and

1:45:41

it was quite brutal. It

1:45:44

was quite a dark time. So obviously

1:45:47

no one hopes for that.

1:45:50

Bit corners don't hope for that. It

1:45:53

would be great to see this smooth

1:45:55

transition that some people have proposed that

1:45:57

maybe we

1:45:59

just start. you know, really

1:46:01

the US is a great

1:46:03

place for this because we had a

1:46:06

decentralized constitutional Republic. When we were

1:46:08

founded, Bitcoin

1:46:10

is like the most American technology in

1:46:12

that sense in the human history, right?

1:46:15

Absolutely. If we were still anywhere

1:46:17

near our founding principles, we'd be embracing

1:46:19

this thing with both arms, but we

1:46:21

have, I would argue due

1:46:25

to the central bank, we have

1:46:27

radically overgrown centralized government and gotten

1:46:29

far away from our decentralized founding

1:46:32

principles such that, you know, you

1:46:35

have Elizabeth Warren's of the world or whatever decrying

1:46:37

Bitcoin. Whereas if we had any real Americans,

1:46:40

we had an Andrew Jackson in office, he

1:46:42

would be like, finally, something

1:46:44

to put these den of Vipers in

1:46:46

their cage, right? And

1:46:52

so maybe we can rediscover

1:46:54

our founding principles

1:46:56

and embrace Bitcoin. Again, you mentioned

1:46:59

RFK. There

1:47:02

is this incentive, right? For politicians

1:47:04

to start caring about what their

1:47:06

constituencies care about. So the more

1:47:09

Americans that are holding Bitcoin and

1:47:11

the more Bitcoin is appreciating, well,

1:47:13

that gets, that preference gets expressed

1:47:15

into the political layer via

1:47:19

the electoral college. So maybe, but

1:47:23

on the other hand, the United States does

1:47:25

have the most to lose in this whole

1:47:27

thing because they sit atop the heap of

1:47:30

the global Fiat paradigm. So

1:47:33

how does it play out? I have no idea. I have

1:47:35

no, I mean, how could I, how could I honestly sit

1:47:37

here and give you some kind of play by play for

1:47:39

how this is going to play out? I would be very

1:47:42

fucking arrogant to do that. Cause like, again,

1:47:45

we're drawing or pulling threads of these

1:47:47

historical events, but even those aren't the

1:47:50

same, right? Like printing press is

1:47:52

not incorruptible money. You

1:47:55

know, taking the way that the monopoly on

1:47:57

knowledge is not the same as taking away the

1:47:59

monopoly on money. These are

1:48:01

different goods, if you

1:48:03

will. So

1:48:07

the best thing I

1:48:09

can flail about over here and

1:48:11

try and offer you or anyone in something

1:48:13

that I'm trying to incorporate into my own

1:48:15

life is

1:48:18

summarized in the maxim that in

1:48:20

times of great uncertainty, the optimal

1:48:22

strategy is optionality. So

1:48:24

you want to develop as

1:48:26

wide and as rich of a

1:48:28

set of options for yourself as

1:48:30

possible. We don't know. Is

1:48:32

the United States going to become dystopian,

1:48:36

totalitarian, nightmare? Is the

1:48:38

EU... You don't

1:48:40

know where these things are going to happen.

1:48:43

So obviously Bitcoin gives you a

1:48:45

great degree of optionality in that you have purchasing

1:48:47

power independent of the state. You

1:48:49

have world money. You can take that anywhere, do

1:48:52

a lot of things with it. Purchasing

1:48:55

power outside the system, as someone like

1:48:57

George Gammon would say, doesn't have to

1:48:59

be Bitcoin. Could be physical gold. Can

1:49:02

be cash under your mattress. Although that's not entirely

1:49:04

out of the system, as I said earlier. They

1:49:06

can deauthorize cash. They can inflate cash. Gold

1:49:10

is okay, but obviously much bulkier

1:49:14

than Bitcoin and it's physical, so you can't

1:49:16

get as much purchasing power into less

1:49:19

space basically. In

1:49:24

my opinion, Bitcoin is like the best

1:49:26

tool for that job in terms of

1:49:28

moving purchasing power across jurisdictional boundaries without

1:49:31

interference. But

1:49:33

other options you want to develop are... I

1:49:37

like the idea of having an alternative place of

1:49:39

living. I'm working with

1:49:41

a place... It's

1:49:43

at the Florida Georgia line called the Farm

1:49:45

at Okefenokee and they have

1:49:47

a totally off-grid living situation. They have

1:49:49

their own water, their own power, their

1:49:51

own food, their own livestock. They're

1:49:55

building a church, they're building a school,

1:49:57

they're building a blacksmith. Like everything you

1:49:59

need to live. completely independently, right? So

1:50:01

if the whole world goes

1:50:04

to shit, well, then I have this sort

1:50:06

of bug out location and plan, call

1:50:08

it a citadel, if you will, that you can

1:50:10

go be amongst like-minded people.

1:50:13

There's a lot of Bitcoiners there, of

1:50:15

course, because that's a huge selling point

1:50:17

for Bitcoiners. And that's

1:50:20

a good option, right? That's a great option.

1:50:22

If things get dicey in Miami, where we're

1:50:24

at today, or civilized

1:50:27

US cities in general, well, then

1:50:30

I can go kind of live

1:50:32

off-grid. And I think there's a lot of,

1:50:35

that option value could be

1:50:38

tremendous in times of great

1:50:40

strife. Other

1:50:42

forms of optionality include firearms,

1:50:45

right? You need to protect yourself.

1:50:48

You're obviously in ammunition for firearms, food

1:50:51

supplies, water,

1:50:55

multiple passports, right? Multiple residency

1:50:58

cards. You can also, when

1:51:00

you start getting into that game, you get

1:51:03

into multi-flag theory, you can optimize yourself from

1:51:05

a tax standpoint, right? You

1:51:09

can spend a certain amount of time in

1:51:11

certain places of the world, and you can

1:51:13

kind of jump through these little loopholes to

1:51:15

optimize yourself from a tax

1:51:18

liability standpoint. Well, when you

1:51:20

optimize yourself from a tax liability standpoint,

1:51:22

obviously you save money, you can compound

1:51:24

your resources more year over year, you

1:51:26

create more and more financial options for

1:51:28

yourself, especially if you're saving some of

1:51:30

that in Bitcoin, which further

1:51:32

compounds your purchasing power over time. So,

1:51:36

and then, relationships, obviously, right? You

1:51:39

need to know people that can

1:51:41

do different things, and community is

1:51:43

very important, not just

1:51:45

in your immediate physical proximity, but also

1:51:48

people you know online, you

1:51:51

know, owning private businesses, you

1:51:54

know, multiple revenue streams is another area

1:51:56

of optionality. I think that's really useful.

1:52:00

And yeah, you just have

1:52:02

to build robustness

1:52:06

or ideally anti-fragility into your life

1:52:08

so that if things do get

1:52:11

bad that you don't, not

1:52:13

only would you not suffer, but you

1:52:16

could even gain, right? If you've positioned

1:52:18

yourself intelligently. There's

1:52:20

that old saying that the best fishing is in troubled

1:52:23

waters, you know? I think

1:52:25

it was Bank of America was founded

1:52:27

in the streets of San Francisco after the

1:52:29

Great Fire, right? The guy sitting there literally

1:52:31

among the ashes started making loans and he's

1:52:33

built that into Bank of America. I'm

1:52:35

not suggesting start a bank, but that's just kind of one illustration

1:52:39

of how in times

1:52:41

of chaos

1:52:43

there's great opportunity, right?

1:52:46

Being greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are

1:52:48

greedy, this whole thing. So I

1:52:53

don't want to say all this to invoke fear. If

1:52:55

anything, it can be opportunity,

1:52:57

right? That yeah, sure. We're going through

1:52:59

a great transition. We're transitioning

1:53:01

from the industrial age into the digital

1:53:04

age. All of the institutional

1:53:06

realities that have been built up on top of a

1:53:08

pseudo gold standard that we still live on,

1:53:10

even though we individually don't transact

1:53:12

in gold, you bet your ass

1:53:15

nation states transacting gold, right? They're not taking

1:53:17

paper in settlement of war debts. So

1:53:20

gold makes the world go around still till this day.

1:53:23

If that technology is being disrupted, all

1:53:26

the institutions built on top of it are also

1:53:28

subject to disruption and change. I

1:53:31

don't think anyone can tell you what that looks like, right? You

1:53:33

just seem like it's going to be a lot of change, a

1:53:35

lot of uncertainty. Therefore, let's

1:53:37

focus on optionality. And

1:53:40

if you do that right, then you

1:53:42

could really come out of the other side of

1:53:44

this transition, not

1:53:46

only having survived, but having

1:53:49

thrived. So

1:53:53

I hope that's helpful. I don't have

1:53:55

specific prescriptions, but options,

1:53:58

options, options. I think

1:54:00

it's definitely helpful and it's

1:54:03

definitely helpful in the sense of it helps

1:54:06

people really truly become a

1:54:08

sovereign individual, which is I think Bitcoin

1:54:11

gives you the tool to do that, but

1:54:14

it's not the only tool. That's right. Optionality

1:54:16

is incredibly important. Now,

1:54:19

Robert, we were talking about earlier on

1:54:21

in the conversation, we were talking about

1:54:23

the importance of number go up in

1:54:25

the sense of that is one of

1:54:27

the biggest converters, right? You

1:54:29

know, we always hear the saying you

1:54:31

come for the money, but you stay for

1:54:34

the revolution, right? One

1:54:37

of the themes that I hear from a lot of

1:54:39

people is they buy into the unit bias

1:54:41

of Bitcoin. They see it. I don't

1:54:43

know what it's at. It's around 60K, I'm assuming,

1:54:46

at the time of this recording, and

1:54:48

they say, I missed the train. So my

1:54:50

question to you is, is there

1:54:52

still an opportunity for someone to adopt

1:54:55

a Bitcoin standard? If they see

1:54:57

Bitcoin today, are they still

1:54:59

going to benefit in

1:55:03

contrast to someone who adopted Bitcoin five

1:55:05

years ago? Yeah,

1:55:07

so unit bias is a

1:55:10

real thing and it

1:55:13

is unfortunate. You

1:55:16

know, maybe there was an opportunity at

1:55:18

some point to standardize

1:55:21

and SATs instead. But then again, I don't

1:55:23

think that works because each set is worth.

1:55:25

I don't know how much is in sat

1:55:27

worth today. I don't know. Sub penny,

1:55:30

obviously. So it gets

1:55:32

difficult to talk about that. You almost need to talk

1:55:34

about, you know, groups of

1:55:37

groupings of SATs. And

1:55:39

then you're in some type of, you know, kill a

1:55:41

SAT, thousand SATs or whatever the thing is. But

1:55:45

yeah, it's man, it's it's

1:55:48

amazing how many people just

1:55:50

think it's been happening the whole time,

1:55:52

right? Like when Bitcoin is 60 cents,

1:55:54

you're like, oh, it'll never go to six dollars. And then

1:55:56

it goes to six dollars. It'll never go to sixty dollars.

1:55:58

It goes to sixty dollars. I'll never go to 600, 600, never go to 6,000, I'll

1:56:03

never go to 6,000. Like it's the same cognitive

1:56:07

fallacy or bias on repeat. And

1:56:10

it has to do with this framing,

1:56:14

like you're looking at the

1:56:16

world through dollars and something

1:56:18

about your mind can't imagine

1:56:22

this asset being worth a certain amount of

1:56:24

dollars, right? But it's, you're looking at it

1:56:27

incorrectly, right? Because that doesn't matter.

1:56:29

It's really the 21 million is

1:56:31

arbitrary ultimately, right? Could have

1:56:34

been 210 Bitcoin, right? And then each

1:56:36

one would be worth a bazillion dollars

1:56:38

each, or it could have been

1:56:40

2.1 quadrillion Bitcoin and then it would be worth

1:56:43

a lot less. Like the

1:56:45

unit, it's just how

1:56:47

many slices of pizza, right? How

1:56:52

many slices you're slicing that pizza

1:56:54

into. But what you really

1:56:56

need to do is look at the size of

1:56:59

the actual pizza, which is the market capitalization itself,

1:57:01

right? So what is the market capitalization today? What

1:57:04

is the total addressable market? Like what

1:57:06

market is it competing in and what

1:57:08

is the total addressable market is competing

1:57:10

for? That's also an

1:57:12

open question, right? Because it's like, well, how

1:57:16

much of the market cap of real estate and

1:57:18

equities and even

1:57:21

bonds, how much of it is monetary

1:57:23

premium, right? The fact that currency is

1:57:25

not holding value over time, therefore

1:57:27

people that are looking for

1:57:29

purchasing power preservation sell

1:57:32

the currency and buy the thing that can't

1:57:34

be counterfeited, right? It's very hard to ascertain

1:57:37

what that is, right? You know it's there,

1:57:40

right? You can see like inequities, it's a little bit more

1:57:42

visible because you'll see historic multiples

1:57:44

like say, oh, this sector

1:57:46

is typically trading at a 29 times

1:57:49

earnings multiple, right? And now

1:57:51

all of a sudden post 1971, those

1:57:55

multiples are averaging 39, 49 times, whatever

1:57:58

it may be, depending on the sector. that

1:58:01

gives you an indication, right? That, oh,

1:58:03

this was pre, I

1:58:06

mean, there was still counterfeiting occurring, but not at the rate

1:58:08

that is occurring now. There's like pre 1971 Nixon shock

1:58:11

multiple, and

1:58:15

then there's the post. So you could infer

1:58:17

that the multiple over 29 would

1:58:20

be something like monetary premium, and less than that

1:58:22

would be the actual reservation demand for the equity

1:58:24

itself. More difficult to

1:58:26

do in real estate, unless

1:58:28

it's commercial real estate, because you get

1:58:31

some of those multiples, but if it's just residential, I don't think you

1:58:33

get as much of that. So,

1:58:37

yeah, I think that,

1:58:46

I'm sorry, what's the original question? TLDR,

1:58:49

are people late to Bitcoin? Are people late?

1:58:51

Yeah, so the unit bias thing, just

1:58:55

looking at the total addressable

1:58:57

market, however

1:59:00

you circumscribe that, right?

1:59:02

On the low end, you could say Bitcoin's

1:59:04

competing for just money,

1:59:08

right? So just the reservation demand for

1:59:10

currency as it exists today, global

1:59:12

M2, somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 trillion, maybe

1:59:14

140. I

1:59:18

would say that's the low end for the total

1:59:21

addressable market that Bitcoin is competing for. If

1:59:25

someone thought that was too ambitious,

1:59:29

they might say, oh no, it's only competing

1:59:31

for gold. Okay, well gold's 14 to 16

1:59:34

trillion market cap, right? So

1:59:37

let's say on the extreme low end, 14

1:59:40

trillion, medium,

1:59:43

midway I'd say about 120 to 140 trillion, that's

1:59:47

global M2. And

1:59:49

then on the high end, you

1:59:51

start considering the monetary

1:59:53

premium that are in other asset

1:59:55

classes like real estate equities bonds.

2:00:00

And again, hard to ascertain what that is,

2:00:02

but I think

2:00:04

it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 to 250 trillion dollars. Okay.

2:00:09

Again, all of this is sort of disregarding

2:00:12

Bitcoin's unit bias, because we're looking at it

2:00:14

in terms of market cap, rather than individual

2:00:16

Bitcoin price in terms of dollars. Well,

2:00:19

Bitcoin today is what, 1.5, 1.7? 1.25

2:00:24

trillion, okay. Okay,

2:00:26

there you go. There's your upside,

2:00:28

right? So if you think it's going to gold,

2:00:30

well, 14 divided by 1.25. If

2:00:33

you think it's going to global M2, 140 divided by 1.25. If

2:00:37

you think it's going to 250 trillion, 250

2:00:40

divided by 1.25, that

2:00:42

gives you the upside multiple that

2:00:44

remains in Bitcoin. Obviously

2:00:47

there's a degree of subjectivity

2:00:50

throughout. I also

2:00:52

don't, as much

2:00:54

as we talk about Bitcoin, as much as I

2:00:56

am a Bitcoin advocate, I don't like to tell

2:00:58

people you should buy Bitcoin, because I actually don't

2:01:00

believe that. I think you should

2:01:02

study Bitcoin, and you should study the nature of

2:01:05

money, and you should decide for yourself. Because

2:01:07

if you don't understand what you own, then

2:01:10

you're going to get shaken out of that position. Like it's just not

2:01:12

going to work for you. Trust me. If

2:01:15

you have things in your portfolio that

2:01:17

you don't understand, at least somewhat, like

2:01:19

the position sizing really should reflect your

2:01:21

level of understanding. Otherwise you're not

2:01:23

going to be comfortable with it, right? Like if the price

2:01:25

movements are giving you emotional perturbation, then

2:01:27

you got a problem. Not just with

2:01:30

Bitcoin, but any asset, right? If you're

2:01:32

too much an indivia, whatever

2:01:34

the thing is, if you don't have a conviction in

2:01:37

that company and what it's doing, and the

2:01:39

product market fit, and the team, and

2:01:41

global macro conditions, et cetera, if you don't have

2:01:44

a deep conviction in that, or

2:01:46

at least let's say a conviction that is

2:01:48

commensurate with your portfolio sizing, then

2:01:51

you are improperly allocated. So

2:01:55

ultimately what I like, what

2:01:58

I think is best for people. Again,

2:02:00

I could be wrong about this, is

2:02:02

that your portfolio construction should