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Explore the transformative power of valuing life through timeless moments over monetary gains with Bitcoin advocates.
Watch this episode on YouTube
Guests:
Jordan Bush is the Executive Director of Thank God For Bitcoin and Former Church Planter and Pastor. - @jmbushwrites on 𝕏
Hosts:
JD - @CypherpunkCine on 𝕏
Bondor - @gildedpleb on 𝕏
Anton Seim - @antonseim on 𝕏
Cory - @PykeCory on 𝕏
Sponsors:
Unknown Certainty - The Bitcoin
Ad Company
IndeeHub - Reshape the Business of
Storytelling - @indeehub on 𝕏
Bitcoin makes everything better. Join the team and our guests as we unpack how, why, and where we go from here.
Hey friend, listen. I know the world is scary right now. Corruption, war, inflation, demographics,
degeneracy, disease, unrest, hatred, and despair. We didn't come here to tell you how it is,
but that it's going to get way better.
It's a good day coming, and it's all I need. Everything I want, just wait and see.
Better. Bye, Bitcoin.
That doesn't get you going. Five in the morning, nothing will.
Oh, man.
That's so different at 5 a.m.
It's so different at 5 a.m. Good morning, or good afternoon, depending on the part of the world you're in.
Trying to do an early morning episode, testing something.
If we keep running this way, we might need a coffee sponsorship.
Shout out to all the Bitcoin coffee companies out there. Please send us coffee.
Anyways, we're going to continue on the trend that we started last time to just really try and poke your emotional bear to make you think and move and shuck and jive in a new way.
And so our topic today to kind of run through something a little more inspirational is this idea of measuring your life in moments, not in money.
How can you measure your life in moments, not in money?
How can you completely shift your thinking around everything?
And, you know, is it just shifting your base layer of unit of account?
Is it something completely different that happens within you in the way you actually shift your base layer of just belief and understanding and all that stuff?
And so I guess that's the topic and where to start.
Bondor, do you have any – or maybe let's start with you, Corey, because you probably have the most firing brain cells at the current moment in time.
Yeah, I've gotten very old.
That's true. I'm in Italy, so it's the middle of the afternoon for me.
Pre-siesta, though, this is probably the most tired Italian time that you get.
It's interesting you say whether it's shifting the unit of account.
It's an odd question to direct directly to economics, but it was really important for me.
Starting in a hyper-fiat mindset and coming out of college with the idea that if you can make as much money as you can early in your life, then you free yourself to do the things that you really want to do, especially with your career and your work and your money later in your life before you retire.
So I think a lot of people that are on kind of a paycheck-by-paycheck trajectory picture spending the moments that they really want to value in their life closer toward retirement or after retirement.
And my view, because I was in a position to, was to try to make as much money as possible so that I could become a patron of the arts.
And I had this idea, this kind of number in my mind of what it would be to the point where I would be the age I am now, 34, being able to then be a provider and my work would be meaningful because I would be a capital provider for people who couldn't provide for themselves in an artistic capacity.
That was kind of the goal. It kind of blew up fairly early on, and to go back to measuring your life in moments rather than money, I didn't totally understand how changing your unit of account to understand how much that was affecting it.
But if I had understood at the beginning of my career how quickly fiat devalues, I would have realized what an incredibly hard rat race I was getting into earlier in my career.
And changing to a Bitcoin standard of account later in life made me realize the amount of work that I think I need to do over my life is actually a lot less than when I started my career.
And then getting – obviously, I eventually got directly into the arts, and my work was directly associated with the arts, and I kind of changed the career outlook.
But thinking about the total amount of money that I would want to allocate toward the things that I'm interested in, artistic endeavors, denominating that in Bitcoin allowed me to see every work project that I do as contributing directly to that on a sound base layer, not on something that's a product.
Not on something that's not on ground that's falling out beneath me.
And I think that's allowed me – even in the past kind of seven years of working in film, I've done high-paid things and I've done zero-paid things because the mission has stayed exactly the same.
So from a work perspective, living for – making moments out of that in a work understanding has been motivating in that I can take whatever job that I want, whether it's high-paid, whether it's low-paid, whether it's zero-paid, just because I want it to exist.
And that was my whole goal at the beginning of my career when the only way I knew how to accomplish that with a fiat-denominated mindset was to make as much fiat as possible.
In a Bitcoin-denominated mindset, I don't actually have to think that way anymore.
I don't have to go do a bunch of work that I don't care about in order to provide for the other thing.
It flattened all of that.
It made it much more cohesive.
Can you double-tap really quickly on the patronage ideation – or rather not ideation, but like you're in Italy and one of the reasons it is so beautiful is patronage, is people taking the time to see the value in things that are beautiful and giving people the time and space to find beautiful things.
Why did that die and can we ever get it back?
It happened on a gold standard.
It's important to remember that most of the beauty that you see around is driven by high-net-worth individuals and families and the church and to some extent the government, but not really.
The vast majority of the beauty that you see here is driven by people who had excess wealth that wanted to do something that lasted beyond their lifetime, and so they invested on a long timescale.
I wonder if the Medici's had had a rapidly devaluing currency, what would have been their idea of extending their value out beyond life?
It probably would have been even more financially driven than they already were, and they were bankers, and there's a lot of villainy in that family.
It's not like they're nonstop heroism by any means, but the way that they invested their money was thinking vertically and thinking across time, and I think about that.
What are the families today that are able to do that, and what is their priority?
Their priority is making sure that their fiat value doesn't go down over time, which means their money has to be invested in financial instruments and profitable things across time.
You lose the sense of what is enough for my goals, what is enough for my dreams, and that takes the whole idea of working in the moment, living in the moment, and it erodes it over time and forces you to say all of my value has to go into preserving my value as well as creating more value.
Then maybe there's enough spillover that I can actually make some sort of impact that doesn't have anything to do with fiat currency, but it's almost a lucky byproduct if you're good enough, if you're productive enough.
I think it's very stark here because currently Italy is extremely fiat driven.
It's extremely top-down controlled.
It is more profitable to not start a business than to start a business, even a successful business.
They have financially disincentivized entrepreneurship and small business, and you see it.
You see it in the quality of modern art and in modern film and things that they used to be outstanding at, and you see that erosion of beauty across time.
Anton, can you kind of piggyback on that because one of the things Corey said was the decision to find things are beautiful and then also the decision to be productive and the disincentivization of that.
I know you've done a lot of ad work for different types and groups of people.
How would you unpack this idea of we're being incentivized to measure in money and not in moments, and it's because of politicians or it's because of the monetary layer that you're being like that capacity to do so, measuring in moments, measuring in money?
Things that actually matter is being stolen from you, and it's intentional.
My whole life I've measured in moments, not in fiat.
The difference between my life in my 20s coming out of college being essentially broke and valuing experiences and now where I have established my career and I get paid a fairly high rate for the job that I do is now I have a vehicle that I can take the excess.
And put it in where I know that it's the value is going to be preserved, and that place is Bitcoin.
But I got really into Bitcoin around 2017, and at the time I thought that I was too late.
I had been watching Bitcoin when the price was $200 and it had gone up to $600, and I thought I'd missed the growth in the value of Bitcoin at that time.
And then the only place that I could find where I could buy Bitcoin was either local Bitcoins where I would have to go meet up with somebody and I didn't understand it well enough to even understand how to do a Bitcoin transaction.
So there was Coinbase, and for whatever reason at the time, I couldn't get Coinbase to recognize my ID, and so I wasn't even able to buy Bitcoin.
So by the time that I finally got approved to even buy Bitcoin on Coinbase, the price had gone from $600 to $1,000.
So at that point, I'm like, well, now it's in a bubble, and so why buy now?
And I didn't have any money.
And so I was originally buying $25 to $125 at a time.
I remember $125 at one point would buy you 0.1 Bitcoin, which is right now as we're recording this about $11,000.
So 0.1 Bitcoin that I was buying for $125 is now $11,000.
I can't predict what's going to happen in the future, but if you—
0.1 Bitcoin that I was buying for $125.
Sorry, it's all good.
All that's just to say that I'm—anyway, I'm glad that I measured my life in moments and I lived for those experiences,
and I wasn't just cranking trying to get fiat because at the same time, the value of fiat has just gone down.
So had I just put my money and not had that sort of desperation to find some way to preserve the value of my money,
I would have been completely living for the wrong thing anyway.
So now people have the option to just put a little bit of the fiat money that they get for their job into Bitcoin,
and maybe you can preserve some of the value of your work.
Bondor, would you—what moments would you trade your Bitcoin for?
Well, I mean, I kind of want to jump off some of the things Corey was saying about how you get like—you get one life and—oh, snap.
Guess who—
Special guest.
Oh, my goodness.
One morning.
Oh, my goodness.
Jordan Bush.
Goodness gracious.
So the idea like—yeah, you basically—you know, for me, it was you go through school.
You get essentially just brainwashed—public school, right?
Brainwashed for 12 years and then like ultra brainwashed in college about, oh, yeah, it's good.
You've got to get into crazy amounts of debt, and then you just got to work that off at some job.
It doesn't matter what it is because—well, if you don't, then you're wrecked because your debt will balloon.
So your whole life is wrecked if you don't actually just slave away for decades, right?
Like literally 30 plus years of just slaving away for somebody else's dreams or goals or whatever.
And something about that, you know, you're just like, oh, this is such a great idea.
We're going to, you know, we're going to make so much money.
And then you actually like do it, and you're like, what on earth?
Also, the screaming in the background.
It's my children.
Oh, sweet.
Love it.
So, yeah, Corey, it was a similar thing for me.
It was like I basically graduated college, got a job working in finance.
It was like finance is like the worst.
And then moved to entertainment.
I was like, this is considerably worse than finance.
And yet I have to, you know, I have to pay my debts.
So like what am I going to do?
There's no other option.
And basically had the incredible luck of getting inheritance money that paid off my debt in full,
which I was then able to be like, okay, I don't need to do this anymore.
So I quit.
And it was essentially just got into film at that point.
But that allowed me moments where I was like, oh, I don't have to work 90-hour weeks at a desk and hate my life.
I can just like literally just sit in a coffee shop for 12 hours or whatever and like just hang and do nothing.
Like this is what I did for a lot of my 20s.
But it was for me, it was fascinating because it was like, oh, I get to like think about decompress about what on earth have I just done?
Like what what was the my upbringing?
What was my indoctrination at college?
Like what what even are we doing here?
Right. Like you guys are asking.
And it was just like that was for me, it was like.
Taking my 20s and just being broken, homeless and poor and like but but having a free mind to actually be able to understand things and think about things,
you know, obviously it leads you to Bitcoin because, well, oh, this is this is a different system to get to eject from the other thing.
Great. Cool. Great. Cool.
This allows me to move forward on the other stuff.
Allows you to move forward with everything else you want to do.
It allows you to be like, oh, this is interesting to me.
And that's not so I'm going to pursue the thing that's interesting to me, as opposed to Fiat, which is which forces you to say, oh, here's this thing is not interesting to me.
I have to pursue that. Here's this thing that I hate.
I have to pursue that or I'm wrecked. My life is over.
So I got. Actually, I do have another great Steve Jobs quote, but I can't find it, so.
Jordan, welcome. Welcome to the pod today.
The big the big goal right now is hopefully any of the, you know, 40 some odd folks are watching trying to inspire at least one of you.
I'm going to, you know, tee up this the question for you, Jordan, of like, how do you, you know.
How do you encourage people to measure the life in moments and not in money and especially in a Fiat denominator world, like understanding how difficult that is?
But I'm curious if anybody finds or if you can kind of like, you know, because I know you have a very unique perspective just with what you saw in in Uruguay and what you've just kind of like been been, you know, really privileged to walk through life with people and kind of like help them get through stuff.
But the the quote is actually a Viktor Frankl quote. And if you're not familiar with him, folks, he's he was in one of the concentration camps and I believe he was in Auschwitz.
But when he was in the doldrums of life in a concentration camp, he said he and he was I believe he was a psychologist or a psychiatrist.
And so he started psychoanalyzing everybody there. But his his thinking was when we are no longer able to change the situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Can you unpack, Jordan, a little bit of how you saw people for better, because I know there's a lot of negative instances of this, but like those people who.
Solve the challenges before them and just completely change their lives when the Bolivar, when Venezuela collapsed, like what did you see?
Like, how did you see people like taking this whole thought of like, I'm not going to just be measured by this money that's evaporated. I'm going to measure my my life, my worth a different way.
Yeah, I think I mean, I think a big I mean, a big part of it is just realizing how quickly your life can just radically change.
I mean, like some of the people who are part of our church community, you know, they they move the Uruguay.
They were making over one hundred thousand dollars a year, like two years before everything collapsed.
And so like just the just the I mean, that reality was just like so sober.
I never I never thought about anything like that.
I mean, just normally you're just like, all right, I have a career.
I've arrived. You know, if you make a hundred grand, especially in a South American country like you're doing, you're doing well.
And and again, these were these were I wouldn't say older, but I mean, late 40s probably.
And so just that reality.
It was just super stark just to think about just to see that and see people trying to adapt to that and then seeing their family forced to reckon, you know, reckon with that as well.
So like in this in the case of the guy I'm thinking about, he had had even married before and he had a kid.
He had a son who was grown by the time we came to know him.
And so they just had to, you know, he's like having to deal with all that.
And then like having to move away from his, you know, move away from his son, move away from the rest of his family and try to find, you know, a job.
And so, I mean, I think that's one thing.
The other thing that came to mind wasn't even so much the, you know, isn't so much like the the with the Venezuelans as much as.
And this is like this is especially it's crazy that we're having this conversation this morning because I just I woke up, had like, you know, Bible time.
And then I hopped on my phone to see that this soccer player from my favorite English soccer team, Diego, Diogo Jota, just died.
He's like 28 years old, just got married five days ago.
And he died in a car accident with his brother.
And I can't remember where, but it just stunned me.
And I think that part of the thing that God, I think God has designed us to work this way is that death is this thing that reminds us of, you know, the fact that life is a gift.
The fact that, you know, we're not promised tomorrow.
You know, death is this thing that in most people's circumstance, you know, they'll they'll sometimes face it when they're younger.
But it's really once you start getting you get into your 30s, you know, you whether it's your parents or whether it's other people, people you work with or whatever, like you start encountering it with increasing frequency.
And, you know, it's it's a gift, I think, in some ways.
Obviously, nobody we wish that death didn't exist.
But, you know, the fact that we experience death is like this, you know, thing that's designed to grab our attention.
And I think it's really interesting and inappropriate, you know, that the older you get, the more frequently you see, you know, you're you're confronted with death.
More of your friends die and you just start to think about this reality more and more.
And so I think that it really is one of these things that I think that in American culture, we do not do death well.
We we we try to avoid thinking about it, if at all possible.
And and I think there's there's obviously there's that's understandable.
But at the same time, you know, there's a verse in Ecclesiastes that tells us that says, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
And I think that that's that's just the reality is like, you know, we and that's just a wise way to live.
It's just, you know, just thinking about the fact that, you know, I'm not guaranteed today.
Am I living my life in a way that I'm going to be proud of that my my my kids after me, my grandkids will be proud of?
And obviously, all of us have examples of things where that's just not true.
And so that's that, you know, I think that's designed to have a sobering effect on us so that we, you know, wait, we we wake ourselves up.
And and then we just, you know, try to live in such a way that, you know, again, both God is honored and then the people around us will be will be honored as well by the by the way that we we pour our lives out for the good of other people.
I just remember one one last thing.
I remember being in Uruguay and there was somebody somebody whose dad I think it was their dad.
No, it was their mom.
That's what it was.
It was somebody who's probably in their 20s and their mom had had cancer for a number of years and she ended up dying and I ended up going to the to the wake.
And what they did, they weren't Jewish, but they had just culturally there's something like similar to like sitting Shiva.
And so we just sat in the in the funeral home for probably, I mean, I was there for at least two hours and there were people who there before I was there and people were there long after I left.
And I just think that's another thing where, you know, just sitting with people in like grieving together was just I just was thinking, I'm going to die.
I don't I don't I mean, I've I guess I experienced that to some degree.
I had three family members die when I was in high school.
But but yeah, it's just it's not a thing that the average person.
I feel like experiences very much.
I haven't experienced it that much.
I've only experienced it four times in my life and three of them were when I was in high school.
So I think, again, people's mileage may vary with that.
Some people are much more acquainted with grief and death.
But I just think, you know, the investing your life and investing yourself in having deep relationships where, you know, part of part of those part of the profanity of those relationships is walking through difficult things, including death.
I think that that is, you know, embracing that.
Okay, so the bear just their Season four just came out and one of the plot points is that the guy who owns this, what's the restaurant called the bear.
His brother died in transition time at 75 where he fought for life and created a successful and super successful and successful business.
So definition of successful business.
Yeah.
Okay, so the bear just their Season four just came out and and one of the plot points is that the guy who owns this restaurant called the bear.
His brother dies and and at some point basically don't he basically he doesn't go to the funeral.
That's like the thing.
He just can't take it.
And so it's like this big point of frustration between several of the characters.
The fact that he just kind of bailed, you know, he bailed on this this time when they're all hurting.
They were all just broken, you know, just broken and and so just the idea of like just for whatever reason just not being there and not sharing in this experience was something that was, you know, very difficult for these characters.
And I think again, I think that's a temptation for all of us is just to try to try to eject from a situation like that rather than, you know, just sit in it and hurt and and be there to hurt with other people who are going through hurt.
Kind of rambling, but that's that's kind of where what I would say, you know.
A quote that I found in in three words, I can sum up everything I've learned about life.
It goes on.
That's Robert Frost.
Robert Frost is also the one who wrote The Road Not Taken.
So that whole idea of a road less traveled was kind of popularized by Frost with that poem and kind of what you're saying.
And I'm very diligently trying to measure my life in moments and not in money actively every single day, because for someone like me who has young kids.
It is very easy to forget that the the the days are long, but the years are short, you know, walking through my yard, even just to come over here to start doing this.
It's just littered with toys everywhere.
And I used to be so frustrated by that.
So frustrated.
My God, it's not clean.
It's not whatever.
That's not forever.
There's going to be a day where I just ache from a clean yard, right?
I'm going to have different problems, different cares, different worries.
But it goes on.
Life is not going to care about the fact that I just want to hold my kid for five seconds because they're having a rough day or because I'm having a rough day.
There's going to be a day where they pack up their car.
There's going to be a day where they pack up their car and they give me a hug and they never come back.
And I think it's really hard sometimes for people to realize that one of the most important things about money is you can always make more.
You can find a way to add value.
You can always make more money.
But you can't always make more moments.
Take that moment to squeeze your wife, your husband's hand.
Take that moment to hug your mom.
Take that moment to make that phone call.
Take that moment to text that person you've been avoiding.
I'm sorry.
Or text that person that you've been wanting to just pour into.
Hey, I'm thinking about you and I love you.
Because just like Diego Jota, you might not get that chance.
So do it.
Yeah.
I just add to it.
I mean, the Diego Jota one was so alarming, right?
Obviously, prime of his life.
Jordan, I know what wages he was on, but probably at least $180K a week or something like that, right?
Three beautiful children.
And those are the alarming things that can shake us out of complacency and force us to think about that in our own life.
But the counterpoint is not really a counterpoint.
I guess it's a layer of nuance to quote a TV show.
If you watch BoJack Horseman, the former TV star who happens to also be a horse, but he already made all of his fame and fortune.
And he's looking for meaning kind of the rest of the show.
And the very last line of it is one of the characters says, yeah, life's a bitch and then you die.
And then he says, yes, sometimes life's a bitch and you keep on living.
Which is such an excellent button for that whole show, because he's searching for meaning the entire time.
He's like Viktor Frankl, but an aged TV star.
He can't find it at all.
And I think one of the things you lose when you think about the morbidity at the end of your life is that the individual moments,
like if we believe that the wages of sin is death, where I used to read that as a threat and now I just kind of read it as a statement of fact.
It's like you can do kind of whatever you want, but you're allowing little moments of life or little moments of death into your life based on the choices, based on how you live every day.
The real world kind of artistic fiat example of this for me is that in the film world over the past couple of years,
the institutional money that's been backing independent projects has tanked significantly.
So most of the projects that I've gotten financed have been from people at the end of their life, generally sad, divorced,
with a baby boomer mentality who were told that security, financial security was the highest value.
And when their grandparents were in the Great Depression and their parents were in World War II, you can understand.
You can have some sympathy for why that was their greatest value in life.
But man, are they unfulfilled, right?
I had someone back a project who's going through a divorce.
His kids don't talk to him.
And he honestly just wanted to hang out with some cool dudes that were doing something interesting.
That's the only reason.
And he had no idea what to do with these millions and millions of dollars that he was sitting on and thought it would be interesting.
That to me is death before you're dead, right?
And it's a series of choices over many, many years that have gotten you to a point where, you know, most of your life is already dead before you're actually dead.
And that to me is the saddest thing, right?
How do you how do you collect the moments that are adding life, that are giving life, whether their work or whether their time with your family or whatever they are, you know, over resting, right?
Over time, over overextending time with your family and not providing enough value for them could also be an abdication of responsibility that contributes to death, right?
There's a continuum there, especially as a man who needs to provide for his family.
But, you know, what are what are those things that are that are actively adding to your life every day so that even if you do live to a ripe old age, you're actually living that whole time?
I think one one other thing I'm just like thinking about and I just I'd never had this thought.
Like I'm I I'm not some I'm not some like giant Bitcoin whale.
Like I just like I was a missionary when I got into Bitcoin.
It was like twenty nineteen.
So like I don't have like tons of tons of Bitcoin.
But like what I was sure, Jordan.
So I just what's your seed phrase?
You have 24 words that you really like.
You want to put out there?
Yeah.
So I just was thinking the other day, you know, like I've obviously we I don't even think about, you know, the day like actually being able to do something with Bitcoin.
Like I'm just like, I don't have and I'm not going to retire anytime soon.
But then I was talking to my wife the other day and my oldest is like 14 years old.
And just the reality that we have like four years, you know, this isn't precisely true.
But like the idea that, you know, before he'll likely go to college or to like a, you know, training training program or something like that, you know, we got for four good years left.
And so like one of the things that I just I've thought about is like, I mean, if Bitcoin went to five hundred thousand dollars, OK, like I don't live in California.
So like my standard of living, like what we live on is significant.
Like it's much lower than there would need to be if we lived in certain other places.
But there's part of me that just I really for you for the first time just thought, what if I like what if I just like sold like what would be, I mean, a meaningful amount of Bitcoin relative to myself?
Like the thing that I can't get back is time with my kids while they're young, while they're in this last four years of my life.
So like would I be willing to sacrifice, I mean, a good chunk of my stack to be able to just like spend meaningful time, like to take the monetary pressure off of my life for the next four years?
You know, and again, obviously not everybody can do that.
I can't even do that to like to the degree of what other people's lives would look like.
But relative to like how little we live on and what we need, like am I is that something that I should be willing to do?
Because that's the real scarce thing that I can't ever get back.
And the more that I just think about, I'm like, I think I should be willing to do that.
And I think I am willing to do that again.
Again, it wouldn't be like I wouldn't do it.
Yeah.
And I wouldn't be not working.
It just would be, it just would remove some of the pressure to work to the degree that I am.
And so again, I'm not saying like this is something you should do when your kids are four or something like that.
But just like I think that I think it's something that we should at least be considering is just thinking about, hey, there's certain seasons of our lives, the lives of our family, the lives of other people who we're in community with.
You know, where we could actually think about this backwards, you know, like where we can we tend to think about, oh, I'm going to retire, you know, for these last years of my life.
And it's like, what if we what if we just thought about retiring for a certain period in the middle?
And then we just kept working because we could work together or, you know, like, I don't know.
I just think that I think that Bitcoin could enable us to think differently than or I mean, I guess maybe it wouldn't you wouldn't even necessarily need Bitcoin.
But I feel like for a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise be able to do so, Bitcoin could could help them, you know, maybe maybe help them think differently and be able to act differently in accordance with their thinking differently.
Can I ask a question off of that?
And I kind of want want Bondo's reaction to this, because I think you've been in the the deepest orange pill for the longest out of the group.
There's there's almost a religious like attachment from from a number from an area of this community that I think to some extent each of us share.
But we all have a religious attachment that's higher than that.
Do you think they're going to be a people who were on the absolutely never sell any train for most of their lives that end up kind of like the boomers I was talking about before that just have a huge stack and nothing else in their lives?
And congratulations, you held on to all your Bitcoin.
But why didn't you sell some to live your life?
Yeah, you think I mean, I mean, do you see that coming?
Possibly, but at the same time, there's there's obviously there's a lot of layers there.
One of the one of the things that we see in fiat culture is that this disordering of priorities.
So if you're disordering your priorities, like you're going to value your job more than your family, you're going to value whatever, you know, casual sex more than long term stable relationships.
And it's just like the complete disordering of all this other stuff.
Right. So.
Bitcoin, because it's it's it's not like I mean, it's deflationary, but it's not demurrage, it's not like it's not going to flip inflation around and say, ha ha, we're going to the exact opposite.
What it does is it's just targeting zero inflation.
It's not it's just a just wait and measure.
Right.
So I like I think and who knows, but I think that that pushes people towards correctly ordering their life.
Right. Like if you're in an inflationary world, you're going to value things in a disordered way.
And that's going to create the.
Absurd boomer mentalities and things that you're talking about.
And if we just map that to a Bitcoin ordered world, but don't.
Reorder everything because Bitcoin is reordering everything.
Well, then, yeah, you're going to get people who are in their 60s, 70s, 80s and have never decided to try and get married or never decided to try and have kids or never just and they're just going to have a fat stack.
And it's like whatever sailor.
And but that's just like that's just total fiat in my mind, because at the end of the day, if your time when you lower your time preferences, your time preferences are going to say, oh, well, at some point, I should just expect that I'm going to die.
Well, OK, then you work backwards from that.
The fiat mindset says, no, whether or not I die in the future, I don't even have time to think about that.
I just I literally just have the next couple of weeks or a couple of days or a couple of months where I got to figure out the next thing.
Right. And you just go through this treadmill of figuring out the next thing for the next 70 years and you never actually realize that, oh, my gosh, I'm actually this is the end.
I don't like maybe this generation of Bitcoin is going to have a fat stack and never actually do anything or the next generation or a couple of generations after that, but at some point, I think the ordering becomes correct.
And at that point, you're going to see like really like civilization really take off where where all the ordering is correct for the largest amount of people.
A lot of the silent generation thought about how can I leave the most to my grandkids?
Many boomers think about how do I die with zero?
They don't even think about leaving anything to their grandkids.
And a lot of Bitcoin is now are thinking, how can I leave Bitcoin to my grandkids?
And so what if you don't spend any Bitcoin, but you set up your grandchildren with the values that you preserve during this time and you give them wealth?
So Bitcoin can possibly help you leave a legacy in a way that is completely impossible with fiat.
You might be able to leave some property to your grandkids, but there's going to be property taxes and all kinds of things, maintenance, things attached to that tenants.
If you're a landlord with Bitcoin, we have a way to give value to future generations and it is completely independent of geographical location.
And it's possibly the first time ever, because even if you gave your grandchildren gold, you have to transport that somewhere with Bitcoin.
There's no transportation.
How do you guys think the because you've already seen it with the Internet, right?
You don't have to transport information anymore.
You can ship posted from the toilet literally and figuratively.
And so the thought of me like at least a rice mile for that one.
The absolute transfer of value across the world instantaneously or in 10 minutes, depending on if using lightning or on the main chain.
How do you think that is going to restructure the way we actually value moments?
Because is.
Is Bitcoin the microwave of money and is the.
Relatively instant instantaneous transfer of value anywhere in the world actually going to do more harm to this idea that we should be valuing moments more than money, or is it actually going to make it better?
I'm curious your thoughts.
It's a good question.
I think, man, there is part of me that thinks that we need like that.
So one of the one of the temptations is to think that limitation is bad.
And so something like trading hours like we only look at trading hours for the stock market.
We're like, oh, this is such a bummer.
The fact that there's times where I can't invest or there's times where I can't do these things.
You know, I'm missing out on the ability to trade on nights and weekends or whatever.
Or again, we could do this.
You could look at this in 100 different ways.
I can't work if I don't.
If before electricity, I can only work when the sun's out.
There's a temptation to look at all these limitations as just big bummers and sucks on our time and impediments to productivity, impediments to progress.
And at the same time, I think that there are so many of these limitations are gifts like they're designed to add structure and help us, you know, live in such a way that's that's rightly ordered, that produces, you know, the best outcomes given.
I mean, I would argue God's priorities for making the world.
And so, I mean, there's our bodies need a certain amount of rest that incredibly corresponds with the amount of time, roughly the amount of time that the world is dark every day.
And so I think that, you know, you've seen something like if anybody were if somebody asked somebody 400 years ago or 500 years ago, would you like the ability to have a son all day long?
They would have been like, well, yeah, that'd be great.
But one of the consequences of that is now people are dealing with all kinds of, you know, they use this reality resisting technology in ways that do produce not just all kinds of good.
Obviously, there's a ton of good, but they also produce and can kind of structure in bend the world in ways that are at odds with human flourishing and at odds with structural, yeah, structural flourishing for a lot of people.
And so I think that obviously there's going to be tons of good as relates to a 24-7, 365 monetary system that, you know, will produce all kinds of, you know, it's going to be good in a ton of ways.
I think there's also going to be just ways in which there's going to be downsides as well.
Everything is tradeoffs.
I think that that's how we have to look at it is there's tradeoffs and there's going to be things that are great.
But there's also going to be ways in which this changes the structure of society even more.
And, you know, I'm just thinking of like a Sunday.
So like, you know, there's like Sabbath laws exist and have existed for like Sabbath practices have existed in many faiths for a long time as long as there's been people.
And when you have, you know, and there's been places around the world where everything will shut down on a Sunday, all the businesses are closed and everybody gets a day of rest.
And then as you've had a secular secularization of society, that's those kind of things have gone away.
And so what that means is that you have people who are working.
Some people are working seven days a week.
Some people are working in.
And so it just has all these downstream consequences.
So I'm not so optimistic that everything's just going to be sunny.
I think it's going to have it's going to have downsides as well.
But again, on the margins and, you know, even beyond the margin, there's going to be there's going to be a ton of ways in which this system and the ability that Bitcoin is going to enable a lot, a lot more good as well.
So I don't want to I don't want to lionize it and act like, oh, we're going to enter this utopia where I just I don't think that's the case.
Here to hear first, folks.
Jordan Bush is a shit corner.
I don't I don't know.
Doesn't believe that Bitcoin fixes everything.
Amen.
I know how he got on this podcast.
Jordan Bush is Roger Ver.
Too far.
One point that I wanted to circle back around to that I thought was interesting is the idea of like when when you get older, you're like more exposed to death.
And therefore you're more like inclined to like really think about these things.
And also stuff like I thought about this and I'd love to just throw this out to the group and see what you guys think.
But.
I'm curious to see how this how this comes about for all society on a Bitcoin standard, because right now, when you are entering the last 20 years of your life and you recognize that your time is short and you're constantly reminded of it because you see your friends and family dying.
Right.
Well, that's an extremely high time preference scenario that says all the things I need to do, I need to do now, because if I don't do them and I know that I'm not going to be able to last here much longer, I got to start really increasing my time preferences.
Right.
Like as you get older, your time preferences are going to like at some point like limit is 100.
Right.
Your limit infinity.
Right.
Like you're going to be on your deathbed and you're going to have in your heart, in your thought, in your head.
I need to tell this person this thing.
Right.
As opposed to something else.
In a fiat world that's just accelerated to the extreme.
You've lived your entire life under high time preference.
And now on your deathbed, you're in a high time preference.
And so you get these really bizarre outcomes of old people making crazy decisions.
Right.
Which is what I think, Corey, you were talking about.
But so in a low time preference world where you've lived your entire life in a low time preference, planning for the future, thinking about all this stuff, like going through the paces of making good choices and good plans and all this other stuff, rightly ordering your life, etc.
On your deathbed, where the time preferences are the highest, what do you guys see happening?
I think Steve Jobs has a great take on this.
There's a quote in a video floating around by Steve Jobs where he says something to the effect of I am not so foolish as to think that what I am doing is going to last a thousand years.
What we're doing at Apple is sediment.
And what he then wanted to explain is when you look at rock, it has all the striations in it.
Right. As a generation dies, it's laid down and then a new generation builds on top of that and then a new one on top of that and then a new one on top of that.
And then when archaeologists comes and they cleave the rock and then they look at it like, wow, that's interesting.
We can look and kind of track what's happened over time.
And to your question, I think we all need to understand it in the same way that biblically, I think it's a lot easier for Christians to kind of think through this.
But it's like we, you know, from dust to dust, we're reminded constantly that from dust we came, from dust we will return.
And if you have that perspective, that's actually a multi that's an infinite perspective.
And I actually have a lot of respect for Satoshi with this perspective, because Satoshi made a 100 year currency.
Satoshi designed Bitcoin to stop kicking out or rather stop being mined in the year 2140.
So roughly 100 years from kind of when it started or a little bit more than 100 years from when it started, because the assumption is something better will be found.
And in my mind, that's the same as building cathedrals.
You know, I constantly am trying to encourage people and trying to encourage myself to think about what is the cathedral I want to build in my life that I will never see completed.
People, when they were building cathedrals back in the day, they might work on a gargoyle that they were never going to see on top of that building.
Or they might work on, you know, the cornerstone in the base of the building that they would never see completely erected on top of that cornerstone that they placed.
These buildings took hundreds of years to build and like the Basilica in Columbia is still being built.
And I think if we can put our minds and our vision in our eyes towards a future we may never see, that is actually how we can live with the lowest and fastest or rather the lowest and highest time preference at the same time, because you can have a sober take on everything.
Because even if you are on your deathbed, you know that there is work that you will never finish and that's okay, because that's how it's designed.
Like we are designed to hand off the torch.
And so I think that is a very difficult thing for somebody who is an atheist to, or rather my perspective, to grapple with, because we're taught in our microwave culture that you can push a button and get a ride.
Or, you know, you can make a phone call and solve something, you know, you can move mountains with your effort.
But what we're told in the Bible is the only way you can move mountains is with your belief.
And so if you can believe in a future that you will never see, but align your life to that future so you can point people towards it, you can and you will make the world a better place.
Yeah, I think what you're getting at is the economy of the kingdom of God, so to speak, is if there's something eternal, you know, if Jesus returns…
Did somebody say economics of glory? I think it's economics of glory.
Whoa, whoa. Big if true.
Big if true. Go on, Corey, sorry.
Is there a book about that?
Not yet.
If you look at, you know, if you look at what is actually eternal, what lasts, and the economy of God flipped the power dynamic of humanity, the humanist power dynamic is control.
The economy of God is sacrifice, right? The use of power for the sake of people who don't have it.
That's an eternal thing. And you know that, right? If you have the Christian faith, you know that if you do that, that is an eternal thing.
And even like you're saying, JD, if it's a very, very tiny piece of an enormous cathedral, if it lasts, that will still supersede anything else you could do with your time, right?
So to me, that's kind of the definition of humility. I'm going to do something extremely small, which is the only thing I actually can do that is eternal.
And that is more valuable than anything else that I could do that would just pass away, even though it doesn't necessarily look like that on a short time frame.
It feels like when you have a theological point like that, it feels like bringing up Bitcoin is insane, but it's so far in an imperfect through smoke and mirrors way.
It's so far as the only economic reality, physical reality that reflects that in any way that, you know, once you transfer value into that, you know where it is and you know that it can't change.
It's not eternal. Like you said, JD, it's a hundred year solution. Maybe reasonable minds discuss how long, you know, it will be the solution.
Maybe 200 years, maybe, you know, but I know it's a lot longer than the U.S. dollar, which is currently the best.
If you throw out Bitcoin, that's currently the best other thing you can do.
I call it the S&P 500. Right. If that's like the best investment that you could project over 50 years, it probably is.
Apart from Bitcoin, Bitcoin reflects that truth that Christians have been trying to communicate for a long time.
And and, you know, just to the Christians, if you're living in the dichotomy between knowing that the kingdom of God is eternal and knowing that you want to work for the kingdom of God.
And then every way that you actually interact with the world is engaging with a power dynamic and a monetary system and everything that the monetary system touches, which is almost everything that you do in your life.
And all of those are opposed to you. Bitcoin will just make you a little bit more aligned, kind of a lot more aligned with the economy that you actually want to be living in.
I think the biggest thing that you just kind of triggered in my mind, Corey, is the economy you want to be living, excuse me, the economy you want to be living in.
Like that conjures up this.
Like reaffirmation of, you know, kind of coming back into the the cathedral you want to build, I think a lot of times our culture is constantly pushing us to look beyond our sphere.
It's like, you know, keeping up with the Joneses, but I think the most important thing that we can be reminded of is that our cathedral is our family.
Your cathedral is your community, like that thing that you're building is your kids.
It's your friends, it's your family, like.
We're so caught up, I think, in a lot of different things and like what we can physically do or what we are physically adding value to that we forget that there actually is a cathedral in our mind, you know, our temple, our body.
You know, this is also a cathedral that people can look at and find beauty in.
And one of the people who's looking at that is also the person staring back at you in the mirror.
And so I think.
Don't be so foolish as to think that you have to build cathedrals that people can see and touch and feel, but also don't be so foolish just to think that those ones also don't matter.
It's a good word.
There's a there's a fantastic book.
If you're somebody who's listening to this and you're like, these guys have talked about the Bible a bunch, the Bible is this opaque thing to me.
I don't understand it.
Where do I begin?
There's a book called A House for My Name that's basically designed, especially to basically explain the Old Testament.
And one of the things that it basically acknowledges is that one of the one of the ideas that's used to describe what God is doing throughout the throughout human history is he's building a house for his name.
And so obviously houses can have this could be you can think about a house literally, but you can also think about a house like it's it talks about as one example.
It talks about the House of David, the throne of Israel will never depart from the House of David.
And so it's basically saying that one of David's descendants will always sit on the throne as a king of Israel.
And so this idea of a house is getting at exactly what JD was just talking about.
This idea of like this is a group of people who are family.
And so then you see this you see this kind of thing expand and grow over time to where in the Old Testament you have like a physical where people go to worship God as a physical place.
So, you know, the garden was a place where humanity worship God.
Then you have the tabernacle was a physical place where people would go to worship God.
That later was replaced with a permanent place, which is the temple.
And then once you get to the New Testament, you have the apostle Paul describing a community of Christians as the temple of the Holy Spirit.
This is where God dwells, not in a physical location that's built with hands, but something in a place that's built by the spirit of God.
And so this this reality obviously has its like that's it has its climax, you know, from the scriptural standpoint in in the spiritual community.
But there's also a smaller, yet no less real reality that, you know, you as an individual, like God, you know, as a Christian, like God lives in you.
It's also true that you as your family, like you are you are a small house, like you are a small house.
That is either being built up or torn down.
And so I think that a lot of for a lot of us, like we could we could do well to think about our own individual lives and then also our families in this way.
And thinking about, you know, building a family through, you know, just through the choices that we're making and through and just thinking intentionally about these choices, about how we're building.
You know, there's a couple of parables where they talk about, like the man who didn't count up the cost before he started building and he gets like halfway through and he doesn't have enough money to complete the thing and everybody makes of him.
This is a known thing. And this happens to people with their families.
Yeah, exactly.
It happens to people with families, happens to people with a bill.
We just passed a bill actually that reflects that perfectly.
No, no, no.
That bill gave us enough money.
It's really complicated.
I must just not understand.
I just trust Trump.
I'm sure they can pay for everything.
So, yeah.
So it's just one of these things where, you know, counting up the cost.
Obviously, there's always limitations in our ability to do this.
But insofar as it depends on us, counting up the cost and counting up and just thinking and planning out in advance, like how we want what we want our lives to look like and trying to get wisdom from different sources.
In order to do that, well, it's something that I think that a scarce money should promote more thought towards.
It should orient us to think more that way, which I think is going to be good for everybody.
Fiat has heightened our time preference unimaginably.
Fiat has heightened our time preference unimaginably.
I was reading Acts 7 yesterday, Stephen's speech, and something jumped out at me when he mentioned Abraham was told by God that his people were going to be enslaved for 400 years.
That's such a long time.
That's probably 13 generations.
And nobody right now is thinking about 24, 25.
And Bitcoin suddenly gives us a way to think about things in the future because it gives us some money that can sustain value into the future.
Whereas Fiat is like, how do I get?
Okay, I might be able to make some money right now.
I might be able to hustle up some money.
How do I get rid of that money and get that money into something?
And so it just heightens our it gives us this frenetic energy and heightens our time preference.
It's really interesting, the notion that like the thing that I keep seeing pop up everywhere, and especially because of like Zoe Saldana or whoever it was who's running for mayor in New York.
Not Zoe Saldana.
It's the same, same thing.
They look about the same.
It's true.
I was like, what?
But the main, like losing my thought and trying to be serious, but the universal basic income.
I'm feeling like that's missing the plot.
Because my current thesis on universal basic income, universal basic income, you know, Elon's like, it's going to be needed because AI and optimists and all these AI bots are going to take over the world and you're not going to need to do anything.
I think universal basic income is coming.
And I think we are going to see the largest revolt in human history against technology when that happens.
Because, you know, as it says in the Bible, without vision, the people perish.
And if you only have a UBI vision of your life, I'm just going to exist and play Nintendo and eat Cheetos or whatever it is.
A lot of bad is going to start happening very quickly.
But you feel like that's already already started, though, to an extent.
Yeah, like we're still already there.
I think we're I think we're already there.
But I think it's going to get a lot worse.
And it's kind of like what we're seeing in your experience is now being in Europe, probably a little sheltered from it where you are.
But, you know.
We have an Italian family member who's been staying with us for a minute, and their perspective on everything is that people in Italy don't want to do anything because, as you said, because they're disincentivized to do so.
However, Italy feels like it's reaching a fever pitch because it is so depressing.
Like they have a passeggiata, so they have a thing where they basically are very quick to take life at its pace.
It's probably the best way to say that.
But that can only go on for so long.
Like you can only have one generation that's just like, eh, because then the next generation is like, shit.
Like we got to fix that.
Like we can't let that live here forever.
And even if you stick an AI on it, or you stick an optimist bot on it, like the problem you're going to run into is like, okay, now we don't know how to do anything.
And we literally are dependent on these robots.
And now we're dependent on whoever makes these robots.
It's going to put mankind in a very desperate situation.
And I hope it comes sooner rather than later.
And I'm personally optimistic that it's going to be the dead Internet and UBI that get us there.
Hard disagree, but okay.
I don't know if we ever get to the UBI level of it.
What I'm curious about is the current kind of millennial Gen Z who has some of the boomer mentality that has the work, buy a home, increase value, retire mentality, which still is a lot of people.
It's a huge voting bloc.
It's most of the middle and upper class.
And if you project out, I think it's on my mind because of the bill that just passed.
But when you lock in a deficit of the size that we just did into the future, right, and there's now, you know, I think we all had about six months where we thought maybe they're going to have some fiscal responsibility, the new administration.
And then this comes out and there's no fiscal responsibility at all, like none.
You lock in a higher deficit where 25% currently of all tax revenue is already interest payments on things that are already paid for that hit 37 trillion this month in uncommitted liabilities.
Right now, in addition to that 37 trillion going out as far as we have liabilities, it's $200 trillion.
And we don't even – I mean it's so – the number is so broken that the only way out obviously is to print.
It's the only possible – so we backed ourselves into the only possible thing.
But my view is for people, you know, in their mid-30s who are making good money, who are buying homes, who are investing in equities and doing the bond market and the traditional things that were utilized to build wealth, that could just completely go away over 20 years.
It doesn't have to be a big dramatic thing.
It doesn't have to be a big debt spiral.
It doesn't even have to be a housing crisis.
It just means that where you could assume that you could make 8% a year and if you invested well, you're going to retire well with a good job.
If that just starts to erode upward from purchasing power and downward from downward pressure on equities and downward pressure on real estate, which is already happening, what does that do to the mindset of all of those people who have over and over again just made quote-unquote the right decision and then by the time they're 50, they're actually farther away from the financial stability they were looking for than when they were 30?
I think that kind of existential crisis worries me more than like a proletariat revolt or something like that.
I think it's very likely that we get a lot of people who are just striving to get a dumpster full of silver coins.
For me, I kind of look at it like this.
This is a gross oversimplification.
Of course, there's nuance and complication, etc., etc.
But for me, it's like you can kind of group humanity into two groups.
I can just never do this because it's terrible, but there's a group who basically values self-indulgence and there's a group who basically values self-righteousness.
Both of these things are not good to value, right?
But call it a sin de jour or just the inclination of your heart.
You can almost say all sins can kind of just be lumped into one of these categories.
Is it just immediate pleasure, self-indulgence?
Or is it just immediate pride, like doing the right thing, right?
Self-righteousness.
If you accept that premise, which you should reject, you can kind of look at the world through that lens, which becomes interesting.
Everybody who's successful over the last 50, 70 years, they've all taken the self-indulgence route of,
oh, I'm just going to get into a whole bunch of debt and pay it off later or whatever.
It doesn't make any sense. It's not the right thing to do.
But I know that the debt's going to devalue and I know the currency's going to devalue, so I'm just going to indulge in as much debt as I can.
And then the economy just rewards them for that because the debt does devalue.
The currency does devalue.
They've taken on all this debt to buy hard assets.
Self-indulgence treadmill, and they just go for that, right?
Under Bitcoin world, it's just reversed.
Okay, all the people on the self-indulgence inclination, they start losing agency and they start losing value.
But that's just replaced by the people on the other side of it, the people on the self-righteous side.
They start gaining agency.
They start gaining the value.
They start gaining the world's political power and influence, right?
So for me, I just see, oh, it's just going to be a new set of people in control.
Now, hopefully, Bitcoin lowers the time preference and the self-indulgent or the self-righteous people begin to turn more to Jesus.
I mean, just as the self-indulgent people did, like the Jesus hippies or whatever it was called in the 70s.
That was a huge, like, oh, yeah, Jesus is the ultimate self-indulgent solution.
Just like Jesus is the ultimate self-righteousness solution.
My goodness, I can't speak.
But, yeah, so the point is, from my perspective, a lot of this stuff kind of just solves itself.
And on balance, because fiat is a horrendous evil and Bitcoin is not, on balance, we're going to have better outcomes anyway, no matter what.
We'll go around the horn because we're getting to our mark for the end of it.
Do you guys have any final thoughts on just kind of any of the topics from today?
But, you know, measuring in moments, not on money.
You know, this idea, the bigger thing about, you know, I guess this makes me a shit coiner, too, but it's like Bitcoin isn't everything.
But what are your takes?
I have a very quick final thought.
I've been thinking about this the whole time.
Yeah, Bitcoin isn't everything.
It's not everything.
So when it comes to measuring in moments and not in money, I feel like I'm speaking all the time to people who aren't quite Bitcoiners yet.
They're listening to us because they're kind of trying to figure out what is this thing.
I'm really interested in it, but I'm not.
I'm not completely sold.
It's OK to spend Bitcoin on things that you need.
If you need a house for your family, even if you want to take your kids on vacation, it's OK to spend some Bitcoin.
We're not trying to judge anybody or guilt them into hodling Bitcoin forever.
It's also good to stack sats and preserve a bunch of wealth in Bitcoin and even leave it to future generations.
Both things are OK.
If you go buy a house right now, that house might lose value in terms of Bitcoin.
But if it provides value to you and your family, that's a good thing.
So it's OK.
Just make wise financial decisions.
And you have this gift that is Bitcoin.
We are very early.
The value of Bitcoin is going to go up into the future.
So just be a little careful spending Bitcoin.
If the price all of a sudden skyrockets and you can then go and do something that is going to preserve moments in your life, it's going to give you memories.
Do that thing.
Just know that we're still early and the value of Bitcoin is going to skyrocket in the future.
It is going to grow in value over time.
And you have to make your own decision on what to do with that knowledge.
We're just giving you the knowledge.
I'll keep mine super short.
Bitcoin fixes almost everything.
Don't try and force it to fix everything.
J.D., any last thoughts?
I think the most important thing you can do in life is to really ponder and consider what you are measuring in.
Because if you're measuring in the number in your bank account, you're measuring is something someone else controls.
But if you're measuring in the impact you have on other people's lives, the moments that you give them of joy, of pleasure, even of discipline, sometimes of correction, of inspiration.
Then you're probably measuring in something that's actually going to accrue not as fast, but in a way that is going to make you feel way more fulfilled when you're laying on your deathbed.
And you're surrounded by people versus just surrounded by a stack of people.
I think for me the last thing I'd want to say is that it's a Mark 424.
With the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.
And if you're measuring in the number in your bank account, you're measuring is something someone else controls.
And if you're measuring in the impact you have on other people's lives, the moments that you give them of joy, of inspiration, even of correction, then you're measuring in the number in your bank account.
It's a Mark 424.
With the measure you use, it will be measured back to you and more.
So, like, if you just measure in money, you'll just be measured back in money.
Like, great.
That's nice.
But if you measure in something, if you measure in moments, it will be measured back to you.
Moments will be measured back to you.
These will be the things in your life that become valuable, that everyone else around you understands that you value, right?
Your life will just radically improve.
Well said.
Awesome.
Great.
Thank you, everyone, for jumping in.
And we'll see you soon.
Not financial advice.
Mathematical certainty.