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Dive into the profound impact Bitcoin has on daily life with Jordan Bush, JD, and Bondor as they explore Bitcoin's practical benefits, from remittances to inflation-proof savings. Discover how Bitcoin transforms lives across borders and industries.
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
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.
any button.
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.
Welcome to the show, Better Buy Bitcoin.
We have myself Bondor, JD, and the illustrious Jordan Bush with us.
Illustrious.
I don't know what I'm illustrating, hopefully Jesus.
This is a pinch hitter, so I'm like, hey, are you free?
Literally seven minutes ago.
Yep.
So I put out a hat and not pants, and here I am.
Indeed.
Today, we wanted to talk about practically what does Bitcoin actually help people with?
Like what is the actual upside of using Bitcoin in a very practical, rubber hits the road,
reality, right?
As opposed to like, oh, we're going to solve all the world's banking problems.
But those are like very distant.
I mean, they're all real, but they're very distant from the actual individual who's working
a job who is wondering what the F is this Bitcoin thing?
Why?
Why, why, why, why do people keep hammering on this?
What's the big deal here?
So I can, I can start us off unless JD, you want to jump in and yeah, let's get into it.
I'd actually toss it to Jordan first, because I think you have the most well known one.
I think if we start from the well known and then move to the non well known.
So like, did you break us down what you've practically seen Bitcoin do?
Because I know you've, you've got some examples.
Yeah.
I mean, and I would just clarify.
I mean, I have seen, I know Uruguayan people who use Bitcoin, but like, it's not like I,
you know, I tell the story of there were people in our church when I was a pastor in Uruguay
and many of them fled from Venezuela to Uruguay.
But almost, I don't think any of them that I know of use Bitcoin, like it's just like
in hindsight, like they should have, you know, they could have used Bitcoin if they knew
about it.
They just, you know, just didn't.
But with that being said, like there were plenty of people, actually one of the most
bullish dudes that I know in terms of Bitcoin, oh gosh, his name is escaping me right now.
He's my next door neighbor.
Incredibly, we moved into this new house after living there for two or three years.
We moved into this other house and, you know, we said hi to our neighbors.
We're like, hey, you know, good to meet you guys.
And we'd see them, but just, you know, they're younger and I think he, I think he worked
at least partially online.
And so we would see each other in passing, we'd be bringing in groceries, we'd say hi
to each other.
And then we like, we wrote Thank God for Bitcoin, we, you know, it gets published.
I got my first copies shipped to Uruguay and I got them.
And so one day we're talking and he was into Bitcoin and I'm like, what are the odds?
In this city where like almost nobody knows about Bitcoin that my next door neighbor is
into Bitcoin knows like a lot of the same people.
And just, I mean, just listen to a bunch of things.
He had actually taken out a loan for, I believe it was like 50K when Bitcoin was around.
I want to say it was under the all time high.
I don't know.
I don't remember how far, but like he took out a loan for 50K and bought Bitcoin with
it.
Impressive.
Exactly.
The conviction, this is not investing advice, but just in terms of, you know, it just impressed
me.
So, yeah.
So, I mean, there were people who were using it.
He knew people who were mining Bitcoin.
But again, the reality is, I mean, just the purchasing power of international currencies
gets absolutely decimated far more quickly than the dollar does.
And so it's far more of an urgent problem than, you know, Americans feel.
So I just remember like from the time that we arrived in Uruguay when we arrived in 2015,
the peso to the Uruguayan peso to dollar ratio was one to 24.
And by the time we left, it had gotten as high as 45 or 46.
And now it's back down to like 44.
So it's just one of these things where, I mean, again, just the reality by the time we
left, if you hadn't gotten 100% raise effectively, then you're getting absolutely decimated.
And so I think that's a big thing that maybe Americans don't appreciate to the same degree.
It's just like this thing happens because there's so much less demand for these international
currencies.
You know, when things start going downhill, they go downhill a lot faster.
It's wild that practically Bitcoin solves international remittances.
And we know this because PayPal just said they're going to give people a 90% reduction
in their international fees if they use crypto and Bitcoin.
Wild.
It's one of those things that we're seeing it practically in businesses.
Practically Bitcoin fixes remittances because it just makes the amount of money a company
needs to spend to actually settle across border, nothing.
And so, you know, like, oh, cool, I can charge you 10% and still make money.
Exactly.
They're effectively making 9%, you know, off of every trade just by doing that.
And so, yeah, again, it's better than 30% or whatever with Western Union.
Or 300%.
I've got a fun story with that, actually.
I lived in South Korea.
And during that time, and we were in like the mountains, like the countryside, the mountains
of South Korea, and we were teaching English and we had debt in America.
So we had to send back money to America every month.
Classic remittance situation, right?
There are two options, basically.
The standard option, which was you get on your like moped, scooter, you drive into town,
takes 30 minutes to get into town.
You wait in line at the bank for an hour, because you can only do this on the weekends
and everyone's doing the banking on the weekends.
You fill out all this paperwork to do an international transfer, which is to say you get your banks,
you get the bank to approve, I'm going to send $1,000 home, right?
And it costs you $50 plus all the time, which is something like three hours total, right?
And then you go home and you have to do it every month over and over and over again.
I did it like once or twice and I was like, this is so painful.
It's such a waste of time.
It's like a complete waste of your Saturday to do this.
But that was like, this is like, oh, you show up, this is part of the training of how you
be a teacher.
Like everyone has to do this.
Every teacher in Korea has to do this and you just go through the process.
That's what you do.
When I was there, it took me like, I was like, nope, I'm not doing that because I know Bitcoin
exists and I know how to use it.
And so at that point, they had Corbett, which is a Korean exchange, and I just like signed
up for a Corbett account.
I don't know if you can do this anymore because they put in all these regulations with regard
to foreign nationals or expats in Korea, et cetera, et cetera.
But like at that point, none of that stuff was there.
So I was like, great, signed up for Corbett account, transferred money, sent it to Coinbase,
which was connected to my bank account in America.
And so the whole process was just, oh yeah, it's one transfer, and then it's like 10 minutes,
45 minutes later, you're like, good to go.
The cost difference was the difference between $50 versus a buck 50, right?
So what was the-
Absurdly cheap.
Yeah.
So what was the path to actually getting your money though?
Were there local places where you could exchange Bitcoin for local currency or like how did
you actually, or were you, I mean, I don't think you were using Bitcoin.
No, I wasn't.
Well, I was using Bitcoin for remittance, right?
Sure, sure, sure, sure.
So like in Korea, I'd get paid direct deposit to my bank account.
In the US.
A Korean bank account in Korea.
And then I connected that Korean bank account to my Corbett account, Bitcoin exchange in
Korea.
And then from Corbett, sent that money to Coinbase in America.
So from Coinbase, then it went to my bank account in America and was able to connect
to the rest of the financial system in America.
So there was no, yeah, Korea is like way more advanced than America is in terms of all the
technology and infrastructure and everything else, which is inclusive of their banking.
They have cash, but it's like mostly cashless.
So then you were using, you were using your US debit card or something like that in Korea?
Is that kind of what you're, that's what you're saying?
No, no, no.
Like there was like, it's a completely separate banking system.
So like when we got off a plane, like we had to go get a Korean debit card and Korean bank
account and Korean like infrastructure around like Korean SIM card, like the whole thing,
right?
Sure.
You are now connected to the Korean infrastructure and all that stuff.
So why were you wanting to send dollars back to the US?
That's what I'm trying to nail down.
Because we had debt.
Oh, got you.
Okay.
American debt.
Just for other expenses.
Yeah.
Like student debt.
Like, you know, how are we going to, how are we going to pay this $1,000 bill in America
when we're in Korea?
Correct.
Gotcha.
That totally makes sense.
Yeah.
You should have just done the responsible thing and ignored it.
That's what everyone should be, is just ignored completely.
Yeah.
I have a, I have a buddy who basically the IRS owed him a bunch of money.
They still owe him a bunch of money, but they accidentally sent him another chunk of money.
And so, so what he did, I'm not advocated, he turned around and just bought Bitcoin with
all this money.
He's like, listen, they already owe me money anyhow.
He's like, so basically I'm just going to buy Bitcoin with it and hold it.
And I, it is already up like a bunch.
So yeah, he's taking the risk.
Like if it goes down, he has to pay for it.
He's got money to pay for it, but like, it wasn't like he's, he's like living or dying
on this.
But again, he's like, the government is super inefficient.
It would, you know, it would affect me in a, in a way, in a real, you know, negative
way.
And so, you know, I'm just doing this.
Not financial advice, but the exact same story, like on Twitter, some of the guys on Twitter
are like, yeah, I had, you know, my tax bill last year, let's say it's a $10,000 tax bill.
But I'm not going to pay that.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to take $10,000, I'm going to invest in Bitcoin.
I'm just going to pay, like, I'm going to do a payment plan with the IRS because you
can, you can do that kind of stuff.
And I, you know, talk to your tax attorney, blah, blah, blah.
But like, apparently you can just do something like that where the financing for that is
5% or something, right?
I don't know what it is, but it's probably less than Bitcoin's CAGR.
And so then you're just like, oh yeah, I'm just going to pay this off for, yeah, never.
I don't care.
Instead of being paying taxes, I'm just invested in Bitcoin.
Yeah.
And this is where, again, like none of these things, like this is, this is where like,
yeah, it's just like you get into the crazy end, late stage fiat type thing where everything's
upside down.
Nothing makes sense.
And so you just have people who are just trying to figure out how to navigate the absurdity
of the, of the collapse of the system.
And I mean, just things that were, like, you just like, who does this serve actually?
Like this actually doesn't serve anybody except for like middlemen who are just skimming money
like this.
Like, what are we even talking about here?
It's wild the practical things that Bitcoin solves in terms of like cutting out middlemen.
The first time I learned about Bitcoin, I was standing in Miami when it actually clicked
and I was watching Jack Mahler's on stage and I have a sibling who is in banking and
they've been in banking for 15 years.
The second I got it, I texted them and I was like, hey, you should probably find a
brand new job.
This was like three years ago.
And they just kind of laughed at me.
And I was like, I'm literally giving you a like, you know, 10 year head start on everybody
in your industry who's going to be jobless here soon.
And we're already seeing it.
You know, I saw the other day, like a lot of insurance companies are starting to use
AI to just cut out people as much as they can cut it as many middlemen.
You know, it's happening all over film.
I'm sure it's happening in nonprofits, it's happening in government, and it's only a matter
of time before it comes absolutely for everyone, not just AI, but Bitcoin, because at the end
of the day, if a computer can solve your problem practically, efficiently and quickly, you're
going to do it.
And that's exactly what we saw at PayPal this last week where they're just doing the crypto
payments.
But like banks are going to do it, too.
We just saw Citibank, I think, the other day being like, we're going to now recommend this
and like the only holdout is going to be Vanguard.
It's going to be 2140 and Vanguard still is not going to let you buy Bitcoin.
No, they're going to be buying Bitcoin.
They also they also are one of the largest shareholders in MicroStrategy, so they're
flaming hypocrites.
It's classic.
I believe they're actually the largest stakeholder in MicroStrategy, like other than maybe
Saylor and stuff like that.
We got Anton.
Whoa.
Anton in the house.
How's it going, man?
What's up, y'all?
Dude, you have always the sexiest voice in the world.
I'm just like, yeah, man, I wish I need like three octaves lower.
We should always do this early in the morning.
In a world, death man says a lot of things.
And do you have any, you know, interesting, good, like practical, I know, putting you
on the spot right as you jump in, but, you know, practical ways that Bitcoin has helped
you. And I'm actually curious, too, because you've traveled a lot.
But like, are there any instances where it's like Bitcoin is actually like practically
help solve the problem for you or made something worse?
You know, there's probably both sides of that.
Well, for me, the biggest thing Bitcoin has been is just a savings technology.
So, you know, nothing.
That exciting other than just allowed me to essentially own little fractions of an asset,
whereas, you know, I'd wanted to buy rental properties back in the day and I just
didn't have the down payment for a rental property.
And Bitcoin is essentially served that same function for me.
More or less, the one thing that's coming to mind as you say that just the practicality
of Bitcoin being a savings technology is you can you can actually go back and look like
what were my monthly expenses like everybody can anybody can do this.
What were my monthly expenses?
Last month, what are my monthly expenses before that go back for the last year, get get 12
months of data and then.
Like go reprice that data in Bitcoin for that month and you just go back and do the math
on it and you'll see like over the long haul, you know, some months ago be up in Bitcoin
terms or more expensive in Bitcoin terms, some are less expensive in Bitcoin terms.
But over the long haul, you'll see that your expenses in Bitcoin terms, if you're
denominating in Bitcoin, your expenses will be cheaper every month just by denominating
in Bitcoin on average, which is to say it's savings technology that allows you to save
that allows you to beat inflation constantly, regularly with certainty because of its.
Finite nature and the rest of it, this is a practical rubber hits the road reality of
Bitcoin. For me, one other thing, practically like practically Bitcoin has been the best
filter for new friends I've ever experienced, seriously, it's such a shorthand of
finding an actual big corner like Orange Pill app is actually cool.
And like shout out to those guys over there.
I think Matteo and Brian are doing some good stuff over there.
I know there's a lot of, you know, thoughts around.
Is it a honeypot or whatever it is?
I don't think it is. I like those guys.
But practically, Bitcoin has been the fastest shortcut for me to find people I can
actually talk with and not get into a screaming match of stupid, because if you're on
the same page of Bitcoin, you have this base layer of understanding of, hey, we want to
make the world better for everyone.
You can talk about anything.
Like I've had conversations with people who are wildly left and wildly right.
It doesn't really matter because we can talk about anything and everything, because
again, we have this foundational understanding of like, hey, if we fix the problem,
which is the incentive structure, everything gets fixed.
And so whether you have this belief and I have this belief will actually come to the
truth, which is probably somewhere in the middle of what we're actually talking about.
Very, very quickly, once the money's fixed, but the problem is we're operating in this
world of stupid that won't be fixed until we fix incentives.
And the cool thing, too, is like, I mean, I mean, in addition, there are some things
where like the third way is is the way the other thing is like just I mean, there's
some some cases I've seen many cases where just people become radically different
people by virtue of getting into Bitcoin.
They just radically change positions on deeply held, you know, long held position
just because, you know, this this shift, the shift in like what money is like once
you once you see that, then all of a sudden that's like this.
It's like going to the chiropractor and it just like brings all these other things
into alignment that, you know, previously, you know, you didn't see the importance or
you didn't see how they connected.
And and then once you fix this one, I mean, it really does humble you just when you
just think about the fact that, you know, I just do this all time is you're like, OK,
the reason I believe this and the reason I did this is because I believed this.
And as soon as that that belief changed and all of a sudden now I'm like, oh, and now
I understand how you could get there.
I see how you like reverse engineer thinking that if you believe this thing.
And so like some of this is like it really does.
By having these more foundational questions, I think you're able to accomplish a lot
more. You're able to like to have more productive conversations because you realize
it's not just it's really easy to stay at surface level and be like, you're an idiot.
No, you're an idiot. You're an idiot.
And it's like really it's much more profitable to get underneath that and be like, well,
why do you believe what you believe?
And so if you believe that, for instance, money is just the positivistic creation of
the state, like value comes is created by the state.
Well, then, yeah, sure. You're going to expect you're going to want a government that
just does everything and that creates money out of thin air and does all these things.
If you don't believe that, well, then you're not going to want that kind of money.
You're going to see that as as illegitimate.
And so I think that, again, we in the name of pragmatism and in the name of really
just not arguing and in the name of just really just being able to make money, like
that's really what a lot of this comes down to.
Why don't why don't businesses want to talk about politics in the workplace or wait a
while? Because they literally just want you to focus on making them money like they
don't actually care about you.
They just want you to focus.
They shut up, make us money like that.
That's really what's going on.
And so I think that having conversations about, you know, more fundamental, more
fundamental questions is both healthy for people and in the long term, good for for,
you know, everybody's society more broadly, business more broadly.
It's a question of time preference.
One of the things that comes to mind by saying that is the idea that practically
Bitcoin fixes your commitments and ties to work.
A lot of times we we have a job.
We have all of our like eggs in one basket and that basket is our job, which is to say
if you mess up on the job.
Next month, potentially you don't have a house, right, like if your employer has
unbelievable weight over your situation and there's basically almost nothing you can do
about it, like practically they own you, practically they are, especially if you have
debt to pay or whatever else, like they are literally the person or the entity that
controls your life.
Right. So practically you enter and Bitcoin enters a situation and like there's.
Oh, man, just with the inflation, you're in salary and everything else like you are
constantly on this like downward slope, even with your employer.
So not only does your employer own you, like own your life, and if you make a mistake at
work, like, well, you might not have a house next month.
They also are paying you in fiat, so they are also.
Like you're losing value in fiat practically every day that USD inflates, so it's you're
becoming more and more of a slave to them, right, you can feel this pressure every time
that the yearly cost of living increase comes around, like, you know, it's not enough.
It's kind of like a slap on the slap in the face.
Right. Yeah.
OK, so practically Bitcoin solves this by giving you savings, by giving you an exit
path where it says it releases a little bit of that pressure a little bit more over time.
Right. And that gives you the ability to say, yeah, sorry, but this is unethical.
What we're doing, what what you are asking me to do at this job is unethical.
Right. You can't you can't say that this is unethical if next month you're going to be
homeless. I mean, some people can do that, but it's very hard to do that if you've got
kids and debts and all the rest of it.
Right. It's just going to be you are you're essentially bought and paid for ideologically by
your job. Unless you have an exit strategy, unless you are able to save and Bitcoin allows
you to do that. I remember I had a little bit of money to
invest and I didn't know anything about investing.
And I went around and asked all these people, you know, how does finance work?
How does how does stocks work?
How does real estate investing work?
And pretty much nobody could explain it to me in a way that it really made logical sense.
Like the closest one that made logical sense was, OK, if you get a rental property, you
want this thing called cash flow.
You want to get a mortgage and then have someone else pay more than your mortgage payment.
So you make money off that person.
I was like, OK, that makes sense.
But how am I actually providing value to that person?
And so that part of being a landlord didn't make a whole lot of sense to me because I
wasn't actually providing value.
I'm like, why don't they just go and get a mortgage and then they're going to pay less
than I'm charging as I continuously increase rent?
So it didn't make logical sense to me with Bitcoin.
I had to go to Bitcoiners and ask them about Bitcoin.
Have you guys ever gotten in one of these arguments where you start just trying to win
the argument just for your own pride's sake?
Well, never one time.
Never, I've never experienced this phenomenon.
Please elaborate.
Bitcoin was super humbling to me because I had nothing to gain in these and arguing
anything. I was more like, OK.
You clearly understand this better than I do.
Please help educate me on this thing.
And in that sense, there was such more purity with Bitcoiners.
It was like they weren't trying to prove anything to me.
Neither party had anything to win.
It's just like, yeah, if you want to know about this, if I know more than you, I will
just help educate you on this thing.
And I find that Bitcoiners have a much more humbled attitude because
just because it's like in the in the regular finance world, it is sort of a zero sum
game. Like that's what trading is.
You're trying to essentially sell somebody something for more than you paid for it and
constantly play hot potato.
Yeah, there is none of that in Bitcoin.
Yeah. And I mean, there is like there is some of that.
Like there are people, especially at the exchanges and stuff like that.
But in terms of like the people, like the vast majority of people, I mean, the vast
majority of coins haven't moved in over a year.
Like there's something like I think it's down like fifty five percent.
But still, like that's a ton of coins that aren't moving, that aren't it's not just
people hopping in and out.
You know, people there are a lot of ideologically convicted psychos who are just
like, hey, I never want to sell this, not because I don't ever want to spend it, but
because I don't ever I'm not like this is long term savings.
This is this is money that I don't want to ever bring back into this, you know, into
the fiat system.
And so I think that, yeah, there yeah, there are just a lot of people who really do see
the problems here.
Now, again, they will they will sell if they have to.
Like they're not insane.
Like if something you know, if something like I just I was just reading this thing, I
should find this link.
But it was a guy who sold three hundred bitcoin.
So three hundred bitcoin, I don't know when it was.
It sounds like it was a while, like a number of years ago.
But his daughter needed an open heart surgery.
And so he sold three hundred bitcoin to pay for the to pay for the open heart surgery.
He's like, I would do it again.
But he's actually running.
It's a geyser campaign right now that's running where he's basically trying to raise
money. I can't remember what it was for this time.
But but, yeah, I mean, just that reality, like things are going to come up where people
are going to have to sell their bitcoin and thereby demonstrate that there's something
that they love and want more than the gain that they can make from bitcoin.
So I think that's a good and natural thing.
But again, yeah, I do think that for a lot of people, you know, they when when you see
that you're being scammed, you want other people to see that they're being scammed,
too. And I think it's easy for for that, the zeal that bitcoiners have to get mistaken
for. Oh, you just you're really just trying to pump your own bags.
You know, you really just care about yourself and you getting more wealthy.
And that's why you want me to buy a coin.
And it's like, no, that's actually not it.
You're just getting stolen from your purchasing powers, getting, you know, deleted to
zero. And I don't want to see that happen to you.
And but yeah, I just think there's I really have seen it over and over again.
Same thing that you're describing, Anton.
Yeah, that's something that for for the tens of thousands of what you could call
coins, you see people who they do want you to jump in because they want to jump out.
They're desperate to jump out.
They're like, please, please pump the price up on this garbage so that I can get out of
it. Whereas with Bitcoin, people realize that this is it is the only thing worthy of
being called a cryptocurrency.
And people aren't trying to get rid of it.
They're trying to accumulate more of it.
And so they're like, yeah, hop on in.
Psychologically, it feels better as the price is going up.
But for the most part, people aren't just trying to get rid of it.
It's like people see a long term value in it.
They have no idea how long of a long term value.
And yeah, they will sell it when they need it, but they're not just trying to desperately
get out of it. So it's a it's a completely different mindset between even people holding
stocks and things like that and people holding Bitcoin.
Yeah. So yeah, the Bitcoin markets themselves are so deep now, like with with all coins,
you can it's like, I mean, do the math on it, of course.
But like. It can take like if you have a hundred thousand dollars and this is this is a
thing that happened in the early days, there's actually a I don't know, this is like
super OG Bitcoin or thing.
There was a no God PDF.
Did you guys ever have you ever heard of God PDF?
So. I've heard of God, too, I think.
But so it was basically a legacy trader was.
Getting familiar with the the market depth of the altcoin market in the super early days,
like 2013 or 14, something like that.
Right. And they're looking at Dogecoin and all the other all the other early, super early
forks or altcoins or coins.
And they're basically come to the conclusion that the markets are so thin that they can
essentially set the price because they've got deep pockets so they can just set the
price to here and then like manipulate it down to here and like get the social media
going, OK, then bring it up, like pump it up again.
And like they just walked through the entire process.
This God PDF walked through the entire psychological process that that a legacy trader
would would go through if he knew he could manipulate the market.
And that's exactly what happens in all the altcoin things.
And you've just seen it played over and over and over and over again, which was you
could just control whatever whatever the narrative, whatever the currency is, because
you just have 10 times more money than the rest of the people who are getting scammed.
Yeah. Now with Bitcoin, the markets are so deep and so robust that you cannot do that
anymore. I mean, you couldn't you probably couldn't do it back back in the day with
regard to that. But for but today, it's just it's impossible to do that.
Like we saw just the last week, 80,000 Bitcoin, 70,000 Bitcoin were sold at market and
the price tanked a couple thousand dollars and is now right back up to where it was
before. Like it's a completely different ballgame.
There's no such thing as.
All coins, it's totally a scam.
I think that having these conversations about Ripple recently, that thing there are I
don't even know what the number is.
It's like tens of billions of Ripple and most of them are held by a select group of
people. Yeah, it's like a complete scam.
Didn't he drop like 200 million or something like that?
Chris Larson, permacellar, Garlinghouse is another one.
He's made, I think, nine figures in Bitcoin.
I mean, nine figures by selling Ripple this year.
Garlinghouse. Yeah, it's it's funny.
No, what's what's interesting about all that stuff, though, is getting an all the
getting into all coins.
Like when I first got in, I was a NFT degen.
Judge me that story.
I earned it. Oh, man, I earned it.
Yeah. But the the thing is, all coins and NFTs and all the scam coins and lower or
rather increase your time preference.
All coins make you crazy because you're pumping and dumping.
You're trying to actually get somebody else on the door before you get out the door on
the backside. So you can actually like keep your money than like run the scam again.
It's a traditional real Ponzi Bitcoin, on the other hand, like lowers your time
preference. The number of times I'm standing at a Starbucks or I'm standing somewhere
with somebody else and it's like, I'll just take water like I don't really want the
coffee right now. I'd rather have five dollars more of this increasing asset than
something else. Like there are things that I've bought, gotten home and I'm like, I
don't really need this. I'm just going to return it like because even then, you know,
the practical application is like, do I need this in the next 30 days is the next
thing. It's like, oh, I don't need this right now.
Like, sure, I do a trip a month from now, but I don't really need this.
Like, I would rather actually have the 30 days of appreciation on Bitcoin because, you
know, we've talked about this on door offline.
It's like Bitcoin makes its gains in like six days a year, right?
Like the majority of the games that come out of that, it's like you don't know when
you're going to be in that six day window.
I think institutions are going to level it out.
I hope not as much as it seems, maybe the path to Max Payne, I'm changing from my
previous podcast of like is just crabbing to the right forever, that would actually
probably be Max Payne.
But I really do think, you know, the the most unique aspect of Bitcoin is it focuses
your time preference of responsibility on the future.
You know, you're not just focused on how do I spend this paycheck before it's
evaporated away because I go to the meat store and, you know, steaks are twenty five
dollars instead of ten like they were last week.
So it's a really different way of thinking.
And it's the way you should be thinking.
Like the reason we don't have cathedrals anymore, the reason we don't have beautiful
buildings, the reason we don't have a functioning government or any politicians with
two brain cells to rub together is because the money is broken.
Yeah, well, yeah, and I would say like, I mean, it is because of just the focus on
short term action.
So politicians, I mean, this is a famous thing, but politicians, they spend 50 percent
of their time on the phone trying to raise money to stay in power.
Now, again, you're like, well, yes, that's actually might be a good thing, because if
they have 50 percent more time to do degenerate things and pass degenerate
legislation, like maybe that actually is a preferable alternative.
But it's still you have a lot of action like these guys.
They want to do important things.
They want to make actions that make people think that they're important so that they
vote them back in.
And that is just not a very good incentive, incentive structure, all things
considered. Like it's and this is why I'm a I'm somebody who I mean, again, obviously
you don't want to ever you don't want to ever like, you know, idealize any political
situation. But like, again, the idea of like we're at we're at a point where the vast
majority of people would see a king reigning as like the most unthinkable, like
totally backwards thing.
And meanwhile, I'm just like looking at this thing like, yeah, you know what?
Actually, it's a lot more efficient.
There's you know, obviously it can go wrong.
But like if you have a bunch of people who are just recognizing like, hey, you know
what? Like there is actually regardless of if it's not stated officially in terms of
voting or whatever, people have always the people always have power.
Like they really do always have power.
And so like, you know, there's just I just think in really realistically, there's not
much. I mean, still, if you look at today, like the effect, like what are most people
doing with their political freedom?
Like what are they actually are they are they actually using it in a way that is like
discernibly a benefit to say?
I don't think so. Like there's I mean, you're talking I don't know what percentage of
people actually vote. There's I mean, like only like I want to say it's like 50 or 60
percent of people actually vote.
So you've got 40 percent of people.
And I just look at the point where really like I think that I mean, you see this in El
Salvador and again, we can debate about, you know, I know there's I guess there's like a
hundred journalists and activists who like fled El Salvador in the last few days here
because apparently, you know, I don't know.
I was glad seeing the saying that Bukele's people are thieves and they're corrupt and
they're you know, this is getting exposed.
And so these people are fleeing.
So, again, I'm not trying to idealize it and basically say, look, all you have to do is put
a king in there. But I just I just don't think it's as straightforward as as American
education would have you believe, where it's like, listen, we just put in the democracy
and everything gets better.
It's like, show me that throughout history.
I don't see that anywhere.
But sure.
You must have been homeschooled.
Yeah, I was definitely homeschooled.
I'll be schooled. The government will solve all of my problems.
Yeah. The nobody's sitting here is going to be like, what?
No democracy.
Yeah, I'll pray for people watching.
You're just like, what?
Yeah.
Good. Part of part of the problem you're describing here is like.
One, the public education teaches us, oh, yeah, well, you can do exactly the thing, but
like to the just the reflexive nature of a democracy.
Oh, it's good because it's good because you can vote and then change the thing that you
think. And like, oh, if it's bad, we'll then vote or whatever.
And we're basically sitting in this this.
Soup of civilization, if you will, like hardly a building, mostly a soup, and it's like
people are stuck at a job trying to make their practically people are stuck at a job
trying to make ends meet.
And the only valve, the only like pressure gauge that they really have or think that
they have is to vote in your democracy.
Right. And it comes out like, oh, just vote for this or vote for everything's terrible
in California. That's because the Democrats and therefore we to fix California, we have
to elect Republicans and like everyone just buys into that.
It's like, why buy into that?
Well, they buy into it because they don't have any time to actually research it.
They buy into it because their time preferences are so high.
They can't they literally can't look back a month, six months, four years previous to
the previous administration's absolute destruction that they caused on the other side
of the political spectrum.
And then it just it just goes in circles and circles and circles and nothing ever gets
fixed and no problems are ever actually solved.
I think one of the other things that's interesting about like the the practical
applications of Bitcoin in that regard, like.
The lowering of time preferences for society, I think, will be a shock to most people,
like especially when we get into an AI world where, you know, I feel we're going to
learn the Europeans had it right or it's like Pasigata in Italy where people just kind
of like take a walk in the afternoon.
They kind of like slow down life.
I think we're so conditioned to microwave everything.
We microwave solutions vote harder.
We microwave like problems.
Oh, we're going to build this building with like, you know, we're going to 3D print a
building with concrete. OK, cool.
You can do that.
Sure, we just built a skyscraper in China in three minutes.
But is it pretty? Is it beautiful?
Like, is it something that people actually like put a lot of thought and effort into
every inch of?
No, not at all.
And I think that's one of the things that we're losing with the current just like
really like high time preference living.
And Bitcoin will practically solve that as it continues to become the bedrock of the
financial institution.
I think even the finance people are going to have to like change a little bit of the
way that they think. I think Bitcoin settling every 10 minutes is going to kind of keep
them in this like, oh, hey, I can do this and be a little bit frenetic.
But I think in the long term, when finance companies continue to realize, hey, I can
just hold on to this asset and make an additional billion dollars by doing nothing.
They're going to they're going to look at that and the nations are going to look at
that and then just practically it's going to be the biggest kind of like tsunami of
understanding that sometimes doing nothing is actually the best way to live.
And so I think that's going to be a really cool thing to see.
I just don't know how long it's going to take to get there.
Bondor tweeted something yesterday that kind of blew my mind about nonprofits that it
was specifically in regards to the L.A.
There was this concert held for victims of L.A.
fires and all of the money that was raised essentially went to the nonprofits and none
of it went to anybody who lost a home in the fires.
And he was saying most nonprofits, most of the money they take in go to just operating
the nonprofit. And Bondor, you brought up that if all of the money had been transacted
in Bitcoin, you would be able to follow and see exactly where it went.
So you could see if all of it went into an individual's wallet or if it went to the
company and if it went to the company, what operations it paid for.
So that's going to be a really interesting development as people start to transact more
and more in Bitcoin. You can completely hold the government accountable if they charge
you taxes. You can watch and see exactly where those taxes go.
There's actually going to be a like, OK, competitive landscape.
One nonprofit accepts only Bitcoin and publishes their address.
Hey, this is we're a nonprofit like we're we want to be above board.
We want to be transparent. We want you to we want to be able to show you that the money
you give us goes and exactly where it goes.
Right. The nonprofit that does that is going to be light years ahead of the nonprofit
who's just like opaque legacy banking, just black box.
Oh, yeah. Give it to us. We'll we'll we'll take care of it.
Yeah. Yeah. We'll we'll fix the homeless problem versus.
Yeah. No. Yeah. You can see like, you know, when you give us money, this is where it goes.
You can see how it's funneled. You can see our accounts.
You can see all our salaries, the rest of it, because we're not trying to make money,
guys. We're out here literally trying to solve the problem and you can actually trace the.
Money flow. Yeah. And this is there's some really cool precedent for this in a couple
different ways. So charity water was is a charity basically dig wells all over the world
and try to provide clean water.
And one of the things that they like their founder was live for a time as a party promoter
in New York City. Young guy worked in.
I mean, he was like, again, probably I think when he first started, he was like 18, moved
to New York City, partying like strip clubs, like working all these things, just getting
to know people, became friends with a whole bunch of like models and actors and all kinds
of people, and then ended up just having like a crisis of faith.
And just realized after like three days of partying, he's like, man, if I were to die
right now, he's like, I will have only served myself for my entire adult life.
And so he just basically started looking for a place to go and serve.
He hopped on a mercy ship, saw the need for, you know, which is a mercy ship.
So these things where you can work for them for a period of time, you literally drive
around in a boat and they pull into ports in poor countries and basically start doing
free medical service for people.
And so he just got to the point where he's like, hey, you know, clean water is a real
need. So as he was trying to set up this nonprofit to provide clean water, he just knew
that with a lot of the people that he was talking to, trust of institutions was very
low. And there was a lot of suspicion about giving money to an institution because of
just the question of where is this money actually going to go?
Does this actually really affect impact people?
And so he was trying to figure out, like, how do we structure this nonprofit so that we
can say that all of the money that comes in goes right back out to water projects?
And so what he decided to do is he presented this problem to people who were in Silicon
Valley. And these are people who understand that like you need structure, you need like
you need back end resources and processes and money to fund all these things.
And so what he did was he basically found a group of tech founders who were willing to
pay their operational costs.
They would donate the money specifically for their operation costs.
And then every dollar that comes in the door to fund to fund basically that for people
trying to fund water projects is going right back out the door to fund water projects.
So I do think I do think on for for many things, Bitcoin will provide the same the same
sort of flexibility and the same sort of transparency.
Like there's there's a way to do that.
At the same time, there will need to be some clandestinality, if that's a word, like to
do some things that certain nonprofits are doing.
There are nonprofits that are working to move resources and different things into places
like North Korea or places in the Middle East and other places where it is illegal to
do whatever the thing that this nonprofit is doing, even though it's totally above board,
whether it's humanitarian services, whether it's whatever it is.
And so there will be need the need for for some lack of you could call it lack of
transparency.
But and again, this is something that even Bitcoin does enable with things like the
Lightning Network and things like other other third layers where you can use Bitcoin, but
not in a way that's able to be tracked on the blockchain.
So I do think that there's there's a place for more transparency.
I do think it would be a benefit.
And I do think there's opportunity.
And so, you know, for and so the people who are going to be starting Bitcoin to nominate
a nonprofit or and running them have a tremendous, even just marketing opportunity to kind
of talk about this from that perspective.
That's a beauty of Bitcoin, that there's both.
Yeah, there's transparency or you can have it not be transparent, you can choose.
Yep.
It's interesting, I'm doing a side conversation with AI right now just to try and figure
out like the philanthropic like benefits that are actually getting to the people that
they're trying to help. And the fascinating piece about this is like even the AI is like,
oh, I don't know, like once you get past the first layer in the veil, you have no idea
because it goes from box A where they're like, oh, 80 percent of box A is going into a
good charitable box.
Oh, by the way, it's just going to another box that that box is also 80 percent.
It's like just these boxes of, you know, the shell game and the shell game is just
constantly moving the money further and further and further down the hole where people
are just taking more and more of a cut out of it all the way to where it just kind of
funnels into the pockets of politicians and other people.
And even now it's like looking at the different like watchdog organizations is like, oh,
hey, where do you actually get the money to fund your watchdog organization?
Oh, from the people that were the watchdog of.
It's like, oh, oh, really?
Yes.
Speaking of Bear Stearns and all these other large organizations that are doing Moody's,
the funding movies, yeah, Moody's and all these other things.
Yeah, Moody's and all these other S&P and whatnot standards and poor.
And so it's just, you know, whenever the government says they're going to audit
themselves, all you need to do is laugh.
That's it, because they're not actually going to audit themselves like the only way
to have a proper audit is to have a unbiased third party.
Actually, you actually want a biased third party to come in.
You want somebody who has a vested interest in actually rooting out the rot, because if
you have an unbiased third party, they can be biased and they will be biased.
And so I think that's one of the things with Bitcoin.
Practically, Bitcoin solves all the problems we're talking about with the government,
because if you can track the wallets all the way back to, hey, I made this donation to
the government.
By the way, my money went to the Pentagon, and I know that I just saw the money that
I donated to the government or spent on my taxes go directly to bombing some kids somewhere
in the world.
I might not actually like that.
And so this obfuscation of the dollars and how they're spent is one of the reasons we
have such a poorly run government, because they can hide behind things.
And so I think that's the thing that's going to be solved by Bitcoin.
And just the move towards cryptocurrencies is we're going to have a lot more efficiency.
But that's actually why you need to use Bitcoin, because at the end of the day, they're
going to use Monero or they're going to use any of these other cryptos that are actually
just scams.
And then they know that they can hide behind the scam, because the biggest scam is the
US dollar.
So all of the transparency point is super valid.
Obviously, you want to have, as Jordan notes, you want to have some obfuscation in particular
situations.
But there's another side to it as well, which is you can think of it almost like the opposite
side, which is when you donate to a nonprofit, you want to be sure that they can actually
execute on the intended purpose, right?
For instance, the truckers in Canada.
If you're donating to the truckers in Canada via a bank account, and the government who
they're protesting can shut down their bank accounts, you're not donating any money to
the truckers.
You're donating money to the government, right?
Or to the banks or whoever else is confiscating the end result there, right?
So you need something that is both transparent and obfuscatable and permissionless.
You can't shut it down.
Which is Bitcoin.
This is the whole Bitcoin solves this problem.
Bitcoin practically brings permissionlessness to a nonprofit or a cause or an organization
that allows them to operate independently without risk of being debanked or shut down.
Yeah, I do think, again, beyond that, there are some other things that...
So I mean, the fact that an increasing percentage of donations to nonprofits,
denominated in fiat, are going towards operations, that shouldn't surprise anybody,
because that's like fiat's fault.
I mean, there comes a point at which, yeah, okay, this is just what happens.
Everything goes up in price, denominated in fiat.
And so then it also shouldn't surprise us.
I was texting back and forth.
JD sent me the tweet that you sent.
And I was like, well, it's like, part of this is fiat's problem.
Part of this is California's problem.
Because if you've got nonprofits specifically related to the fire money, it's like, if you've
got nonprofits that are operating in California, they're going to have much higher operating
budgets, because their salaries are going to need to be higher to be able to pay insane
California real estate prices.
And so it wouldn't surprise me in order to see a nonprofit exodus from California.
Some of this might already be happening.
That's just making it worse.
So if you're founding, if you've got the nonprofit that's based in Wyoming or whatever,
that's just a way to make even more money.
But definitely, if your nonprofit organization is founded in California, you're going to still,
if you're trying to pay Californians, you're going to need to pay them a lot more than
somebody who's living in Iowa or something like that.
So again, this is my argument.
I was like, see, listen, so part of this is we just need to adopt Bitcoin.
The other part is we just need to abandon California.
So as he says this to two people who are actively in California.
That's the joke, yeah.
But again, that problem is solved by Bitcoin.
Practically, Bitcoin reduces real estate prices because it takes out monetary premium on real
estate.
So both Anton and I have been following real estate in LA and California for a long time.
Just it's part of what you have to do to live here, right?
And I'm already seeing it over the last six months.
Prices in real estate are coming down.
Now, is that because of Bitcoin?
It's probably because the interest rate is really high.
But when you price it all in Bitcoin, it's coming down even more, right?
Yeah.
Just from the last six months of Bitcoin bull run.
If you're saving in Bitcoin, if you're denominating in Bitcoin, real estate is just getting cheaper
and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.
And practically, that's a huge thing because everyone's like, well, I need a place to live.
Everybody needs a place to live.
Every, like in California, every other person is homeless.
Well, gosh, like you see these, wow, this is connecting some dots on some practical
solutions to things.
I'm seeing something slightly different than that.
Whereas real estate has been falling in price in nominal terms for some properties, it's
been going up for other properties.
And what I believe is happening, and this could be happening as a result of Bitcoin,
properties, if they are truly valuable, remain valuable.
But it's revealing which properties aren't as valuable.
So you'll have a-
Speculative or something.
Yeah.
You'll literally have a house that is on the freeway.
And it had been used as essentially almost like an altcoin before.
It's like a place to put your money because real estate prices just go up forever in California.
It's just like buy any piece of real estate, you can park a little bit of money for there,
and you will be able to sell it for more money a little bit down the road.
That's how real estate has been treated here.
It's why people will not give deals on real estate to friends or family or anything like
that because everybody's like, I have an absolute jackpot sitting here if I own this house.
And as Bitcoin becomes more and more the standard, and people realize that they can park their
wealth in Bitcoin rather than having to speculate in all these different markets,
it is going to reveal true value, which is exactly what is happening.
And so we're going to see more and more and more of that, which is kind of cool.
Absolutely.
One thing we're getting to the close to the end of the show.
We still got maybe five, 10 minutes left, but I wanted to bring this up because
this is a hugely practical thing that a lot of people struggle with with regard to Bitcoin,
which is you are working four jobs.
You have 80 hours a week.
You have all these expenses.
You have zero ability to save or invest, right?
Practically, you think Bitcoin is not for me because there's nothing I can do.
There's no amount of time or energy or money or any kind of possible resource that I can
actually put into Bitcoin, even if it's like an hour a week of research.
I cannot do this, right?
So practically, how does Bitcoin solve this problem?
Now, I've gotten into a whole bunch of arguments with people about this online.
I think this is the end result, and I've gone down this path for a while.
Okay, so here's the idea.
The idea is that if you negotiate your salary because you're getting paid, you've admitted
you're getting paid, right?
Like you have to meet your bills, you're getting paid.
So if you renegotiate your salary into a flat rate in Bitcoin terms, a flat rate Bitcoin salary
where you're not taking a pay cut or you're not asking for more money, you're just getting paid
in Bitcoin at a flat rate, whatever your current salary is or your current income.
That is how you get access to everything we're talking about, because what's going to happen
is that your salary is then going to be tied to Bitcoin and no longer tied to inflation or USD.
What are the consequences there?
Well, your salary is going to be more volatile.
Okay, so you would ask in your negotiation for your salary, you would ask for a minimum
exchange rate, right?
Over like the next six months or a year or something.
And you would also concede with your employer as a negotiation tactic, as a part of asking
for a salary in no longer a fiat salary, but a flat rate Bitcoin salary.
You would concede to your employer that at the end of every year, we get to renegotiate
my salary, bring it up to, or bring it down to where, what is the
copacetic agreement about what my salary should be at the end of the year, right?
But why does this matter?
Why should you do this?
This completely inverts the dynamic that we talked about earlier, where your employer owns you.
This changes it from you now have the upper hand against your employer because your salary
is going to beat inflation.
Your salary is going to become a liability to them if they don't address it and renegotiate
with you.
Okay, so, oh, well, practically, again, getting back to practically, does this actually work?
So I ran the numbers on it.
Here's a graph that basically on the top in the orange, this is a projected Monte Carlo
simulation for Bitcoin's price using the meme, three green, one red, which is to say Bitcoin
on average goes up three years in a row and then crashes for one year.
So up 20%, up 40%, up 60%, down 40%, right?
So that's the orange going up is the Bitcoin projected Bitcoin price starting from today.
And then the green line is your savings if you're getting paid in Bitcoin and your expenses
are denominated in fiat.
So as you can see, after about 2.5 years, there are no simulations, in which case, or
no simulations where you are no longer broke, no longer without savings.
And the reason that works is because you like the amount of money you're getting paid exceeds
exceeds the inflation that your lifestyle will naturally engender and your just cost
of living stuff.
Yeah, right.
So this is a very practical thing.
You can do this today.
You don't even need to buy Bitcoin or invest or anything.
Just renegotiate your salary into a flat rate.
Jordan, thoughts?
I like the idea.
It's going to get, again, somebody's going to be a genius and get this in writing and
they're going to hit it at the perfect timing and absolutely make a killing and their employer's
head's going to explode when they realize like, oh, shoot, what did we do?
And then at that point, I mean, it's just one of those things at that point.
It's like, well, can they just fire you?
If it gets to the point where you're literally making three times more than you were supposed
to, are they just going to fire you and then they don't have to worry about it?
It's just one of these things where-
That's exactly it.
But again, you can write that in the contract.
Hey, if it exceeds this amount, that triggers a renegotiation process.
Sure.
Okay, yeah.
And it's like, yeah, but you can just plan for all of that stuff.
And then the company's like, well, what's the cost for us?
If you're willing to set the minimum exchange rate-
And it goes down, it could be, yeah.
If you're willing to set that 10% below your current salary, well, the company's going
to be like, well, wait a second, we might be able to save 10%.
We're bearish on Bitcoin.
We don't believe in this thing, whatever.
I want to save 10% on my employee salary.
Absolutely, let's do it.
And it's like, no, but that could catch up to them at the end of the year.
But you can kind of see how this plays out.
You're like, wait a second, this could actually solve a lot of the issues with regard to,
yeah, I have zero savings.
I have zero time.
I have zero ability to pay attention to any of this stuff.
I have like, just, you just go through it.
You're like, oh, interesting.
Yeah, I would be more dubious that even that would work.
Because again, even if it's, again, because the point is, when it starts to disadvantage
the company, like even if they're like, oh, look, we saved 10% and we can fire him when
it gets to me, or like, it's just one of these things where I just feel like there's going
to be a lot of cynical people.
Cynical people, like there might be some people in the beginning, depending on, really, it
comes down to the character of your employer, right?
And it depends, like, I mean, the other thing, it's one thing if your employer is like cash
rich and they're making, you have a really, you have really good profit margins on your
product.
But like, if you're barely, if you as a business, if you're working for somebody who's like
margins are tighter, then like, you know, there's, I feel like there is a limit to the
effectiveness of, you know, of like some of this, I don't know, I don't want to call it
cute, but like some of this like system gaming, like there is a sense in which like this,
this is going to take longer.
It's going to be systemic.
Again, like I think where it could work too, is if you're working for like a big company,
like if you have a lawyer and, you know, you're, you're working for Apple or something like
that.
And, you know, you can, where they, again, you're a, you're a rounding error.
Like you can kind of disappear and go under the radar.
I think someplace like that, it's going to work.
But like, I feel like your average, your average place, even if, you know, unless you're
capping it, it's something, you know, something like a 10% above or, or I could, you know,
something like that.
I feel like it's going to, I don't think it's going to work the way in practicality, the
way that it would seem to be able to work on paper.
But again, happy to be wrong.
There's no point, there's no hurt in having the conversation.
For sure.
Here's one other thing that I think is fascinating and interesting about this idea.
And I think you bring it up nicely, which is, wait a second, how much of your business
model itself is predicated on just enslaving your employees at a fraction of their time,
right?
Yep.
Because you're just, oh, well, the company is literally just benefiting from the inflation
because they don't have to pay as much for their salaries year after year, provided they
don't offer the cost of living increase, which is commensurate with the actual inflation
that their employee is experiencing, which no company does.
They just say, oh, the inflation rate is whatever the interest rate is, right?
Like, oh, that's going to be, and they can contractually, well, if I'm just contractually
write that into the thing, but like, no, no, no, that's, that's actually a bad business
model.
Yeah.
That's saying that you're just going to cheat your way to the, to your, to your quote unquote
profits.
That's just total fiat mindset.
That's not real.
That's not a real actual business.
You guys aren't actually making money.
You're just arbitraging employment or, or even if you are like, you can still be like,
even if you are making money and let's say the employer is keeping more of it.
Like, you know, he's got a couple of employees, he's making out like a King and he just doesn't
want to share that with his employees.
Well, again, if they're skilled, if it's skilled labor, then they're going to look up, they're
going to look elsewhere.
And so you're going to have to, like, it's going to be a higher cost to, you know, hire
somebody else.
And you know, just the efficiency, it's going to go down.
So like there really are real incentives towards taking care of your employees and acting
ethically.
But yeah, it really is fascinating when you start thinking about, again, all the game
theory.
It's like you can choose your actions, you can't choose your consequences.
And the more that you, you know, the more that you try to shortcut and try to not treat
your employees effectively, you know, there's, there's costs to doing that.
And as, as employees, as a particular skilled workers come to understand Bitcoin as, as
everyone is, is on the path to doing, they're going to be like, wait a second.
It's unethical.
I mean, my last gig was like, you guys, this is your inflation rate, which was nominally
2%, but it was obviously like 8% or something.
It was like, you know, I wrote letters to the company, you guys, I know what's happening.
I know that you are not meeting the cost of living appropriately.
It's, it's, it's a disgusting practice.
Honestly, it's unethical.
Consequently, what are you going to do about it?
No response naturally.
Yep.
Right.
And this is, I do think Bitcoin like has a radically, it has the ability to radically
shift things like this for wealthy people.
So like one of the examples, I've got a buddy who runs a nonprofit who is, is denominating
things in, in Bitcoin.
And like one of the things that they, that they started to look at is, you know, like
10% raises.
Like if we hold a big enough percentage of our balance sheet in Bitcoin, like then we
can, we can do that happily and easily.
Like that, that's not a big deal.
Again, if you start with a big enough treasury, you know, that you do these kinds of things,
like you can, you can actually take care of your people and it not affect your bottom
line.
And so what this incentivizes is again, it incentivizes moving towards sound money as
fast as you can.
The people who move, the faster you move, the easier it is and the better that you're
going to be able to treat, you know, your, your customers, your, your employees, all
these kinds of things.
And so again, I just think that, and again, you could get to the point where if you get
the tail end of this thing, you start seeing runaway hyperinflation.
Oh, that's okay.
Well, we still have, we have enough Bitcoin that's increased in value enough that we
can, you can do 20% raises.
You know, we can, we can actually keep pace with even hyperinflation because of how, like
because of how Bitcoin works.
And so, and because of just the way reality works and scarcity works.
And so again, I think the more that all these nonprofit organizations, in addition to all
the businesses, like obviously on a business end, but on the nonprofit end, like they,
they are, you know, even more incentivized to stop, like to start plugging the holes
in their leaky bucket, you know, as soon as possible.
It's important to note that people can do this for themselves now.
Yeah.
They don't have to wait to get paid in Bitcoin.
You can take your salary and you can convert it to Bitcoin now.
Yep.
So in, in the future, we will have sound money.
Bitcoin is the future, but do you ever think about the 1920s era in America?
And you just can't even believe that it ever existed.
There were actual coinage that had precious metals in them.
The money was more or less sound during that time period.
And what did we get?
We got art deco buildings.
Sometimes I'll drive through Los Angeles and you drive over these incredibly ornate
bridges and you're just like, how, how did the government ever build this?
Why, why were they building things that were aesthetically pleasing that a hundred years
later are still standing?
And when we have sound money, again, we will get back to that, to that place.
It's funny looking at bond doors graph.
I'm looking at it.
I'm like, well, if we had sound money, if our money didn't inflate and you just could
make more money than you had to spend to live, and you just put it in a bank account and
it grew with interest and that interest compounded over time, then you'd have the same thing.
But we haven't had sound money in our entire lifetimes.
And so it looks like magic to us.
We're like, what are, we could have more wealth later as opposed to less, our, our
lifestyle could actually increase as opposed to just, we get poorer and poorer and poorer
until the day we die.
It's like, we're conditioned to have a fiat mindset.
And so when we get presented with the idea of a fiat mindset, we're like, okay, well,
we get presented with the idea of sound money.
It, it looks like this impossible science fiction, but it's not science fiction.
It's Bitcoin.
And, and it was gold.
Like this, I, this is the thing that just blows people, blows my mind is the average
salary in the United States in 19, sorry, in 1913 was $800, $800 per year.
Okay.
That equated to, uh, let's see, 38.7 ounces of gold.
Okay.
So if you, if you now take 38.7 ounces of gold times, I believe gold's around $3,400,
$3,300.
If you multiply it by $3,400, that's $129,200.
And so it's just like, no, again, that's average.
The average salary, I think in the United States is somewhere around 80, 80 K, something
like that.
So you're still, you're talking about losing roughly a hundred, you know, roughly 50 K,
you know, 50 K of, I mean, so almost half, like you're approaching half, you have half
as much.
And again, for a lot of people, it's way worse than that.
For some people, it's not as bad.
But again, like the, the purchasing power is just, just disappearing because of the fact
that you're, we're operating and living our lives in a deficient money, a deficient currency
system.
And so, again, as you move to, to a currency system that, you know, actually gets more
valuable over time because of its scarcity and because of its adoption rate, you know,
you're going to start seeing this thing go the other way and it's going to appear like
magic.
People are just going to be like, oh, you know, you just got lucky, all this.
It's like, no, we didn't get lucky in the truest sense.
Like maybe, again, we were fortunate to have our attention called to this thing at some
point.
But again, there's, there's a ton of work that goes into understanding it and just curiosity
that goes into, into understanding these things.
And so your curiosity is a commodity.
Your attention is a commodity.
And if you're giving it away willy nilly to all kinds of ridiculous things, then yeah,
you're, you're not going to have spare, you know, excess attention to be able to give
to, to things that could, you know, value that could contribute and help you economically,
whether it's Bitcoin or whether it's even just other economic, other economic opportunities.
There's tons of people.
We all have the same amount of time.
We all have the same amount of attention, more or less.
And again, but just people choose to steward it differently.
And those, those actions compound and have consequences.
I think Anton had a like excellent tweet on this exact phenomenon, like prove it.
So this is Anton, this is you.
I have watched people discover Bitcoin and become more conservative and grow deeper in
relationship with Jesus Christ.
At the same time, I've watched other people gamble on altcoins and fall away into secular
progressivism.
And I basically say, I 100% agree.
I'm convinced this is now me.
That Bitcoin is the underlying reason the vibe shift has gone from degeneracy to less
degeneracy for the first time in a hundred years.
Over the last 100 years, we have literally seen everyone's agency erode, slowly erode,
their time preferences erode, slowly erode.
One generation is like a little bit more degenerate than the previous, a little bit more
degenerate.
And we're now at the point where, wait a second, the vibe shift has literally shifted.
Like the next iteration is not more degeneracy.
The next iteration is now literally a little bit less degeneracy.
Like we care a little bit more about beauty than we did before.
We care a little bit more about stable relationships than we did before.
We care a little bit more about conservative values than we did before.
And I think, you know, like people say, oh, that's because we've all voted Republican.
It's like, no, one, not everybody voted Republican.
Two, there's a really strong case to be made that the only reason Trump won was because
of his engagement with Bitcoin and the crypto community.
This is a real economic powerhouse that's pushing civilization in a new direction,
unlike the direction that the Federal Reserve has been pushing civilization for the last
100 years towards degeneracy.
We're now pushing away from degeneracy.
Now, of course, as we're all well aware, we're all still very much in the soup of
degeneracy, but we're going in a different direction.
Yeah, I think one of the things that the story that comes to mind is the story of the
prodigal sons, like the parable.
And you get you have the one son who grows up in wealth, grows up and having everything
he needs is he gets to the point where he demands his inheritance from his father, which
is effectively telling his dad that he wishes he was dead so that he could get his money.
And so then his father incredibly gives him a share of the inheritance.
He runs off and he blows it on, you know, hookers and blow and, you know, all kinds
of all kinds of things.
And he wakes up and comes to his senses and basically says, how many of my father's hired
servants have a better life than I have?
And so I think that just culturally, you know, obviously, I think the point that you made
about Bitcoin afflicting, you know, tipping the election, I think that's true.
You know, there's like apparently five percent if you get if these numbers are to be believed,
five percent of voters were single issue Bitcoin voters or crypto voters.
And so I do see that being like a potentially a tipping point thing.
I do think in addition to that, there is and there was there's this a fatigue like sin
in degeneracy has a shelf life like you can.
There's a tipping point to where the degeneracy and the pain that comes from, you know, sin
and prolonged insanity, prolonged exposure to insanity gets tiring and people just react
against it.
And so I think that that's part of what we've experienced.
I don't think we've experienced anything like an actual, you know, actual meaningful
cultural repentance where we've really seen like we've come to the end of our rope.
I don't see that really to any degree, but I do think I mean, again, just a lot of the
a lot of the shaming, like a lot of the, you know, the left leaning stuff of like you can't
joke about these topics.
You can't do all these things like it's just all the just the, you know, just cold, dead
restrictions.
People are just like, shut up and go away.
Like there's just a lot of people who are not religious, who are not conservative, who
just were like, dude, I'm so sick of your harping on us and not letting us do stuff.
And so, again, at the same time, I'm hopeful that we're going to see more, you know, real
actual change over time, because, again, I still think there's still plenty of degeneracy
that people are still getting fatigued of.
But yeah, I really do think it's one of these things that there's multiple factors that
are that are coming into play.
And again, we just have the opportunity to, you know, with Bitcoin and with, you know,
lives.
I mean, you know, as I'm speaking as a Christian, like, you know, we just go along.
There's we just keep living our lives and there's keep compounding consequences to the
way that you're living, you know, positively or negatively.
And, you know, this is something of what, you know, what the Book of Revelation says.
It says basically, let the let the righteous continue to live righteously.
Let the unrighteous continue to live unrighteously.
And basically, time will go by.
Things will compound.
And basically it'll become clear, you know, it'll become clear what what the way of what
the proper way of living is.
And so, you know, it's not that we need to run around and scream at the top of our lungs
for people to change.
Like there's some of this change that, you know, hey, you know, we'll see.
We'll see where we're both at in 10 years, 15 years and go from there.
Well said, guys, I think that we are coming up on the end here.
Anton, if you have any last words, go for it.
Otherwise, I'm going to shut us down.
Jordan said it pretty well.
And yeah, things will compound and they'll compound for the better or they will compound
for the worse.
And when everyone is cheating, there's this feeling that you're only cheating yourself
if you're not cheating.
And with Beyot, we've all been cheated and we've been lied to for so long that it has
just led to a culture of lying and cheating.
And hopefully Bitcoin, because it is it is just true.
It's just math.
It's something that is provable.
It is going to usher in a time period of truth.
Indeed.
All right, guys.
Thank you so much, Jordan, for popping on here.
Anton, always seeing you around.
Peace.
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