Are you a slave: Defeating the Surveillance State - Ep 027

In this energizing episode, hosts JD, Bondor, and Zach delve into privacy in a world dominated by surveillance. Will Bitcoin combat the surveillance state, or simply add new layers of complexity? They explore tactical anti-surveillance aids and discuss the evolving digital landscape, speculating on Bitcoin's role in decentralizing power amidst governmental control.

 

Watch this episode on YouTube

 

Hosts:

JD - @CypherpunkCine on 𝕏
Bondor - @gildedpleb on 𝕏
Zach - @idiotfortruth on 𝕏

 

 

Sponsors:

Unknown Certainty - The Bitcoin Ad Company
IndeeHub - Reshape the Business of Storytelling - @indeehub on 𝕏

What is Better By Bitcoin?

Bitcoin makes everything better. Join the team and our guests as we unpack how, why, and where we go from here.

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.

Better.

Buy Bitcoin.

Hey, well, we are streaming from a new platform today, so hopefully it doesn't suck.

Cheers.

Episode 27, Better Buy Bitcoin podcast.

We have myself, JD, Bondor, and Zach on the pod today.

And we are going to talk about, are you a slave?

Defeating the surveillance state.

We're kind of curious about some of the stuff going on with the L.A. riots and with just

kind of the random videos we've been seeing on X and everywhere in the world.

Elon's thing where it's like the drones are beating the humans.

And so I think kind of the question to start with is, does this ever get better, Bondor?

I mean, there's no privacy, period.

And that's just what it is.

Maybe we'll get some privacy in the future if Bitcoin wins, but there's just no privacy.

Does it get better?

Well, I mean, hopefully.

It's probably not for us.

That's a shining light in a glimmer of darkness.

Thank you for that.

Yeah.

I mean, who knows?

Can't predict the future.

This is one of those days.

Maybe we should have just not done this.

I mean, will things get better?

Yes.

When?

I don't know.

They certainly have to get worse before they can get better.

We certainly agree that Bitcoin is the antidote to a lot of the poison being injected into society.

You know, I, it's like, think about nature.

Think about camouflage.

You know what I mean?

Let's talk about privacy.

Like, it's always a cat and mouse game.

It's always predator versus prey.

Humans have this ideological concept where we want everything to be perfect, and we want it to be a utopia based on our value system, whether you're a communist or a libertarian or whatever.

But it never plays out that way, and it's never fully that way one way or the other.

So I feel like, honestly, it's probably the same game that was being played before.

It's just being played with new tools.

Now we're in the information age, and we have to move this battlefield to the realm of information for the most part.

You know, it's not like, you know, like peak World War II, like World War II, post-World War II.

Those were highly centralized times in human history where the government had a lot more control than we imagined they did.

There were only three news networks.

They controlled the propaganda.

They controlled the media to a much larger extent than I think exists today.

It just seemed more calm because they controlled it better.

You know, so I don't know.

Like, I actually feel like we're reverting back to the mean of just like general chaos that humanity experiences.

I think that nukes have actually drawn conflict out, and, you know, the overall numbers of deaths and the intensity of it and the speed is less.

But, you know, like we're not in all-out combat, but instead we're in Afghanistan for 20 or 25 years, you know.

So it's like it's attrition right now is what it feels like.

It feels like we're in total attrition on all sides.

Nukes play a big hand in that.

Bitcoin is going to continue to decentralize power and authority, and that's going to be a painful process.

You know, the people who have the power now are not going to want to let that go, and they're going to want to do all of the crazy shit that we're seeing them do right now to try to hold on to it, to try to make people afraid, to cause problems and then offer up solutions.

So, you know, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

You know, throughout all of human history, people fought and died for freedom and autonomy and sovereignty.

You know, as Jason Lowery points out, like the physical domain is where these disputes have always been settled when it came down to it.

You know, we have this new thing called Bitcoin where maybe we could resolve some of those disputes digitally instead of physically.

So I don't know.

I think this is actually more like par for the human experience.

You know, I think that we all look at the past as this ultra-peaceful, ultra-wonderful place where nothing bad happened and everything is totally fucked now.

But I don't think history supports that thesis.

So I don't know, man.

Welcome to humanity.

Do you guys think Bitcoin makes the surveillance state better or worse?

Because I feel like we're probably all in agreement that the surveillance state is not going away.

And it's only going to get more advanced as we continue to be more connected and have more drones and have more ways for them to listen to you.

Cough, cough, whatever you have in your pocket or whatever device you're listening to this thing on is listening to you.

But do you think...

Shout out to our FBI guy, local FBI man.

Yeah.

Or girl.

We're not sexist here.

We don't discriminate.

We don't discriminate.

So if our local FBI guy or girl...

And also, by the way, you guys, if you're the FBI guy, should not go mingle with the NSA individual who's also listening.

Because cross-pollination of that information is actually probably illegal in some jurisdictions that are not the United States because it's probably legal here.

So where we're going with this is...

What do you guys think, though?

Does the pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin make the surveillance state stronger or does it actually make it possible for privacy to return?

I mean, it's an interesting question because it's pseudonymous.

If you can tie one address to somebody, then you can see all of their transactions that went through that address.

Now, one example...

Like, okay, how could it get better?

One example that comes to mind would be like the traffic light thing.

Or the automatic...

Oh, you ran a traffic light, so we had a little robot that took your license plate photo.

And then we'll just send you the ticket, right?

No problem.

This is going to be swimming.

We're going to make so much money off of this bad boy.

And lo and behold, it takes a photo.

And there's a famous case of this.

It takes a photo with a guy driving because you have to get the...

No, it was your car and you were driving, right?

Therefore, you get the ticket.

Here's the evidence.

But it was the guy driving, and then there was somebody in the passenger seat that, like, wasn't his wife.

And so, like, that turned out to be evidence that he was cheating on his wife for some other case or something.

And I'm totally butchering this story, but you kind of get the idea of where this is going.

He basically sues the city, wins the lawsuit, and they completely either have to dismantle or essentially destroy

or not use or can no longer use the automated traffic stops.

Now, that was the case for a little bit.

I don't know if that's the case still.

This is something that happened in L.A. as I understand it.

But it's interesting because it's this new technology that is, oh, great, look, we can push on this.

But then there's consequences for pushing on that that they may not realize that are more expensive.

You know, you can imagine a guy suing the city, and, like, that could be a $100 million lawsuit,

crazy amounts of money depending on his circumstances and the amount of money that was in play in his marriage, etc.

So you think about that, like, well, what if the state, because we all, like, the state is going to be on a Bitcoin standard.

This is just going to happen because Bitcoin is the best money it's going to win.

Okay, when the state's on a Bitcoin standard and they can just surveil everybody because they'll have everyone's at, like,

they'll have, oh, we know that you got Bitcoin to this address and we know that's you.

Will everybody else be able to look at the state and be able to say, yeah, and we know where we're paying our taxes.

Like, we know the address we paid the taxes to and we can follow that address through all this stuff.

So it becomes very important for the state to all of a sudden obfuscate just for the sake of national security

and, like, how do they fund their, how do they fund the military and, like, how do they do all this stuff that the state knows it's going to have to do.

But if it's on a Bitcoin standard, there's some real problems with that.

So there's going to be a lot of pressure, political pressure and otherwise, to obfuscate Bitcoin transactions.

Now, I don't know how that all plays out.

You know, this is very speculative, but it's something that's, like, interesting because there's always knock on effects.

And a lot of times there's knock on effects push in ways that we don't necessarily expect.

So that's interesting to me in terms of what could happen for privacy, for, like, good things that could happen for privacy going forward.

And maybe that's, like, maybe the state's just like, yeah, cool.

We're, you know, everybody, we're going to do this huge campaign.

Everybody's going to get cryptographic or confidential transactions on Bitcoin CT, right?

There you go. Now you get a lot of the whole like everything kind of changes in that regard.

It's who knows if that happens, but it's interesting to me.

It's interesting, actually, that perspective of, you know, it's going to be a rules for the and not for me type situation where the state's going to be like, no, no, no, no, no.

You don't get to know what our address is.

Oh, but you get to know our address. Oh, yeah. Yep.

Yes, we we got to try. We got to track your taxes.

And it's going to be one of those interesting, like, you know, cat and mouse games where that that is kind of decided and figured out.

You know, I really do appreciate the snow crash perspective on this, where, you know, there are a bunch of different states.

And if you've ever read the book we talked about on a much earlier pod, but the TLDR is it's a future state.

It was written in nineteen ninety nine and it's like this future state version or like the early 2000s of kind of the world takes place in Los Angeles.

But, you know, the US has collapsed and then there's like General Mao's Hong Kong or General General Chow's Hong Kong.

And there's like all these like little different, you know, like they call them burb claves.

But like each one is a specific country and you can have passports to these different countries.

And then it's like you get, you know, safe transport in and out of that country if you have that passport type thing.

And so it's going to be a similar situation where I think.

You know, the government that is requiring you to pay taxes is actually going to also be required to, like, put up or shut up.

And so we actually get to this point where people like you need to pay me taxes and it's like, well, what am I getting for that?

It's like I'm not going to pay you taxes if you're not giving me something.

So I also think the other side of that will be sharing my privacy and all that.

So it's going to be interesting because it's like the government obviously is going to want to have their addresses, you know, hidden, which is sailors whole point.

Right. Like Mahler's and those guys are kind of coming out. Metaplanet, you know, GameStop.

This is our address. And then sailors like that's really stupid.

And so it's like those are two sides of the same debate. It's like one guy's like this is a terrible idea.

One guy's like this is what you need to do. And so it's going to be really interesting to see how that continues to advance and go through and move through.

StreamYard or rather Riverside, which I'm doing here. No offense, Riverside, but you're kind of terrible.

It didn't let me it didn't take my episode name. It says welcome to our live stream.

And it has the Riverside logo in the top left hand corner and says live, which is also terrible.

So thank you, Riverside, for being terrible and confirming for us that we need to use StreamYard when it is not broken.

So StreamYard, if you are listening to this, they're both terrible.

They both have some terribleness to them. But we know to the Internet.

We know I have a backup that works, but it is just as terrible, but definitely terrible than our traditional streaming platform.

And also X, you're terrible because you won't let me change the name of the live show mid show.

So welcome to our live show will be the name of the show until I get to change that.

So anyway, I think in terms of in terms of surveillance, I mean, that's like Bitcoin related surveillance.

But there's also just the general surveillance of like one nation under CCTV kind of like surveillance.

And speaking of the United Kingdom. Yeah, like that already exists, like even in America.

I don't know if you guys know about Gorgon Stare. Have you heard of Gorgon Stare?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think I just was reading about this the other day.

Did you just become Mr. T for two seconds? Oh, yeah. Gorgon, the Gorgon.

I mean, I don't know if I'm even pronouncing it right, but Gorgon Stare is like it's a 3D or maybe it's not 3D, but it's it's real time.

It's it's real time tracking and video that you can like fast forward and go backward in time on of massive like city city wide things.

And then it'll have an A.I. overlay. So it's like, oh, yeah, where did this car start?

Where did it go? How long did it take to get there? Like, OK, rewind on that.

And that's basically we should just basically assume like this is Gorgon Stare is one of the systems, one of many systems that exists as a an attachment to like drones during the L.A.

riots. We know somebody figured out, oh, yeah, there's a drone that's mapping the whole riots as they unfold.

Just to say everybody who is at the riot, like your entire position, every everything you did during the riot was recorded, probably in 3D fidelity where they can see.

Oh, yeah. You reach in your pocket, you pull out your cell phone, you check your tweets, you put it back, you reach down, you picked up a rock, you threw the rock.

Right. It just tracks all that stuff. And then it's like, oh, yeah.

And then you like walked over here, then you like went over here and your car was parked six blocks away.

And so then you walked to that and you got in your car and you drove home where you live in whatever Inglewood or whatever it is.

Right. So all of that is just it's already done. And that's just one of the systems.

We already know there's another system that was built by.

Lockheed Martin, that's deep space satellites orbiting Earth that are literally just scanning everything that happens on Earth all the time for Lockheed Martin for the Air Force or the Navy, whoever needs it.

Right. So like we already know, like all this stuff is out there. So there is no privacy.

The only way that you're going to get privacy is if you figure out the systems and there's cool stuff and cool devices like this that can somehow block these these privacy surveilling systems.

It's like Zach said, cat and mouse. One of the systems I think is cool, and I don't know if it'll block the high end government surveillance, but it can certainly block CCTV stuff, which is it's like sunglasses that shine ultraviolet light that you can't read on your own eyes.

But it like will like destroy, but not destroy, but like very much blind CCTV for your face.

Like you won't be able to track your face. There's another video I saw recently, which I thought was hilarious, but I think it's a new Jaguar or new one of the new cars that's coming out.

High end car uses LIDAR for its tracking system, as in, like, we're going to track the cars around us so that we can do auto driving and other full service driving, etc.

And the video was a guy recording this car on his cell phone, like just looking at the front of the car on his cell phone.

And you could see the LIDAR dots burning the burning the retina of his his cell phone camera just destroyed, like literally destroyed his camera on his phone because he was shining it at the car.

So it's like, well, that's interesting, right?

Like at some point, you'll be able to fight back on this stuff.

You're going to try to fix my camera.

Hey, it's contagious.

My camera.

Now, I know that's hilarious.

It's so funny.

The the interesting thing about the.

Surveillance state like fighting back thing is the clandestine solutions are also interesting.

I watched a video a couple of weeks ago of this one like part of China where these people are literally just wearing the like pantyhose over their face to just like block out.

It's like, oh, like you just see these people.

I was like, oh, everybody here is like.

Is everybody here just like a criminal?

It's like, no, they just don't want their face tracked.

They were just like where the pantyhose over their face.

And then it's like they have the pantyhose with like Joe Biden or Trump or whoever's face in the front of it.

It's like this is kind of funny.

But that's that's going to be kind of the solve you need to have.

It's like if you want to have a true privacy like Gigi in the Bitcoin space, you know, you just wears a giant green suit.

Greens probably not like full disclosure.

If you want to be anonymous, a giant green suit is probably not the way to go.

Do like a black, maybe like a camo or like an off white, like a cream.

Don't go green.

Like people are going to be like, oh, there's a dude over there.

Like that level of, you know, like coverage of your face, I'm not sure that's a dude.

But but to be fair, like that's that's it.

Like if you want to legit be anonymous and if you want to legit be, you know, a true cyberpunk of some way, shape or form,

you're going to actually have to do stuff in the meat space to do that.

And so it's going to be interesting as number go up and as the stuff continues to change and grow and morph, you know,

how how the world. Adapts to privacy in a surveillance state world is going to be really interesting.

I think the other thing that's still not talked about enough, we talked about this on an earlier podcast.

Also, those the actual like hardware back doors that are in all of our devices that we don't even know about.

You know, there are just things that you legitimately have to trust.

And it's like, oh, I'm trusting my camera. I'm trusting my computer.

I'm trusting this microphone like I'm trusting all these things.

The most common case for people to or rather the most like known.

Instance of a hardware back door that people are just like, what the hell's going on is actually DJI with their drones,

which is why, like three or four years ago, there was a big hubbub about, you know,

municipalities in the United States using DJI technology or DJI drones for their for their surveillance within the country,

because DJI drones have a back door that is confirmed that, you know, people were basically doing like, hey,

I'm going to do like a test to see, you know, what's what radio signals are coming out of the thing.

And so it's like my remote is transferring from my remote to my phone and from my phone to my drone.

But then what's this fourth video stream that's going to frickin nowhere that nobody knows about?

And that was one of the issues that was coming up was like DJI was legit mapping the entire world by just taking a feed of every single DJI for the purposes of the CCP.

Yep. And so you you're going to have to shake hands with the surveillance state in some way, shape or form like it's going to happen.

The question just comes on whose terms is it on? Is it on yours or is it on, you know,

the terms of whoever's making the devices that you're using?

And there's going to be a time where the most valuable person in your family is going to be your kids.

And the reason for that isn't because they're your kids.

It's because they're digital natives and they will think differently about the technology that you're interacting with.

You will also be important in their lives because you will have a different perspective for them.

But for you, it will be very important for you and them to actually have open dialogues about this kind of stuff,

because you're just going to get a perspective from them that you've never had.

And they're going to get one from you that they, you know, aren't naturally inclined to think about.

Twitter wrecked Twitter's back up.

One thing that's interesting, the there's I think and, you know, this changes on a probably monthly basis,

but I think there's still the ability to be fully anonymous online.

And I mean that in the sense that Satoshi was fully anonymous.

Nobody has actually pinpointed who Satoshi was with definitive evidence.

I mean, Zach, you have a theory about it.

And people have a lot of theories about it.

But there's no real.

There's no real.

Wrong.

It's Bondor.

There's no real like a hardcore case for it.

It's definitely not me.

And I find that interesting.

Well, you can't run this like you can't trust the software you're running, et cetera.

There's actually systems now where it's like, no, no, you can actually like.

Go through and like, hey, if I hash this set of software, I should have this hash.

It does.

That means I can trust that.

And if I, you know, I can use this and you can actually like, I forget what the name of the project is.

It's out there.

But it basically starts with these really easy to verify primitives that are not even hashes.

But it's like, yeah, this is the software you're running.

It has you have to read 100 lines and confirm that these are the 100 lines.

And from those 100 lines, you can start to build higher.

Higher systems and higher things that are like, yeah, we can deterministically prove that I'm owning the software.

That it's in accordance with what I believe it should be running.

Like, I mean, when you run an Apple computer, it's constantly talking to Apple and just sending all of your information to Apple like all the time.

Unbelievable amounts of information.

And you just have to like go along with it.

Versus these other systems and privacy software that you can use that are like, okay, cool.

And now from those primitives, you can start to build higher primitives.

Like now I can connect to the Internet via Tor and no one can get my IP address.

Well, that now you can start to get an e-mail address.

When you get an e-mail address, then you can start to get access to accounts and all sorts of other stuff.

That is that no one can actually even a tie.

No one can actually tie to anyone's like physical presence anywhere.

And, you know, if you if you go through these, it's extremely painful and hard to go through some of these processes.

I've tried some of these things before.

I recommend trying it just so you can see.

But, man, it's so painful.

And.

You need to have it's painful, but it exists, it's possible.

I think where I'm going with all this is that.

For all of these stuff, for all these things, there's tradeoffs and the tradeoffs are always going to be.

You have to make the tradeoffs in accordance with your risk model.

Like, hey, do I need to protect myself from from nation states?

Because of what I'm saying is is extremely is going to be very painful for a nation state to hear.

Right. Am I a whistleblower?

Well, then you have to you probably have to go through those steps and go through the process of putting together an anonymous online account.

Which is going to be very painful for you, but it's going to be less painful than spending your life in prison.

So you can have to make those kind of tradeoffs.

And same thing with your kids. Same thing with your family. Same thing with your.

Hey, I just want to torrent like illegal movies. Right.

Well, you're going to have to make choices about how to do that, because there's still probably suing people for downloading content illegally.

So it just goes on.

Do you guys. I'm actually curious about this because it's like, you know, you constantly hear about the like EMP gun or just like guns in general.

You know, shotgun is probably the most effective if you're trying to go after a drone for obvious reasons.

But I am kind of curious, y'all's take on the Second Amendment and the United States, because, you know, looking at our our demos of like who actually watches the show, we do actually have, you know, a pretty decent sized viewing audience that's not in the United States.

How would you guys, you know, break down two things?

The relationship with the Second Amendment, with the current state of the surveillance state in the United States, like how important is it or not important, is it?

And secondly, how do you think the last bastion of the Second Amendment, like the United States, is going to impact other people as it gets worse?

Because I do think the surveillance state is going to get worse. And I actually do think the cause or the call for guns is actually going to be higher in a Bitcoin world for a lot of different reasons, because I just think it's going to be one of those things where, you know.

More people in a lot more places are going to want guns and they're probably not going to want them. I mean, it's probably just for like sport or hunting like cities, probably not so much.

But I'm just curious, like, you know, relationship with the Second Amendment during a surveillance state, you know, has yours changed?

You have one. And then do you think, you know, more people around the world are going to actually start like really vying for that right, especially with drones and stuff like that?

I, you know, I think that, I think that sovereignties will bifurcate on a Bitcoin standard. And for the record, I don't, I don't think we're going to see this in our lifetime in any like massively meaningful way.

You know, 20 years really isn't that long, especially as you get older, like, they just go so fast.

Now, obviously, a lot can happen in that timeframe. But what I'm trying to say is that, you know, let's hypothetically speaking, let's say the US totally just fails.

The Second Amendment is not respected. Just authoritarian regime. The commies take all the guns as commies usually do. You'll start to see the idea.

For your protection.

Exactly. If you want to be safer, guys, make sure you can't defend yourself. It's definitely safer.

But the you can't kill the idea of America like that cats out of the back. And so it'll just manifest itself somewhere else. And that would likely be on a Bitcoin standard.

And so you'll have, you know, new America form somewhere, wherever, Latin America, whatever, on whatever continent, you'll have a bunch of freedom minded people who are obviously down to defend themselves are going to create their own state.

That'll probably be on a Bitcoin standard that'll be that'll be armed to the fucking teeth.

And we'll be like America 2.0 like that. So just like hypothetically speaking, you know, if America falls, you know, with respect to the Second Amendment, you know, I used to be.

I used to be a lot more naive in my thought that, you know, everybody in the world wanted sovereignty and everybody in the world wanted freedom. But the fucking reality is, is they don't.

There's a handful of people around the world who truly want to be responsible for their decisions. And there are a lot of people who don't.

And I guess what I'm trying to say is that the Second Amendment is like, can the culture who's adopting it handle it? Because it comes down to culture.

And no, like not every culture can handle it. Like they just can't. You know, they're not born with the idea of sovereignty and a disdain for the government.

They want to be taken care of. They're basically, you know, children in adult bodies and they want some authority figure to be taken care of them.

So, no, I don't. I think that there's a lot of people who prefer to live under an authoritarian regime.

You know, we assume that that everybody values the things that we value as Americans, but those are generally speaking, pretty unique characteristics.

In other words, with great power comes great responsibility. And there's not a lot of people who really want to take responsibility for their behavior, which is what being pro-Second Amendment really is.

It's saying I'm willing to have this great power, but I'm willing to take great responsibility in order to maintain that and utilize it.

So, do I see the rest of the world just, you know, waking up and being like, hell yeah, freedom.

Based off of what I've seen over the last four years, like, no, no, I fucking do not.

And the people who don't want it will be totally captured by it.

And maybe it'll take them 50 years or 100 years or 200 years to be like, wow, authoritarianism is terrible. We'll have our own little mini revolution.

But the thing that's special about the United States and about American culture is that, and the thing that we can't assume, you know, you were talking earlier about kids, JD, like we have to, you cannot assume that the kids aren't going to be brainwashed like they're being by an authoritarian state that wants them to feel safer under their care, which is ultimately abusive and manipulative.

So, it's our responsibility to instill these principles and these ethics and these morals into our children.

We have to do that.

So, I don't know. I don't know if that answers the question, but I think that, you know, with respect to drones, there's always a countermeasure.

There's a countermeasure to everything.

Countermeasures will be developed.

There's no question that drones are insane.

They completely change the dynamic of the battlefield, I think, only on par with nukes.

Like, if you guys have seen Jason Lowery's little chart, it's like blunt force objects all the way to nukes.

And then there's one branch off of that, which is drones, in terms of where the end of the line is of kinetic, you know, combat.

Yeah, because after nukes, there's nothing beyond mutually assured destruction, right?

Like, okay, cool, everyone's dead.

But with drones, it's a tactical, completely surgical kind of warfare.

Yeah, I think everything that you were just saying, Zach, I think the thing that's been hitting me the most, because, you know, I had a 16-hour drive this week.

And so I spent a lot of time kind of thinking about this topic of story.

And it's like, I think the most expensive real estate in the world is right here.

And everybody forgets that.

It's like, you could go buy Madison Square Garden.

J.D. just pointed to his head, by the way.

I did. I pointed to my head.

By the way, my head is the most expensive.

He's not talking about Los Angeles.

It is the most expensive.

Your head is definitely less expensive than mine.

But, you know, the space between your ears, the space between your ears is the most expensive real estate in the world.

And that is why there is such a battle for your attention.

Period.

If you can be convinced something is true, it is true.

If you're convinced that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, he did.

If you're convinced he didn't, he didn't.

If you're convinced that you're a piece of crap, you are.

If you're convinced that you are a champion, you are.

Like, you know, Henry Ford was right when he said, if you think you can, you're right.

If you think you can't, you're right.

Because the studies they've done over and over and over again about things like the, you know, superpower of moms, right?

And so what I mean by this is there is a study they did where it's like if a woman hears a crying baby, she can have superhuman strength.

It's like that.

There's all these stories where, you know, this car flips over and then they hear a crying baby, you know, and the mom kind of runs in and like lifts up the car with the superhuman strength and like gets her baby out kind of thing.

The reason that is so important to understand is because everything is physics, everything is momentum and everything is story.

You know, the interesting thing about the Bible is the Bible and just kind of like creation is a story.

That's how we talk about it.

It's like the creation story.

It's the story of humanity.

It's the story of time, right?

Like time is not just talked about as this abstract.

It's talked about as this evolutionarily developing thing.

It has a beginning and has a middle where we're at now in this like existing state and it will probably have an end, right?

But that is all a direct byproduct of momentum.

And so if your real estate between your ears can be co-opted by someone, anyone because of the stories you tell yourself, then we're going to be in a really bad way.

Like you were saying, Zach, it's like.

Culture is the stories the collective tells themselves.

It's the reason the people in Japan walk up the same side of the stairs and only walk down the other side of the stairs.

You see these great images of people in the subway, like funneling up the stairs on one side, and then people are able to really easily make their way down because nobody's going down like the story of that culture is respect.

One of the issues I would say with the United States is we've been constantly lied to by our electorate that assimilation is not required.

That is a lie and a misnomer because at the end of the day, you know, I think the.

Pride people get one thing right.

And what they get right is like you are right, you should celebrate your differences.

But what they get wrong is all differences are important.

So if you're white, that's important.

If you're black, that's important.

If you're brown, that's important for a lot of different reasons, because at the end of the day, like one black people interact differently with vaccines.

That's kind of important.

Same with, you know, brown people.

Whether you be a Latin, whether you be Indian, whether you be Asian, like whatever it is.

The the removal of these differences is the big problem.

And so circling back to what we're talking about.

The surveillance state's entire goal is to keep you on your toes.

And so it's very important that you fill this real estate with positive, empowering and focused stories that remind you of all the things that you want to be reminded of.

You need to be sovereign.

OK, that's a thing.

And if you don't want to be sovereign, by the way, then you're going to just be what Zach was saying is you're just going to be a lemming.

And that's fine.

A lot of people can be lemmings in life.

That is what it is.

But I think, you know, if you are just watching something like this and it's just a good thing for you to consume and you're having a good time, we're very glad you're here.

But do know that.

Anything and everything that happens to you in your life is your fault.

To a degree, like, you know, you walk out and a bus hits you.

OK, but why were you there?

Right.

So like there's a lot of different pieces to that.

But yeah, in terms of, you know, how does Bitcoin make this better?

And the stories we tell ourselves, I think there's a really interesting call it a synergy or like this beautiful relationship between the First and Second Amendment, which is like the First Amendment is protected.

You know, the memes go on.

First Amendment is protected by the Second Amendment.

Because if the First Amendment fails, well, then we're going to need the guns.

OK, that's interesting.

But now we get now there's this other part of it where the First Amendment is now has now given us Bitcoin.

You cannot have a Bitcoin without a First Amendment because software is speech.

And if you don't have a First Amendment, then you're not going to have software.

You're certainly not going to have robust software.

You're not going to have highly developed software that doesn't have backdoors because it's just, oh, software is not speech.

At that point, software is a product that we can regulate.

But if software is speech, well, then you can have cool stuff like encryption and cryptographic signing keys that nobody can F with and the whole thing.

And ultimately, you'll get something like Bitcoin.

Now, Bitcoin to JD, to your point, has these really fantastic qualities, which are you can custody your own keys.

You can just hold on to your keys and then you become responsible if something happens to them.

Well, you're so well, sorry.

And that's that's your reality all of a sudden.

Well, but then that is now a.

Oh, I custody my own keys.

All of a sudden, Second Amendment becomes very important again for a different reason, because now I'm custodying my own personal wealth and value.

OK, well, then.

Owning guns is all of a sudden very important.

OK, so that's interesting, right now.

What does that do in terms of stories like if you can custody your own keys and you're in a country that doesn't have a Second Amendment?

All of a sudden, there's a lot of pressure, a lot of political pressure to have a Second Amendment to make that more more possible gun ownership, more possible self-defense, more possible, right?

There's also.

Even if you don't have a First Amendment.

Well, just because one other country, the U.S., has the First Amendment, we can be relatively certain that Bitcoin development will continue, that Bitcoin nodes will not be able to fully shut down, etc., etc.

And therefore, anybody who's in a world where they don't have First Amendment, right, they're still going to like they still have to use words, right?

Like, OK, so if you have to use words.

Well, then you can store Bitcoin because words, Bitcoin is just words.

And then you get into the like, OK, well, then Bitcoin is literally infiltrating their culture and pushing on these stories of the tons of we don't we don't have free speech because it's not useful or whatever the story is.

But then Bitcoin basically just says, well, that's clearly that's false.

It's totally useful in so many ways for all these incredible reasons.

And then that pushes on that and then it's like pushes towards the second.

And it turns into this like virtuous cycle of increased freedom, increased responsibility, increased freedom, increased responsibility.

And.

I don't know, man, that just it just seems super interesting, fascinating, bullish for me, like, great.

This this is this is a this is a cycle that you can imagine it pushing on, ultimately pushing on surveillance state where it's like, no.

Like even the state itself was just no.

Wait a second. We want to shut down.

We want to shut down the surveillance on particular types of transactions and people and places because, well, heck, like we can't be we're the state.

We can't be caught with that. And that turns into other things as well.

Yeah.

Counterpoint. I mean, I don't disagree.

I like as you're talking, I'm thinking about, you know, there's that quote that human beings overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term, you know, and we're all generally pretty egocentric.

You know, we we we think of things in terms of our at least our own lifespan.

You know, it's like everything's going to change in our life.

You know, and I'm kind of thinking like, you know, what if we just zoom out on that quote?

You know, like, you know, I've said this before, but like I try to think in terms of generations, right?

Because you because once generation it takes, let's get let's say 15 years to brainwash them and indoctrinate them into whatever culture.

And then, you know, you're kind of roughly set in stone unless they spend the next 15 years on indoctrinating themselves.

Rare, very rare.

You know, so Bitcoin does some of that, but yeah, but those were people who were inclined to figure it out anyway.

Right. This is why so many people don't care.

Right. You can literally say here is freedom in code and they're like, did you catch the game last night?

You know, like they don't they literally don't care, bro.

You know, but but I'm hopeful.

Over the long run, I think that that's possible, but I I really think I think it as you're saying this, I'm just I think it takes a lot longer than we'd like it to.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying it's just generations away because that brainwashing has to like effectively go through, you know, three, four generations.

The elders have to agree with it, believe it. The 70, 80 year olds have to believe it.

And the newborns have to be taught it.

And, you know, we're the first generation really here to, you know, take this thing on.

And so it's like the people all over the world who've adopted this are the people who are Americans.

Are the people who are Americans.

In spirit and in heart and in ideology, like ethically Americans, ideologically Americans, not, you know, geographically.

So so America as an idea, you know.

It like it infests.

You know, the virus, the virus spreads to the people who are who are who would be Americans either way, people who are willing to take responsibility, people who believe in sovereignty, people who don't believe in being taken care of by the state.

And so like that's the tip of the spear, right?

And so how long does it take for the tip of the spear to bleed out to whatever the next percentage of the population is?

I don't know.

And maybe, you know, maybe what I'm not accounting for is like if you see.

Crazy hyperinflation, you know, maybe that's the catalyst, like Saylor says, that's the war that gets people willing to change their habits and behaviors.

But we've seen hyperinflation happening within the last 10 or 15 years.

Bitcoin's been around.

We've seen it in multiple countries, and we haven't really seen massive Bitcoin adoption in these countries that I'm aware of.

So it's interesting.

I don't know.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I totally agree with you.

And I think that the real corollary is just looking at what looking at fiat and how it came about, how it changed the culture and how it did that over generations.

Like the Federal Reserve was created in 1913.

Right. And you look at all the generations.

It's basically just been a slow, slow roll downhill since 1913.

You know, like there's been big steps along the way, like Bretton Woods, U.S. becoming the international monetary standard.

OK, that's a big like that's that's a cliff right there.

And then 1971, you know, with going up the gold standard, that's another cliff right there.

And you can see like we've been tumbling down this hill for a long time.

So as we're working our way back up the hill, like, well, the bottom of the hill was the invention of Bitcoin, because that's that's at that point.

Anybody who sees all the problems of the last 100 years can now exit and they can just I'm done with that.

Cool. There's a solution.

Bam. We don't need to participate anymore.

Awesome exit.

Now, as all of the wealth and everything else flows to them, it's going to be exactly like you said, it's going to be.

They only have influence over their extremely small group of people or their family, right?

Like, oh, yeah, we're a Bitcoin based family and that's what we believe is true.

And so as they live their lives out in their communities, they'll gain just that little bit more agency because they're on Bitcoin standard versus everyone else on the fiat standard or going like putting all their wealth in real estate or whatever it is.

And then over the course of generations, that's what compounds.

And so. Whatever that's going to be.

Five generations down the line, we're back to what we were in 1913 in terms of culture and economics and world trade and all the all the big picture things, music and art and everything else.

We're back to like a level of sophistication that we haven't really even seen since 1913.

And then from there, we'll go forward.

And that touches surveillance state as well.

Like people, of course, they'll care more about privacy if you don't need a credit score to get loans or whatever else.

If you need a credit score, everyone's got to know all your transaction history and the rest of it.

It's just like, wait a second.

What are we doing?

So. So, yeah, absolutely correct, I think.

Yeah, to your to the I think circling back to the surveillance state point.

One of the things I was thinking before, and I think you touched on it, Bondar, is.

Like the surveillance is only relevant if somebody has physical leverage over you.

You know, OK, surveil me.

But if you can't stop me from behaving in a particular way, like I don't give a fuck, you know, honestly.

So if interesting, if the states if if if the sovereigns lose that leverage over however long, 100, 100 years, 200 years, 50 years, then it's sort of irrelevant, you know.

And obviously, Bitcoin gives us the freedom to transact, which is the reason we all value it above anything else is they don't have the leverage anymore.

If a group of people wants to break off and do whatever they want, so cool, surveil me.

But I'm only afraid of the surveillance insofar as the state I'm in has total control over my my physical behavior.

And I think that that will erode significantly over time.

You know, certainly not tomorrow, but as new states pop up and evolve and form, and maybe this happens in the United States, you know, maybe you see a bifurcation, states rights become a huge issue again.

And certain states will be made up of a particular group of people who are not going to exercise, you know, physical threat over their constituents because their constituents are all Bitcoiners and they're paying tax in Bitcoin.

And they've kind of reorganized what the social agreement is, the social contract.

So, you know, it's like the surveillance in the digital age is information, right?

We've got two realms.

We kind of touched on this earlier.

You know, there's the information realm.

There's the physical realm.

Bitcoin fuses these two things together.

That's what's novel about it.

And, you know, digital surveillance is inherently informational.

It's digital.

So, you know, but I think that I don't care unless they also control the physical realm and they can control my ability to move around and eat.

If they can starve me out or throw me in prison, then them controlling the informational realm is also really valuable.

So, you know, you got to manage both realms, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

They're both important.

This is actually how I think it gets better.

And I know we're a little past transitioning into that, but I actually think that's how.

The reason the world gets better in a surveillance state is because of Bitcoin, and it's because of.

The requirement of sovereignty for the sovereign.

There is going to be a massive additional requirement for sovereign individuals to be able to remain sovereign, a massive requirement for a drone state to be overcome.

You know, there's going to be kind of like we have cell phone jammers and you have, you know, all these different areas where you can block Wi-Fi or block any type of emitters or rays or waves or whatever.

There's going to be an entire cottage industry that already exists that we just don't know about.

But it's all about, you know, three things.

It's like the meat space, clandestine solutions, the super high tech solutions that are like weapon oriented.

And then the, you know, digital solutions that are just completely software based.

There's going to be hardware, software and then like meat space stuff.

But that entire industry is actually only going to continue going to continue to advance and develop and move and get shaped as the.

Surveillance state continues to evolve because people are going to want to remain anonymous and they're going to want to remain unseen.

They're going to want to keep themselves and their families protected.

And so, you know, that will be there.

And it only takes one person to need that.

It only takes one person to require some type of mini gun that shoots baby drones to kill big drones.

And then that thing will be developed.

It only takes one person to, you know, need a solution that you can put a phone on a table or put a piece of hardware on a table and it can find any, you know, mechanical or electrical hardware back doors in that thing and tell you you want to use it or don't use it.

Right. Like these sci fi things that we've heard about forever are only one crazy person away from existing.

And that's pretty exciting.

Like, I think we're actually now on the precipice of a lot of really cool technological advancements.

And for me, that's exciting, terrifying, but but pretty exciting.

Yeah.

I, I just think that, you know, there's never going to be 100 percent.

There's there's always going to be, you know, cloaked, camouflaged, clandestine individual sovereigns in an attempt to fool you, confuse you, take advantage of you.

That's not going away.

The way that they do it will evolve and change how people defend against it will evolve and change.

But, you know, the crucial thing about Bitcoin is that.

Yeah, well, let's let's say this right.

Like, so the surveillance state, like I said before, is it's totally it's basically digital.

They're vacuuming up all of this information, all of this digital information.

But the real control that they have in the digital world is over the ledger.

The real control that they have is they say, hey, you're kicked off of the monetary network.

You can no longer spend if everybody is speaking that language.

And they say, bam, you can no longer speak that language.

You're you're forced from being able to participate, you know, in the physical realm by paying for things, voting with your energy.

But Bitcoin completely fucking changes that and they no longer have the ability to enforce an economic choice that I'm making.

Which means that they have to put themselves at risk and intermeet space militarily or physically in order to stop me from doing something.

They can't just press a button and turn off my ability to participate in the network anymore.

So in some sense, it's kind of ironic, right?

Bitcoin actually forces things back into the into the physical realm a little bit, which evens the playing field quite a bit.

The state for the last 30, 40, 50 years has had total control over the ledger and total control over the network, which gave them outsized leverage and how we behaved.

And they didn't have to do anything physical at all.

They didn't have to go to our door.

They didn't have to get a bunch of people to arrest us or whatever.

But Bitcoin totally.

I mean, look at the nature of inflation itself.

It's like inflation is literally theft from a distance.

You can steal somebody's money from across the world.

Like just, yeah, we're just going to take that.

Yeah, crazy.

Yep.

And Zach, I think that I think that's the I think that's the really incredible point.

And I'm going to try and try and butcher it here for you.

It doesn't matter if they can't do anything about it.

Like your credit score only matters if you're going to need your credit score like that.

It doesn't matter if you don't need it.

Right.

Well, why do you need a credit score?

Well, if you want to get a mortgage, like if you want to get a car like, well, yeah.

But if you have like Bitcoin, you know, with the products that are coming out today, they're like they're so there's just Bitcoin back loans and everything else.

And all of them are like, yeah, we pride ourselves on you don't need a credit check at all in any way.

Well, wait a second.

That's different.

Right.

That.

Oh, well, the whole surveillance state, the apparatus like doesn't matter anymore because it can't affect your behavior.

OK, so then why invest all the money in putting together this crazy surveillance state thing?

Because it has no effect on reality.

Right.

There's got to like I'd have to do more research on this, but there's got to be like an interesting historic corollary.

Hey, we used to do this, but we don't anymore because there's no like there's there's just this weird thing that we don't do anymore because we realized it wasn't actually.

Paying for itself, essentially like we don't need these processes anymore.

I think it's a fascinating point.

I don't.

I got to think about it more for sure.

It's a fascinating point because it has the power and the potential of completely obsoleting a surveillance state.

You know, not today, not next generation, 100 years from now, perhaps, but it has the power of it.

It has the economic incentive says, boop, we don't need that anymore.

Yeah, you could you could surveil the block chain all you want, but it doesn't matter because no one cares.

It's not useful for anybody to look at it because at the end of the day, they can't stop you from making the transaction.

Yeah.

Now, maybe they enter the meat space, like you're saying, and they go through this wild process of, yeah, well, you know, now we have an A.I. drone that just follows everybody around and blows up and like blows their head off when when they do some when they make a drug purchase or something.

Right.

Like, but who wants to live in that world?

That's insane.

So I don't know.

It seems it seems pretty bullish to me.

Any last thoughts on, you know, we're coming up on coming up on the hour.

Thank you for the comment about our title, Martin.

Point taken.

Probably still going to keep it in there because we're mildly regarded.

But at the end of the day, you're probably not wrong.

I think for me, kind of like a last thought on this is, you know, really trying to go into the.

Like generational mess of everything, like I'm really trying to get a good understanding of what our generation, you know, 80s, 90s kids, you know, millennials, as we are called.

Have in.

Kind of like giving something to the world, like I'm very curious.

What generation Satoshi is from, you know, is Satoshi a boomer, Satoshi, Gen X, Satoshi, a millennial, he, she, they, them, whoever.

But I do think that's interesting because.

I think.

Generational curses or generational struggles and trauma are real.

You know, Covid is going to be a thing that, you know, our kids in the generation below us really struggle with because there's just so many kids that had so many developmental issues because they never saw anybody talk and saw no smiles and no anything for 18 months.

And there's still that I still see people walking around.

I literally was at freaking Costco getting gas and saw somebody walking around with a mask and gloves on outside in 90 degree heat.

And I'm like.

Apparently, Covid affected your brain.

It didn't just affect your your physicality.

It affected your brain.

No, no.

It revealed their brain.

This is true.

This is also true.

But I think that's going to be the biggest thing is, you know, what, what, what.

So the question here is Wingard in regards to the surveillance state.

I think what our generation is going to bequeath to the next generation in a positive sense is a latchkey kid mentality in a good in a good way.

I think the latchkey kid mentality of come home when the streetlights turn on is actually probably one of the most powerful things we can pass on to our kids.

Because our kids are sucked into little blue lights all the time.

And it's hard because we are sucked into those little lights, too.

I am sucked in way more than I than I need to be.

And so I think if we can continue to find ways to get people outside while the sun is out and get people off these little blue screens and continue to remind people that meat space is important, like meat space is important, I think is the note.

Our generation is the last generation to remind people before it's lost forever that meat space is important.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah.

That sounds good.

Yeah.

I mean, it's.

What's.

So your point to your point JD.

Expanding on that a little bit

is it's like

to be built

the useful seeds from the old world need to be replanted

the things that are eternal

and should continue to live on and previous generate

and into the next generations,

you know, not everything needs to be destroyed.

Obviously certain things need to be carried forward

that are useful and important

and end up being the enduring timeless aspects of

you know being a human being.

So yeah, I think you're right on that.

I think that makes a lot of sense.

We have to rebuild the thing

but we have a responsibility to inject

the important useful things from generations past.

Any last thoughts Pandor?

No, I think that's all on point.

The idea that

millennial, I mean millennials

here we are in a fully internet-based call.

I've you know, the Gen Z is

fully aware of how AI breaks everything online.

The next generation is just going to be like completely

completely uninterested in AI

and but Millennials will have all the power

or completely uninterested in anything online

because of AI because they can't

there'd be no way to distinguish between reality and AI.

And so one of the great ways to distinguish

just to not open your computer and not look at your phone.

And Millennials have that experience already deep deep

in our childhood somewhere.

What becomes important is just meeting people in meet space

having eye-to-eye contact having handshakes

with people giving people real hugs,

you know that kind of stuff.

It's not the world that was created by the internet

is a is a wildly incomprehensible world

in relationship to the all the rest of human history.

And it should it has usefulness is Etc.

But it should certainly not be the basis upon

which we predicate human civilization human civilization

is physical fundamentally physical

and returning back to that is going to be hugely important.

Yeah, we're going to be fighting for that.

Yeah, we you know, we like nobody nobody ever really predicts this

but like maybe because nobody's predicting it.

It's exactly what will happen in like a generation and a half.

There's just a fucking huge swing away from technology.

Like it's so integrated.

It'll be there.

It'll be in the background, you know,

but it's it's novel for us.

I mean the internet the internet's new like we're you know,

most people don't even have fiber yet,

you know, like DSL came out, you know, like high-speed like we're on dial-up.

Well, this is super dial-up right now.

This is all dial-up.

I can tell 56k 56k but you know,

maybe maybe in a couple generations everyone's fucking sick of it.

The novelties worn off.

We don't care and you know,

well, yeah, we know it's not real.

We're all drug addicts at the end of the day, right?

Like we're all looking for some dopamine hit,

you know, some people jump out of airplanes.

Some people are addicted to Twitter.

Some people fucking like to go run,

you know, whatever some people smoke crack like it's all dopamine.

It's all serotonin and at some point,

hopefully we recognize that you know,

the social media algorithms like those are just those are over the top moms totally get their kids off of that stuff

and we find ourselves back in meatspace and technology takes a backseat as it should in order to help facilitate a better human experience,

but isn't the human experience itself.

Very curious of the Twitter slash X feed of somebody who likes to smoke crack.

Like what are the little things the algo picks up on that's like,

oh, well you probably like Hunter Biden because you smoke crack.

So this is probably like right up your alley.

You get a little little crackhead you and with that anyhow,

I mean wait one final point here, you know,

we act like scrolling and like being addicted to this thing is some new thing.

But the fact is is that it's absolutely not back in the day.

People used to do this thing for you Gen Zers out there.

It was called channel surfing and they would just sit there on their ass with the remote

and they would just press the channel button

and it was a lot like a Twitter feed one channel would have something on it.

You'd be like, oh wow, you'd look at that for two seconds next next next before that.

It was newspapers before that. It was magazines before that it was comics.

So humans are always looking for novel dopamine hits.

I guess this is really what we should be trying to figure out is where does the next novel dopamine hit come from?

Is it from the internet or you know get out there touch grass find some dopamine in the ground touch grass

for real like legit touch grass dirt.

Take her to stop somebody.

Let's go downhill fast throw rocks punch punch a pedestrian see what happens.

If you want go down to the riot a lot of real life interaction.

This is not financial advice or something you should actually do.

If you do do it do it at your own risk.

If you haven't rioted and you have a social media addiction,

put the phone down chance go outside throw shit at people and just see what happens.

It'll be new. It'll be interesting and know that you are being watched by the drones that are above you.

They have probably tracked you in 15 D at all times.

So but that'll be an experience. So have good experiences make good choices.

Stay arrogant sell saps.

Thanks for tuning in to better buy Bitcoin Bitcoin makes everything better.

Like subscribe and follow us on X at better by BTC YouTube at better by Bitcoin.

Not financial advice mathematical certainty.

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