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.
I've got a good day coming. And it's all I need. Everything I wanted. Just wait and see.
Better. Bye, Bitcoin.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
All right. How's everybody doing today? Welcome back.
I heard your voice underneath the intro.
This is real good. Welcome back. We got JD, Anton, and myself, Bondor, on the pod today.
Basically, we wanted to talk about what the biggest problem is and why aren't you solving it?
So this morning, just total shower thought for me. It was like sitting in the shower.
I was like, why? The Epstein stuff is coming out. The crazy absurdity of our communist mayor in L.A.
trying to shut down ICE. We're trying to defend MacArthur Park, which is one of the most drug-ridden,
insanely indefensible places on earth. And it's just such a bummer encountering all this stuff constantly.
All day, all day, all day. So I was just sitting in the shower like, what can we do about it?
What can we do about it? And it was like, what's the biggest problem we can solve?
What's the biggest problem I can solve? What's the biggest problem Anton or JD or anybody else could solve?
And then why aren't we solving that problem? Like, go solve that problem.
What else are you doing here? Are you playing video games? Go solve the problem.
So anyway, we kind of just wanted to break this down and figure out the different strategies
or the long-term perspectives on this and what actually solves the problems
and how to actually work through this and think about it correctly.
So that's where my head's at today.
So we can go through and say, the biggest problem in the world is...
Yeah, there you go. That's great. So for me, I think the biggest... I mean, this is a Bitcoin podcast.
The biggest problem in the world is fiat. And the way to solve fiat is Bitcoin.
Now, that's just that, right? But then in my head, I'm just like, nobody believes that.
Okay, so everyone else has got, what's their biggest problem? Right?
What are the biggest problems, Anton? What are the biggest problems in the world
that everyone else is like, that's the biggest problem. I got to solve that one.
The biggest problem in the world is shorts on airplanes.
I don't know if I've ever worn shorts on an airplane in my life.
Like maybe if I was flying to Cabo for vacation or something.
But there's been a breakdown in decorum in American society and a breakdown in culture.
And people just act like absolute slobs. They litter.
They... I realize you cuss, Vondork, but I mean, I cuss too.
But, you know, like, you'll be at a restaurant with your children...
I think we got a cuss word in the intro to this pod today.
You'll be at a restaurant with your children and you'll have somebody just, you know,
a little drunk sitting next to you just saying horrendous things with an earshot of children.
People have just lost all sense of etiquette and respect for others.
And I think it's indicative of a larger breakdown in American culture.
What has caused that? I mean, in the most simple explanation, fiat has caused that.
You have a lot of different cultures coming into the U.S.
and not being expected to assimilate into American culture.
And, yeah, I don't know. Why do you guys think that etiquette and decorum has broken down in the U.S.?
I love that. I didn't think you were going to go that direction because this started so jokish.
Like, I wear shorts in an airplane. No, that's 100% true.
And I struggle to find a better explanation than fiat.
Because, OK, fiat lowers your time preferences or fiat heightens your time preferences,
brings all of your choices forward, and therefore you make choices in the moment, in the day.
Like literally, I'm wearing a T-shirt right now. Anton, you're wearing a T-shirt.
A T-shirt solves the problem of something to wear.
But etiquette and decorum would say this is just underwear.
And it was just underwear until 1913, the same year the Federal Reserve was founded.
Right? It's like, literally, you would never wear just a T-shirt in public, ever.
And it's the same thing. Like, whoa, why? I struggle to find a better solution than fiat.
Like, what other thing could be causing all of this?
Oh, it's because men, like, forgot about God.
And you're like, no, we didn't really forget about God.
Like, everyone still believes in God. And you can, like, look at the statistics on that.
And it's like, sure, churches are falling apart, but belief in God is not.
And you're like, OK.
Like, people will give other answers, like, it's pop culture. Pop culture's doing this.
Like, it's the, you know, whoever's controlling Hollywood.
And it's like, well, no, they're just beholden to the money, so that doesn't work.
That's like, that just points right back to fiat time preferences.
I don't know. J.D., what do you think?
Did we get you on? Oh, we got you on mute still.
What is that for me?
Did you re-mute yourself?
OK, start over from the top.
Am I muted now?
Yeah, the great part about this is, like, every five seconds I lose one of you.
And so I'll see one of your face and not hear you.
I just see you reacting to the other person.
But the top line, I think you were saying, or what I did get is, like,
what is the biggest problem in the world? And it's fiat.
And why aren't we solving that problem?
It's because we've been born into this understanding that we can't.
Like, fiat is the base layer of understanding for most people.
Most people believe that you will never be able to solve the fiat problem
because the fiat problem is the bedrock of their understanding for how all things work.
And until you completely change your paradigm of money, until you can really –
it's not even money.
If you want to solve the biggest problem in the world,
you need to change the paradigm of value in your life.
Because right now, the way the world works right now is value is the U.S. dollar.
Value is fiat because the U.S. dollar has no value outside of what, you know,
one government says that it is, and they just bag it up with a money printer
and, you know, excessive military force that they will just ad nauseum throw at you.
And so until we can get the entire world to look at value and look at time
as the measure of value and realize, hey, we need to have our time measured
in something that can't be devalued out from under us, I think nothing's going to change.
Yeah, it's like pants on an airplane, or rather shorts on an airplane, or T-shirts in public.
The Italians still dress really nicely.
But the problem the Italians have is even though –
actually, I'd say most Europeans have –
even though they have a comfortable understanding of how, like, time should be spent,
they take passeggiata, they take a little bit of time to actually enjoy things,
they're suffocating and they're not actually experiencing true opportunity
because the way that their economies are still valued is fiat.
And so until you can change that, you're stuck, just like everyone else.
And so everyone needs to change their understanding of value from fiat to real, hard, tangible things.
And until that happens, we're going to be stuck in this infinite loop of stupidity.
Yeah.
One thing that comes to mind when you say that is this idea that we all essentially have –
I mean, everyone knows this.
We all have a different worldview just because we have different eyes that are at different locations.
Like, we view the world differently.
Now, we can have a lot of overlap in that worldview, but we view the world just a little bit differently.
And one of the difficulties of solving big problems, the big problem like this, is –
Anton, like, you're passionate about, like, not cussing.
I'm like, that's awesome. I love it.
I'm passionate about, like, at this point, pop music is –
like, one of the things that just comes to mind for me is, like, it's just anathema.
It's, like, the worst possible thing you could consume.
And I'm like, I don't know if you share that view or not, but it's just like some –
it's like cussing, fine, whatever.
Wearing T-shirts, I'm like, usually against wearing T-shirts, but, like, the Italians, they will dress well, right?
They'll eat well, but then they'll have these really not-so-good problems as J.D. just elaborated on.
We all have these different kind of, like, manifestations about what we care about and what we think is good.
And then we're all missing each other on the bigger issue that's really, like, motivating all of the stuff.
Like, how do you solve the problem of pop music?
Well, fiat. You have to end fiat.
How do you solve the problem of war? Fiat. You have to end fiat.
How do you solve the problem of getting people to actually care about the words that come out of their mouth?
Tactfulness. How do you do that?
You've got to lower people's time preference and have them think and process speech appropriately.
The biggest problem in the world right now is that we are all being extracted a hidden tax of inflation by money printing.
The money printer is controlled by an evil elite class of people who stand at the very front of the spigot and get the original printed money,
put it into their own assets, and have their wealth continuously increase while the whole rest of the world just suffers the effects of inflation
and gets penalized by what is essentially a mob that is making them pay.
What's it called when you have a bar and the mob comes and says,
if you don't pay to operate your bar, we're going to burn the place down? There's a word for it.
It's insurance money, but it's like forced insurance or something.
That's essentially what paying taxes are. If you don't pay your taxes, you go to prison and the taxes don't do anything.
In the US, the money printer prints more money than the government collects in tax revenue,
and they can print as much money as they want.
The people who print can then go and take that printed money and put it in anything that they want to.
I was being asked this the other day because I was explaining this to somebody, and they were like,
well, there's no solution for that. That's just the most depressing thing that I've ever heard.
And there is a solution. It's the most simple solution. The solution is Bitcoin.
The word is protection racket. Just have a look at it.
What's the biggest problem in the world?
Communicating that fiat is the biggest problem in the world.
It's like, how do you even begin to break people's minds?
I had a conversation with a guy online today that was like,
somebody was saying, fiat will never go away, Bitcoin will never fix it, never take over.
And I'm like, I literally use Bitcoin. Fiat for me is just rails. I literally use Bitcoin for everything that I do.
It's how I live and support myself, right?
And they're basically saying, no, it'll never work. There's no way.
What you're arguing for, I'm like, I literally am doing this today.
Bitcoin is the car in the age of horses.
And the guy's like, nah, Bitcoin is the zebra in the age of horses.
And I'm like, you're just lost, bro.
How do you communicate? How do you jump this problem? How do you do the communication problem?
This is a job for JD, because this is specifically what JD is trained and gets paid to do,
is communicate and market and advertise and break people's minds about pushing a product out there, pushing an idea forward.
So, JD, how do you solve this problem?
In the world, when communicating, something has value is making it actually hurt.
And what I mean by that is the only way to solve the problem of broken money is to make people feel pain.
People will move towards things that give them pleasure, but they will feel visceral, just hatred and immediate need for action if they feel pain.
Like pleasure is a vice, pain is a mover.
And so if you want to solve the most potent problem in the world, you need it to get worse.
You need it to get worse.
And so what we need to see and what we, like, unfortunately have to have happen is that, you know, good men make good times and, you know, hard men make, you know, bad times.
And we kind of need those bad times to come to make good men again.
And it's unfortunate, but the answer to the question of how do you solve the biggest problem in the world is you make people hate it.
And so my personal thing right now is, as you like to say, Bond or Accelerate, I'm actually very excited about the America Party because I think it's going to break everything.
I think it's the first time ever that the fiat state has had a third-party actor with some excitement and momentum, and they're actually afraid for the first time ever.
Like the vitriol from both sides is actually what's making me really excited.
It's like, how do you solve the two-party system?
You put a really big champion who everybody hates on the top of it under Elon Musk.
America is going to be on one wild ride for the next six years.
I wouldn't have agreed with you a day ago because there have been so many billionaires that have started third parties.
And then this whole thing where they've just dropped pursuing anything having to do with Epstein, and they just said, you know what, no victims here.
We arrested him.
He killed himself.
He actually was probably innocent.
And so was Ghislaine Maxwell.
And let's just forget about it.
There were no elites running a pedophile sex ring.
Now that that's all happened, I'm kind of in the mode of screw it, burn it all to the ground.
We need a new third party.
So I'm with you.
Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes has been a very consistent refrain for the last 20 years.
And we're finally at a point where people are just like, I think I'm going to because we know everything else is getting fake with AI.
So I feel like I got to believe something.
So to push back on it a little bit.
I mean, I agree with you.
It's got to get worse, right?
Like you have people have to experience pain like the guy riding the horse is going to get smoked by the guy right in the car.
And that's going to be a visceral like, oh, I'm out of business, right?
I can't get there in time.
OK, so but how do you make people feel pain in a fiat world where they can just print more money?
The containers get close access.
And then they've also established these systems like the whole welfare state establishment and welfare cliff.
Which actually puts the people at the lowest end of the system closer to the money printer than the people in the middle of the system.
So they print more money, they'll just give it to the welfare state.
Hey, you know, the people like the proletariat is essentially just bought and paid for.
Right.
So how do you make people in the fiat world feel pain to solve the problem of fiat to get everybody on Bitcoin?
Yeah, the lowest people are literally incentivized to not work.
And the people who never understand Bitcoin.
Yeah.
The people who are somewhat in the middle are there in the rat race.
They're on the constant wheel of just trying to survive and they can never, ever get ahead.
And actually, their quality of life degrades over time.
They're they're punished for doing the right things, which just makes people want to just join the ranks of the lower class because they have no chance of getting to the elite class.
It's super twisted and it's going to break down.
It's just when is it going to break down?
Sorry, I kind of interrupted your point, but.
That's it.
J.D., how would you how would you make people on fiat feel the pain of being on fiat in comparison to what what else is out there?
How do you make the lower class feel more pain so that way they solve the problems that they have?
And the upper class.
Unfortunately, the answer is.
Oh, sorry.
And the contillionaires.
I think maybe the other way to do it is, again, this is going to be an unpopular opinion.
This is probably going to be the most unpopular thing I'm going to say on this.
But like, how do you make the poor feel more poor?
And the answer is you can't.
There is no level of rock bottom that will universally make somebody move.
And so the only answer to the how do you make somebody actually feel pain is you can't.
The only thing you can do is try to make them aware of pain that they're feeling.
And the only way you can do that is storytelling.
The most powerful tool we have is narrative.
That is why we orient ourselves in tribes.
That is why we do stuff like this.
The uniqueness of the human narrative and story is unlike apes and chimpanzees and orangutans.
We have a story ethic that actually transcends the bifurcation of our species.
Whether you're from Latin America or you're from the United States or you're from Russia or you're from Asia.
Story and myth have a ubiquity in the human psyche that doesn't exist in any other species in existence as far as we're aware.
And so I think the most powerful thing we can do, if you really want to change the world, learn how to tell a good story.
If you can very quickly sum up why something hurts or why something is pleasurable or why something should be desired, you can move people closer to it or away from it.
And until you can do that, you can do nothing.
And so I think how do you solve the biggest problems in the world? Learn to tell stories.
So, Anton, you and you and me both, I mean, we were we've been friends on Facebook for it's got to be like a decade or so.
We've been trying to tell people about Bitcoin for who knows how long on on Facebook, trying to tell these stories.
Right. Like, I don't know about you, but I don't feel like I was very successful in that endeavor.
Well, you did the exact opposite. You tried to get every single person not worthy of it to unfollow you on Facebook for a decade.
Success. Yeah.
But OK, so the follow up question is, how do you tell the story correctly?
Because, JD, I love it. I think you're 100 percent on story is the key.
Narrative is the key. How do we tell the right narrative?
How do we tell the right story that breaks this like these unbelievably ridiculous connections in people's minds to get them thinking correctly about the nature of reality and the nature of the world?
Practically, it's not like you don't even have to jump through these like spiritual hoops like evangelism, like as you do.
Like this is this is very practical.
What's the practical story that we can tell people?
And how do we tell it? I love it.
And I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I'd love to tee this up and have you run with it. Sure.
Sure.
The way you get people to do something is you pick an emotion like story is all about emotion.
And so I'd be curious, you're taking it and like how you break a dock or how you break down your storytelling process like and actually even more specifically, though, an emotion for an audience for a who.
Like, how do you kind of go to that?
How do you kind of go to that? Because, you know, everything I do from a marketing perspective, the first question I ask is who am I talking to and why am I talking to them?
Because until I have that answer to who, you know, the way I would talk to a king is different than the way I would talk to a slave.
And I'm using that as a very stark contrast.
But it's like talking to somebody who's in bondage versus somebody who imbues, you know, their own ethic on the world are two completely different methods of communication.
There are similarities, like they both understand pain and happiness and joy and pleasure.
But how you package it is a little different.
Like, how do you kind of solve the problem of pain or the problem of storytelling and your way of, you know, communicating?
One of the biggest problems in the world is that people don't believe in themselves and they don't tell good stories about themselves.
People tend to be jealous of the people around them.
They're always looking around at the things that they don't have, comparing themselves to other people, and they're not satisfied with what they have.
In the context of good storytelling, there are universal truths or there is a universal truth and there are archetypes for storytelling.
And so as a storyteller, you need to be true to the archetypes of storytelling.
But when it comes to you as a storyteller, your experience is unique.
So if you tell stories from your own experience, you have a good story to tell.
So you have to believe in yourself.
You have to give yourself credit and tell yourself that you are capable of really incredible things.
I personally believe, and I think this goes into what I was saying about the loss of values, the loss of etiquette in the United States.
People don't believe that they can be in shape.
People don't believe that other people are going to like them.
And so they have this anger and this jealousy and they don't strive for great things personally.
And then they have these false stories that if they just got lucky or if they didn't get unlucky with some circumstance or somebody else got lucky.
And as Bitcoiners, this is something that we all face.
We know the hard work that we put into getting Bitcoin, understanding Bitcoin, the years that we've put into studying Bitcoin and fostering relationships with other Bitcoiners.
And then let's say that the price of Bitcoin all of a sudden went to a million dollars and your friends knew that you had Bitcoin.
And they would say Bondor got so lucky or JD got so lucky.
If you can just understand that you are capable of great things yourself, you won't be looking at other people.
You'll be happy for your friends.
And in the context of storytelling, you have a great story to tell already.
You just have to believe in yourself, have a vision for yourself, tell a great story about yourself first.
And then you will be able to share a great story and it will make you attractive to other people.
I'd like to hear JD's take on this.
How do you tell this story about fiat, about Bitcoin to somebody who just doesn't want to hear it, doesn't care, doesn't, you know, is looking, is a horse owner entering a world of cars?
You will never solve the problem of how much you are worth until you tell yourself you can.
Until you tell yourself you are capable or you are worthy of whatever it is you are doing or that you will succeed, you will always fail.
And that goes with your savings.
That goes with how you plan for retirement.
If you tell yourself you're going to have no money for retirement, you're absolutely right.
You're going to spend and you're not going to actually take yourself back.
What you tell yourself is what your subconscious does.
You always find what you're looking for.
So you know what the biggest problem in the world is?
Most people don't lie to themselves enough.
Most people tell themselves they're fat.
Most people tell themselves that they're stupid.
Most people tell themselves that they're unlucky.
You know what?
You will be.
Because at the end of the day, you find what you're looking for.
Sometimes you do have to lie to yourself.
And lying to yourself a little bit is actually not bad.
Lying to yourself to tell yourself that I can get in shape, even if you might not believe it a little bit.
Lying to yourself to tell yourself I can save that extra money, even when you know you have a little bit of a spending problem.
But if you start moving yourself in that direction, that's how you solve that problem.
And so solving the problem of fiat starts with the first thing of maybe I can trust Bitcoin a little bit, even if you don't trust it completely.
But just lying to yourself a little bit.
Because then you'll go search and you'll think, okay, well, if I am going to trust it, why?
And that, as soon as you ask your first question, that is when you can win.
You will never win until you get to your first unanswered question.
And at that point in time, the race is on.
This is a great episode of the show Radiolab from probably 2009 or 2010 called Deception.
And it's a great episode for many reasons.
It's a great episode for many reasons.
But one of the things that they go into in it is they talk to Olympic athletes.
And the Olympic athletes tell themselves, I am the greatest runner in the world.
I am the greatest person at this sport in the world.
While they essentially deceive themselves into believing that they are capable of incredible athletic achievements.
And then they're able to actually do them.
I mean, at that point, it's not deceiving yourself, right?
Even in that, there's got to be a better way to frame it.
Just lie to yourself, bro.
It's good.
You're not in debt.
You're fine.
I think that's a good, that's a wise reframe.
So I think maybe the better way to frame this is one of the biggest problems in the world is people don't take enough chances.
People don't take enough chances in how they talk to themselves.
People don't dare themselves to be better.
They don't dare themselves to be skinny.
They don't dare themselves to do some research.
They don't dare themselves to do that big audacious thing.
And that's what you should do.
Because that's what elite athletes do, is they dare themselves to be better.
They dare themselves to be the best in the world.
They dare themselves and they dare their friends to be better.
The biggest problem in the world is one dare to yourself away from being solved.
I did phrase it as believe in yourself, not lie to yourself.
J.D. to the end.
That was a little more negative.
Okay, so I feel like there's some progress here.
Now, again, there's another problem.
How do you frame this?
You're like, oh, okay, believe in yourself, believe in yourself.
Well, the reason I don't believe in myself is because every time I try and do something, it just gets harder and harder.
I got this new job, but then they didn't give me a pay raise, but the cost of living is going up, and so I'm not making enough money.
That's just a fiat problem all over again.
We're back in the same treadmill of trying to solve the problem.
Now, maybe this is just me in my own head being like, bro, you're not thinking about it right.
You got to believe in yourself and take a dare and try and think about it better.
But man, how do we get over the hoop?
Because as we were describing earlier, all the problems that we can see in the world have some input, which is money input,
which pollutes the nature, pollutes the well, pollutes the nature of how we can go about solving these problems,
including our own self-talk about what we think we're capable of doing, right?
So how do you jump through that quagmire?
Memento mori.
Remember that you're going to die.
Money locks up time.
It is time put into a physical form.
That said, you're still going to die one day.
So remembering that you're going to die gives you an appreciation for what you have in the present,
and it gives you, if you frame it in the right way, a gratitude for what you have.
You can visualize success for yourself and you can come up against roadblocks.
Or in the Christian framework, I like to think of seasons in life.
There's four seasons in the year, and autumn is great.
But when it slides into winter and you get that horrible weather time period and it just gets old after a while, it's getting dark all the time,
it can seem like it's going on forever.
And then you might get a little bit of spring going on and then it gets dark.
It's stormy and nasty again.
Is winter ever going to end?
And then there's a new season.
However, you're going to die at some point in your life.
And so at some point, if you have time locked up in money, you also have to spend the money.
And so it is a balance in life.
And the way that you learn how to do that balance is by pursuing wisdom, which is its own reward.
But it also takes a lot of hard work and discipline.
So just remember that you're going to die and it will give you a greater appreciation for the time you have.
This reminds me of one of Tony Robbins' truisms or one of the phrases he says a lot, which is,
life doesn't happen to you.
Life happens for you.
And in the changing and the reframing of your perspective on your life, you could have,
it's the worst day of my life.
It's the worst day of my life.
Life is just completely dumping on me today.
Or that's the life is happening to you perspective.
It's the worst day of my life, right?
Or life is happening for you perspective.
This is a challenge.
The Jocko Willink thing.
Good.
This is the worst day of my life?
Good.
It's time to reload, to put together a better plan.
It's a time to think about what went wrong and fix it.
It's a time to re-engage, renegotiate.
Do the things that you think you couldn't do because it's the worst day of your life.
It can't get worse than this.
So you're free to make choices and do things that you wouldn't otherwise do.
Anything you want to add, J.D.?
Sorry, I got a phone call and then it was, the service here is wildly terrible.
To the whole world and to you guys.
Yeah, the, I had a verse a second ago.
But I think the most important thing you can do is remember that you're going to die.
That is the most important thing you can do for yourself.
Because if you remember, recognize, you acknowledge that you do not have infinite time,
you will hopefully be spurred on to action.
And so I think that's the greatest gift you can give to yourself,
is remembering that you only have so much time and effort you can give to everyone you love and to yourself.
And so don't squander it.
And in not squandering it, remember that you are trading it every day for something.
You could be trading for pleasure or you could be trading it for value.
And if you are trading it for value, try and gain an understanding of what is the bedrock of that value.
Because if the bedrock of that value is something they call fiat,
which means it is a value that is derived out of something that is printed or created out of thin air by someone else,
you're actually trading it for nothing.
And so it might be a good idea to learn what fiat is and try to get something that isn't fiat.
Because it'll be better for you and everyone else.
Yeah, that's the Jack Muller's thing, right?
Like, don't spend your time working for something that another man can just print with a button.
Anton, you had some?
I'm thankful that we have Bitcoin.
There's a risk involved with putting your time and your effort into Bitcoin.
And time's not infinite.
There's ways that you can frame it in your mind, like going to the Jocko Willink good thing.
Let's say that the price of Bitcoin is $1.
There's ways that you can frame it in your mind, like going to the Jocko Willink good thing.
Let's say that the price of Bitcoin were to fall and the price drops 25% tomorrow.
And you hoped it just went up forever.
Well, you could be disappointed.
I just lost 25% of my money.
If your belief is strong enough that Bitcoin is valuable and you know that fiat is just eroding over time,
and it's a one-way street to zero for fiat, that gives you more time to work.
You're going to get paid in fiat and to take that fiat and buy Bitcoin at a discount.
But your belief has to be pretty strong that Bitcoin is actually going to be worth more in the future.
Otherwise, if you haven't framed it correctly in your mind, you are going to be disappointed.
You're going to be depressed.
And so many things in life are that way.
If you have wisdom, if you've put in the work to know what you truly believe,
then you will not be as disappointed when there's little bumps in the road.
You can actually look at them as opportunities or as learning experiences.
But you have to make the decision to have that perspective ahead of time.
And a lot of people don't make that decision as life is happening to them.
If something good happens, they're happy.
If something bad happens, they're sad.
And they have this negative outlook.
And so things get weighted to the depressing, disappointed side.
And people, as they get older, some people just get more and more pessimistic and grumpy and disgruntled.
And then some people, those rare people, their joy actually increases as their wisdom increases,
even though they're getting older and getting closer to death.
Personally, I want to be more like the person who, as I get older, my joy and my peace increases.
And that is a choice.
The greatest...
The biggest problem in the world is people remaining ignorant
when they know they can take the time to educate themselves so they don't fall for everything.
Maybe there's a better way to say that is...
If something doesn't feel right, and you don't try and rectify it, you are at fault.
And I think that's one of the biggest problems in the world is people feel like everything is off.
People feel that everything is just not right when it comes to their money.
They feel that the stock market is manipulated.
They feel that they're being manipulated.
They feel that everything is just not right when it comes to their money.
They feel that the stock market is manipulated.
They feel that they're not earning enough interest on their bank account.
They feel that interest rates are high.
They feel that the real estate market is upside down.
And what they're feeling is true.
What they're feeling is correct.
But what they keep being told by the media is,
Oh, everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine.
They keep being told by their president is everything's fine.
They keep being told by their brokers and their investment bankers is,
Oh, everything's fine.
Everything's fine.
Nothing has been fine since 1913 when they got the Federal Reserve.
And everything's been even worse since 1971 when they got off the gold standard.
The house is on fire.
Everybody can feel it. Everybody can smell it.
But the problem is the media and everybody else is telling you to go back to sleep.
And if you do that, you're going to burn down in this house.
And you will be the only one to blame.
So it's probably a good idea for you to figure out what's going on and why.
Because if you don't, you are the only one to blame.
Like Bondor says, the move is to attack.
And when it comes to wearing shorts on an airplane,
trimming your fingernails, picking up litter,
not getting drunk and cussing in front of children in a restaurant,
you can't control what other people do.
You can't control that society is breaking down around you.
You cannot make other people behave.
But what you can do is you can make a choice in your own life
to live in the best way possible,
the way that you know is the way that you should be living.
And you can do the same thing financially
by learning about Bitcoin, investing in Bitcoin,
even if nobody else does it.
You can choose to do it yourself.
So that is the way that you solve the world's problems.
You don't solve them for everybody else.
You solve them for yourself.
Yeah.
When I have these conversations online,
it's like you see these people appealing to politics.
Well, Trump will be able to fix this for us.
So-and-so will be able to fix this for us.
As long as we can just vote, as long as we can just do this or that.
The other thing like that will never solve the problem.
The biggest problem in the world in many ways
is just thinking that you don't have to take responsibility
for the actions that affect your life.
And the thing with Bitcoin and the thing with fiat
is that so many things in your life are affected by money.
And when the money is devaluing, your life is devalued.
So you personally right now today,
you don't have to wait for a politician to say it's okay.
You don't have to vote. You don't have to do anything.
You can just convert your entire life into Bitcoin
and just stop having that problem.
Yeah, we're all waiting for the world to go on a Bitcoin standard.
But what you can do right now is you can go on a personal Bitcoin standard.
You have the ability to do that.
It's amazing because I know for a fact that you have been living that way.
And so many people are debating the future
and not realizing that they can be living in the future for themselves.
They don't have to wait for everybody else to do it.
It's a mindset.
We are living in a world that's dominated by horses.
And you can go buy a car right now very cheap, right?
You just be the one guy on your block who has a car, right?
You can just do that.
And you can buy a fraction of a car too, which is just crazy.
Here we are.
But the people don't care.
That's the meme.
But the people are retarded.
Yes.
One problem that I've been trying to figure out in my own mind
is the problem of accepting Bitcoin as payment for goods and services.
I remember probably 2018.
I work freelance and I put on my invoices that I would give my clients a 25% discount
on what I was charging them if they would pay me in Bitcoin.
I bet you can guess how many of them paid me in Bitcoin.
Zero.
And I've thought about the same thing with, let's say you want to open a small business.
Let's say you wanted to, okay, in LA right now, everywhere across the city
are taco vendors on the side of the street.
They don't have, they have not passed health code.
They are cash only.
I'm pretty sure that they're getting food stamps, going to Costco,
buying all the meat and making pure profit.
What if you did the same thing minus the unethical thing of taking the food stamps,
but you try to run a business profitably, but you only would sell to people
if they paid you in Bitcoin.
I'm curious what you guys think.
How do we bridge that gap?
No one would ever buy.
Not right now.
I'd love to hear JD's thoughts on this.
It's an interesting thought experiment because that's the basic premise
behind the Bitcoin treasury company.
Take out a whole bunch of debt, buy Bitcoin, sit on it, speculative attack.
That's all you're doing with the, if you were to take,
even if you were to go to the extreme, like you said, don't do,
but if you were to take the EBT and then sell that,
so you got free meat and then you go to the street and you sell it,
and you sell it for Bitcoin, you're just taking on somebody else's debt,
which is EBT, and you're buying Bitcoin for yourself.
It's just a speculative attack all over again.
There's way more efficient ways to do that, but in terms of your deeper question,
the better question, which is how do you actually bring Bitcoin into a world
as a circular economy, as part of your everyday life and business?
I mean, for me personally, the way I think about it is
fiat is just rails system right now.
Right now I have a credit card.
I'll swipe my credit card and then I'll go to my credit card statement,
which will go to my bank.
But I just sell Bitcoin to pay for that.
So it's just a rails system.
I'm not saving any money in my bank.
I don't have any debt on my credit card.
This is just the system that gets swipe, swipe, swipe, gets you all the way through.
I've been thinking about if you had a coffee shop
and I live in Los Angeles.
If you had a coffee shop in Los Angeles,
if you were to go register with the city,
you would have to pay taxes on the business itself.
If you own the building, you're going to pay property taxes on the building.
There's all kinds of regulations for, I don't know,
if you have to get a food and beverage license to do coffee or not.
But I was thinking,
what if you just got a little cart and you went to the beach
and you just pulled up on the side of the road
and you put up a sign and you said,
we only accept Bitcoin.
I bet that you,
especially if you started in an Instagram or something,
you marketed it so that other Bitcoiners knew where to find you.
And let's say you did it just on the weekends or something.
So it's not like your main business model.
You still have to buy the coffee cups.
You got to buy the beans.
You got to make the trailer.
You got to pay for the gas.
You have to have a car that can tow it out.
There's a lot of expenses involved in doing that.
And so it's doable.
It's absolutely doable.
But you have an inherent cash flow problem.
And especially if the price of Bitcoin started to dip
or something like that.
Bitcoin treasury companies,
it's the same thing times a hundred for them.
Do you guys think I'm missing something here?
A little bit.
I think here's the biggest thing.
Bitcoin is currently an insurance product.
Like people are not using it as rails,
as Bondo was saying.
So I think that the better way to think here is the,
or rather,
I would posit a way I would try to break this problem down is
the goal in sales is not to make demand.
It's to channel it.
And so finding the beach where there's an inordinate amount of coiners
is where that kind of coffee shop would work.
The same thing is true with storytelling.
You're not trying to
make people want an escape
when you're creating a Netflix
or a streaming platform.
You're trying to provide an escape
from what people already want to escape from.
People already get home from work and they're tired.
They already get home from work
and they just want to check out their brains.
Feeling that desire for rest,
for Sabbath.
Unfortunately, it bastardized
because we were called for Sabbath.
We were called to take a break.
But we have
learned that the best way to take a break
is to fuel an addiction for dopamine
because that's what these shows
and that's what content does.
And so the biggest problem in the world that we have right now
is we are addicted to
the symptoms of the Fiat culture.
That is dopamine.
That is caffeine.
That is, you know, sedatives.
That is uppers and downers and alcohol and stuff.
The only way to break yourself free
is to gain an understanding of that.
Is to realize pharmaceuticals
are not going to make you skinny.
Your habit changes are.
Is to realize, you know, taking on debt
is not going to help you get out of debt.
Your habits of spending money in a relationship with money is.
And realize that voting harder
is not going to solve any of your problems.
Your relationship
with your cultural understanding
of your government system,
i.e. the monetary value that
they are requiring of you in tax
and that you are giving them in taxes
is the root of everything.
And so the way you fix the world
is you fix the way the world values things
and the way that the world values things is money.
And the only way to fix that
is to help people gain an understanding of
valuing their time and
their insurance policy for their retirement
is actually not an insurance policy.
It's a sinking ship.
It's broken.
And you just think it's your life raft.
Your life raft is the Titanic, guys.
It's probably time to find a better one.
So the title of this episode is
What is the biggest problem in the world
and why aren't you solving it?
Right. For all three of us,
the biggest problem in the world is fiat.
And we are attempting to solve that problem
via Bitcoin and producing Bitcoin content
and putting ourselves out there as Bitcoiners
being like, yo, you guys,
you can just use Bitcoin.
You don't have to use fiat.
So we're trying to solve the problem.
Now, JD, I think you just had a really awesome point,
which was about the desires out there.
What you want to do is you want to channel
the desire or take it
and push it towards where you want it to go.
Now, when you just look at social media,
when you look at the news,
when you look at all that stuff,
it's bonkers how much desire is out there.
You can look, it's like almost every post.
You could scroll up millions and millions of posts
and almost every single one of them
will be a problem about somebody's life,
about why they hate the world
or whatever the thing is,
what the problem is that they're going through.
The standard refrain is, what happened?
Why is it like this?
That's the standard refrain now, right?
From Bitcoin's perspective,
we're just like, it's fiat.
The reason that it's like that is fiat.
So the question is, how do we,
as people trying to solve this problem,
how do we channel the desire,
which is absolutely there,
towards the actual solution, which is Bitcoin?
What can we do to actually facilitate
the cultural change that needs to happen,
the narrative that needs to happen,
the story that needs to happen
that opens up that pathway for people?
One thing that you can do to change the world
is to build.
If you are a person who has a great idea
of something implementing Bitcoin,
you can just make things.
But if you're not the type of person
who has technical knowledge
and you just want to use Bitcoin
as a savings standard, that's fine too.
If you want to use it like an IRA
and you know that it's going to increase in value over time
and that gives you some peace of mind,
that also makes you a value to the world.
And I just want to encourage you,
if you feel like you're caught up
in the hamster wheel, the rat race of life,
and you know that you have something
to offer to the world,
but you just have to spend all your time
just thinking about how to survive,
how to just do your job,
make enough money to pay your bills,
I just want to encourage you
to believe in yourself
and do the thing that you know you were made to do.
Because you are capable of doing it.
And if you take the risk to take the time
to think through it,
get a pen and paper, write out a plan,
you will succeed.
Even if success looks a little different
than what you imagine,
taking the risk
and doing something that you know
in your heart that you are capable of doing,
you will succeed.
Other people may not be telling you that
because they are infected with jealousy.
They are infected with a fear.
They don't have faith in themselves.
They have doubt.
Who cares?
You have the capability of doing great things.
If you're listening to us
and if you're interested in Bitcoin,
you probably have a pretty high intelligence.
So go out there
and make the thing that you want to make.
Tell the story that you want to tell.
Every risk is rewarded.
But not every reward is monetary.
I think sometimes we get so caught up in the
I don't want to fail
because I don't want to lose money
or lose friends or lose out on something.
You're not losing anything.
You're getting insight. You're getting knowledge.
You know, Dyson
did I believe like 900 attempts at the Dyson vacuum
before he made his first successful piece of hardware.
Edison was hundreds,
if not thousands of attempts at the light bulb.
If you have something you want to go build,
go do it and know along the way
you're going to fail.
But that's just part of the process.
So if you want to solve the biggest problem in the world,
just keep going.
Yeah.
And theoretical knowledge will only get you so far.
You have to try and fail.
Failure
will teach you lessons
and it will help you iterate
because if you're only trying,
you won't iterate at all.
It'll all be stuck in your head forever.
You have to try.
You might fail a little bit.
But you will make the thing
that you're trying to make
better and better and better
and you will gain knowledge
that you can never gain with
just thinking about things theoretically.
Don't let your ideas get stuck in your brain.
Go out into the real world and try.
Okay.
So what I'm hearing,
and I love this answer,
is that to solve real problems,
you have to build real solutions.
You can't just sit there
and postulate about it or whatever.
You literally have to build something,
create a company, create a product,
create a movie or a film
or whatever the thing is,
but you have to go out and you have to do it.
You can't just be like,
well, I'm just going to postulate about it.
JD, did you have a different answer to that?
Or is that kind of like
you're just 100% on board with that too?
Shoot, did we just lose JD?
I can hear him.
There we go.
No, I was just going to say
a podcast. Go make a podcast.
Oh, yeah. Go make a podcast.
Yeah, go make a podcast.
Don't let those haters
tell you not to.
We're getting better at this by doing it.
That's for sure.
Yeah, that's true.
So, you know,
we just sat around and brainstormed a podcast
for the last year.
We definitely wouldn't be any better at podcasting.
We wouldn't know anything.
Yeah.
And I think actually to that end,
I think the most important thing
we did when it came to doing this
is we just picked a goal
and that goal is 100 episodes.
So hopefully, you know,
we could do 100 episodes
and be like, damn, that was a terrible idea.
But you know what? We learned something.
We learned how to formulate our thoughts.
We learned how to be better
at articulating ourselves.
We learned how to, you know,
how to do streaming
in a world that really needs it.
But at the end of the day, we built.
And there's a lot of failure.
There's a lot of bad episodes, guys.
God, there's a lot of bad episodes.
I'm also talking inside.
I'm so sorry.
But you know what? We're building
and we're learning and we're doing.
And I just encourage you guys to go
because even if you're building in hard times,
you're going to learn something every time.
All right, guys.
I think with that, we should call it quits.
I got to get out of here.
Anton, JD, always a pleasure.
Unless there's any last words,
I'm going to call it here.
Don't let your dreams be dreams.
And buy big ones.
Love it, JD.
Cheers, guys.
All right. Peace.
Peace.