Bitcoin Wisdom in a Fiat World - Ep 038

Dive into the philosophical clash between Bitcoin and fiat mindsets as JD, Bondor, and Cory explore the values within these systems, drawing parallels to culture, inflation, and the future of money.

 

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Hosts:

JD - @CypherpunkCine on 𝕏
Bondor - @gildedpleb on 𝕏
Cory - @PykeCory on 𝕏

 

 

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All right, guys, welcome back to Better By Bitcoin. Today we kind of wanted to talk about where we were just shooting around, like, shooting around some ideas for a pot. And a lot of these ideas were like, I don't know if I want to do that or whatever, but there was kind of this underlying mechanism that we were kind of confronted with about these ideas, which was There's a differentiation between Bitcoin wisdom and wisdom in a Bitcoin world versus Fiat wisdom and wisdom in Fiat world. So we kind of just wanted to explore that a little bit. And as we're doing research, it was like, wait a second, it just connects to everything. There's so many other jumping off points. For me, one of the things that, well, before I get started, We also have JD and Cory on the pod. Welcome, guys. Also, yeah, here we are, episode 38. Congratulations, everybody.

We did it.

But yeah, let's jump right in. So one of the difficulties with.

The.

Fiat world and the Bitcoin world is that there's very little overlap and nobody can really see it. especially in the fiat world. And so the first, like, we got together some quotes about this stuff. And the first quote that comes to mind for me is the famous David Foster Wallace quote from, I believe it was a graduation speech, maybe at like Reed or some college, but he starts off with this story. There are these two fish, young fish, swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. who needs or who nods at them and says, morning, boys, how's the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit. And then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, what the hell is water? And that's the, that was the start of his, you know, speech. But it goes on to say, you know, there's something there, right? It goes on to say, the immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. For me, that is what it's like talking to anybody or interacting with anybody who's still stuck in a Fiat mindset, in a Fiat world. They just can't see it. What the hell is water, right? They're just, you talk about incentives of Fiat and how it pollutes or changes or does, you know, does something, and they're like, no, that's we've known about this for years. This is that really high level philosophical concept that ever, you know, Freud was talking about this. That's where it's from. It's from Freud. That's why everyone's like that, because. Because nobody's reading Freud, but that's. Everyone's like that because of Freud. There's. There's this disconnect. People just can't see past their little. Fiat world, if you will.

So I have a question about this because I was having a conversation about this recently with a pastor friend. We were talking about the existential things we're facing at the moment, what he experiences leading a Presbyterian church. And we were talking about Fiat and the Fed and inflation and the fact that more and more people are aware that inflation is really bad. and he doesn't study the economics side like I do. I really love that and read it. But he said, the creature from Jekyll Island I read in high school, I knew this was a problem 20 years ago. And it feels like people are just now starting to wake up to it. And the thing that I couldn't understand, I still don't totally understand, is as people wake up to this, why is there a big component of people defending it? defending the Fiat world, thinking that the Fed really has our best interests at heart. It feels like all of that anti-establishment anti-corporatism that's been so present for the past 20-25 years and even longer. That's just my experience with it. It feels like it's been such a common thing. We all love to hate Monsanto because they ruin our food. We all love to hate monopolies and monopolistic urges, and we love competition and the freedom of the working person to elevate their economic status. These are all pretty universal, like across bipartisan American values. And when it comes to this one, the Fiat world, it feels like there's this crazy pushback from normal people, from common people. It doesn't feel like it's all top down. And I've been trying to figure out why that is. Why do people dig in their heels on printed money, controlled money, and the Fed?

I have a take on that actually. It is really hard for you to go against the only thing you've ever known. It's really difficult for you to look yourself in the mirror and affirm the fact that you've been living a lie. And I think that's the challenge with the fiat mentality. is you were born into this. So it's as real as gravity. The Fiat world, the Fiat structure, the Fiat culture is as real as gravity for normies. And the challenge is you have to psychologically and philosophically start to believe that gravity is wrong if you actually want to be able to understand Bitcoin. And I think that's the big challenge, is we have this Keynesian gravity that.

Is.

Implanted and taught everywhere. And that's water. And so that's, I think the challenge that we have is in order for you to truly break free of the matrix, as I say, you do have to be on the edges of those bell curves because you either have to be completely incompetent present or really, really, really, really smart.

To.

Gain an understanding that they're trying to keep you in the middle. They're trying to keep you as a sheep. They're trying to keep you asleep so that way they can play their game and keep exploiting you. And so, yeah, I think the quote's great.

There's a really interesting dynamic there, though, too, because they're trying to keep you. And it's like, are they trying? Like, do people really actively believe that anyone's trying to get them to do anything? Like, no, we're like, everybody is constantly like, oh, they're going to job and working and like, no, there's no, like, there's no, oh, somebody's actually forcing me to do this. Somebody's forcing me to take Fiat. And it's like, nobody believes that.

Yeah.

I feel like when it was working really well, like, it's so hard to have a conversation with my dad about this because he has decades of evidence of the bond market never going down. So a retirement portfolio for him was invest in as many equities as you can with an IRA or 401k. and then slowly as you get closer to retirement, change your mix of that from stocks to bonds, and then you'll be fine. And I don't really blame him for having that opinion because he was right for decade after decade after decade. He was pretty much just right. And it worked out well enough for him that at this point in his life, it's probably going to work out for the rest of his life, at least, you know, maybe step wise, not as well as it would have 15 years ago. I think I have more trouble with the younger generation wanting the old system to work for them as well as it did for their parents. And I understand that instinct. It's safer if you were the type of person that made a lot of quote unquote correct decisions, do well in school, go to a good college, try to get a job at a company. And that life Isn't going to get you a home, isn't going to allow you to have as many kids as you wanted to have some serious existential things. That's where I hope for people, especially of our generation, to say, I wish there was something better. And even if they're not ready to get all the way to Bitcoin, there's still gold just sitting there. Gold is still a lot harder as a money than Fiat is. And people are still extremely resistant to that. It's kind of like the boomer money, right? I just don't see a lot of warming up even to the idea that this is a huge problem. And because most of the solutions that I hear anecdotally when I have conversations with people who aren't Bitcoiners, most of the solutions I hear are, how can the government fix this by spending more? And that to me is, that's the water, right? It's, to me, that's like the fish saying, I'm not in water. More water is what will help us, right?

There'S a. So I think part of it is. It's. It's the you. Like JD, I think you said, you really have to confront the reality that.

If.

This is all just a fabrication, like the Fiat is a fabrication, if it. If it's all garbage BS, well, then what have I been working for for the last 40 years? or, you know, shorter, longer, whatever. Why am I like, there's some, there's some real complications to that. Right. The, another famous quote, which is the, you know, butcher's name, too. The Upton Sinclair quote, it is hard to get someone to believe something is true when their job depends on it not being true.

Right.

Like, if you work your entire life slaving away for money, that money can just be printed. I mean, this is a common refrain in the Bitcoin circles, like, what have you done? You have literally wasted your entire life that you accomplished nothing, right? Apart from the output of your work, you did all this stuff and somebody else could just have pressed a button and giving you the money. So, like, yeah, the, Cory, the framework of, oh, well, the government should fix this problem. It totally makes sense in a Fiat world. It totally made, like, that's how it all works because they have all the money. They have the money printer.

Like what?

We all agree to this social contract where they have the money printer, and so they should use it to fix all of our problems. But it doesn't work that way. Reality is disconnected from reality.

I think I agree with you, and I think it helps me put some context in it. If you believe that value is time plus effort, right, with that kind of basic equation. Value is created when you put time and effort into something. And the government or a small group of people can just create value out of nothing. And in order to do that, they have to steal the time and the effort of everyone else who's creating the actual value. That is evil, right? That's on the order of like a science fiction villain who, if I read it in a script, I'd say that's a little thin because it's too evil, right? and it's kind of talked about this a little bit on the pod last time that we, the human brain likes to think in marginal changes. We don't like to think in order of magnitude changes. And it's just very, very hard to wrap our mind around it on the order of someone telling you how many stars there are in the universe.

Right.

It's just like a number that doesn't Make any sense. Our brain can't, can't comprehend it. And to me, that to, to understand how money printing is so evil and is so pervasive and touches everything is kind of like an order of magnitude shift in how corrupt you think our system is and how corrupt you think our world is. And I don't think people generally want to think that, right? Just at a base level.

Yeah, it's interesting. this notion of this idea of trading or something like extra y, like value for value, like the Bitcoin notion of value for value is actually challenging for a lot of normies and just kind of people who are not thinking about economics to fully grasp because you have to go all the way to the end of the chain of what you're trading. to get a full understanding of value for value. Like, if you're like, hey, I'm trading, you know, I'm giving my time for some money. You're only looking at half of the equation because you need to actually look at the other side of, okay, well, what is that money? What is that thing you're doing? It's different when you're trading your time for, like, eggs. Okay, I'm trading for food directly. Like, if I'm trading, you know, my time for, like, a cow, you know, the way the barter system used to work, you actually knew you had the hard asset, whatever it was at the end, like cows are not that hard of an asset, asset than but a piece they're of paper that a somebody harder just printed asset. and told you was worth something. And so it's a really interesting.

Challenge.

And a really interesting piece of literal mental gymnastics that you have to do to get to an understanding of, hey, these things that we believed in a fiat world don't actually make sense in a Bitcoin world. Because if you're in a Bitcoin hard money world, you actually have to go all the way back to the beginning of the value chain to understand anything and everything. And so it's really, really interesting this idea of trading time for something because in the current world, the problem we have is people are just like, oh, I went to school and I got a master's degree or I have 74 doctorates or whatever it is, and I traded my time so I should be making a bunch more money. But the only job I can get is at Starbucks as a part-time barista because I have blue hair and 84 piercings. It's like, yeah, you made a bad call because you didn't understand what you were trading your time for. You traded your time. for a piece of paper that's actually worthless because we don't actually need underwater basket weaving gender studies people. We just don't, we actually need rocket scientists and engineers except for AI. But anyways.

But that's interesting. I mean, the underwater basket weaving, that's like, that is a joke that has literally been around. I remember my dad telling me that joke. This is a joke that has been around when I was in high school, right? this is a joke that's been around for like 40 or 50 years. When I, and bring you back to another point, when I was in high school, I remember having conversations with peers and, and other people, adults, being like, yeah, there's no possible way that we're ever going to be able to rely on Social Security. Like, just intellectually, you're like, yeah, there's more Boomers than anybody else. So consequently, like, they're just going to Like it doesn't matter how much you contribute to Social Security because it's just more people. And so the math doesn't math, right? So it's just never going to work out. And so there's like this, you know, that's a that's a concrete example of, oh, well, the standard path of you go to high school, you get a new good college, you get a good job and like that's going to be your future and then you're going to get a nice good retirement and like that that's how it's going to go and that's going to be good in terms of getting a number of kids and at house and the rest of it. I remember in high school thinking, I'm not sure that that's gonna work out for many people. And I went to high school in.

The.

Late 90s, early 2000s. So this has been going on for a long time and it really causes you to question, why is it still going on? Why are we still having this same discussion? like 20 years later, and that's on top of another 20 to 30 years before that where people started to realize, oh, this isn't going to work. Like, this is, this is goofy. Like, my wife's dad at one point told me, he's like, yeah, I, you know, he studied, like, personal investing for, for a while, and then was, like, totally jaded about it. But he was like, at some point, you realize it's all just money chasing after money, like printed money chasing after printed money. It's all these structures that shouldn't continue to support themselves. Why has this not collapsed? You study it for a little bit and you're like, oh yeah, it's going to collapse any day now. And then decades go by and it still hasn't collapsed. And I mean, perhaps this is the power of fiat and the brainwashing that goes on, but like, Man, it is so difficult to bridge the gap, to even convince anybody that like, hey, maybe we should do something different.

Yeah, I think it might be in order, again, in order of magnitude change. Where do you remember the hand-wringing and how hard it was in Obama, early in Obama's first term, to pass the bailout for the auto industry and that whole big package? Do you remember the size of that bill? It was only $800 billion. $800 billion.

Right?

And that was in 2009. And during COVID the last two years of Trump and the four years of Biden, we printed $13 trillion in six years. I think it's this idea, like your father-in-law saying, how can you have these runaway valuations? How can you have fake money chasing fake money without a crash? And the answer is, if you backfill with printed money, then it doesn't have to crash. But what does happen is massive inflation over an enormous number of things. And for 30 years, the things that have been closest to the money printer, like you were saying, JD, college education, higher education, that's extremely close to the money printer. It's places where the government can create a tremendous amount of debt in a short period of time. So it's Fannie and Freddie, in the housing market. It's federal student loan programs and payments to colleges and healthcare. Those are the three major things. And it's not a coincidence that the core inflation numbers started removing all three of those things. So your inflation rate has averaged two and a half percent for the last 30 years. If you don't want to go to college, if you don't want to buy the same house that your parents lived in one day, and if you don't need any healthcare.

Right.

But if you want any of those things for your life, then your inflation rate is more like 15%, which is insane. And I think that's the order of magnitude shift that I do see happening among young people. I don't think they've understood that hard money could be the answer to this, should be the answer to this. But I think they are recognizing that. I think that's where this kind of general malaise is coming from.

Yeah.

I think what's interesting about that too is again, going to Bitcoin wisdom and a Fiat world. is one of the things that's a tough pill to swallow, I think, for myself and other people who are new to Bitcoin is you will never get rich off of owning Bitcoin. And what I mean by that is the point of Bitcoin is not for you to get rich. Buying Bitcoin and hodling and holding and just holding on to the asset is not actually a way to make money. It is a way to preserve effort that you have put out in the past. In the beginning, the, you know, the people who originally were putting the, the effort into hoddling and actually making it worth something like, that was actually what they're being compensated for. Like, the people who were doing this, like, Adam back and, you know, Satoshi and how Finney. And I'm going back to, like, all the way in the beginning, like, those people who were just basically beating the drum of, like, hey, you might want to get some in case it catches on. the value they were adding was adding value to the chain by making the chain valuable. A perfect example would be Pokemon cards. Pokemon cards are literally only as valuable as somebody will pay for them. And that's the same thing with money. Money is only as valuable as somebody is willing to give it value. And so the beginning of the Bitcoin journey was people forcibly giving value, starting with Laszlo, who bought pizzas with it, right? Traded bitcoin for pizzas. Like that was the beginning of the value chain. And it's only become more valuable because of these intrinsic properties it has. It's finite and it can move over, you know, digital channels and things like that. And so going back to what you're saying, there's a, there's an Elon Musk quote that I think is actually really, really challenging because it still shows a little bit of the Fiat mindset that he has, which is it's okay to have all of your eggs in one that basket ideology as long as is you control what happens every to that single basket. government That ideology and every single bank is Wall in Street. the world, because the basket that they are paying attention to is fiat currency. And so that's part of this battle that we're in right now is there is a better way, a finite currency that nobody can steal from the people, but the people who have their eyes on the basket, fiat, don't want that to happen. And because everybody else kind of has their eyes on that basket, because that's what they're trading their time for, if you control the basket, which bankers do, it makes it really, really easy for you to continue to manipulate the basket and manipulate the world to make sure that that basket still has value. And the only way that that'll change is some sly roundabout way, which happens to be Bitcoin. But whether or not Bitcoin can weather Wall Street trying to come in and take over, which is what they're doing right now, is yet to be seen.

And for me, it really begs questions along the lines of like, how, how do you confess, how do you convince the, the fish swimming in water that they're swimming in water? Like, how do you even do that? You don't have to, like, I mean, maybe you do have to show them Bitcoin and have them understand Bitcoin.

Right.

But, like, that doesn't work.

No one cares.

So how do you just convince the fish? Like, for, for me, one thing that's important is, like, there's no such thing as a contradiction. There's a famous Ayn Rand quote, you know, if you There's no such thing as a contradiction. If you encounter a counteraddiction, reevaluate your premises and you'll find that one is wrong. So how do you like show that to somebody? How do you like show them, Hey, this is, this is an invalid premise. I like one thing that's coming to mind. I don't know if this works, but it's like, it's interesting to me, right? There's the videos online of them just printing the money, right? The actual physical massive stacks of 100 bills, like a million, 100 bills. So whatever that is, 100 million dollars. And they're just like with the machine, chop up this, you know, chop, chop, chop, spin it around, chop, chop, chop. And it's like, you know, show that to your, show that to your children who have the, the very visceral understanding of what money is. Oh, I can hold it in my hand. This is, this is what I can trade at the store. you show them that that's how that money is made. They literally just make it. It's a total fabrication of value. There's no reason why you should work for that money because somebody else can just print it. Right now, I don't know if that hits on any level, but like that's what I want to do. Like that's what I, that's the story I want to tell my kids, right?

It actually, so I'll throw one more quote out there from Elon because I do think Elon has a lot of really interesting things to say. But the other one that actually he said, and I saw this the other day was if there were, and this was actually something he said when he, people are giving so much flack about being so involved in the, in the last election. But what he said was, if the rules are such that you can't Make progress, then you have to fight the rules. And I think that is one of the most important sayings of the last, of the last decade in my mind, because that is what the whole Bitcoin ethos is about, is fighting the rules of the system, which is Fiat, and trying to show people that there's a better way. The challenge is there's just so much momentum. Momentum is not just the physical inertia behind something. Momentum is actually emotional. And so one of the things that the whole Bitcoin ethos and mindset is up against is it's against the inertia and momentum within the fiat movement, within the minds and hearts of people in the real world. There has to be a cataclysmic break like a car accident, like Weimar, Germany, or there has to be a cataclysmic event like Japan collapsing, that their economy collapsing, that would actually make people stop and be like, Ow, I don't like that. That was not good. I just lost everything. Like 2008, if 2008 were to happen again, it's going to be on a scale so much larger than it ever was because there's so much more money in the system. But that's why they can't let it happen. So it's going to be interesting to see how long they can keep these plates spinning. I mean, do you guys think they can? Because that's what I'm curious about. I'm kind of hoping that they can't, but right now it feels like they.

Can just keep kicking the can down the road forever.

Yeah.

So I think it's a great point that momentum is emotional because you have a whole generation of people like this Malaise that I was talking about setting in, realizing that they can't afford the life that their parents had, even if they work as hard or harder. and they make more money. They could make nominally a lot more money than their parents and still not afford the quality of life that their parents had. That's malaise, right? And that's emotional. And I think there's something to the past 30 years, and this might be related to a religious conversation that I don't know if we want to get into, but as you de-church, there's still a hole of needing authority in a human heart, right? And a lot of people right and left have ascribed that to the federal government, to the highest authority that they see in human perspective. And I think the existential dread of saying, no, that government is actually manipulating you, they're taking your, they're stealing your time, they're stealing your effort, because they can just create the other side of that equation. I think that's an existential emotional issue that's extremely hard to break out of. And to your question about, is there going to be a big dramatic failure? I don't think they, I I think they figured out that they don't have to let that happen if they just keep printing money. So I don't see a Weimar or maybe a Weimar, probably not to that scale. I don't see an 08 happening, which with this massive asset collapse, with the massive real estate value collapse, because there's so much political value around the voting base and the donor base feeling wealthy and continuing to feel wealthy that they can keep kicking the can down the road as long as they're willing to just print money. and they keep hiding inflation. The thing that does happen year over year is what's been happening for the past about seven years, and I think really ticked up in COVID, which is the people who are unaffected by inflation are the ones with a lot of assets because their assets keep going up. The non-asset class is growing, and the non-asset class is the one that feels all of that inflation, and they get angrier and angrier a little bit more every year. realizing that even not being able to describe it or not knowing why, but that anger grows slowly every year. So I don't know what the tipping point is on that. I don't know when Bitcoin hits a high enough price point with a stable enough value that people say, okay, now I trust it. I think we're probably still a couple of years away from that. I think it will probably have to be at a million dollars consistently for some time before a true normie would see it as an asset that they could escape to. But I think instead of that 08 style collapse, we've seen for 17 years since then, the only priority is don't have another one of those. That's the fiscal policy. And if it means we're going to raise our inflation rate more and more and more and more as we have to pay off the debts from before, they've shown that that's something they're willing to do. So I think it's more likely it would be a debt spiral that we'd have to that we have to pull out of some way instead of an asset collapse.

There's real risk, and let's not understate the real risk of the non-asset holding class suffering from inflation perpetually, because you can look, and I've done a lot of research on this, but as far as I know, there's no real codified volume that kind of outlines this, but you can think about it logically. When inflation hits and there's an entire class of people that just have to suffer through that inflation, there is a outsized amount of political risk that begins to brew in that economy, right? Which is how you get all of the communist revolutions that we've ever seen, all of the fascist craziness that we've ever seen. Like all of it, you can, I mean, this is my assertion, a scholar with much better talent and ability should explore this on their own. But it's fairly clear, the Bolsheviks, there's tons of inflation, and that led to the Bolshevism, which led to the Russian Revolution, Nazism, there's tons, Weimar Germany, there's tons of inflation that leads to Nazism, that leads to Hitler's rise to power in Third Reich. And the same with almost every other system, like same with Paul Pot in Cambodia. And it just goes on and on. Same with the French Revolution. Like it just goes on and on and on. And gosh, if only we could connect those dots and see like, hey, you guys, you're nominally, like, you know, on the right, they're nominally fighting communism. On the left, they're nominally fighting Fascism. And none of them can connect the dot that these things, this political impetus to pursue fascism, to pursue communism, which are really just totalitarian collectivism, where me personally and my group of people, that non-asset class holding group are suffering and have to suffer inflation, we're now circling the wagons and We're going to try and fight back. Well, guys, it's like you don't understand that all of these inputs ultimately stem from fiat currency, inflation, the water that you're swimming in.

I have an interesting theory that you just kind of brought to me, but I have told you guys the premise of this before, but I've still been chewing through it. There are three pills in life that you take. If you take one of them, you'll take all three. There's the red pill, the white pill, and the orange pill. The red pill is, you know, not necessarily conservatism, but it's more of a, like, approach where you are looking for, like, libertarianism. Like, you're looking for a political, like, truth. You're looking for an actual, like, fairness. There's the white pill, which is truth, which if you are on the pursuit of truth, I will, I personally believe you will end up at God. But if you start the libertarian, you know, down the libertarian path, it is, it is very likely you will come to taking the white pill. And then in my mind, there will be the orange pill, which is the pill of, you know, just of hard assets. It's the pill of, like, economic value for value freedom. It's like the true that true, true. place of that. I find it interesting, where was we going with this, is it's very interesting to me than the amount of people who are either atheistic or Christian, it's like on the binaries, it's on the edges, who come to Bitcoin. Because I think what's interesting about this, and this is where I'm going, is It's very easy to keep people in a box when they're filling the god hole, the truth hole with a leader. So if your leader is Trump, or if your leader is Kamala Harris, if your leader is a politician, you have filled the god hole in your life with a supreme being that gives you meaning, which is why you become ardently red or blue and take any other political person from any other country and put them in that box. And so that is the masses. The masses have filled that hole with some type of ideological leader. They've put an idol, a person, or a movement into that box, which then makes it very easy for them to be stuck in the malaise, to use your word Cory, because I agree with that, of the culture, because at the end of the day, the person who is in that hole is already so steeped in the cultural malaise that They're incentivized to keep everybody there because they want to basically be the leader. That's what they want to do. And so they're leading this movement and they have an incentive to keep people there. And so I find it really interesting that, you know, the group of people that are in Bitcoin are either very, very Christian, i.e. they have a rooted rock in that God seat, in that truth seat, in that white pill seat, or they're atheistic, where they have a rooted rock. There can be nothing. It is absolutely, there can be nothing. in that seat. And so I think it's interesting. It's like you have to have some kind of true North, right or wrong, before you can even start breaking through and start seeing the orange pill or seeing the red pill, the, the, the seek, you know, the seeking of libertarianism, which is basically not communism, not killing other people. I don't know. It's just interesting. That was just kind of a thought you, you spread on for me. It was like, you kind of have to have some kind of true north before you could even be open to the idea that, you know, your world is broken in some way, shape or form.

Yeah, I think the, when that story of, of Jesus with the coin, what do we do with our taxes? And he says, render under Caesar what is Caesar's. There's this, there's a Christian ethic that I think is true in the other monotheistic religions as well. I think Judaism and, and Islam have it as well, where you exist as a citizen of a nation, and that's a good thing. It's how it's organized, right? It's how the world was meant to be, right? And I think the Christian ethic says we find a way to work with unity across diversity, which is what the university was initially intended to do. I think they've strayed a bit.

But.

The point being, if you have that true north, that white pill, you have a proper understanding of where do your loyalties lie first. And there's a superseding law of love and goodness and humility and sacrifice that if your nation ever asks you to supersede that, then it is subservient to that law.

Right.

Our self-sacrificial love is a higher call than the call to paying taxes and entering a military draft or, you know, whatever that is. And I think if you have that disordered, I think that's where a lot of the existential dread of our generation is coming from. Because I think they thought, I think it's a bit of a relic of the Obama era because of how hated Bush was, how unpopular those wars were. There was this, it was an easy slot in, like, now it's going to be okay. Now we're going into when Obama was elected, there is this national thought and and a heart toward apart from some, like, some pretty, you know, extreme on the right Republicans, there's this thought that now we're going to be in this liberal, a paradise of liberalism, right? Not necessarily like a Democrat driven thing, but liberalism was now going to rain the day. And that ended as soon as it could possibly end, like as, as soon as there was an option for the rights counterpart to that, it happened. and then it bounced back and bounced back again. And I think that existential dread of like, well, if our person's in charge for long enough and we just have control for long enough, that liberalism Utopia is coming. And I think it's just all personally, I think it's all in place of the kingdom of God and people thinking that there is an authority out there that can deliver them the kingdom of God on Earth. And that authority isn't Jesus and that is destined to fail again and again and again as often as you make that category mistake.

You have a take on her?

I had a good idea, but I've lost it.

I was like, he's processing something and I just, I scared it out of him. No, but I think the, I think the, you gave me an interesting way of even trying to organize this like red pill, white pill. orange pill thing because I've used that now for like, you know, since I was orange pill for like two years. And I think there's actually an order to it. It's like the white pill is the God pill and it's like kind of at the top and then there's the red pill and it's kind of that association with man with other in your community. And then there's the orange pill kind of as the bedrock of like, okay, so you have your community and you have your way of associating with other people, which is the governance structure, right? But then you have the value structure on the bottom, the orange bill. It's like you have this, this, you know, these strata of understanding because I think you actually have to have that. You have to have a bedrock of understanding in one or all of these levels before you can change another one because it's kind of like you're just fighting fires in your life. If you have no mooring in any of these value structures of your life, you're a listless person. You're very listless and you have no way of actually being like you've seen those people, like you see those guys who are just chasing, you know, leaves in the wind because they have, you know, no mooring in any way, shape or form. They don't have a budget. They don't have a schedule. They don't have any friends. They, you know, they might have a job. But the bigger challenge is it's like if you can't make value deductions on one or two levels of your life, you'll never get to making a value decision on that third one. And so it's like having, you know, Christ as a foundation for me and then having an ideological understanding of like, hey, it's probably not good to steal from people as my understanding of like libertarianism. Okay, cool. So I've solved this one. I've solved this one. Let me look at this one and let me actually like dive in here. And sadly, I, you know, I have no qualms with anyone in the world, but I think a very true statement that people don't actually want to face in our current culture is that not everyone is capable of certain things. It's the same thing with even God saying, like, not all people are the people of God. That's sad. That's unfortunate, but it's the truth. Like, I'm not gonna let every person go drive a. A semi-truck or fly a 747. People just don't have the skills. And then there's also even bigger things of, like, not everybody has a capacity for even, like, big, deep thought, and that's okay. And I think that's the bigger challenge. I think sometimes as bitcoiners, like, well, everybody. We want everybody to be a bitcoiner. orange It's layer like, changes. yeah, the only But way for the only that way to this happen orange.

Is if layer this.

Changes is if we solve, you know, the first two.

I think in the, I don't know if this is pushing back on your point, JD, but in the, like, Christian world of we have truth, we have really, you know, strong moral claims, foundations, traditions that allow us to, like, have a very clear understanding of moral reality and truth and ethics and like really foundational stuff that allows, you know, in our view, allows us to move forward on things and make decisions about things and come to conclusions about reality. Come to, hey, there's this new thing. Well, yeah, that's fine. We have this like extremely long history and context and way of processing new thing. So Christians can be like, oh, yeah, let's look at this new thing. Evaluate it according to, you know, the long history that we have of evaluating things similar to this or a little bit different or same category.

Right.

And they're like, great, we can, we can evaluate this now when you put Bitcoin in the, hey, here's the new thing. Christian evaluate it. They're just, like, lost out of their mind. One thing, I mean. You guys probably have thoughts about that. But one thing that comes for me comes to mind is that perhaps this is why people evaluate Bitcoin in terms of the parable of Christians evaluate Bitcoin in terms of the parable of the sower. Hey, you got to sow it. If you sow it here, it's going to grow too fast. If you sow it on the right spot, it's going to grow just right. If you sow it over here, it's not going to grow at all, right? So, Bitcoin look at this and they're like, ah, I need to do more research. I need to think about this more. I need to make sure that I'm taking deliberate and wise actions. And I'm not going to go all in, of course. I'm going to do some more research, maybe buy a little bit $100, see how it works. That's kind of the framework in my exposure to this. That's kind of the framework, right? But what if that's just the wrong paradigm to evaluate Bitcoin under? What if the paradigm is actually what Jesus says about measurement, which is with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you and more?

Well.

Then you're like, no, no, no, that's not a, well, I'm going to be careful and deliberate about this. No, no, I need to use a better ruler now. because if I don't, all of my life is going to be disordered and there's a real consequence to that.

I think it goes to another parable of the man discovering the treasure in the field and he sells everything he has to buy the field, right? And that's his description of the kingdom of God. Once you find that, you don't step into it and do some research and take a little bit of it. to see if it's good, try it on for yourself, see if you like it, then get a little bit more. He's saying, I'm completely flipping the power dynamic of this world, and the best thing that you can do is get all in as soon as you can. Just do that, just pursue that. And that supersedes Bitcoin, obviously. But I think Bitcoin is a similar thing. If it's superior, if it is actually what it says it is, then do everything you can to be as much a part of it as you can, because everything else is dying. And that's what he's getting at with the kingdom of God, too. Like, everything outside of this is futile. There's nothing else you're doing with your time and with your life that is of any value. And I think that it's a similar paradigm for Fiat versus Bitcoin.

I love that. And it goes to, like, one of the quotes. from Henry Ford that kind of spoke to me about, like, this notion of, like, making claims. It's like you're making claim on that field. You found that, you found that treasure and you're making a claim to it. You're going all in it. And one of the things that is in the Ford biography, and he said, is you can't build a reputation on what you're going to do. Like, you have to have done it. You have to have made a decision. You have to have been decisive in your declarations. And I think it's really, really valuable, the, the notion of finding your treasure and claiming it. And I think that's one thing that, you know, I, I really am appreciative over the Bitcoin Community is, you know, they've found the treasure and they're claiming it. They're like, no, this is what is actually valuable, and we're going to go do it. and it's not just the asset of Bitcoin. It's conversations like this were actually having larger existential conversations about value and worth and health and life and time and what all those things mean because humans have kind of lost their ideology around those things. They've lost their claim on those things. They've just kind of been there. They've been out of sight, out of mind. You've been told you have your weekends, right? You work five days a week and then you're off Saturday, Sunday. Well, why is that? Why is the case of that? Why do we have a 24 hour clock? Why do we have 12 months in a year and not 13 or 28 days? It's like we have been born into the structure that we've never questioned. And I think it's really cool to see a cultural awakening with Bitcoin that Building a reputation of being a countercultural thing in every way, shape and form because they've found a valuable thing and they're staking their claim. So, I don't know, it's interesting.

Yeah.

I think the months are because of the moon. That one makes a little bit more sense. Reflects the natural order. But I, I, I love it. I hear what you're saying. And I think the, the natural human heart wants to think across a long term time frame. They want to think about their whole life. They want to think And about their impact. as you devalue money, which is one of our primary interactions of value in the world, if you just start taking that away slowly over time, people won't think that way because they can't. And they'll think about necessity instead of thinking about beauty. And that's a tragedy. That is a massive, massive tragedy. And we see it in art, we see it reflected everywhere. So I think Bitcoin, if you align with Bitcoin, you're aligning more with what your human heart wants to do anyway, which is think about the long term and think about the greater things, the higher order things.

You've been quite a bit in, I would say, more beautiful places than the United States of late. And I'm actually curious your take on, like, is there any, I'm gonna say colloquial wisdom that you kind of heard repeated in any of these places or not, or like there, like I'm very curious, you know, in Europe, are they thinking, this way of like, we need to get back to our roots, we need to get back to faith in something, you know, we need to get back to beauty, or is it still, you know, just kind of like laissez faire, you know, and, you know, nothing matters and woe is me and, you know, the man is always oppressing me and there's nothing we can do. Like, I'm very curious.

Well, I spent the most time embedded in Italy, and I think the biggest difference there is a focus on the present moment. I think that was probably the biggest cultural difference with America. They don't have nearly the weight on work that we do often in a really healthy way, sometimes not a healthy way. And it's very easy to romanticize la dolce vita. And when you're at a cafe having a cappuccino in the morning before 11 a.m. of course, or you know, you're just at the beach at, you know, the Ionian Sea and it is Living in the moment there is fantastic. Turn your emails off. That is an amazing thing and it's something they really have. On the other hand, they have a tremendous amount of fiat corruption as well. And their government from a business perspective, an economic perspective, is far more oppressive than ours. Their small businesses are taxed on revenue, not profit, which means you have to be profitable enough in your first year to cover the taxes on your revenue. That's insane. It's almost impossible to start a business there. It's very, very hard to jump economic classes there. And so I think there's this symbiotic relationship to what they value culturally, which is beauty and which is the present moment and appreciating the beauty of the moment, right? That it's a very common refrain. It's really beautiful thing that there's this symbiotic thing of there's no future for us anyway, so we kind of have to do this. And I think that, you know, before we over romanticize other cultures that have these aspects of American culture that we don't have. You do have to look at the other side because I talked to a lot of people there in their highest goal is to move to America and start a business. That's what they want to do. And the people who are completely overworked and stressed and on this Fiat rat race in America just want to go sit on a beach in Italy and that just know that the people who are sitting on the beach in Italy don't necessarily want to only do that. They want the opportunity to do what we do. So somewhere in between those I think is a more ideal way for a human to live their life.

Yeah, it's interesting. We had a Italian cousin come and stay with us for a couple months, and it was a similar thing that they said is the, the business owner is vilified and the, you know, the, the, the social protections are revered, and it's just really interesting. twisted understanding where they're just like, do you realize where those social protections are coming from? Do you realize where that value is upstream being generated? It's coming from that business owner. And so it's really twisted. It's only where I can think about. It's just like a twisted understanding of how value actually works. And this comes back to the whole Bitcoin understanding in a fiat world is, I think the most valuable thing Bitcoin has taught me is value starts somewhere. has to start somewhere. And if where the value is coming from, i.e. if the measure, as Bondor was saying, is bastardized, then you don't actually have real value. All you have is a bastardized system that is oppressing people. And until you can completely rip out all the weeds, change out that system, you will never have a fair system period. It just cannot exist. It cannot symbiotically be fair and be oppressive at the same time. Those two things cannot coexist.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

So, well, yeah. Do you have any last thoughts and kind of wrap up? We appreciate everybody kind of jumping in, but I'm just, you know.

No, I think we covered it. That was good. That was a fun, fun conversation.

Yeah, that was sweet to have you guys on. Thank you, everybody, for just kind of jumping in and hanging out with us. We're, you know, still figuring this thing out. And if you have any feedback, please feel free to drop it in if you want us to do current events or any of those things or just hear us continue to ramble on hot takes on some of these more philosophical topics. But it's been fun doing these. We're on our road to 100. We're gonna get there as fast as we can, but it's definitely been a cool thing to learn and figure out some of these tools and start trying to formulate thoughts verbally versus just doing it all in our heads.

Absolutely.

Cheers.

Cheers.

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