Society's F**k'd? - Ep 043

Hosts JD, Bondor, and Cory delve into the deep issues facing modern society, from money printing to societal division and the role of Bitcoin as a transformative force. They challenge the current fiat system and discuss the lack of true leadership in today's political landscape.

 

Watch this episode on YouTube

 

Hosts:

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

 

 

Sponsors:

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

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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. Better By Bitcoin.

Good morning or afternoon, everyone in the world. Welcome to another episode of Better By Bitcoin. You have myself, cyberpunk cinema 3D. You also have Mr. Cory. And we've got Mr. Gilded plebe Bondor over there. How are you gents doing today?

Good, man.

Doing great.

Cory. Cory just got back from a big old shoot and his When he says he's doing great, he really means that he is sleep deprived and don't care.

I mean, I'm happy to be here and physically not great.

Physically not great. Hey, that's why Zen exists, right? Zen, if you want to sponsor the show, that would be no free ads.

Honestly, if the Swedish one wants to sponsor us, that'd be amazing.

That's great. Totally down. I don't use any of these products, by the way, but I know these guys do. So I'm down to just keep the overhead of zero. Below zero, that would be.

I appreciate solidarity.

One team, one dream, which goes into the topic, is society aft? I think there's been a lot that's been covered in the past, you know, two weeks, but it's been really kind of boiling at least since 2016 and even 20, you know, 2010. Right. I think. I think we've kind of seen an interesting. Arc, especially with our lifetimes of kind of the Obama era and then moving from Obama into kind of, you know, the next era with the Trump era presidency and then kind of with that interesting thing that happened with the Biden presidency to where we are now with another Trump presidency. And I think we're kind of sealing this really interesting cultural moment where Is America just a bunch of frogs in a pot? And are we now getting an inkling of the frogs wanting to jump out of the pot and that pot being the melting pot that we were said is our strength. But I think the bigger piece is are we reaching a point where.

The.

Pot has just been filled with so many more frogs that have been imported from all over the world. That we are just seeing a boiling over and it'll calm itself down and this overflow will kind of stop. Or are we just at a point where society cannot actually coexist together and we should actually move in a different direction? I'm curious y'all takes on that. I'm curious the first piece there is like, can this work or does something really need to change?

Yeah, it's an interesting way to frame the question. I think that should we move in a different direction is an interesting one because I think you're up against societal forces that are enormous and immigration is just one of them. But obviously the money printing that's been going on since '08 and more aggressively since 2018 creates societal problems. And I think in order to frame the question additionally, you have to say, what is the society that is F? What is it that you and I look around our country and say, this doesn't look a lot like when we were growing up, doesn't look a lot like our parents' America, but they would have probably said a fairly similar thing to their grandparents' generation. And so I think the interesting thing for us to think about in our generation, as we, you guys have young kids, you think about what world they're going to grow up into. What are the things that are gone and aren't coming back? Or what are the things that are changing slightly? Technology contributes to that. Money printing obviously contributes to that. But some of the big overarching things are can you grow up with an education, get a decent enough job to pay for a decent middle class life, get married by a house and raise children, right? This has been an American value. This has been a human value for as long as as long as there's been humans, right? This is what the free society wanted. This is why we shook off the oppression of the British. The most commonly celebrated holiday in the world is independence from the British.

Right.

There's a reason for that because that under the oppression of people, you couldn't do that.

Right.

It wasn't so that great 30 Rock quote, it, you know, the, the third generation, after the wealth has been built, the third generation takes improv classes and snowboards. It wasn't for that. It was for It was so that you could raise a family, practice the religion that you want, and own property, and build wealth to your name and for your family. And those are the things that I look at without getting into yet a big right-left debate. Those are the things that are less and less true every single day for everybody. No matter if there was immigration or not, if there wasn't a single immigrant in the past six years, that would still have gotten harder every single day for every kid that's being born. That to me is the degradation of society. And then the other factors being thrown in are things like immigration and oppressive tax policy and things like that.

I mean, we're all Bitcoiners here. For me, so much of all of these things like is society F'd? Well, it's like, look at all the sources for everything. And it's all just, you can almost trace at least 80%, perhaps more, of our problems back to money printing as a fundamental cause for all of these things. Immigration. Well, how on earth could money printing cause immigration? Well, the structure of the world is set up in that In America, we can print money and then export the inflation because of the way that the world order is set up. Consequently, if you're in a South American country and your currency gets inflated away because of what American monetary policy is doing, you're going to have to seek out economic opportunities elsewhere. Where are all the economic opportunities in America? So you're gonna do whatever you can to get here. Like, these are all like, that's just one of them. And you can make the same case for housing. Oh, why is housing so expensive? Well, it's because they print money and housing is a hard asset. When you print money, it's gonna cause the price of the hard assets to increase in value 'cause it's harder to build houses than it is to print money.

It's also positioned closer to the money printer for any individual American. That is the way that you position yourself closest to the money printer.

So, okay, so is this society F? It's like, well, of course it is. Every single thing. And that's just two things. You can go down way more pathways and draw these exact same conclusions. Is society F? Yes, all of it. Anything that's downstream of money printing is going to get destroyed because money printing necessarily perverts the incentives in the system and necessarily robs people of agency. It necessarily causes division and causes in-group out-group fighting because everyone is lost, has lost their ability to participate and have a voice and be able to say no, like we were talking about yesterday. When that's the case, all of those systems get destroyed. They get systematically dismantled. So, yeah, everything's F, everything is Downstream of Fiat is F. Now, thank God that not everything is Downstream of Fiat.

What do you guys think about? I think that's an interesting thing. And, you know, just to kind of bring everybody along, if you're, if you're not familiar with the concept of, like, Fiat is by decree. And so the US dollar is by decree the de facto currency of the world, right? A bunch of big bankers and big governments got together and said, we're going to settle our accounts in the US dollar. Bretton Woods is when that decision was made after World War II. And prior to that, it was the British pound. And so if you've kind of heard of, like, the ubiquity of the British pound, kind of like being the currency, the reserve currency of the world, that's what it was. And before then, it was gold, which is where you get the Tory ounce, which is where you actually have, like, you know, the proper weighting of gold and why it's like, you know, why, why it is that way is because that's what they used to actually, like, you know, it's like, oh, you have this many coins and this much gold, and this is what it is. But the interesting aspect of what we're talking about here is it sounds like, and I'm curious how you guys would kind of unpack this, but, like, you cannot have a society that succeeds and flourishes for a long time. If what if the foundation of that Society is by Fiat, whether it be from a dictator, whether it be from a group of people, like whether it be from a single person or a group of people, Society does not have a long tail of survival if the foundations on which it derives value or measures value is probably a better way to say that is at the whim of a single person or individual. Would you guys agree with that? And like 100%?

Yeah, I would. I would. And I would take it to a pretty philosophical place for America specifically, where our Declaration of Independence and the way that the Founding Fathers wrote our Constitution was around the idea that humans have inherent rights they aren't given them. And the duty of the government is to protect the human rights that humans already have. I don't think we've meaningfully departed from those really, really core principles as America yet, but you can see a similarity or a perversion of that, I would say, in the way that the government now, I believe we think the government gives us everything, right? It is provided to us well, the right to freedom of speech. Now that that's under debate in, in some way, I think there's more of a cultural understanding or acceptance of the idea that the government is the one actually giving us that. And if we don't treat it well, they can just take it away like a parent.

Right.

And that is fun, to me, is fundamentally untrue. And I think you look at it in the same way. Does the government create money? Or does it create a system that protects value as humans understand it? And that's a perversion that we left long ago, right? Creation of the Fed. It's not something that the government creates or, you know, at a philosophical level, money isn't something that can be created. It is inherently scarce. So when you ignore that, you're essentially ascribing to the government a role that was only supposed to be gods, right? And that to me, as long as you're making that original sin, it's going, you can't survive very long, right? That original sin tends towards its own destruction. That's not a threat, right? There's nothing, you don't even have to push, you know, it doesn't even take a group of revolutionaries to push a snowball down a hill in that scenario. It tends toward its own destruction by its nature. That misunderstanding. And I think that's what we're seeing now.

For me, it's, I take it from a, I can, for me, I can almost take it from a purely engineering perspective, which is to say, you need equivalence to be exact and universal. Example, or to build anything, you need equivalence to be exact and universal for the thing you're building. If you have a ruler, like a tape measure, and you want to build a house with that tape measure, your house is going to be awful and probably collapse if that tape measure is not a solid, if it's not a solid immutable object like a metal tape measure where you can't adjust the size of the inch. But if it's a rubber band tape.

Measure.

You cannot measure anything. Oh, I stretched it this far and this was a foot. But this foot and this foot are not the same foot. There's no equivalence there. Consequently, if you use that measure, the elastic rubber band to measure to build a house, your house is going to collapse instantly. And you can't build anything without this particular type of equivalence universally throughout whatever the system is that you're trying to build. You can't build an airplane with measures that change. It's literally never going to get off the ground. Likewise, you cannot build a civilization with a measure for value that changes over time. If your measure for value changes over time is elastic like USD is via inflation, what's going to happen is that your civilization, which you're trying to build, is going to necessarily fall apart, be unable to support its own weight, unable to build anything substantial. And at the same time, you're going to have to build up all these buttresses and weird devices that support things. Instead of fixing the foundation, you now have to put a jig into the wall to make sure the wall doesn't fall over. You have to re-shingle the roof, because it's leaking all the time. You have to do all this other.

Stuff.

To affect and to make your actual structure usable when instead you should have just been measuring correctly, measuring with actual exact equivalence that's universal across the whole structure, the whole civilization in this case.

So, yeah, I'm curious, I love this kind of thread of like, you know, You know, I think one word that is really bastardized of late is equity. And it's the like, you know, it's the equitable nature of like they want equivocal, like equal outcome, right? Like that's the whole piece here is they want everything to be equal. That's kind of like the cause du jour for some people politically and ideologically to today. I'm kind of curious, do you guys feel, I feel like right now the cultural shift is the political right is now starting to use a lot of the tools that, you know, the adage used to be in politics, the processes, the punishment, using a lot of these tools that are already in place that, you know, the right didn't use for a long time. Against the left as we just saw with Jimmy Kimmel, like two days ago or last night or yesterday or whatever it is. And the left is now upset about that. But they ignore the times where Tucker was displaced, where Alex Jones was displaced, where, you know, Trump himself was, was banned from the X platform. Like all of these cancel cultural culture things have not been applied equitably. Across left and right, the political divide. And so I guess what the question here is, do you think it is good that we're moving towards, like, this equal usage of punishment? Or do you think, you know, in the end, it's actually going to lead to a greater demise for everyone involved? Because I'm kind of curious, I think we all agree that the solution is elsewhere. But I'm just kind of curious, like, what we're seeing happen right now in the culture. Like, is this going to just kind of accelerate what we all think is inevitable, which is a change over to an actually more valuable system like Bitcoin? Or do you think it's actually just going to make everything worse and it's going to make Bitcoin harder to see for people?

Well, I think on that last point, I think when everything gets worse, Bitcoin will be the only thing eventually that people will see. I think it will emerge right now. I have I have the image of the two parties as a married couple that doesn't handle conflict well at all. And it's like one person goes too far and the other person says, well, you went that far. I can go this far. That never works. We all know that couple and they get divorced. Without one person or the other saying, I have principles that I'm going to hold to even when you're not. That it doesn't ever resolve. And that's kind of obvious. It's like the Gandhi eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. That feels really obvious to me. And I think the way the abuse of power on the right right now would make Republicans of 2008 blush, right? They'd say, if you saw everything that the Republican Party was doing today and you just showed it to early Obama era conservatives, they would assume that it was the Democratic Party, right? And I think that's probably the same for classical liberals from the early 2000s. The original sin to me of what's happening right now is this wild abuse of authority because we have this overtrust in authority. And I think it's this God-shaped hole that the only people that can pull us out of this are the people that are in charge right now. Well, we live in a representative democracy, so it's going to change every four years. Even if Even if the same president stays in four years to four years, you can even say it changes every two years with the midterm elections. No one can actually implement all the things that they're trying to say. So no one actually has to have principles that last longer than two years. And I think that's what we're seeing. There are no principles, right? Like the whole government efficiency push. Remember those couple months when we thought that they might actually push for fiscal responsibility? And that was a nice few months where we had some hope about that. That's all completely gone.

Right.

Elon gave up.

It's impossible. Sorry. Good luck to everybody. I'm going to go on a boat with $200 billion. But that to me is that escalation is all bad for everyone. And I think the only thing you can really do as an individual citizen, I don't know what activism looks like today. Who are you trying to activate? What does awareness do for anybody who can actually make an impact on the thing that you care about? Whether it's, you know, whatever those things were from again, from ten years ago politically, people cared a ton about the environment and about free speech and about gun rights and about abortion and whatever those really hot button topics are right now, they're just going to be what they're going to be. No one's changing their mind. It's just this gridlocked fight that is more intense, in my opinion, than than anything we've seen yet. And those sorts of abuses of authority, I think, will just continue. And they can happen because of money printer, because they control the military and they control the military because they control the money printer. And that's where I think as it degrades, as this sort of gridlock just turns into awfulness for everybody, that's where I think a system of real value will steal their authority without them even realizing it.

Yeah, there's some real risks to constant escalation, arms races between the two parties with regards to who gets into power and how they use that power, and then using that power in the exact same way that the, that, oh, somebody abused the power. So we're going to run on a platform of we got to get them out of government because they abuse the power, and we're going to get into government, and then we're going to abuse the power just the same. It's, I mean, We've also already seen this, which just for decades through the Libertarian Party, we're gonna lower the cost of government by, or we're gonna lower the impact of government by being that impact of in the gut. Like we're gonna be, it's just totally contradictory in terms and in many ways. That said, I do like the idea of all these people just getting fired. Both on the left and the right. Like anybody who's a politician, like y'all should be fired. Just 100%, everybody just resign. Like every single one of you, all of like all the pundits on TV, just all of you should be fired. Just every single one of you and replace it with people who, hey, we're actually going to be trying to be decent human beings or something. I mean, I don't know what standard you'd replace it by. And maybe this is arguing against my point, but it's just, Man, there are no leaders in the current paradigm who are actually presenting solutions to problems, who are actually giving anybody any hope about anything. It's literally the only thing that anybody gets is like, if you back me and if you jump on my social media platform, what we're gonna do is we're gonna bring justice. We're gonna bring the fist down, right? And none of that's gonna give anybody any hope. Once you get the justice, you're probably gonna go too far in the justice and somebody's gonna try and get you justice and you just do the escalation thing all over again. And then even if you do, even if you do get the justice, that's not gonna bring you any hope. That's not gonna bring you any like, that's just gonna fix what has been done to you. It's not going to have you be looking forward about the future or having any kind of plan that really takes you to a place you want to be. And again, going back to the whole thing, the whole system is necessarily by design pointed towards society theft. All of it points in that direction. And the only hope that anyone actually has in terms of real solutions is a Bitcoin solution, is an exit solution where it's a soft exit, where you exit this particular part of the system, but you remain locally or politically involved with bringing Bitcoin about to those systems because it actually solves the problem and it actually brings people hope looking forward. Yeah, it also solves the problem of justice and reduces the escalation but it also provides the hope going forward.

Yeah.

So many people just don't get that.

Yeah.

I'm curious your take, Cory, on there's kind of like a pendulum. And where I'm going with this is.

Like.

We have all of these companies that spend all of this effort to build town squares. Like Twitter is a town square, blue sky is a town square, Reddit is a town square. And then the punishment becomes, oh, we want to get you here. They spend all this money getting you there. And then the punishment is kicking you out of the town square, right? It's like this, right? The opportunity to talk to these people all around the world because we're on this town square. And I guess I'm like, I'm curious, you know, the ramifications of that as we kind of see the degradation of society with this cancer culture start to spiral out of control and Like, does it reach a point where people just don't care anymore? And they're just like, you know, it actually has the opposite effect and just pushes people outside. And they're like, all right, I don't even care anymore. I'm not gonna go on the computer. I'm not gonna use it. I'm not gonna buy a new phone. Like, do you think it actually gets to that point where people are just like, okay, everybody who is of any value to listen to at all are not on the internet anymore, so I'm just not gonna go there?

Yeah, I think there's too much demand for those eyeballs for those creators. To for it to go away entirely. But I think you hit on something really interesting, which is like the Catholic church didn't put people to death, they excommunicated people. And that was considered like worse. It was being out of the group, but that was the center of wealth and power and community for the entire countries, for the entire part of the world. So to get excommunicated from that really meant something. If you get kicked off of Blue Sky, what is one exact thing in your life that will change for better or worse, like nothing. It means nothing, right? If I were to get kicked off Twitter tomorrow, it would mean absolutely nothing, right? I think for an individual creator who loses a revenue stream, it could mean that. But these are like really, really, really low stakes. And I think you're hitting on something interesting, which is what is the actual community that you really want to be a part of in America that if you were to get excommunicated from it, it would actually matter to you?

Right.

For me, that would be my church. And, and there's nothing about me politically that's going to get me excommunicated from my church. There's probably things, if I said, said them out loud, that might make it harder for me. And I say them out loud here. It's not like I'm hiding them. But if I was up for a movie within a studio or something like that, and someone are to hear that, I think inflation is a bigger problem than racism in America. They might not want to choose me.

Right.

That, and that's okay. And, you know, but. Again, you see these communities and it's happening in Hollywood right now where that community, which was this in group that millions of people would come to LA just desperately trying to get into, that's really fracturing. It's not the same. They don't carry the same weight they used to. They don't carry the same money they used to. They don't nearly hold the same cultural influence that they used to. There's been all this internal self-degradation of that. So I think the interesting thing to look at going forward is not to, when you talk about that pendulum, I think you kind of look back and be like, and you say, like, when is it gonna be the 90s again? And we have to just say that was a very Fiat driven false piece that was driven by a power, a post World War II power that was much more than American military strength. It was American global hegemony of the dollar, right? And when we destroy that, there is no going back. To the 90s, this peaceful time when 60 great movies came out a year and the divorce rate was lower and everyone owned a home. That era is just gone. So I think you look forward to what are the community centers, what are the things of value that will emerge out of the fact that we over levered that era, right? Which is basically what's happened.

Yeah, I like the idea. Or jumping off the idea of you get kicked off, you get deplatformed from or canceled from whatever, you know, stream or whatever community that you have online. Okay, you have a couple options. Like Trump gets deplatformed from X. And what does he do? He goes and starts his own entire own social media platform. It's like, okay, there's an option. You can also just go into other social media platforms and then rebuild your community there or, you know, have multiple platforms and just cross-pollinate between all of your communities. But, Cory, I think you hit the nail on the head with this. It's like at some point, you'll probably be de-platformed because you're too right in a left-leaning community or you're too left in a right-leaning community. And you're just gonna, what does that do? Well, it's just gonna silo you into a particular community that's just 100% your little niche where everyone agrees with you. And well, what happens when everyone agrees with you? And it's like, well, we just saw those results, which is, oh, it's funny to joke about because everyone's on the same page in this community. It's funny to joke about, well, what if we were going to, I don't know, assassinate somebody? Oh, that'd be really funny. And you can just kind of see how that just turns into an actual plan to assassinate somebody. Because there's no back, there's no back talk. There's no, it's just everything is good, everything's good to go because we all agree and we all have the exact same blind spot, right?

So.

One particular thing that fights against that is a church community, is a local community, is a physical reality community. But even with those, those are all going to be siloed too. Okay, where does this lead us though? Well, there's going to be communities that have a whole bunch of things wrong, like Antifa. They just have wildly ridiculous viewpoints that completely disconnect from reality that they're just in their own echo chamber of absurdity, right? They're not going to survive. There's just no way that when you disconnect from reality so intensely that you're going to be able to continue on that path. But for communities that actually do connect with reality, you are going to have a lot of robust ability to process and deal with any kind of drama or difficulty going forward. The church is going to be a huge, huge purveyor of that because they have one of the most robust anti-fragile models for any community that ever existed. So, I mean, you can kind of walk through this path, if you will, which is Oh, if everyone gets siloed, the silos themselves will have to fight on their own merits and many will completely fail. And then the silos that do prevail will have outsized influence on the rest of culture and society. Well, what are the silos that are going to survive? And I think we all know the answer to that.

Yeah.

And I think it's a really interesting one because this is not new, right? An empire rising. And becoming so powerful that they believe they're godly and then acting like God and destroying themselves is the nature of empires in human history. It's every single one, right? And before, like, Romans, right? When the Romans went from Senate to empire, they said that it was a divinely appointed emperor, right? They stole from the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians and Assyrians who said that there was some spiritual authority that was granted to that, you know, and then they start believing that, and then they start acting like it, and then that naturally tends towards its own destruction. And they had inflation, too, but over a much longer period of time because it's harder to pull off. But then you go to, you know, the ray dalio rise and fall of currencies along with Empires. And you have the Dutch kroner and the British pound and then the US dollar, where it Rises, you pretend that you're God, you pretend that you create value out of nothing, and you can't. Only God can do that. So the more that you do that, you tend toward your own destruction. The structures that were so solid that felt like the structures of society itself, of humanity itself, those begin to crumble. And then there's the existential Terror for the normal man of what happens when the society. When Society's structures crumble, when the culture that I thought was a human, like, fundamentally human, falls down around me. You realize that those things weren't fundamentally human. Those were the socially constructed things and they created peace and they created prosperity. They also created a bunch of horrors and some of the most brutal colonization of all time and all of that. But those things start to fall away. What continues are the things that are submitting to reality that are actually reflective of reality. I think that's what we're going through and I think it's a way that with a Christian mindset specifically, you say at some point the kingdom of God's going to come back and redeem all of creation. And that's the end point. Can America in its current state be a part of that? I would say not really at all, right? There may be a couple of elements, but there's a lot of stuff that needs to burn away from that. Not people, structures, right? Every person can be welcome in that, right, if they want to submit to that. But the way that America is currently set up needs to fail, right? As long as it's acting like God and not submitting to God, it will burn away. And so I think there should be some hope, even if our lives get harder over the next 30 years than they've been for the previous 30 years, there should be a lot of hope that that work is good, that that work goes toward a good thing, even though it's painful. It's like a surgery.

I'm curious to, because kind of like talking about the, the Town Square and talking about kind of like the degradation of society and kind of like technology as a, so I had an interesting thought and I'm having it kind of do a chart right now. And I don't know if the chart's going to show what I'm like trying to posit, but I'm curious about this thought. What would you guys say if I were to say the demise of the United States is directly correlated with the rise of the use in automobiles?

I would say it's a false correlation.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because I'm curious. Well, I'm just hear me out on this, and I'll actually. I'll use a. An anecdotal. Explanation that actually shows the inverse corollary. So in the United States currently in Los Angeles, you can get in your car and drive to work and it's going to take you about 90 minutes. So for 90 minutes, you are in your bubble, you are ingesting whatever you want to ingest, you are in me world, you are in you world, you are in whatever world you want to be in. If you want to be in a podcast for NPR world, if you want to be in a podcast for Tucker Carlson world, if you want to be a podcast for whatever it is, Pearl Daily or Crowder or if you want to be doing Don LaMond or whatever it is, right? You can be in me world and you have that every day, twice a day for three hours. If you have a 90 minute commute, I think the average commute is like an hour. So for two hours, let's just say we're doing the average. That is a new phenomenon of the last 50 years, right? That not only are we adjusting how we work. So I can drive an hour, depending on where I'm at, that means my work could be anywhere from one to 50 miles away from where I live. So my home community. And so I'm extricating myself physically from my home community, indoctrinating myself by choice as I go to a community that I like better By choice. Or rather that I see less and then coming home, having never poured into my local community, my church community, whatever community, and having spent all of my time in a personal indoctrination camp that I'm being told is the correct way to do it because every single restaurant has a drive-through whereas take the inverse of European culture, which is definitely on the downward spiral as well, but for a different reason, as I think European culture is on a downward spiral because they don't have the population reproduction. They're not having babies and so they need to import the work or rather they've been told they feel they need to import the work. Poland and Hungary are showing people that's not true. But again, that's a whole other can of worms. But where I'm going with this is I'm curious your take on do you think the mode, the adoption of certain forms of transportation or of technology, because transportations of former technology can accelerate the demise of a culture if they don't have a solid foundation.

It's an interesting point because I think what you're talking about is the tribalism used to be in your immediate community and it really couldn't extend beyond how far you could walk or the distribution of news beyond your immediate community. And that led to a very, very intense tribalism and an othering of people.

Right.

And I think the baseline xenophobia of all humans up until about 100 years ago was probably crazy high.

Right.

The idea that maybe the Native Americans have a point and that's brand new because it was the savages over there and it was the good people over here. And that's just how you saw it because it was this immediate, intense, completely surrounded tribalism. And the rise of technology allowed us to choose different tribes than our neighbors. I live in a place in LA where I'm surrounded by as many people on my block as there would have been in a small town 150 years ago. And I don't know any of them, right? I don't know any of my neighbors. And I don't know any of their opinions. We don't feed off of each other at all. So I choose my tribe. And it's decentralized across Los Angeles and around the world. And I think that leads to a kind of intense tribalism as well. But I don't think that, I don't think it's given rise to a new sense of human tribalism. It's just broadened the opportunity for you to, to choose it, if that makes sense.

It, it also, I mean, so I'm watching the, one of the Apple screensavers, and it's just this, so it's visually, like, in my face right now. So the the analogy is coming to mind. But there is some truth to what JD is talking about how automobiles can destroy a society in that to build automobile infrastructure, you have to necessarily just using this, this episode, the necessarily episode, you have to build freeways that necessarily destroy communities that literally cut through a ribbon of concrete that cuts through and cuts in half and makes it dangerous for that community to continue to participate with each other. If you were on one side of the freeway and your best friend was on the other side of the freeway and all you guys did was hang out and throw the football and bike, but now you have to participate in or you have to go through an underpass or go, you know, walk or ride your bike 25 blocks to the local way that you can actually cross the freeway and then ride at 25 blocks black. It's like that that relationship is done, right? Like, unless you're able to really like dig in and do it or move or whatever, but like you're not going to like it was it was the relationship was predicated on the proximity and the proximity is gone. So there's some real effects of the technology. But I think that it cuts both ways. It's not all just downhill. It's yeah, but the upside is that I get better education because I can drive to a better school. The upside is that I get.

A.

Wider view of the world. Like, oh, here's my, this was my bubble. There's other bubbles I didn't even know. Hey, maybe this ethnic enclave is like they got some cool food. I didn't realize that their food was so good, but now I can participate in that where I couldn't before. So it's a trade-off. There are some technologies, and I think Jordan Bush argues this pretty good, there are some technologies that are definitely detrimental. They literally just cause pain, suffering, and destroy human flourishing.

And.

You have, like, at that point, you should just be careful of those technologies. Sure. Is automobile one of those? I think it could go both ways and how it affects society. I certainly don't think it's as big as other more upstream inputs like fiat currency, which will, hey, you put fiat currency in a car denominated culture. What are you going to get? You are going to get the ideological siloing, not necessarily the the local community siloing, which you had before, which is necessarily again has more diversity than an ideological siloing. The ideological siloing just says we're 100% right. Consequently, our moral structure and our moral fiber, even if it's strong, is just not going to have many tests that allow it to prove itself as robust.

What's the silver lining? We're at that spot where we're trying to turn it. It sounds like there's a lot of challenge with what's going on just in the world and also just, you know, the way humans have evolved, right? We've evolved.

We're.

We're story driven creatures, and it's the story we tell ourselves. It's the indoctrination we give ourselves, what we choose to ingest or are forced to ingest by whoever we're trained. Like, what's the silver lining? Like, what. What do you guys think is the silver lining of, like, if Society is actually afted? Where's the silver lining?

Yeah, I mean, I'd say, I think I alluded to this a little bit earlier, but I would say on an individual level, if there's something in your life and in your heart that makes you a bad friend, husband, father, son, brother, like if you have some pocket of vindictiveness that comes out of pain or you escalate conflicts like you don't need to, to see that burned away, even if it's painful, is a good thing, right? That should be an encouraging thing, even if it If you're like, oh man, I thought that was a piece of my identity, it's really not. I don't need that. Like, I don't need shame. I can act in love, I can act with nobility, I can act with dignity and with self-sacrifice, and I could act with love. And the ways that I'm not doing that, I would like to get rid of those things, and I would like to act in love more frequently. I think I look at the country the same way, and I say like, there's rot there, and to watch that kind of escalate, in a way that will reveal it and hopefully will burn away. The transition could be really painful, but we have to view that as a good thing. There's structures that are built on top of lies like fiat currency and like this overreach of government. And like I said at the beginning, this kind of ascribing upon the central government as things that should only be ascribed to God. Those things will continue to reveal themselves. And as they reveal themselves, I think General people will not accept them anymore. And that could be violent. It could be. It could be a lot less peaceful. It could be a lot less prosperous than the. The world that we grew up in. But I think you can only look at the burning away of those things as a good thing. Why would like, the tacit is quote, a bad piece is worse than War. Well, someone's cooking.

I.

Don'T even know. Literally that happened and then my camera died. What's up here?

Wow. This might be a building wide alarm. I might have to sign off.

All right.

Well, stay safe, Cory. We will catch you on the next one. Oh, man, I had a good idea, but we're interrupted there.

There we go.

So.

On the idea of we're cutting out the wheat in the shaft, right? We're cutting these things out. Hey, this is good under, under a inflationary Paradigm and under a nationalist or whatever kind of, like, high tension kind of Paradigm, especially we're under we're seeing right now. A lot of, if you go back in history and you look at the exact same time places when other people or other civilizations, other countries were going through similar things, a lot of those events coincided with inflation. I think we mentioned this earlier in this podcast. Take Nazi Germany, for instance. It's the rise of Hitler was, was, prefaced by Weimar inflation, hyperinflation. When everyone's agency is being destroyed, what happens next is that political extremism starts to take over. And, and it's not just the Nazis, it's, you can look at almost every single major revolution, major violent conflict, and you can find those correlations. Whether it's hyperinflation or low inflation or medium inflation, it's pressure. Inflation is a pressure cooker for all the other stuff that's going on. Now, if we have just been going through the exact same pressure cooker America has for the last 5-10 years, arguably since the money printing that took place post global financial crisis, that pressure cooker is now pushing towards political extremism, which manifests in assassinations, villainization of the other party, all sorts of other stuff, right? All sorts of bad stuff. And if there's no outlet or if there's no way to escape that system, if the only possible way is to actually participate in the political extremism, well, you're going to have a bad time. Everything's going to get wrecked, as we've seen so many times before. But if there is a way to exit, if there's a way to preserve your agency in such a circumstance, why would you not do that? And here we are. We have such a, we have this ability for the first time in thousands of years, we have this ability to to preserve your own agency under the circumstances of political unrest. And that device, that technology is Bitcoin. It allows you to exit the absurdity of not being able to afford a house, not being able to buy groceries. If you are getting paid in Bitcoin, or if you're converting as much of your wealth to Bitcoin as you possibly can, you are literally building a firewall and insulation against all of the political absurdity and drama that's happening around you. Now, the political absurdity and drama will probably escalate, but as it escalates, so too will your firewall grow in proportion to the need to protect yourself. That's fundamentally the way that Bitcoin was built as a hard money, as a zero inflationary thing, as inflation skyrockets in the Legacy world, the value of Bitcoin also skyrockets accordingly. So you have a firewall talking about silver lining. This is the first time we actually have protection against the one thing that causes most of the drama and absurdity and death and awfulness of the last 250 years. Starting basically with the French Revolution.

But.

I think what's interesting about.

It'S.

Kind of goes counter to the point I was making before about like technology, like accelerating the demise, but technology can also accelerate the prosperity. And we've kind of seen that because like Fiat is still a technology, right? It is a terrible technology, but it is a technology. Money is a technology. Like all of these things are technology.

That.

Provide interesting ways for humans to interact that is apolitical, essentially. Like money is essentially an apolitical thing, you know, and it's the whole thing of everybody's like, oh, money is the root of all evil. No, money is a tool. Guns are evil. No, guns are a tool. You know, in the same way a hammer is a tool, in the same way a car is a tool. You can kill someone with a hammer, you can kill someone with a car. You could go make money with a hammer or you could go make money with a car, right? Like all of these things are just tools in the same way the first, you know, wheel was created by somebody way back in the day. And the same time, fire was also created way back in the day. Like every time you turn on your stove, you're using a tool that somebody, you know, many people over, you know, decades, eons, have been able to craft and hone and learn and experiment and fail, fail forward and move forward and progress to the point where we are today. We are but a blip. And where I'm going with this to kind of just break it out is the interesting thing about there are interesting things about tools of prosperity and their development and their life cycle. And so what I mean by that is salt was used for flavor, but then it was also used because it was discovered to preserve things. So originally refrigerators were just you encase something in salt and then you can save meat or whatever it is for a longer period of time because it would dry out and become jerky and become something different because we put salt on top of it. But then, you know, the, the, and so salt is a little bit different, but let me use like an actual technology because that's like a mineral. Like the refrigerator, right? The original refrigerators were ice boxes. They literally take a piece of ice and throw it in a box when you had a bunch of cold stuff and it would keep it cold relative to that. And when the piece of ice melted, you'd open up the bottom, drain it out, throw another piece of ice in. Then we had the refrigerator and ice boxes and refrigerators. Like, you can still find ice boxes from the beginning today that still work.

Why?

Because these products were developed as products for prosperity. They developed. They were developed with a low, a long time preference, a low time preference. They were developed by people that wanted something to last. And now technology, and I would say actually the most detrimental technology of the last 100 years is the stock market, because we've moved into this world where we've been told that investing is good, but gambling is bad. The stock market is literally just a casino that is legalized for everyone in the world. That's all it is. If anybody tells you differently, they're selling you something or they're a financial advisor, probably both. The stock market is legitimately just a casino with a bunch of different names that are really, really hoity-toity that Bankers want to confuse you with so they feel empowered to sell you a product that they can make a spread on. That is the, that is the stock market. And that boom and bust cycle of the stock market that we've become accustomed to, that's not normal. That's not normal. Like in nature, you do have similar boom and bust cycles, but where I'm going with this and I need to actually like be positive and I'll land the plane really quickly. We've moved into an era where planned obsolescence is the cause du jour for corporations. We're going to introduce a new product every year. We're going to introduce a new, a new, version of this thing. So we want a monthly subscription. Like the tale of turnover is really, really telling in terms of the actual quality of the service that you're getting. And so what is going to be really cool to start to see is as society starts to crumble a little bit more. And I'll use a perfect example of what happened with Disney right now is like conservatives canceled Disney two years ago. They canceled Disney when they started to cancel Tucker Carlson and cancel all these other people. Now we have the exact opposite happening where the cultural left is canceling Disney because of what's happening with Jimmy Kimmel. What that is going to do is it's actually going to accelerate the need for Disney to reinvent itself on a Bitcoin standard because they're going to need to find a way to help people in the way technology was originally intended to help people a politically. It's going to force them to find a way to provide value to everyone in the best possible way that actually adds the most possible value. Because if you hone in on a specific political demographic, you're ostracizing a different demographic. And so I think that's the thing is we're going to get to a really cool place is that with the Bitcoinization of society as it crumbles, because I do think we're going to see a crumble. It's going to get worse before it gets better. What the Phoenix from the fire will be so much better than anything we could ever imagine.

It's a good place to stop.

I like that idea. I really like the idea of.

As.

Bitcoin essentially just gains as Bitcoiners gain and gain more agency and as the legacy world loses and loses all of its agency. The legacy world to survive will have to participate and have to find and use technology apolitically to regain any kind of basis for their influence, for their legacy, for their continuation. And like any company or any media platform or any manufacturer, anything that doesn't recognize that and just kind of leans into whatever the weird political silo that they're in. If they lean into that, it's going to be, there's just no future for that. There's no future for them as a company and as a thing because they're leaning into reducing their own agency. It's just ridiculous.

Yeah.

In a very quick and ham-fisted defense of the movie Tenet, this is what he's addressing. And I think it's one of the reasons that it's his least successful movie of the modern era for Nolan was this love letter to reality. And there's this excellent line when the people in the future are sending weapons back to the past because they're their opponents, they're gonna essentially try to kill the great-grandfathers of their opponents. And the guy's like, this is a paradox. Like, does it work? And the guy's like, it doesn't matter. They believe it. And basically making the point, if they believe in this unreality, we're going to die. So we have to fight it. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether they're right or not, because the eventual end of what they're doing is terrible violence. This is, and this is like the apocalypse is, you know, the word apocalypse means unveiling. It doesn't mean fire and brimstone from above. It only means that if you think there needs to be fire and brimstone from above, right? The apocalypse was never meant to be this horrible Sodom and Gomorrah type thing. It just means the unveiling of what's already there. And I feel like at the moment we're in a moment of apocalypse in American culture right now, where the unveiling of things like, does everyone who told you they believe in free speech actually believe in free speech? Doesn't really seem like it because push is coming to shove and they're neglecting that like crazy. Do the people that told you They care about fiscal responsibility, actually care about it. Are they capable of achieving fiscal responsibility? No. Like as soon as push came to shove, we saw all their true colors. And I think it's that push come to shove moment that unveiling for a lot of those things where the things we were being told actually we see the true color of a lot of people. And I think that be, I think that we should partially as a good thing. That at least we're dealing honestly with the people in charge and with our neighbors and that's the only real way we can make progress. I think that's an optimistic thing.

Yeah, I think so. It reminds me of actually one of the things my pastor said on Wednesday at our men's group. Can you hear me? Yeah, I got you. So the Greek word for repentance is metanoia. And I'm probably butchering that. So if they're in our, you know, Greek Scholars or, you know, Jam, if you're listening, sorry. But the premise of that word, repentance, is it literally means change of mind. Literally means to change your mind. It literally means to transform your thought, the transformation of thought. And so I think that's the thing. We're kind of at this precipice moment. For society where society needs to repent, society needs to completely transform how we think about everything, completely transform how we think about value, completely transform how we think about relationship, completely transform responsibility, integrity, all of these things because we have gotten so numb because we're just doing this cultural cocaine. Where we're just binging on story and we're binging on really not great story. Like, we're binging on, like, even stuff like this, like, nothing wrong with what we're doing right now, right? We're trying to actually, like, push the envelope forward in the way that we see fit. But I think the biggest challenge that we have right now is even us, as we're trying to figure this out, is, like, how do we. How do we repent and atone? How do we repent, transform our minds? And then atone, remember how we got here, so we don't do it again. And so I think that's the thing that's going to be the most interesting to kind of come out of this is if Bitcoin can survive, which I do believe it's the only logical solution and we will see a lot more adoption by nation states and governments here very, very soon. It will actually force a cultural reckoning across the entire globe. And we're probably going to need another Charlie type of moment to happen. And I'm hoping it doesn't come in the form of an assassination, but I'm, I'm thinking it's going to become. Bitcoin will deliver the philosophical and ideological assassination of the Fiat world, and that will be a very, very difficult thing for a lot of people who are selling you something to digest.

Yep.

I I love that. Because the first thing that's coming to mind exactly is what happens when you go down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole. Your mind changes about almost everything.

Yeah.

The further you go down, the more your mind changes. The first, like, it is. It is just almost all encompassing, right? There's so many things, and it really just. The wheat in the shaft completely divides it all. You get to see what is going to end. As Jordan Bush says, logic is a time machine. And the more you understand Bitcoin, the more you understand where you need to change, what you need to repent of, where your mindset, belief system, knowledge gaps need to change. And as you understand that, as you go through that process, And as everyone else goes through the same process too, we're all on a journey. We're all on a Bitcoin journey. Some of us are just further ahead than other people, but everybody's on this journey. And we don't really know where it's going to go yet. Nobody has the crystal ball that sees forward 100%, but the logic dictates that certain things are going to happen. And if you can internalize the logic, if you can change your mind, you can protect yourself from those things.

Yeah.

Amen. Cory, you have any last thoughts?

No, I think we got it. So, I gotta run.

Love it. This was great. Thank you, everybody, for joining in. And we will see you guys either later this week or next week. Cheers.

Thanks for tuning in to Better Buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin makes everything better. Like, subscribe and follow us on X@BetterBYBTC, YouTube@BetterBYBTC, not financial advice, mathematical certainty.