♪ Got a good thing coming, and it's all I need ♪
♪ Everything I wanted ♪
Every time.
Hey everybody.
So today we wanted to talk about
USAID tariffs and Bitcoin and how,
kind of like a macro update,
because we got Corey back, who's our macro guy.
Me personally, I used to be macro stuff,
but no longer in the investment world,
no longer doing that.
But yeah, if you guys want to go around
and do like a, I don't know, round robin,
short introduction, I'm Bondor.
I'm here in LA.
I've been involved with Bitcoin for a while.
Presently a developer, but also trying to push
towards media and media-related endeavors.
So, JD.
Sweet.
Hey guys, JD, SoccerPunk Cinema.
I do advertising, so I just love ads
and SoccerPunk Cinema is kind of my foray
into features and content and like longer form stuff.
But I just like telling stories
and kind of making stuff go on.
I'll kick it to you, Corey, next.
Awesome.
Corey, I'm a co-founder of Indie Hub Studio,
and I also produce independent films and TV shows
when the opportunity arises.
Presently in Rome, if I'm not mistaken, too.
Presently in Italy.
Yeah, I just wrapped a travel show in Italy, yeah.
Let's kick it to Zach.
Yo, Zach, I'm the founder of IndieHub.studio.
Basically, it's a film exhibition platform,
independent film exhibition platform
built on top of Lightning.
Check it out.
What's up?
I'm Anton.
I'm a filmmaker, cinematographer, and live in LA.
Cool.
All right, so to kick us off,
it's been rattling around my brain
for the last month and a half,
and I've not been able to have a good conversation about it,
but the idea of knock-on effects and impacts
of the no longer USAID-funded programs,
because it seems like all of these USAID-funded programs
were essentially just all left-leaning.
There was nothing on the right.
It was like, there was no church plants.
There was no conservative things,
apart from one or two, I don't know,
quasi-conservative effort.
It was almost all exclusively left-wing media,
transgender, clown stuff,
LGBT, clown world, LGBTQ,
all sorts of weird stuff on the left,
and to the left extreme, right?
Now, all of that funding gets cut out,
and there's a few knock-on effects
that immediately happen through Dodge's efforts, right?
One of them is the real estate in DC takes a dive
because everyone can't afford their home anymore.
Another one is the political narratives
around like, hey, these news organizations
were getting funding from the government through USAID
to push particular narratives.
They're no longer getting that funding,
so they're not gonna be pushing those narratives anymore,
right, and then you look at other stuff,
like the whole, I don't know,
funding transgender musicals
or funding whatever, Sesame Street,
and all this other stuff.
It's like this media essentially is just shut down,
and most of that media is left-wing media.
Now, when you shut down left-wing media,
which is being paid for by left-wing politicians,
it's like you're creating this huge gap
in political narrative and the back and forth
because nobody can afford to be on the other side anymore.
So the question for Corey is,
this impacts international relations,
game theory, funding, real estate, and so much more.
It just keeps going, and the more you think about it,
the more crazy and goofy it gets.
So that is the premise, I guess.
Corey, what are your thoughts on big picture?
How does this play out short-term, medium-term, long-term,
and what do you expect going forward?
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question.
I took a little bit more of the positive view
when I looked at it because there is an aspect of USAID
that did fund,
JD, can we keep it on gallery by any chance?
Is that possible?
We can, yeah, I can keep it as a thing.
We're learning this week, ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah, we're figuring it out.
So obviously, Bandar, when I see those sorts of things
as part of a government program,
to me, that's just what happens
when the group in charge for most of the time,
most of the past 20 years,
those are spillover effects
because government has a tremendous amount of inefficiency.
And one of those inefficiencies is people
who don't necessarily care about the thing that's going on
get access to money and then add their thing into it.
There's this prevailing sentiment
that people, that congressmen show up to Washington
when they're newly elected and say,
my goal is to get as much money for the thing
that I care about as I possibly can.
And that's what I think DOJ
is being a really good antidote to.
So I think there's a reasonable conversation
to be had there.
I think there's also a reasonable conversation
on the positive side to say that USAID
does fund tuberculosis and malaria and AIDS treatments
in parts of the world that are impoverished.
So I take it, I try to take it
from more of a first principles perspective
and say, what is the US's role
in caring for those people, right?
And as Christian people,
we care for the value of every human life.
Like as, you know, no matter the value, right?
That's the charge.
And I think that's the differentiator of our faith.
So I actually, I tried to frame this
and the way that it came to me
was like a masculine feminine type thing, right?
Where the, when the man abdicates
a masculine leadership role, responsibility,
the best thing that can happen at that point
is for someone to encourage the man
to then step up into that role.
The worst thing that can happen
is then the woman takes over that role.
Then they're both done for, right?
Then, you know, then you've flipped the roles.
And I see it in the same way.
It's like the church was supposed to take care
of the poor and the sick and the weak.
And in large, in many cases, it hasn't done that.
And we look to as a culture, as a society,
we look to government to fill that role.
That wasn't the solution, right?
That was never the solution.
And it was not very effective.
And it just ballooned up in this road of good intentions
saying, well, if other people,
if good intentioned people
aren't gonna take care of these people,
we'll just have the government do it.
And it's a silver medal in a way.
It's like, okay, well, it kind of works,
but it's also completely out of order, right?
It wasn't ever supposed to be that way.
So in my mind, that misordering,
that flip of that responsibility completely ruined it.
So in my mind, it's like this whole endeavor of USAID
was let's just entrust the people
who can't actually do a very good job taking care of it.
Let's just entrust it with them.
And then we don't have to think about it anymore.
So I have a lot of criticisms
about the way that USAID played out,
but the biggest criticism by far
is why do we think it was their responsibility
in the first place?
That shouldn't have ever been their responsibility
because they can't do it.
And then the downstream effect of that, what is it?
How long has USAID been around?
50 years, something like that, right?
Somewhere around when we left the gold standard,
when we just outsourced what we were supposed to be doing
as good Christian human people, as men, right?
We should be taking care of the poor,
the weak, the outcast.
Everything downstream of that is a symptom to me
of that problem, right?
And then 50 years later,
you have transgender Sesame Street
in the Arabic world for $20 million.
And then we all like scream and cry about that.
And we should, like, that's not like,
I saw all those things, I saw all these reports,
but to me, it's an original sin.
It's an original abdication of responsibility
and of saying like,
there should be people taking care of it.
It should not be the US government
because they're terrible at it.
And to me, that's this big sprawling program
that just got ended.
Does any of that make sense?
I'd love to hear some reactions to that take.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Part of it is like, that's its original intention, right?
We're trying to do this,
but then it like, the original sin, like you're saying,
but then it gets corrupted into the thing that it became,
which was, oh, I'm gonna, you know what?
I'm going to college for social work.
And I'm gonna work in a homeless nonprofit
that's gonna help homeless people.
But it's like, oh, well, yeah,
but how am I supposed to live in LA
where all the homeless people are
with a salary less than $200,000 a year or something?
And then that just kind of feeds on itself.
Cause like, oh yeah, well, we're worthy cause,
we're homeless, we're suiting the homeless or whatever.
But then it turns into this thing of like,
this feedback loop of, well, it doesn't matter.
And now you see in LA, like there's a pushback
because the director of one of LA's homeless programs,
like brought her husband on and gave them $2 million
to do essentially nothing.
And it's like, when did that become the culture
of the system that was supposed to help the people?
I think the homeless issue is an exact proxy
for what we're talking about, right?
It's like, there are people who are homeless on the street
that should be cared for and should be treated with dignity
when we outsource that as people to the government.
And I'm saying like, we all share in that, right?
If we didn't take care of them,
then we outsource it to the government
thinking they'll take care of them.
And they weren't ever supposed to be able to do that.
That's where it becomes,
that's where like every downstream effect,
you see all these tweets that are like,
how much money has Gavin Newsom spent on homelessness?
Hundreds of millions of dollars.
That was his big thing when he was running.
I'm gonna fix homelessness.
And it's worse now than when he started.
So what was the point of the hundreds
of millions of dollars, right?
So clearly, clearly, and this is where I wanna frame
the conversation around philosophy,
around like, who are we as people of God
and people who have a sense of the dignity
of the human being?
Who are we as those people?
Because when we outsource that to the government,
they do not have that by definition.
They do not, a government cannot look at a person
and say, you are a God-breathed individual.
I'm gonna take care of you as such.
It's a completely antithetical.
Yeah, they look the exact opposite thing.
You are my slave.
They look the exact opposite way.
Worthless.
You're a number.
They have actuarial tables.
Exactly.
They have actuarial tables about the value
of the human life in a dollar amount.
And we don't have that.
So to me, I look at all these downstream effects,
all these symptoms, and they're all ridiculous.
Yeah, I'm totally on the same page.
It's all ridiculous.
I'm glad it's ending.
I'm glad all of that is over.
I just hope that there's a charge then,
when it ends, that the value of human life,
the value of human dignity,
is an important thing to people again.
I think this is a classic move of evil.
This is like the oldest trick in the book,
is evil takes advantage of the empathy that people have
and convinces them to do things using their empathy.
We all sound, oh, that sounds great.
Let's fix homelessness.
Let's do this.
Let's do that.
And then it just steals all the money
and does whatever the hell it wants to do anyway,
because we've abdicated our responsibility,
which is another, you know,
nothing downstream of abdicating responsibility
is ever good.
But I think more than anything,
it's like we just have to pay attention to,
you always have to be skeptical when people are saying,
oh, I'm going to do this.
Give me money.
I'm going to do that.
You know, they're going, evil always finds a way
to make what it's doing sound and look good.
It's as close to good as it can possibly get
as a defense mechanism and as a camouflage.
And then-
I totally agree with you.
Yeah, go ahead, Bondar.
And then when you actually step back in and say,
no, no, no, I'm not going to abdicate my responsibility.
I'm going to take responsibility now,
the knock on effect from there immediately is that,
that evil you're talking about switch,
it completely switches and says,
oh, no, no, no, like the people who are getting defunded
by the lack of funding now are turning around
and saying, Trump is evil.
This program was evil.
Like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No one's going to support us.
Like, no, like you will never be able
to take responsibility.
We want the thing, the abdication of responsibility.
We want that back because our livelihoods
have been destroyed because of this.
And they do just enough, right?
Like what you talked about, Corey,
like they're funding these AIDS programs
or whatever these beneficial programs.
If we really dig into the budget,
and admittedly, I have not,
but they do just a fraction of a percent enough
that when it gets taken away from them,
they go, you turned this off, you destroyed these things.
But it's like, this was 0.001% of the budget
and you stole the rest, like, you know?
Yeah.
No, it's a really important point.
It takes the empathy piece of the budget
and it's, I mean, it's similar to NASA, right?
In a way where like when Elon found a way
to get a rocket profitable,
the cost of a payload went down by like a thousandth,
you know, to like a thousandth of what it was before.
And that's, I think that's what we need to focus on finding.
And that's why we're all Bitcoin maxis
because if you fix the money, you fix the world.
And to me, tuberculosis becomes a thing of the past
when you're in a Bitcoin society, right?
Bitcoin-based society, because, you know,
because it becomes a thing that's competitive
and it becomes a thing that's mutually beneficial.
So yeah, I don't know that it, yeah.
We could go deep on where all the money went with USAID,
but to me, it's just not,
it's the least surprising thing in the world.
It's empathy leading to theft, like you said.
I got a spicy take on that just to just spice things up.
You're talking about masculinity and femininity.
You know, it seems to generally speaking
be more of a feminine trait to say,
hey, I'm going to give you everything
and more of a masculine trait to say,
hey, I need to teach you how to provide this for yourself.
And, you know, I think there's another knock-on effect here,
which is to your point,
what is America's role in the world?
Is it to provide everything to everybody?
No, it shouldn't be.
It should be to help provide a structure
such that people can provide for themselves.
And I think this ties into a fiat world very, very well,
because if we could provide everything to everybody,
maybe we should, but we can't
because the money doesn't exist, right?
And this is where we departed reality.
It's like, if we could completely cure tuberculosis
and malaria and AIDS, maybe we should do that.
But we actually don't have the resources
and the capabilities to do that.
We're just pretending that we do by printing money.
And that's where I think it's a really pernicious evil.
It's like, yeah, I'd love to be able
to solve all of human suffering.
That'd be amazing, but we can't.
So we have to make hard decisions
with the resources that we actually have.
And when we look at USAID,
were we using the money that we actually had
to fix the ills of the world?
No, not at all.
We weren't doing that at all.
We were literally inventing the value out of nothing
and impoverishing our own people,
based around this kind of lofty ideal
that didn't work at all.
So taking all of this in stride, Corey,
I'm curious about how do you perceive this going forward?
What are actionable things that people can do,
that I can do, that you can do,
that actually mitigate what's coming?
Because there's gonna be the pushback that's coming
that evil doesn't wanna give up its power, et cetera.
And it's just gonna restart all over again,
next election cycle, and blah, blah, blah,
and never is it actually gonna be solved.
It's a big deal right now,
but in six months, it's gonna be less of a big deal.
Next election cycle, all the people
who are disenfranchised by this are gonna reorganize,
and they're gonna be like,
no, we want all this stuff back.
We want the money printer.
We want all the free money again.
We want to not have to work and actually solve problems.
What do you see as a solution to that?
That's not just like big picture Bitcoin,
because we know that that's the ultimate solution,
but practically, and also strategically,
how do you go forward?
Yeah, so I know you want the macroeconomic answer,
but my answer is as micro as it possibly gets,
which is every person has their sphere of responsibility.
And the only responsibility that I have
over the federal government is a vote every four years.
That's it, you know?
And the only responsibility that I have over the poor
is the poor that are brought into my life, right?
The needy that are brought into my life.
And I think that's like when Jesus says
the poor will always be with you,
I think that's really prescient, right?
He had this vision for the future
where even as economic tides rise,
there will still be the bottom 10% of the population
that is poor and that is sick and that is needy
and that cannot provide for themselves.
So he wants the productive people, right?
When he speaks to the rich, he says, be generous.
He doesn't say, don't be rich.
He says, be generous, right?
That to me is the responsibility,
especially if we're Bitcoin maximalists
and we're over the next couple of years
finding ourselves in tremendous wealth.
It's like, that to me is the only responsibility, you know?
And I think there's an interesting conversation
and a fun conversation to be had
about where we think things go.
But I'm talking about like the charge on a man
or the charge on a person in their sphere of responsibility.
That's all our responsibility has ever been,
no matter what the political conversation has been,
is to care for the poor and to care for the sick
and to care for the needy, the widows and the orphans, right?
And there is no government policy
that will ever change that responsibility in my mind.
And that's the thing about evil,
which says, I will take care of you.
You don't have to take care of yourself, I will do it.
But of course that's a lie.
We were in my men's Bible study last night.
We were talking about the fact
that the church has become a cruise ship when,
and that's kind of like the colloquial church,
like the mission of kind of like churches,
where the church and the commission from Christ
and just in general was a battleship.
And I think it's a very interesting thought experiment
to kind of walk through Bitcoin and money.
And that same thing is like economies
kind of became a cruise ship,
kind of became this serve me type thing
where it's like, okay, cool.
10% of the people on that object
are doing 100% of the work,
which is exactly what we see now,
where in actuality,
the way a properly functioning economy should be
is like a battleship.
Everybody has a battle station that they go to,
whether you're a janitor or you're, you know,
freaking loading the guns and making stuff happen.
You have a purpose, you have a task
and you're not just freeloading.
And I think it's really interesting kind of shifting us
and this USAID thing kind of coming down
and removing the cruise ship mindset
that has kind of permeated culture.
Reminds me of something,
you were early on when you were talking, Corey,
the thought propped up for me,
which is that this has always been a battle of ideas.
All of this is a war of ideas.
And we're bringing that battle into the physical realm,
literally and metaphorically.
But at the end of the day,
all of this comes down to who has the best idea
and what is the outcome you want
from the idea that you believe in?
You know, and kind of to the point of USAID
and the propaganda machine like that,
they've been fighting this idea battle for a long time
and they've been funding the idea battle
and it's all propaganda
and that's where they put a lot of this funding
because they know what the actual war is.
And, you know, I think really, really understanding
the ideas that you're representing,
whether it's Christianity or otherwise,
and knowing that that's where the fight really has to be.
I think that's important, you know,
and that comes down to media, you know,
that comes down to how you propagate that message.
You know, and they stole the money to do it
because it's a bad idea.
They couldn't get the money organically,
they had to steal it in order to propagate that idea.
Because it's literally an evil, like purely evil idea.
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
And like the truth is always,
the truth is always slowly,
the truth is always behind the lie, you know,
but it's just a glacier and it's more powerful
and over time it wins.
But, you know, maybe we can close the gap a little bit.
I was listening to Bill Murray on Rogan,
I don't know if you guys caught that.
And Rogan was trying to explain how basically
these government programs that are meant to help people
end up incentivizing the thing
that they're supposed to fix.
Like we were talking about homelessness earlier
and they were specifically talking about homelessness
in California.
And Bill Murray was like not understanding him
and he was saying, you think they want homelessness?
Like there's good people within these organizations
that are there to help, you know, people who are homeless.
He's like, yeah, but by it existing,
money gets put into the system.
And the thing that Rogan was missing
and what you're talking about, the evil aspect
is there are lots of good people
who wanna solve these problems,
but over time, very evil people have gotten themselves
into the position where they're kind of at the top level
of these organizations.
And governments, although local governments
would probably argue that this is not true,
but they essentially have infinite money
because the people who are printing the money
can just assign budgets to them as,
I mean, use your imagination how big they could possibly be.
And so if these problems were fixed,
then that money goes away
because it's not necessary anymore.
So they're literally incentivized
to keep these problems bad so that money keeps getting put in
and then evil people at the top of these organizations
basically find ways, whether it's giving a contract
to a friend, like in my neighborhood,
we have a tiny home village,
which is just a bunch of tough sheds that they let,
you know, people who are drug addicts live in.
And somebody got the contract for that
to build that tiny home.
Somebody gets a monthly budget
for how much money is put into that.
And so if they just spend 1% of it to keep this thing going,
have people and have demand,
have the homeless people swarming around the neighborhood,
then really bad people get to continue
just taking money off the top of that thing forever.
And so, you know, there's like,
and there's, it's like hilarious
because I know the place you're talking about,
and there's literally a tent city,
like just right up the street.
Like right up the street, there's still a tent city.
It's like, come on guys.
This is exactly that story of British empire in India.
I forget.
Some, you know, back in the day,
and they were like, oh, we got this problem with snakes.
So we'll just pay everybody for every snake they give us.
And so these people just started breeding
these super poisonous snakes.
Yeah.
And the problem got a hundred times worse.
But that's actually a great example because COVID, right?
Like COVID is a direct response to contagion research.
That's literally what it is.
COVID was a systemic response to a system
that was funding gain of function research.
And so if you're funding gain of function research,
you're obviously going to go try and find
the biggest problem you can find, which is,
hey, can we find a disease that'll kill everyone?
And it's like, oh yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
They didn't stop to think,
like Elon has a video that he, you know,
he went through and he's like,
the biggest problem an engineer has
is solving the problem that they don't need to solve.
And so that's the issue is it's like,
you get caught up in the system, which is,
hey, gain of function research,
people will give me money to do that.
And you don't stop to think, should I be doing this?
This is actually a good idea.
And it's great when my camera freezes.
Always love it when I'm in that way.
You're going, you're good.
He ponders out though.
So Corey was saying that, you know,
eventually one day as Bitcoin maximalists,
we're going to have a bunch of money
that we're going to be able to deploy.
I don't own any Bitcoin.
So I'm hoping one day to get to that club, but.
So these governments, these agencies,
which by the way, USAID,
I'm so glad you guys are calling that, not USAID,
because it is an agency is the agency for it.
Well, it was the agency for international development.
And I would encourage anybody listening to this.
Cause I did this right as we started
to go in the way back machine and put in a USAID.
It's USAID.gov slash who we are in the USAID history.
So you can read about it, what it actually was.
For a long time, these agencies had infinite money
and they're incentivized to keep all the problems
in the world, all the poverty in the world,
as bad as it can possibly be.
So the money gets piled in and yeah,
you grab a few people who actually want to try
and solve these problems and you put them
in like lower level positions.
And then you have however many tens of thousands
of people had million dollar salaries in the DC area
that just get to keep their lifestyle going.
Well, at some point as Bitcoin takes over
as the monetary system,
as hyper Bitcoinization takes over,
those, all these governments,
they're not gonna have infinite money anymore.
When that bubble bursts, it's gonna burst.
And then it's gonna be on the individual.
And like Corey was saying,
we can't solve all the world's problems.
We can only solve the problems
that are within our individual sphere,
within our families, within our own lives.
And at that point, you will need to solve problems yourself.
Like right now, if there's like a crazy homeless person
wandering my neighborhood,
like I can't just go out and do something about that really
because there are all of these,
there's all these organizations,
there's the police, et cetera.
And I'm not allowed to go and just, I mean,
I could do something about it, I guess,
but you're really not supposed to.
At some point, there is going to be nobody
to do anything about the stuff that's happening.
And it is going to be up to us to run our own lives
and solve our own problems.
And that's, it's gonna be a great thing.
It's kind of the way that it really should be.
And Bitcoin is going to drive that.
Yeah, and yeah, 100%.
Do you guys think-
I mean, it's the way it was before central banking, right?
It's the way it was for the vast, vast,
vast majority of human history.
And we've forgotten in the past 120 years
since we've been outsourcing that responsibility.
And I think it's honestly, genuinely,
just because it felt easier.
It's nicer for someone else to take care of that
than for me to take care of that.
And that to me is like the central, Zach,
war of ideas that you were talking about.
Is it personal responsibility
or is it collective responsibility?
And if it's collective responsibility,
and I don't even have to trust someone
that I know to take care of it.
I understand collective responsibility
when you're in community with people.
There's someone who's really good at security.
I want that person at my church.
I want that person in charge of security
because I'm not great at security, right?
And I'm not checking exits when I go in,
but there's an ex-military guy there.
I feel better that he's there, right?
And I also feel better that the pastor
is a really good pastor.
You know, whatever those things,
we all serve our community in our own ways,
but we've outsourced all of those things
to people that we don't know at all.
And they've taken that empathy
and added an enormous amount of money and stolen it.
Do you guys-
I wonder-
Go ahead, J.D.
It's kind of a question of the same thing though,
but do you think we will ever reach escape velocity
from the fiat system?
Like, it's a black hole
and it's a very comfortable black hole,
but do you think we will ever get to proper escape velocity?
Like, can Bitcoin and just kind of an Austrian-style
philosophy ever kind of come back about,
or do you think we're too far down that path?
I think we're four or five generations out at the earliest.
You know, we always joke about how early we are.
Like, I think we're earlier
than any of us could possibly fathom.
Yeah, that's likely.
You know, it takes, you know,
I think of it in generational terms
because really you have these like 10-year windows
where the newborn's brains are being wired
into a particular system.
And, you know, it's going to be a few rewirings
of society down the line,
which I think three, four, five generations.
Kind of tying that,
one of the things I'll say tying into that though, JD,
is that, you know,
there's, the way that I see it right now
is that Bitcoin needs the dollar,
the dollar needs Bitcoin.
I've said this before,
but Bitcoin is going to allow for the propagation
of more fiat, I think,
than any of us could possibly imagine.
And it'll be somewhat tempered.
You know, it's not going to be
the ultimate fiat printing extravaganza,
but as people start to use Bitcoin to borrow against,
you know, these are two systems
that are going to kind of use each other.
And I think that that system's going to take quite a while
to fully unwind before the dollar,
before, you know, the dollar supernovas and just dies
or Bitcoin just absorbs it all and people just abandon it.
But in the interim,
we're still in this world where a bunch of people
who have a bunch of money
are going to be able to create more money,
more dollars against the Bitcoin that they already have.
So I guess the question to you guys is,
do we see that as being positive or negative?
I guess it depends on who owns all the Bitcoin
and what their mentality is.
But, you know, you could be, you know,
worth four or $5 billion right now,
not buy Bitcoin until it's a million or $2 million
and still have more Bitcoin than everybody else.
Yeah.
You know?
Do you...
I think to your question directly is,
is it more likely that we escape fiat
or more likely that we see the inevitable heat death
of the universe because of nuclear war?
No, I don't.
I think we escape fiat.
Yeah.
I think it's more likely we escape fiat.
Yeah.
There are other things that can happen in between too.
I mean, the US dollar could lose its reserve status.
Another currency could just become the reserve currency
because, I don't know,
that country just becomes super powerful
or a bunch of countries can get together
and create some other currency
or some central bank digital currency.
And Bitcoin still exists,
but everybody's starting to use this other thing.
And that can go on for a really long time too.
But right now, you know,
just in the time that we've been in,
well, I guess we've been interacting with Bitcoin
really since the beginning,
since all of us were probably like in our late 20s
to early 30s when Bitcoin was even created.
But right now we're seeing the price
basically like take a stair step upward.
And there's a good chance that for us
that'll keep happening.
So even though hyper-Bitcoinization is going to take place,
if we have a bunch of Bitcoin and if we hold onto it,
and if we keep having income in dollars,
we're probably just gonna generally get wealthy
way before there's anything close to hyper-Bitcoinization.
We'll keep having these news events and these crashes.
And like, it's crazy as it sounds,
it's very possible that for the rest of our lives,
our activity in Bitcoin is going to pretty much
follow a similar trajectory that it's taken so far,
where it's like, yeah, there's big dips,
there's bear markets,
but generally our net worth is just steadily increasing.
But we're not like ruling the world
or getting citadels in our lifetimes, most likely.
Yeah, I think a fair, a few people will, right?
There's gonna be, there's always a handful of people
who've got that accumulated at the top.
And they'll be able to do that.
But I do think that-
Speaking of North Korea.
I do think that, I think that peak centralization
for humanity was post-World War II.
I think, let's call it 47 to now, roughly,
or maybe like when that fucking planes
took off from Afghanistan.
I think that marked the end of the post-World War II paradigm.
I think that peak human centralization is totally done.
And it's gonna be, it's gonna go in waves.
It's not gonna be linear.
It's not gonna be all at once.
But I think that we're on a permanent downtrend
into a more decentralized planet
from a power structure perspective.
What does that look like?
And Bandar, I want, actually, I want your take on this,
but walk me out 50, 100 years.
What does that look like?
Like, what is peak Bitcoin, you know, Austrian worldview?
What does it look like in a peak, in peak Bitcoin world?
Or what does the transition look like?
I think, let's start with peak.
Because, and why I think peak is interesting
is because people are really bad at seeing things
unless they're shown it.
It's the whole Steve Jobs thing.
They're like, don't tell people,
don't tell somebody what you're gonna make them,
just show it to them.
And so I think that's what I'm very curious to see
is what do you think the peak is?
Like, what does it look like to send your kids to school?
Do you send your kids to school?
Like, what does security look like?
What do nation states look like?
Like, you know, some of the stuff
that's covered in The Sovereign Individual,
you know, like Snow Crash is a dystopian version of that.
Mandibles is a dystopian version of that.
Like, what do you think this kind of looks like
from your perspective?
Because you're pretty rose colored glasses, I'd say,
and I'm pretty like the glass with a hole in the bottom.
I think, this might sound weird,
but I think it looks a lot like the jungle, you know?
I think it turns into a very beautiful,
very integrated, very open system
that like in the micro can be somewhat dangerous,
but in the macro, it's a very, very healthy ecosystem.
You know, I think that we're not going to continue
to outsource power to large institutions,
sovereigns or corporations or whatever.
I think that we become much more, we become much smaller,
we become much more micro,
we become much more community oriented.
I think that you start to see subcultures start to flourish
and get created and survive.
You know, one of the things about the fiat world we're in
is that, you know, everything sort of gets washed out
to being the exact same,
but I think we end up seeing just much, much,
much more vibrant, open planet.
I think travel becomes, I think travel explodes.
I think that we're able to kind of go in and out
of wherever we want in the world.
I think there will be certain areas that are very closed off
that'll be very closed cultures,
that'll be very open cultures.
But I think that people will generally respect
those ideas and boundaries.
I think that we're, I think that we're on the precipice
of like just an explosion of, you know,
color and vibrancy, for lack of a better descriptor.
Well, an explosion of,
and I think the technical term is going to be beauty.
It's going to be an explosion of beauty.
And Corey, you've talked about this before.
Expression, yep.
Yeah, we have our entire world,
we've done everything to cut the beauty out
of our entire world,
because beauty is not going to pay the rent.
Beauty is not going to,
what's the yield on beauty and blah, blah, blah.
It's just, it's just gone.
And you look at the architecture, you look at the art,
you look at the way people treat each other,
you look at the way they treat themselves.
It's just, there's no beauty.
And I think that all of that's coming back
because beauty and decentralization,
you can't plan beauty, right?
Like you can't just top down everybody,
this is what beauty is going to be and what it looks like.
Yeah, money is the ultimate form of expression.
There's no better way,
there's no better tool to express yourself.
And when the tool is deadened,
when the tool is not very sharp
or you can't really use it very well,
you can't express yourself.
But when people have a money that can't be debased
or can't be taxed before it's even entered their wallet,
human beings will be able to express
their massive diverse range of ideas
and beliefs.
And so I think Bitcoin is going to help propagate
expression to a level that we haven't seen
or we did see back in the day,
but none of us have any idea what that even looked like.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I'd say like, what are humans preloaded with
when they're born, right?
And what is nature versus nurture?
And this is where I look at the arc of the church
and I look at the arc of human history
as it's kind of assaulted Christianity.
And there've been many heresies that have attacked it.
But the reason I bring that up
is the way that Catholics and Protestants
and Orthodox alike talk about the eternal things
are beauty, goodness, and truth
that keep running through the core of humanity.
And we divert from those things because we're human.
Each of us do that in our own lives
that we do it as a community, we do it as a society,
we do it as a world.
We divert from those things.
We get away from truth and beauty and goodness
to our own peril, but those things necessarily die, right?
If you divert from those things,
if you divert from the eternal truths
of the human experience,
those things tend toward their own death.
So I don't know exactly what it looks like,
but from a macro perspective,
if you depart from beauty,
whatever that diversion is will tend toward its own death.
We don't have to kill it.
We don't even have to, we don't have to do anything for it.
It will kill itself.
And then it will return to beauty in a new way
that hasn't been revealed yet.
And so that's what I look at.
And I think Bitcoin plays a role in that.
I think it's a subservient role to the role of God,
obviously, but I think it plays an important role
because I think fiat is, like you said, Vandor,
is the number one most diversion from beauty
we've ever seen in human history.
I think central banking and the printing of money
has diverted us from beauty more than we've ever seen.
And it will tend to its own death
and then recenter around truth and goodness and beauty.
And I think that's just the way of the world, right?
Whatever role each of us play in that,
we're accountable to ourselves,
but I don't see any other way that it can possibly go.
Yeah, I mean, the dollar has lost 99% of its value
over a hundred years.
So it's a very impermanent, very short-term thing,
whereas Bitcoin has the potential to be intergenerational.
And so theoretically, people will make things beautiful
and they'll make things to last
because you have a money that is going to last generations.
Right now, your money doesn't even last your own lifetime.
So you just have to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
Why would you spend any more than you have to
to build something that's gonna last?
You just have to get the money out of your hands quickly
and just get something with it.
Yeah, yeah, the incentive of,
you know, from a practical perspective, right?
Like let's say fiat didn't exist, Bitcoin exists,
and we allow for a hyper-deflationary economy
where prices are allowed to fall to their,
as Jeff Booth would say, marginal cost of production.
If you're not out, you know, essentially slaving away
40, 50, 60 hours a week, you know,
worried about subsistence,
and we allow for the market to do its thing
and prices to fall dramatically,
people can spend much, much more time in their life
focused on building things that are beautiful
because they're not focused on, you know,
oh, eggs just went up to $16 this week or whatever.
So from a practical perspective
and a deflationary perspective,
it frees up so much more time
by allowing the market to do its thing.
Yeah, exactly, yep.
Do you guys think-
Yeah, I totally agree.
If you look forward at your life and you think about,
oh, sorry, go ahead, JD.
Do you think an SBR, Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,
would, because I'm just looking right here,
the value of a U.S. dollar
before the removal of the gold standard in 1971
was fixed at 20 U.S. dollar,
20.67 U.S. dollars per troy ounce of gold.
And then it was changed to $35 in 1933.
And I'm using that as an example
because we're talking about things that people made
and it's like, I still have people I know
who have like the fridge from the 50s, right?
And that fridge from the 50s is still fricking kicking
and doing way better than most of these fridges
that were made in like 2025.
Do you think that, you know,
I guess that's a two-part question,
was part of this an understanding
or rather a like subliminal understanding of value?
Because I'm going to say most people
just kind of interacted with money.
They probably didn't have like a deep care or desire for it.
But like, do you think a lot of it
was a subliminal understanding of value slash money?
And do you think an SBR will bring that back?
I got, I'm not sold on the government
owning a shitload of Bitcoin
as solving much practicality wise.
I think it's necessary to inflate the value of Bitcoin.
But it's kind of like with Bukele, you know,
like, you know, that's all cool
and sounds great and whatever,
but like you still have a logical,
meaning like a verbal rather than physical,
you know, a legal document that says
somebody has to use it this way or do it this way.
And that's still, we still,
that's still a governmental problem.
That's still a problem of, you know,
a bunch of lawyers sitting around arguing about shit
rather than being in the real physical world doing things.
At $5,000 an hour.
Yeah, I mean, I'm open to it,
but I'm just not sure that the government's owning Bitcoin
really improves anything that we're talking about
significantly, you know, I don't know.
Yeah, it creates like a grab from a bunch of governments
because if the US were to announce it,
then all these other governments also have to do it,
which just makes crazy scarcity
and it makes individual wealth go up.
And which would, for us,
it would give all of us a lot more time.
All of a sudden,
because if there is an actual strategic Bitcoin reserve
announced, the price of Bitcoin is going to,
is going to moon like crazy.
It's going to go to a million dollars.
All of a sudden,
if we have any significant portion of Bitcoin,
it's going to give us a little bit of breathing room
to have the time to do some things that we want.
But the US government having Bitcoin doesn't,
it just takes it off the table.
It just makes scarcity.
It doesn't really do, in my opinion,
it doesn't really do anything else for Bitcoin adoption.
It just makes the value go up.
One thing it does do is that it takes all the people
who are essentially statists.
It takes them and says, no, no, no,
you can buy Bitcoin now because the state has bought Bitcoin.
It like gives Bitcoin a new sense of legitimacy
to all the people who are totalitarian statists
who literally can't think and NPC, et cetera.
So there is that side of it.
But again, how much is that going to actually,
these people like literally can't think.
So how much are they going to go through with this?
Yeah.
Honestly, in the short term, I think it's almost nothing.
I think in the longterm,
when you start pricing the things
that government is spending money on in terms of Bitcoin
and it's on their own balance sheet,
I think that argument gets a lot stronger over time, right?
Like if you look at the price of social security in dollars
and then you look at it in price of Bitcoin
against the strategic Bitcoin reserve
and we've had the strategic Bitcoin reserve for eight years
then you start to see,
then normies and statists like Bondar was saying,
normies start to see it, right?
They start to see like what I saw with real estate.
When I sold my real estate portfolio and bought Bitcoin,
it was, I saw the value of my real estate
just falling against Bitcoin.
And I was like, why would I hold this?
And I think that could start to happen
for more normal people.
But again, I think that's minimum a 10 year timeframe
before people would actually start to recognize that
and take it seriously.
Yeah.
Okay, not to derail things,
but can I hear about that just real quick?
I've never heard you talk about that before.
What does it feel like to sell real estate,
this physical thing that is widely considered
like the most conservative investment,
the most, you know, you don't have to worry about it.
It's just gonna go up forever.
You're gonna have cashflow.
What's it like to go from that to Bitcoin for you?
I mean, have you ever had like everyone meaningful
in your life disagree with you on a point
that you were convinced was right?
Yeah.
It's kind of, my parents were like, are you serious?
Cause you know, but again,
it's just like strength of conviction, right?
It was just like, I could carry this on.
I could keep this going, but in five years,
you know, what's the point?
You know, and this, you know, this one thing
takes management, it takes time, it takes energy,
and it will probably continue to make,
you know, five to 8% a year,
but in a higher interest rate environment, why?
You know, that I was already pretty, you know,
I was pretty orange pilled by that point.
I was pretty into Bitcoin at that point.
So to me, it was a pretty, it was a pretty obvious decision.
The only real opposition was from people
who still think in a complete fiat mindset,
and that honestly kind of made it easier.
Like every opposition I had to it,
you know, people that was in my life
that I was asking about it.
Whenever the response to the argument for what I want to do
has nothing to do with the argument,
it's a pretty good indication
you're going in a good direction.
Do you think it's more important to get people on board
with the idea of adding value
or more important to get them on to a Bitcoin standard?
I think that's, I think that's going to be a,
there's always going to be a particular percentage
of the population that are productive.
You know, like it's like Pareto principle, it's like 80-20.
There's always just a particular amount of people
who are sort of driven to be productive naturally.
I think you've got to get those people on board.
There's a small percentage of people
that are the most important to get on board.
You can't focus on everybody.
You got to focus on the people that move the needle.
And I think, you know,
a lot of those people have started to figure it out.
The kind of entrepreneurial types,
the people who try to figure that stuff out
sooner rather than later,
are kind of on board and continue to get on board.
So if we have to attack a particular cohort,
I think it's the people who are just sort of naturally
want to be productive anyway.
Because you're not going to,
it's really, really challenging to teach somebody
something that appears to me, at least,
to be sort of inherited or given or innate.
Or on the, even push that further,
it's extremely hard to teach somebody something new
when their paycheck is predicated on them
never learning that thing.
Or the famous Upton Sinclair quote, of course.
Do you, that's actually an interesting thought.
I just, I'm curious the take on this.
If paychecks overnight switched to Bitcoin,
and you're getting paid in deposits of sats,
in the same way, like secure taxes
are taken immediately out of your paycheck,
do you think that would be enough to move the needle
to get people onto a Bitcoin standard overnight?
Okay, so if that happens, I can tell you right now,
so many people make such bad financial decisions
and are bad investors,
that the second that the price dipped,
the people that have massive credit card debt
and want to keep increasing their lifestyles
are going to freak out and lose their minds,
which is probably the majority of Americans right now.
And then you're going to have a tiny little segment.
It's like, whoa, the price just dipped.
I just got a ton more Bitcoin out of this.
And so that's kind of where we are right now.
It's like, you know,
only really the financially responsible
are the people that can handle
dollar cost averaging Bitcoin right now.
JD, I think that there's an underlying assumption
with the question that says,
that's kind of like, it's asking the question,
is there an actual,
is there a way that we can just like jumpstart this?
Like, let's go, like actually move the needle on this.
And as much as I would love there to be that thing,
I don't know that there is that thing
or that it could exist.
I think that having conversations
just talking, going to meetups,
like actually sussing out ideas,
like providing good arguments, refuting bad arguments.
I think like, it's like, this is a philosophical change.
It's a philosophical retooling
of everything you've been learned,
everything you've learned over your life.
So like, how does one expect someone to figure that out
or to go through that process?
It's not easy.
I think behavior is always more important than talking.
And if you go out and you live your life
and you're productive and you're kind
and you're generous and you're successful,
the people who are interested in knowing how that works
will figure it out and they will ask you
and they will learn from you.
Talk is cheap.
And the second you start getting into arguments
with people about how things are,
they start to defend a position
that may not even be to their benefit.
So I think that behavior is far and away
the most important way to convince people of anything.
Do you, I mean, I'm going to play devil's avocado on this.
It's a hell of an avocado, dude.
Are we destined for a world where the Bitcoiners
have to circle the wagons around the Bitcoiners
and keep everybody else out?
Is there a world where we have to?
Yeah.
Why?
Well, $5 wrench attacks and jealousy.
Like will innate human sin be the bottleneck
in this war we're fighting?
Not that, not that innate human sin.
I think much of the stuff that we're dealing with today
kind of just has a slow exit, like a $5 wrench attack.
I mean, yeah, we're still going to see $5 wrench attacks.
Yeah, we're still going to see physical violence
and all that stuff.
But at some point people are going to realize
that it's just the returns on it are just so low.
Like because Bitcoin fundamentally is information
and you can't just like take the gold bar
and it's mine now, right?
Like you just can't do that with Bitcoin
if it's set up and stored correctly.
So that really does impact all of this stuff.
Now there's going to be other stuff later on down the line.
If all of those are sins of self-indulgence
or violence, me here now, I get what I want, sorry.
All of that is self-indulgence.
In the future, the Bitcoin denominated future,
we're going to have all sorts of self-righteousness problems
like people who always do the right thing and have no mercy.
Like that is going to be a big problem.
Especially outside of Christian circles.
I think the only way that happens JD
is if we continue down the path we're going,
which is a fiat path and you continue to see a massive,
I think the world that you're talking about
absolutely happens without Bitcoin.
For sure.
We're already seeing signs of that.
You know, in LA you can now, you know,
rich people are rolling around with armed security
that you can order up on an app.
Like it's bonkers.
But that's a function of a whole class of people
who have been left behind by a system
that has made their life far too difficult and expensive.
And so they now see that kind of behavior
as a better risk reward.
In a Bitcoin world, as prices fall,
that's not going to be, you know,
in the ideal version of it,
that's not going to be the reality we live in.
People are going to be mostly taken care of.
To Corey's point, there's always going to be a bottom 10%,
but, you know.
Collaboration and conversation will be huge.
Everyone will be like, wait,
how can we get on the same page and organize?
So we're going to have better returns
if we all organize and try and figure stuff out.
As opposed to a fiat denominator world,
which says, wait a second, are you trying to take my,
like, hey, these are my resources.
I'm trying to protect these.
All my resources, I'm losing value all the time, right?
It's just, it's a totally different mindset.
Scarcity and abundance, yeah.
And I don't, honestly, man,
the overwhelming majority of people
don't give a flying fuck about wielding monetary energy
or building a fucking giant business.
They just want to live their life.
They want to raise their kids.
They want to feel loved and they want to be loved.
Leave me alone.
Yeah, you know, straight up.
Goodbye, life.
You take care of that cohort of people
by just letting the free market do what it does.
And, you know, I don't, I don't,
I don't see that happening in some large degree.
But if we continue down the fiat path,
we're continuing down,
the violence will increase 100%.
I want to ask one question really quick.
Can I say something real quick, J.D.?
Oh, go ahead.
It just, it kind of bums me out to think about,
in order for Bitcoin to really succeed and go mainstream,
then what is now a Bitcoiner
kind of won't be a thing anymore.
Like, we still, like, this grouping of people still exist
and we'll find each other and everything,
but there will come a day
when a Bitcoiner is not really a thing anymore
because Bitcoin's gone mainstream
and everybody's just using Bitcoin
and people, no matter what they believe,
just have it and use it and are benefiting from it.
Because right now you say the term Bitcoiner
and you're talking about a personal philosophy
and a type of person, a personality type.
It's like, you say Bitcoiner,
I kind of know what you're talking about, just as it is.
But as Bitcoin becomes more mainstream and more successful,
that thing's going to go away.
It just kind of bums me out.
How are you seeing-
Well, it's beginning to become normative.
Like, just as a USD-er or a fiat, like Maxi today,
that's just normative culture.
Right.
And it's-
And I actually totally agree with that.
And it's the same thing with, like, Betamax, right?
It's like, you don't talk about VHSs anymore.
We don't talk about CD players.
You just, you don't talk about MP3 players.
You just talk about music.
You talk about the greater thing of, like,
you know, what are you looking for?
I'm looking for something to be entertained with.
That's music.
What are you looking for?
I'm not looking for, you know,
I'm looking for my class of people.
So the Bitcoiners will be the philosophers,
the monetary philosophers,
as people were thinking about that.
But Corey, I'm very curious in the last bit here,
like, how do you see,
because now you're an American in a foreign country,
and I would say, you know, a lot of people don't realize,
but Italy is a third world country.
Like, if you are not aware of anything outside
of the tourist centers,
you're pretty blinded to how rough it really is over there.
And I'm very curious, you know,
what your experience has been over the past little while.
Do you think this will break through?
You know, do you think it's possible
in a non-Western philosophical worldview
to kind of, you know, be infiltrated
with the mind virus that is Bitcoin?
Well, I would say, JD,
you and I went to a third world country last year,
and Italy is not a third world country.
It has its challenges,
but they've got running water and concrete floors,
so, well, marble floors, most of them.
Second world.
But I hear what you're saying.
And I would say that the penetration of Bitcoin
into these other spheres is very, very low
from my experience so far.
And it's interesting because when you and I were in Africa,
we were presented every day with people
who desperately need it right now.
And I think Italy needs it too,
but they need it a lot less than the people
that we saw in Togo and Uganda and South Africa.
And I think that kind of groundswell adoption of it,
or what was Togo's inflation rate?
30% a year or something, insane, right?
The Central African franc is one of the biggest injustices
in the world that's never talked about ever.
Those people need it immediately.
Like they need it today.
And in Italy, you still have the Euro.
You have an oppressive government with extremely high taxes,
an enormous amount of bureaucratic red tape.
It's crazy hard to start a business,
but life's still pretty okay.
They're still eating very well
and they're surrounded by beauty and history and all of that.
So I think it'll be...
I'm fascinated to see how it plays out
because I think there will be more places like El Salvador.
I think Argentina is on the way for whatever blips
and whatever Malay is doing with his crypto nonsense,
but it's so disappointing, so disappointing.
But I do think that we all adopted Bitcoin
and found it fascinating and interesting in the future
out of abstract thought and philosophy.
And most people in the world don't get to hang out
with their friends eating steaks and smoking cigars
and talking about abstract thought and philosophy.
That is an unbelievably first world position, right?
That is a level of wealth.
Like that experience is a level of wealth
that most human beings have never known.
And I think, what I hope anyway,
is that the global poor recognize this,
that there is a way out of this
and desperately want it and adopt it because it's necessary.
And we see more things like Ukalian, right?
And coming through the side door.
And I think if there's gonna be widespread Bitcoin adoption,
it'll be because those people recognize it
as the deliverance from poverty
that has been unavailable to them for basically forever.
We're about to be talking about that a lot more
because these countries like Suriname is one of them.
I forget, she follows my ex, I can't remember her name is.
She's running to be president of that country.
A lot of these tiny third world countries
that don't have access to whatever the eight
mainstream currencies of the world are that aren't,
they all inflate, but they don't inflate as bad
as the Central African franc.
Those people are gonna start using Bitcoin.
They're gonna have Bitcoin.
They're gonna see their wealth increasing
literally faster than people in Italy.
And we're going to have a time of massive development
in countries like we just saw in El Salvador.
There's gonna be like 50 countries like El Salvador
over the next 10, 15 years
that all of a sudden are put on the map
and start becoming more like first world nations
because of Bitcoin.
So while actual hyper-Bitcoinization
may not happen for generations,
it kind of will be happening on a smaller scale
in those third world countries, which is super exciting.
I wonder, maybe this controversial question,
but I, you know, sticking to the motif
of that we're sort of perpetually engaged
in a war of ideas, will, you know,
there are certain cultures, I think,
that might not be compatible with Bitcoin as an idea.
Now, obviously, you know, money as a tool
is pervasive across cultures,
but I wonder if Bitcoin destroys ideas that don't work.
And by ideas, I mean cultures that don't work.
Like there may well be cultures that are just not,
like it doesn't matter if you propagate it into their,
they're not gonna figure it out from a Western perspective.
I mean, this is what we believe
is a better way to live or whatever.
But I wonder if we'll see, I mean, earlier I was saying
that I think we're gonna see an explosion of new cultures.
I think that's totally possible,
but I wonder if Bitcoin destroys the ones that don't work.
So yes, absolutely.
But I think the interesting key there
is the cultures that don't work under a Bitcoin standard
are mainstream Western culture today,
which is totally fiat culture.
It is a dead end.
It is a death cult, like a literal death cult.
It does not work under a Bitcoin standard.
It does not value beauty.
It does not value humanity.
It does not value human life,
just even absolute basic things.
It's dead.
It will not continue.
And as everyone here, I'm sure will attest,
we're all out to end it.
Like literally part of the reason we're here
is to be like, no, this needs to stop.
This is a death cult and we're done with it.
And that's Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the replacement.
Bitcoin will fix it.
Bitcoin has the whole upside, so.
Bitcoin is the rising tide.
I was saying before that it's a bummer
that the idea of Bitcoiners will kind of go away
because right now the people with those values
become Bitcoiners.
But I will say, as people find Bitcoin
and learn about Bitcoin, they also become that.
And that's that thing that will bring the beauty
back into the world.
It's kind of like as a naturally occurring thing
that happens when you have hard money.
Like if you look at Art Deco in the United States
or even like the arts and crafts movement,
these various like pinnacles of design and building
that were taking place, all those like big projects
that were happening in the early 1900s,
that was because of hard money.
And when we have hard money again,
those things will start to happen again.
So it's like the idea of a Bitcoin will go away,
but the people who are normies right now
will sort of become something closer
to what Bitcoiners are.
It will help them to have a better philosophy of life.
So it's a positive, no matter what.
Do you think Bitcoin is gonna bring back
more Gothic architecture, more Art Deco architecture
or something completely different?
All of the above.
I think the beauty of it is that it's gonna bring back
what the next generation wants to create.
I don't think it's gonna bring back
something that's already been.
I think it'll be the next thing,
that's what those cultures wanted.
And that's one of the beautiful things
about being in Italy, honestly.
You can see these things that were built to last forever,
because it was people that were making things
out of the conviction of a love of God.
And like, let's make a house for God.
Should we make it last for 30 years?
No, let's make it last for 3000 years.
And they're still there.
And they're still like the center of the cities here.
And that's something so foreign to American culture
because we started underwriting buildings for 30 years.
So you literally spent money
as if it was gonna last for 30 years.
That's insanity.
That's crazy.
That's anti-human.
That's anti-beauty.
That's anti-everything.
I love the idea that like,
if I have a son and he grows up,
he's not dealing with any of this.
That's my encouragement, Anton,
is like, I hope he never has a conversation like this.
If I have a son who grows up to my age,
I hope he's dealing with the next problem
that the next generation has,
and we've already solved this one.
That would be amazing.
We should be trying to work ourselves
out of a job in that way.
So I think that,
I actually kind of see a trajectory backward
because for the last 100 years,
we've basically, you know,
we peaked at the 1900s in terms of art,
or 1900, rather,
in terms of art and architecture and the rest of it.
And then, you know,
with the Federal Reserve and everything else,
it's just kind of gone down.
But you look around and everyone's like,
oh yeah, it was beautiful.
Back in the 50s, it was beautiful.
Back in the 90s,
when, oh, America was flourishing,
had a total aesthetic in the 90s,
like, I'm gonna go and do that.
And I think what's gonna happen is that like,
all of the real terrible things
are just gonna be, you know,
torn down and redone for the 50s,
or for, oh, it's like a,
it's a post-war,
we wanted to go for a post-war thing, the 40s.
Oh, we really wanted to do the arts and crafts thing,
the 30s.
But then what's gonna happen is,
Corey, is exactly what you're saying.
People are gonna go back to those things
and then they're gonna get in those patterns again.
And then it's gonna start accelerating
towards new innovation, new art,
new architecture, new trends, new culture.
And that's-
Yeah, humans will do what they do best.
We have to reconnect to what we lost
before we can launch forward.
Yeah, yeah, we'll do what we do best,
which is continuously blend ideas
to create new things,
take two old things to create a new thing.
I think it's gonna be dope, personally.
Oh, yeah.
Do you, Bondor, wanna give us the final question
you want us to kind of go around the horn
and answer as we wrap it up?
Might have to think of a question first.
Do you have one, J.D.?
I do have one.
Maybe to just kind of go with that is like,
what is the thing you want to see built
on a Bitcoin standard?
What is this piece of art that you hope to see?
For me, I've always, the second I became a Bitcoiner,
the first thing I wanted to see was a Bitcoin cathedral.
And I don't mean a cathedral built towards Bitcoin,
but I mean, I want to see,
and I'd love to be a part of the thinking
and the commissioning of a thousand-year cathedral.
It's like this thing, or a hundred-year cathedral,
it's like this thing is going to take 100 years to build
and hopefully last for a thousand.
Like, that's what I would love to see.
It's just, and in my case, it would be as a testament
to Christ and the amazing stuff
that he's kind of done in my life.
But that's what I'd love to see,
is like the return to that and the building of that.
Where it's gonna be, I have no idea,
but I'd love to see that.
For me, I'd say urbanism that's beautiful, vibrant,
safe, and lovely, and beautiful.
Like, just right now, our urbanism is,
you basically graduate high school or college,
you move to an urban city center,
you debauch yourself for the next 10, 15 years of your life,
you finally meet somebody,
and then you guys move to the suburbs,
and that's what urbanism is.
That's what urbanism is.
And really, most of human existence
was you were born in a city,
you lived your entire life in the city,
you got married, had kids in the city,
grew old in the city with your kids just around you
and everyone else around you,
because it's just a vibrant human community.
Every single, like, Corey, every single town in Italy
is predicated on that idea.
There's no, like, oh, I'm gonna drive
to my suburban house 25 miles away to see my kids.
It's like, no, it's like,
I mean, today it's different, of course,
but all these cities were built with that in mind.
I would love to see that come back to fruition.
We talked about Frank Lloyd Wright
on an earlier one of these,
and for me, there's no reason
except for really wealthy people,
there's no reason to design your own home
and make a really, really beautiful structure
for you to live in.
And on a Bitcoin standard,
I think that dream is going to be something
that a lot more people can save towards,
and they can, Frank Lloyd Wright also had this idea
of a thing called the Broadacre City,
which is kind of what you're talking about, too, Bondura,
is like an idea of urbanism.
It's essentially like a blueprint
for what the suburb has become,
except that people's property could produce the food
that they ate, they could run their businesses from it,
and they could have a really, really beautiful home
on their property, and it all was kind of cohesive together.
And in my mind, when we have hard money again
and people can save and think about, like,
a thing that they're going to pass on to the generations,
they're going to build really, really beautiful
and productive homes for themselves,
and they won't be these cookie-cutter developments,
and they won't be, you know, shitty apartment buildings.
They're going to be something closer
to what the ideal of, like, a Frank Lloyd Wright house was.
Are we going around the horn?
Yeah, you go, Corey.
Yeah, I mean, to me, it's beauty generally,
but as it plays out in art,
I want creators looking toward the future
rather than speaking toward the immediate cultural moment,
and that, to me, is the difference
in high-time preference and low-time preference thinking.
And obviously, my interaction is mostly
with writers and directors,
but I want visual art and architects,
like you guys are saying,
and I want filmmakers, obviously.
I want them looking out into the future
and thinking, what is the cultural thing
that I can respond to today
that's going to be responsive in 100 years, right?
I love the Flannery O'Connor quote.
I would rather have one reader in 100 years
than 100 readers today.
I want all creators thinking that way all the time.
You know, I think I want the general incentive
for the artists of our community to be,
what is the thing that lasts?
And that, I think, has been eroded over the past 120 years,
and I think we can get that back
because that's how creators want to think,
and we've prevented them from doing that
with horrendous monetary policy.
Yeah, totally agree.
Totally agree on all fronts.
I'd like to see all of this, for sure.
I think, to your point, Corey,
I agree my focus is primarily on expression,
and I think that there are these,
the context of our time is always unique,
but there's always the thread that we can look to
to get us through the context of our times.
We can look towards the things that are universal and true
from the deepest human perspectives,
and artists occupy this really, really unique
and really, really interesting space
where they have to be masters of both.
They have to be masters of the context of their time
as well as understanding these universal stories
that get humans from 2,000 years ago to today.
So, you know, I mean, that's a shameless plug here,
but that's really, I think,
what I'm trying to do with Indie Hub
is to create a structure that allows for artists
to focus on their artistry and on their craft
and filmmakers to focus on telling stories.
And, you know, I think that those stories
are necessarily contextual and necessarily of the time,
but as long as they have the ability and the time
to afford to intertwine that eternal universality to things,
then you start to see really, really,
really great works pop up.
So I guess the answer, JD, is to build a structure
that allows for human beings to express themselves,
you know, in both contexts to the fullest extent,
to the fullest extent of their capability.
That's great.
Anything else, Bandwar, you want to touch on
before we round out today?
I think this is awesome that we got all the guys together.
So I appreciate it.
And we'll be seeing you all around.
Go ahead and slap that extraordinarily loud.
Roll that beautiful beat.
Do we have a YouTube channel right now, by the way?
Do we have Better Buy Bitcoin?
I just applied for it,
and you have to wait 24 to 48 hours before you can stream.
Next week, we'll have YouTube running.
Awesome.
And then let us know if any of the 30 plus people watching,
if you want to see this daily,
if you want to see us kind of break these things out
based on kind of our areas of expertise.
We have Bandwar on the software side.
We have Corey and Zach
on the kind of like business side of entertainment.
And then we have Anson on the feature film side
of like the creator piece, just like being in there
and like being a, you know,
having the number 30 documentary in the world,
kind of a big thing.
And then also just be on ads.
So, you know, let us know if you think that's interesting.
Cause we think all this stuff is interesting
and we think you're interesting
and we think we're interesting.
So, you know, hey, let us know.
Maybe, maybe it could be something.
It could be fun.
♪ Got a good thing coming ♪
♪ And it's all I need ♪
♪ Everything I wanted ♪