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Explore the mindset of being "trapped" in Bitcoin versus the fiat world, with insights from hosts JD, Bondor, and Anton Seim. They dive into societal issues, the impacts of regulatory systems, and the broader implications of Bitcoin on individual and economic freedoms. A must-listen for anyone wrestling with the dichotomy between current economic systems and Bitcoin's potential.
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Hosts:
JD - @CypherpunkCine on ๐
Bondor - @gildedpleb on ๐
Anton Seim - @antonseim on ๐
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Bitcoin makes everything better. Join the team and our guests as we unpack how, why, and where we go from here.
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.
We've got a good day coming. And it's all I need. Everything I wanted. Just wait and see.
Better. Bye, Bitcoin.
Hey, hey. Welcome to the show. Super stoked to be here with Anton and Bandor. Very excited about our topic of the day,
which is, are you trapped in Bitcoin? There's a couple different ways to be trapped in Bitcoin.
I think the thing that we were all talking about that's the most difficult and actually unique in terms of being trapped in Bitcoin
is not necessarily the monetary aspect of it, but the logical aspect of it. I think that's what we want to unpack today.
How do you find yourself trapped in the Bitcoin mindset? Trapped in a fiat world where people just can't see or understand what you see
and understand. Trapped around normies. Yeah, I think that's kind of it, right? I'll start this kind of with a quote from Henry Ford.
It's a great book that I'm reading right now, Henry Ford's autobiography, which is Henry Ford, My Life and Work.
And one of the things that he talks about, actually, chapter pretty much 11 through 13 is Bitcoin.
Like Henry Ford actually was the first one to posit Bitcoin back in this fiat world, back right after 1913 when the Federal Reserve happened.
He was kind of like belaboring this point that we cannot have a centralized monetary aspect because the bankers will just become worse.
And so what's really interesting that he was saying back then, though, is. I mean, this is probably the way to start off as one of the quotes in the book is
it is easier to make money from money than it is to make money from business. Don't take the acumen of banksters as any guide for business.
All they know is money. The fiat mentality is I'm just going to put more money printing into the money machine to make more money.
That has nothing to do with providing better service, better business, better whatever.
It's just literally a money lever to solve a money problem.
What are you guys seeing in what you see all over L.A. or all over your specific industries that are kind of mirroring that?
Like, how are you trapped in the Bitcoin, the Bitcoin mindset?
It was a terrible intro, by the way, guys, so thanks for just the three people watching this also with my camera frozen.
This is just awesome. We're off to a great time.
Hey, you came up with the phrase trapped by normies.
Yeah, well, currently I'm trapped by a normal fiat computer brain as my computer does not want to do anything with this stuff.
Bondor, do you want to go with it? Do you feel trapped by Bitcoin?
I mean, I definitely feel trapped by Bitcoin in that.
My economic allegiance is to a Bitcoin denominated reality versus everyone else's economic allegiance, which is to a fiat denominated reality.
So the way that they process all of the world is in fiat terms, the way that I process all the world is in Bitcoin terms.
And the differentiation there is massive.
For instance, in the fiat world, in fiat terms, oh, housing is super expensive.
In a fiat world, in fiat terms, there's nothing you can do about it apart from make more money or move to somewhere else where housing is cheaper.
Right. There's almost like no other solution there.
So what does that do to the culture?
It says, oh, yeah, you just got to move to somewhere cheaper or you just got to.
But it never actually solves any of the problems. Right.
It doesn't say. Well, maybe we should build more houses.
Well, I mean, that's certainly a solution, but that costs so much more money, too, and the rest of that.
But what it really does is just say, oh, yeah, you can move, you can exit, you can do, you know, the super fiat things.
But all that's really doing is just kicking the can down the road. Right.
It's you. You then move to Tennessee, like the In-N-Out founder or the In-N-Out owner has now is now done.
There's the big news this week.
So you're moving to Tennessee, but all you're really doing is just making it more expensive for everyone to live in Tennessee because it's just more demand in Tennessee.
You're not actually solving any root problems or issues.
So as a bitcoiner, all I just see is that problem.
No one's actually solving the root issues here. No one's actually solving the problems.
I'm like stuck in this mindset of like there's nothing that can be done to fix that.
Apart from just get on a Bitcoin standard and then all of it changes.
All of it turns around. All of it says, oh, well, instead of instead of moving somewhere to solve this problem, which doesn't actually solve it for anybody, just makes it worse for everybody.
If I just denominated Bitcoin, the problem solved, I'm no longer aligned to that ideology that thinks I can move there and figure it out.
So, yeah, I mean, and then you just you only see that everywhere.
You're just totally trapped like you see with every single problem.
You can just like go down the list of like, oh, yeah, well, that's just the fact that people are just stuck on fiat.
Oh, that's just it's just it's mind boggling. I can go on.
Yeah, with. OK, let's let's take the in and out founders moving to Nashville.
I don't know exactly. I know they're they're moving a portion.
Owner, owner, not founder. But, yeah, they're moving the family there.
They're not moving the company, right? Yeah, I think the founder is unfortunately tragically passed away a couple like like a decade ago.
Yeah, it's it's his daughter, I believe. His daughter is worth eight billion dollars.
I can't remember her name, but so she moving to Nashville is that the idea just she personally is moving there.
Right. And her family, she's justifying it with like, well, it's cheaper for us.
It's cheaper for Internet employees like blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, they don't have a state income tax. And I'm sure some element of the corporate wing of executives, people with a high salary are moving to Nashville.
So you have a lower cost of living in a place like Nashville than in Southern California, because let's face it, Nashville is cool.
Tennessee is cool. It's great. It is not as desirable of a geographic region as California is.
It's just not. California is the best place in America.
You could argue that somebody somewhere like Hawaii or something is nicer, but it's isolated is an island isolated in the middle of the South Pacific.
California, continental United States, easy to get anywhere and geographically is the best.
The climate's the best. The stuff that is here that has been built here is the best.
The ideas that have come out of it as a result are the best. California is the best place to live.
But it has an incredibly high state income tax for the income earner. It has other high taxes, burdens on corporations.
And so for those people like let's take Joe Rogan, for example, his original contract with Spotify was 200 million dollars.
His second contract was like 230 or 250.
I looked it up the other day personally by moving to Austin, establishing residency there before he moved.
He saved and was able to pocket about 60 million dollars, 60 million dollars that would have just gone to the state of California had he not done that.
So for him, it makes total sense. Even if California is technically the better state to live in, he has an extra 60 million dollars to do whatever he wants to.
He can add to his personal lifestyle all the things that he's missing from not technically living in California.
He could buy a private jet and fly to California in a few hours anytime he wants to.
Like if he wants to go for a trail run in California, he can literally fuel up his private jet, fly to California, go on a run and fly back home to Austin if he wants to.
But for most people, it's not that much of a benefit. It's just a little bit more of a benefit.
So yeah, I just want to say that about the whole story about In-N-Out moving to Nashville.
It's not what people are making of it.
And for most people who live in California now, I would argue you're going to have a better quality of life if you stay in California.
As long as California doesn't become absolutely communist and isn't actively taking away your rights, your life is going to be better in California than if you go move to Austin or Nashville for most people, in my opinion.
You're 100% right. Joe Rogan saved $60 million.
But again, he's just playing the system too. He's not actually solving any problems for anybody else except for himself.
So yeah, if you have the extra $60 million, sure. Move to Nashville. Save the $60 million.
Apply that $60 million to a marketing campaign against the Federal Reserve Bank that just plasters billboards and says the Federal Reserve Bank is evil.
And then systematically put that into the public conscious.
The reason that I have to do any of this at all is because fiat's evil.
And therefore, actually start addressing the real problems.
This just speaks to the general principle.
I mean, there's another, what's the guy, Andrew Tate, one of his tweets.
It's like, yeah, once you get to $500 million, there's just nothing to do anymore.
There's no way to spend your money. You can buy yachts, etc., but then you're just bored. You have yachts. You got the yachts.
It's like there's nothing to do with your money.
It's like all you're doing is solving problems for yourself.
You are not actually pushing society forward or doing anything that's useful or valuable or value add or like, I don't know, helping anybody here on Earth, right, J.D.?
I totally agree with that.
And I think actually, you know, as much as I don't wish ill on anybody, but I feel like this is another quote from I really do think Henry Ford's book, you know, My Life and Work is a phenomenal read.
I highly recommend every Bitcoiner to do it.
I would say it's as important as a sovereign individual from a perspective of seeing a industrial titan of the early 1900s see Bitcoin.
You know, again, he was the one who posited it in the New York Times, the New York Tribune at the time, like, you know, really diving into it.
But it's actually like three chapters of his book talking about monetary stuff.
And one of the things that he and it's like you can kind of see him getting there and like the culmination is his article in the New York Times.
But one of the quotes from that is being greedy for money is the surest way not to get it.
But when one serves for the sake of service, for the satisfaction of doing that, which one believes to be right, then money abundantly takes care of itself.
And the Andrew Tate example there, you know, his.
Service right now that is providing to the world is kind of like giving people something to look at.
And I'm saying look at because I'm not saying it's something to strive for.
Like, I don't think the Andrew Tate model is something to strive for.
I do think I do think there is something to be said about having men who.
You can. Respect different aspects of like I respect how disciplined and how hard he was working when he became a pro level boxer like kickboxer.
That takes a lot of hard work and discipline. Like, I do have a lot of respect for that.
What he's doing now with his money and how he's kind of like treating masculinity, I don't really love.
I know it is more aligned with his religious affiliation. Right.
But I think one of the things that he's on the way to is on the path to ruin.
You know, I think that goes back to the question of like, are we trapped in a Bitcoin mindset?
I think as a Bitcoin like I cannot unsee that, you know, the whole sovereign individual thesis is people are going to flee from a.
Unjust fiat world into a more just and more libertarian.
You know, place where they can provide more value. And that's one thing that we're seeing all the time.
You know, this quote that I just read talks literally about, you know, another quote is like speculation into things already produced.
That is not business like that is literally the business of government.
The business of the Fed is to basically like, OK, so the current economic situation is we have this much inflation and we have this much business.
We have this much GDP. So we've already produced this much.
So if we just change these levers a little bit more, we'll be able to produce this much more.
You're not doing anything. You're not producing anything.
All you're actually doing is adding more hurdles and making it harder for people to do anything.
Like people who thrive in the business environment of the current day, like Elon Musk and, you know, Jeff Bezos and all these other current like titans.
They did a really good job of navigating this regulatory capture and navigating this world where at the end of the day, the only thing the government is adding is more regulation and more hurdles.
But the reason they were able to navigate is because they were the first ones through the door.
And so what you need to understand as a Bitcoin is that the whole point of the world is to put you in a box.
And if you can see a way to get out of that box before they put you in that box, the opportunity you have then is you can look around and decide where you actually want to put your resources.
What boxes do you want to actually fill up or do you want to make your own?
And so I think that's the thing that's the coolest about being in Bitcoin now is you can kind of understand that.
But being trapped in that mindset and knowing that, oh, crap, like.
Most people don't care about getting out of the box is pretty lonely and sad sometimes, especially in L.A.
I think the other side of that, too, like you're right about the government regulation, but.
But. You're like the other side of it is the is the safety thing or the zero to one thing safety talks about in.
Bitcoin standard. That most of the inventions that have impacted our modern life in the 20th century all happened in the 18th century, 1800s or I guess 19th century, 1800s.
Right. The computer, the toilet, like just really basic stuff.
All was invented at that point. First programming. Right.
And the only thing that's really happened, there hasn't really been much actual new inventions.
The only thing that's really happened is just the optimization of those inventions.
So on the government side, it's all about how do we regulate?
How do we control? How do we pull the levers?
And on the like the business, the quote unquote capitalism side, which is really just at this point totally crony capitalism.
All they've done is just.
Made it more efficient. We're not actually going from zero to one much, if at all.
What we're doing is making microchips smaller and smaller and smaller year over year.
Year over year. And the consequences of that are life is a little bit deflationary in terms of the technology.
And then things can kind of work their way through that system.
But nobody's really inventing a new car. Right.
Nobody's really going from a car or going from a train to a car. Right.
Those are those are big leaps. Or from a horse to a car.
I want to bring it back real quick. You were saying that for specifically for the In-N-Out founder, she's got eight billion dollars.
And she's kind of like ringing the alarm that California is not doing so well and that, you know, Tennessee is a better place to live for.
And you were saying that she could take out billboards all over, like on every interstate.
Yeah, I was saying Rogan. I was saying that for Rogan, but she could do the same thing, too.
Right. Like just everybody, any any billionaire who leaves California should be like attacking the reason why they can no longer where they should no longer economically live in the best place on Earth.
Yeah. Most people do not know why inflation is happening.
They don't even know what the negative consequences of inflation are.
They certainly don't know about the Cantillon effect, that when there is inflation, the people who hold assets, especially a certain type of assets, the value of those assets increases before the people that don't have assets realize that the inflation has taken place.
So the people who don't have the assets get poor faster.
The people who have the assets get rich faster.
It widens that gap.
So you would think, OK, well, then if you just have assets, then you are just benefiting from inflation.
You're just going to get richer and richer and richer.
So if I just get assets, I'll get richer.
But inflation affects everybody negatively.
And that is exactly what the founder of In-N-Out is saying.
She's saying California is getting worse and worse and worse.
There's homeless people everywhere.
The crime is crazy.
They had to shut down an In-N-Out in Oakland because there was so much crime and people were getting robbed in the parking lot.
Those are the effects of fiat and of inflation.
So even for the rich, they're facing consequences as well.
And then you have the other guy who says he has $500 million, which I kind of don't believe, by the way, and he doesn't know what to do with it.
The reason he doesn't know what to do with it is because he's only focused on himself.
He's unhappy and he's just, how can I bring more pleasure to myself?
Not realizing that it's more blessed to give than to receive.
He has no concept of that.
He's not actually trying to educate the world.
He's trying to get rich off selling programs to younger people to try to tell them how to be scammers.
He's just like a shit coiner.
The people that are losing their souls by possibly enriching themselves just trying to do a Ponzi scheme where they scam somebody faster than they can be found out so that they can rug pull before anybody else so that they can take the money that they've stolen from people.
It's thievery and it sucks your soul dry.
And also in that guy's case, he says he's Muslim.
I don't even believe that.
He's not actually a practicing Muslim.
He's just looking for things that will pump up his own ego and give him justification for the things that he wants to do.
And Bitcoin fixes all of that.
The thing that's coming to mind as you're saying that is, again, the trapped in fiat thing.
He's trapped in fiat.
When you attain a certain level of wealth, it's like the same thing with Rogan, the same thing with the In-N-Out founder.
They're all trapped in the fiat world, the fiat mindset.
When they attain a certain level of wealth, that necessarily puts them closer to the money printer.
They get access to the better accounts.
They get more inside information.
They're closer to what's happening in terms of the money printer.
Consequently, why on earth would they ever spend the $60 million on billboards that defame the money printer?
Now that they're close to the money printer, they like it.
It's nice up here.
They're completely trapped by the system.
Golden handcuffs to the extreme.
They will never fight the system.
And it's literally just up to all the people who have exited the system, the Bitcoiners, the plebs, to actually go out there and do it.
Because nobody, and not get close to the money printer themselves.
And that's important because a lot, like as we're seeing with all the treasury companies,
oh yeah, we'll just get as close to the money printer as possible.
Hey, maybe that's going to work out for you guys.
Personally, I'm just like, oh my gosh, guys, you've lost your minds.
But do not get close to the money printer.
When you get close to the money printer, it's game over for you.
Your entire mind is just captured.
It's interesting to me how so many Bitcoiners, they may not even have that much money in Bitcoin.
But as soon as they understand that there is a way to escape suffering inflation,
even if they put $5,000 into Bitcoin and they held onto it for a year or two,
and they've seen that amount in dollar terms increase,
and they've started to understand the implications of Bitcoin.
Their life philosophy starts to change as their time preference slows.
And there are so many people that have a bad life philosophy,
and more money is never going to change that life philosophy.
They get richer and richer in fiat, and yet they don't have a good philosophy.
And so they're not going to go and try to educate people and fight the system.
Because it's like you have to establish the philosophy first.
And without that, you're forever going to be missing.
Yeah, anyway, it's just interesting.
Bitcoiners so often, it's not the amount of Bitcoin they have.
It's not how rich they are.
It's just understanding the implication.
So before we went on this, JD was like, get some facts together.
And he wanted to talk about Henry Ford.
And what instantly popped into my head was, I was like,
there were a number of people who basically came up with Bitcoin
way before Bitcoin existed.
They had no idea how it was going to be accomplished.
But they could see that once it was discovered how to do it,
that it was going to change everything.
And so I put together a little list.
So I'm just going to read them off real quick.
So Henry Ford was one of them.
Henry Ford came up with the concept of energy currency,
which was a form of money backed by energy units,
rather than government issued fiat or gold.
And he suggested that a currency like that would be more stable,
less prone to manipulation by central authorities.
Sounds very similar to Bitcoin.
Another guy, have you ever seen the movie A Beautiful Mind?
John Nash came up with this concept of ideal money,
which was a theoretical currency that would be stable and non-inflationary,
independent of government control and potentially managed
through mathematical or algorithmic principles.
Again, it's just Bitcoin.
David Chom, was he mentioned in the white paper?
I can't remember.
He was cited.
So he came up with e-cash,
which had blind signatures for untraceable payments.
You could argue that Bitcoin is traceable,
but as we all know, there's many ways around that.
The book, The Sovereign Individual,
talked about a coming digital cash or cyber cash,
which was a form of money that could operate outside
the control of governments and central banks.
And then two more, Milton Friedman,
he had a quote where he said,
I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces
for reducing the role of government.
The one thing that's missing, but that will soon be developed,
is a reliable e-cash, even called it e-cash,
a method whereby on the Internet,
you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A,
the way I can take a $20 bill and hand it over to you
and there's no record of where it came from.
And then Friedrich Hayek, who was also of the Austrian school,
and there's a video, it's a really short clip,
if you want to look it up,
it's called Predicting Bitcoin in 1984,
a Sly Roundabout Way.
This is the last thing I'll say.
He said, I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again
before we take the thing out of the hands of the government.
That is, we can't take them violently out of the hands of the government.
All we can do is by some sly roundabout way,
introduce something they can't stop.
Bitcoin.
And we have that now, it's called Bitcoin.
Yep.
Those quotes are all so good.
I love those.
Those are all great.
And I think one of the things that I wanted to bring up
and see how this works is,
I just had GPT make a Cantillion Effect graphic,
but this is pretty much accurate.
The money creation goes to everybody near the money printer
and everyone else just kind of gets screwed.
And so I think what's really interesting though about this
is if you don't fully grasp the divide,
this is actually a great breakdown.
Because at the end of the day,
they don't want you to know about the money printer
or rather how the money printer works,
because that's how the game works.
What is the game?
The game is to confuse.
The game is to divide.
The game is to make everybody feel alone.
There's a reason they call options and stocks,
calls and puts,
which is different than shorts and longs,
which is different than CDOs,
which is different than swaps.
They come up with a jargon
that the people within the game understand and live by.
And that jargon and the understanding of that jargon
means you understand how the game works.
And so we get to a really, really interesting place
when momentum starts to get behind something,
Bitcoin in this case,
that breaks your mind free from where you're trapped.
Because we are all born into a game that we are trapped in.
Period.
No one watching this right now,
no one on this call opted into this system.
We were just born into the system.
And the system was created by men
to keep other men in line
in such a way that they could be serviced by those men.
That's it.
Like at the end of the day,
you had a group of people in elite
that were like, all right, cool.
We want to stay elite.
We want to stay at the top of control.
We want to stay for good or bad, right?
There are people like George Washington who knew,
hey, if you make me a king, I will be the first king.
And by the way, I'm going to die because I'm immortal.
And we don't want a king.
That's why we left the king.
And so I think that's the biggest thing
with what you're talking about before Bond
or about ideas moving us from zero to one.
Bitcoin is not a zero to one idea.
It's not.
Money was the zero to one.
A medium of exchange that was not the object
was the zero to one moment.
Bitcoin is just the current new
and best iteration of that zero to one change.
And so what's really cool about that
is because Bitcoin is just an optimization,
eventually everyone will understand it.
Whether you understand it before
you're forced into understanding it is your choice.
So I think we've all made this mistake
of thinking that people are just idiots
for not getting Bitcoin.
But people are not idiots.
If you understand the bell curve of intelligence,
most people are kind of of average intelligence.
And if you're of average intelligence,
it's very, very simple to understand that,
especially if you're an American,
that the government can print
an endless amount of money.
They can pay for anything they want to.
But the faster that they do that,
the more it devalues the money,
the more expensive that things will get.
And your salary cannot keep up
with how expensive things are getting.
So they got to be a little careful.
They can't print too fast
because then people will get unruly.
It's very easy to understand that.
And so I've spent a lot of time just like,
why are people not getting this?
How do they not see that Bitcoin
is the solution to this?
And the answer is so simple.
It's that the people who are doing this
are bad people and they are lying.
A smart person can figure this out.
But the thing is,
if a scam artist,
if a con artist comes up
and tells you that their name
is something that is not really their name,
or they're from a place
that is not really where they're from,
you will believe them
because you have no reason not to believe them.
Humans are very, very susceptible
to being lied to.
It is very hard to tell
when somebody is lying to you.
So what we're doing
is we're trying to ring the alarm
that they are being lied to
by the Federal Reserve.
They are being lied to by the government
that is printing more money
than they say they're printing
and is devaluing your money
and making your life worse
and enriching themselves.
And that's why people aren't getting it
because they're being lied to.
J.D., what you said earlier,
there is an elite.
There's always going to be an elite.
The thing that's nefarious
about a fiat system
is that they're going to lie to you
about the nature of the system.
And the consequences there
is that, oh,
everyone gets to just be free
and work how they want to work
and do what they want to do
and raise their families
and all this other stuff
because they're printing money.
And when they print money
below the terminal rate
of massive violent revolution,
they can just continue this system
and everybody in the system
who works for fiat money
is perpetuating the system
and enslaving themselves
at whatever it is,
10% per year
because that's the inflation rate.
You are 10% of your time
is just slave labor,
unpaid,
that you cannot get back,
that you cannot exit from,
that you cannot do anything about
apart from just endure
the 10% slavery,
soft totalitarianism.
What's really wild about that,
and Henry Ford is talking about this too,
is actually,
I think as Bitcoiners,
we are too idealistic.
I think we are trapped in this mindset
that we are very lucky
that we're around a lot
of really, really smart people.
I think you actually do have to be
on the ends of the bell curve
to fully grasp Bitcoin
The lower end, yeah, the lower end.
You have to be on the lower end.
I'm on the retarded end.
I think all of us are.
Hopefully the 32 people watching right now
are on the other side
and they're just feeling sorry for us.
But the key here is
you have to be on the ends
of the spectrum of understanding
because at the end of the day,
it's too comfortable
in the middle.
And there's comfort
in knowing that you know
you're going to get a paycheck on Monday
or Friday or whatever it is.
And you have a know
that you have a place you need to go
and you know that somebody needs something
because you don't have to think.
You don't have to agonize
over what is my purpose.
You don't have to agonize over
how do I help a bunch of people?
You don't have to agonize
over a lot of these things
that all you want to think about
is just what's going to be on TV
that's being built by men
and women
who want to make the world
different in some way,
shape or form.
And that's not everybody.
And that's also OK.
And I think that's the thing that
as Bitcoin is as tough sometimes
for us to understand and swallow.
Not everybody wants to
be a leader
and not everybody needs to be a leader.
And I think right now,
you know, we're coming up to the wave of,
you know, we're on the bell curve
of adoption too, right?
You know, the way the adoption
curves goes.
And I think we're still probably
at the front end of the bell
curve of adoption.
You know, we're definitely not at
the innovators and, you know,
we're probably still with the
trailblazers and maybe we're
in the early adopters, probably
closer to the early adopter phase.
But as soon as we get into
the mass adoption
phase of Bitcoin,
Bitcoin isn't going to be fun
anymore.
Bitcoin is just going to be roped.
Bitcoin is going to be the common
understanding.
It's just like the U.S. dollar
after Bretton Woods,
you know, just became the
understanding.
This is the business handshake.
This is the jargon
of business.
Bitcoin will become the jargon of
business and it will be
boring eventually.
And you will then be trapped in
that Bitcoin world, which I think
all of us would argue would be
better for you.
But the challenge is going to be
how do we get people who
like being trapped
to understand that
the grass isn't greener on the
other side.
Going back to the fiat system,
where you have rulers
is not actually a better world
for you.
And they saw this in Exodus,
right?
When the Jews were
cast out of Egypt and they left
Egypt and they went through the
Red Sea.
If you don't know the story, you
know, Moses had the Red Sea part
and the Jews ran through it and
then the sea came back together
and it killed all the Egyptians
were chasing him.
Great story.
But.
They got out of the they got out
of their oppression.
They got on the path
to what God was planning to give
them, which was the promised land.
And they just started grumbling.
And that is what the majority
people want to do is the majority
people just want stuff handed to
them. We see that with welfare.
We see that with social security
checks.
And so I think where we're trapped
as Bitcoiners is we're trapped in
this idealized world of,
oh, everybody wants the best for
everybody.
It's just not the case.
Sally, I love that you I love that
you bring up the welfare thing, too,
because we tend to think about like
as Bitcoiners, we tend to think
about the quintillion effect,
the closeness to the money printer
as like it's all the elite
billionaires. It's all the
Elon Musk and Joe Rogan's and
my gosh, Bill Gates and all the
rest of them, right.
The politicians and you just go down
the list. Right.
But there's other ways to get close
to the money printer, one of
which is welfare.
Right.
Hey, that's the shortcut way.
We just get on the welfare cliff
because, oh, well, that that's
all the print a bunch of money and
it goes to the welfare system.
And so all the people who are not
working and just vote for welfare
check welfare check.
They are actually closer to the
money printer than the person who
is working 60 hours a week, making
minimum wage, trying to just pay his
rent. Right.
The person in the middle there,
they're the furthest from the money
printer. The absolute impoverished
person just relies on the government
for all of the handouts are
closer to the money printer than
the person who is actually trying to
be a responsible human being.
Yeah, if you're on Section 8 and
you're getting EBT, then
you really got nothing to worry
about. In fact, usually
when inflation ramps up,
the government does these programs
that only apply to the absolute
poorest people and gives them more
free stuff.
So actually, in a way, as things
get worse, as inflation gets worse,
if you are a poor person who's
on the government dole, you're
actually getting more.
Yeah, that's so twisted.
Yep. It's it's the
the borrower is slave to the lender
and borrowing government money,
i.e. welfare, is not
the way people think.
Like, you don't have to be in debt,
physical debt with a credit card,
whatever it is, to be slave.
Welfare makes you a slave.
It does. That's why they call them
poverty pimps.
Because at the end of the day, if
you're listening to Maxine Waters or
any of the Republicans to Mitch
McConnell, doesn't matter.
It's a uniparty.
You are stuck in the matrix of red
versus blue and you are a slave
mentally. And in some cases, in a
lot of cases, monetarily and
physically. And so the only way to
break free is to start thinking for
yourself. But that requires two
things. You want to think for
yourself, one, and two, you have the
capacity to think for yourself.
Henry Ford's book is also
fascinating because he did a lot of
work actually trying to help people
like everybody gives him such a bad
rap. And like reading this book
totally blows my mind.
Like, yes, he's who gave us the 40
hour work week. But the reason he
gave us the 40 hour work week is
because he wanted to provide that
consistency that men need.
People crave consistency.
And one of the things that he talks
about in the book is actually the
better way to work would be if you
come and work for four months in a
factory, the four months when it's
snowing and then the rest of the
time you go out and work in the
field again, different times.
Right. We have different machines
and stuff like that back in the
1880s, late 1880s and then early
1900s when it was written.
But one of the things that he
talked about is men don't want to
work, but the ones who do want to
work will. And so he had all these
systems where, you know, they
basically would test people who
had one arm or one eye or who were
deaf or bedridden.
And he's like, the men who had the
obstacle were far and away
better performers than the normal
men. Because if you're bedridden,
but you need purpose and Ford
gives you a job at a Ford factory
like just screwing, tightening a
nut or whatever it is, you are
ecstatic that you can have purpose
and something to do.
And so the problem we have right
now is we just have such a dearth
of purpose. We have so few people
who who have a desire to do
something because they don't know
what to do.
And, you know, this is such a
challenge. I challenge you and I'm
charging myself, too.
This is one of the things that I'm
personally working on.
One of the reasons I'm doing this
thing is like I'm really trying to
figure out how I can add value to as
many people as possible.
Like I know what I'm good at, but
Bitcoin just made me think
completely differently because at
the end of the day, how do I make
the biggest impact the most number
of people and make everything better
for as many people as I can?
I know we like to turn things
positive after the 30 minute mark
and we're way over it.
Have you ever wondered how a
homeless person sustains a drug
addiction because drugs?
I mean, I wouldn't know, but drugs
are expensive, especially if you're
doing drugs all day, every day.
And you've got to pay cash for them.
Where does a homeless person that
doesn't have an income get the money
to sustain a daily drug addiction?
And why would it's the government?
Why would the government give them
money to then turn around and pay
the drug dealers who are working
for cartels?
And I can speak about Los Angeles
and Los Angeles.
We have this thing you could call
the homeless industrial complex.
The more homelessness that exists,
the more fiat money that gets
printed, that gets thrown at the
problem, that goes first to the
people who can give favors to their
crony friends who are supposedly
running these programs that help
the homeless people.
So by increasing the drug addicts,
giving the money to the drug dealers
in the cartels, the people who are
running the show get richer and make
more money off of the pain and
suffering of the people.
Again, it's so twisted.
It's unbelievable, but it's what it is.
Did you guys see this?
The USAID, or not, sorry,
did you guys see this?
The Cal Fire concert that raised
$100 million and had all Lady Gaga,
all these like big names,
Billie Eilish, raised $100 million
and zero of it went to actually
helping the fire victims in California.
All of it went to charities.
In large part, like NAACP,
like race-based charities,
advancing black things,
there's literally nothing to do
with fire relief at all.
Marketed as a cause,
just absolute opportunism.
Good, good.
This is also just an artifact of
the fiat system,
that if you didn't know,
this has been around.
This particular scam,
which is throw a benefit concert
for the whatever thing,
it's been around for a long time.
One of the famous ones was the
famous Freddie Mercury concert in 1975,
which is the ultra,
like everyone is aware of this concert.
I'm trying to figure out what the name is.
Live Aid.
Live Aid, yeah,
which went for the purpose of this concert
was through a huge concert,
raised tons, millions of dollars
for the purpose of saving people
from a crazy famine that was,
I don't know what the country was,
but there's a huge famine in Africa, right?
How much of that money went to
the famine victims?
A lot of it went to purchasing guns
for the government of that country.
And it's like,
why is this even making news?
Why is this $100 million
for the benefit aid of policy
or fire victims, et cetera?
Why are people even upset about this?
They should have the expectation
of getting trapped in the fiat mine.
It's almost like you forgot
what happened six months before, right?
Like, no, this particular scam
has been happening for a long time.
This is a standard scam.
And yet here we are.
We're just trapped in the fiat world.
Yeah, we're going to raise a bunch of money.
Everyone's going to be happy.
We're going to be so good.
We're going to do such good things.
So good, so good.
And here we are.
The biggest thing about,
it's actually freaking wild.
So I just had GPT make me another
one of these things,
but I'm going to throw this one up here really quick.
But the biggest issue with all this stuff,
this actually goes exactly
what we're talking about right now,
is at the end of the day,
if fiat money died,
all of our problems would go away.
They would.
We would have different problems.
There would still be problems.
Problems are going to go away.
Problems are a piece of life.
80% of our modern problems
would definitely go away.
Yeah.
And this is actually a great chart to explain that.
This is the Cantillion effect
in perfect definition of a bell curve,
is you have all of the wealthy welfare people
and then the super poor charity people.
Actually, I'd probably put wealthy on the right
and super poor on the left,
coming off on welfare.
But it's actually not wrong, right?
Because the wealthy hide behind
the welfare that they're providing
or the charity.
Yeah, it's backwards, but I'll flip that.
But this is exactly it.
And what happens, though,
is when this is solved,
this Cantillion effect problem is solved,
is, yeah, I probably shouldn't throw this up
because then it messes with stuff for later,
but we're trapped right now in a fiat world.
And what that means is there is no escape
because the point of the fiat system
is to keep you trapped.
The point of a Bitcoin system
is to make you think.
The beauty is if you don't want to think,
there will always be people
who want to give you a job
so you don't have to think,
which is actually great.
There's more opportunity for that
than a Bitcoin standard.
The challenge of the fiat system, though,
which is where we're stuck,
is that system does not want to die
because the people at the top of that system,
they don't want to work.
And that is a very big problem
because they know the way to not work
is to push a button and print some money.
And the closer you get to the money printer,
the more inclined you are to believe that
and dig into that
and make that your purpose.
Oh, my purpose is to just,
I don't need to work anymore.
I can just print the money.
I don't have to do it.
When Bitcoin fully takes over,
the whole world is not just going
to turn into utopia overnight.
We have examples,
because everything is cyclical,
of time periods
when the money was harder
and art was more beautiful,
architecture was built with more foresight.
The things that were built
in those time periods
stand the test of time,
last for centuries,
sometimes a thousand years.
It'll be more like that,
but the issues of human greed
and jealousy
and violence and things like that,
those things will still exist.
But you can look at those time periods
and see that
some of the things in your life
that you can just sense are lacking now
will be fixed by Bitcoin.
But it is not a magic bullet
to just create utopia.
I just want to express that
because I think sometimes
people look at Bitcoiners
as delusional,
thinking,
because we say Bitcoin solves this,
that we think that
Bitcoin just magically solves
every single problem
and death
and the sinful nature of human beings
just goes away.
We're not religious about Bitcoin.
I just want to express that.
You might not be.
I will say it did cure my psoriasis.
As soon as I got a little bit of Bitcoin,
it just went away.
I'm just, you know...
Not financial advice, though.
Or a doctor advice.
One of the things that
Bitcoin definitely solves
is the thing, J.D.,
that you were just talking about,
which is the dearth of purpose.
Bitcoin brings back purpose
to people's lives
because they can actually
spend their time
and trade it for value.
In the fiat-denominated world,
every time you spend your time
to trade it for value,
which you think is value,
is denominated in money.
And a part of that money
is just taken away.
And so a part of your purpose
is just taken away.
It's purposeless.
There's 90% purpose
and 10% meaningless slavery
to somebody who you will never meet
and who does not care about you
and actively hates you.
That's cross-purpose.
And when you're at a cross-purpose,
the value of your purpose,
the intensity of your purpose
is undermined.
You are undermining your own purpose
about what you're doing.
The consequences of that
are just a dearth of purpose.
Bitcoin takes all of that away
and restores real purpose
to real people.
It allows them to expend real effort
and receive real value in return
add real value to the world,
actually fix real problems,
make real progress about things.
It's going to be awesome.
When you get paid in fiat,
you're taxed four times.
You're taxed with the trading your time for money.
You're taxed instantly when you're paid
by the income taxes
that you pay on that money.
You're taxed when you save your money
because you have a ticking clock.
You have to spend the money
because the longer that it sits
in your checking account,
the more it's being devalued
day by day by day.
And you're taxed a fourth time
because if you have a salary,
you are locked in at a fixed rate.
Let's say your salary is $100,000.
Every single day of that year,
that $100,000 is becoming less valuable
because inflation is taking place.
The only thing that could counteract that
is if your salary was increased
by 3%, 5%, 8%, 10%,
depending on what the amount of inflation is.
Every single day that you're working,
if your salary is increased.
You start out the year making $100,000
and at the end of the year,
you make $130,000.
The next year, you make $200,000.
The next year, you make $400,000.
But that's not the way it works.
Your salary is fixed.
And if you want an increase,
you have to negotiate a year later
after your salary has already been devalued.
So you're negotiating just to maintain your salary.
You're literally taxed four times.
So when you start saving in Bitcoin,
you are saving in a money
that never gets diluted.
There's only 21 million Bitcoin.
And this is so hard to understand.
It's not that there's a trillion dollars
and one day there'll be $1.2 trillion.
It's that there's trillions and trillions
and trillions of dollars
and one day there'll be infinity trillions of dollars.
Fiat money gets devalued endlessly.
There is no top to the devaluation of money.
But Bitcoin is only 21 million ever.
Did you guys know they just found
a way to turn mercury into gold?
Not the planet, but the element.
So they're literally doing a new nuclear reaction
that allows them to change mercury into gold.
So gold bugs,
debase the gold, debase it.
Just gone.
There's no reason for gold,
apart from various electronic uses.
I think the other thing about like,
are you trapped is like,
are you like,
do you feel trapped?
Like if you feel trapped,
that means you're trapped in the Bitcoin system.
Sorry, said that wrong.
If you feel trapped,
like if you're feeling trapped,
you are trapped in the fiat system, period.
Like feeling trapped is actually a symptom of the fiat system.
Because in the Bitcoin world,
all you can see is opportunity.
There is a world where you can feel trapped
because you can't do enough.
I think that's a different form of like,
you know, obsession, if you will,
like you see the mortality of your life,
like the finite nature of your life.
But I think that's the biggest value Bitcoin can give you.
Bitcoin moves your time preference from high to low.
A low or slow time preference is actually a good time preference.
Because if you're looking at things on a long time horizon,
you're going to steward it.
You're going to steward your garden,
you're going to make it grow.
You're going to actually like watch your basket of goods
and make sure that the inflation in that basket of goods
isn't going way out of whack
to where you need to remove something from that basket of goods
so you don't actually count it in CPI,
so that way you can continue to lie to people
because you have a high time preference,
because you want to change what the inflation actually is
to make sure people feel safe so they can actually spend,
so CPI can actually stay relatively close to 2%
when it's actually closer to like 100.
Like that is the issue we have here,
is we have a system built on high time preference
when low time preference is actually the way to do things.
Like the great Chinese proverb of
when was the best time to plant an oak tree?
20 years ago.
When's the best time now?
Or when's the next best time?
Now.
Bitcoin is now.
That's it.
And a Bitcoin is a low time preference.
I think that that Chinese proverb
is actually not a Chinese proverb
because you can like look it up.
It's not from China.
I'm pretty sure it is a bona fide Bitcoin proverb.
Like didn't exist until Bitcoin came about.
And it's only ever used in Bitcoin circles.
Like it's just,
it's a cultural phenomenon that you can see changing.
And it reminds me of just what,
like how do you frame this?
There's this zeitgeist in the fiat world, right?
And in this zeitgeist,
there's particular things that are appropriate,
not appropriate.
One of those things that's not appropriate
is this idea of, oh, well,
when was the best time to plant things?
20 years ago.
What's the best time?
Plant it now.
That's just, it doesn't,
like there's no reality to that
because in a fiat world,
there's no such thing as 20 years ago.
It didn't exist, right?
Like the 1984 version of like,
there is no past,
there is no future.
It's just the eternal now of,
oh yeah,
we just rewrite the past,
doesn't matter.
So there's no 20 years ago in a fiat world,
but there is in a Bitcoin world.
It's like connected to reality.
It's connected to a timeline.
So part of that,
which I think is interesting,
is that fiat,
the fiat system has the psychist,
that, I'm pronouncing that word wrong.
I don't know how to pronounce it.
Zeitgeist.
Zeitgeist.
And part of that is there's the Overton window.
There's things that are appropriate
and there's things that are not appropriate
and there's various like borders
around the appropriateness.
In a fiat world,
the window is perpetually shifting
towards higher time preference.
Me here now,
drug,
sex,
violence,
like just the debasement of everything,
absolute absurdity,
unabsurdity,
right?
In a Bitcoin world,
which we are already seeing,
the Zeitgeist,
the Overton window,
pushes in the other direction.
It lowers the time preferences,
right?
And I'm convinced that we are actually
seeing this in the actual culture.
It's not appropriate to do these kinds
of things anymore.
We actually see that in real time,
right?
This is what happened on the left's
mistakes with about what you could do
with COVID, right?
There's all these Bitcoiners.
Before Bitcoin,
you couldn't just speak out
and it'd be like,
okay.
But with Bitcoin,
you could speak out because you couldn't
get shut down.
That's a change of how society and how
culture functions.
So we actually see the culture being
affected by Bitcoin.
We actually see this ultra slow moving
Titanic level turnaround or just insane
mass that is actually changing course.
And in terms of,
hey,
Bitcoin makes everything better.
Like,
yeah,
this is exactly what it's doing.
It is affecting culture in ways that
are slow and often imperceptible,
but absolutely real and quantifiable.
And it's winning.
It's actually pushing culture forward.
It's actually breaking the fiat trap.
It's undoing this damage that has been
assaulting human conscious for a hundred
years.
It's incredible.
Ultra bullish.
A lot of people think that what we're
saying about inflation is some sort of
conspiracy theory.
They just don't buy it.
That inflation is as high as what we are
saying that it is.
The truth is that the Federal Reserve
and through a bunch of processes,
it's not only the Federal Reserve.
They are printing trillions of dollars
that money will go into scarce assets.
So scarce assets are things like really
valuable real estate or old vintage cars
that are one of a kind that are well
maintained or watches or gold and silver,
things like this.
So eventually this incredible pressure
is going to go into something we're
saying it's going to go into Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is going to suck it up like a
black hole.
And I just want people to know that,
that the price of Bitcoin,
it may sound insane to say that Bitcoin
is going to a million dollars.
But the longer that this last,
the more money that is printed,
that number becomes more and more huge.
And there is no number that is too big
of a number because they will print
forever.
So the longer that we go and this
doesn't happen,
I would say this is my opinion,
obviously not financial advice.
Bitcoin is either going to go to
infinity in dollar terms or something's
going to happen.
Bitcoin is going to break and it's going
to go to zero.
I would argue it's much more likely that
it goes to infinity than it goes to zero.
So I am also ultra bullish.
What's really exciting about the world
right now and about Bitcoin is Bitcoin
is going to bring about a resurgence of
100 year cathedrals.
If you're not familiar with it,
the cathedral in Milano in Italy took
about 250 years to build.
And there are currently only one
hundred year cathedral project being
built.
And it's not even that it's being built,
it's actually just being completed.
And so the big thing right now is when
we have people start operating on a
system that is a low time preference
system,
they're going to start thinking about
100 year cathedrals.
They're going to start thinking about
solving problems that they will never see
solved.
Elon Musk operates on that wavelength
already.
He may never see us get to Mars,
but he is working on that 100 year
problem.
And so what's going to be interesting
when you start reflecting on it is now
they talk about 10 years ago,
if you hadn't bought that Nintendo
Switch,
you would have 5000 Bitcoin,
whatever it is.
I think the better way to think about
that is 100 years from now,
if you have one Bitcoin today,
what seeds could you be planting that
that Bitcoin has grown into?
I think that about wraps us up over
here.
Um,
those are some,
final,
good final last words,
everybody.
Um,
and we should probably just,
uh,
just leave it at that.
Cheers,
Joe.
All right.
Peace.