Chat_116 - Bitcoin Is Money For Heroes [TFTC]

[00:00:00] Speaker A: If your rule is about keeping people safe and there is any point at which the rule is not keeping people safe or it is specifically causing people harm, you let go of the rule. These are guidelines to make sure that there is no default harm being done. But the point is to help people. It's to make sure society doesn't collapse, is to make sure that people are actually doing things to benefit so that we are not wasting resources and you are wasting resources, hurting people and destroying the, the very mechanism that we have, the very community value and the hope of people coming in and trying to help other people in the effort of keeping the rules in place. If the rules are getting in the way, you ignore the rules. Authority for the sake of authority is just tyranny. What is up, guys? Welcome back to bitcoin audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, I got to hang out with Marty Bent from TFTC, went on this show with him and this is, we talked about a bunch of different things, but this was mostly in reference to everything that's been going on with Hurricane Helene and the disastrous situation in western NC, the Tennessee, basically in the appalachian mountains. This one was all over the place, got a little bit intense, but it was a really, really good conversation and I thought it would be good to repost here also just to call attention to what's going on. Again, it is still ongoing and I want to give another shout out to the bitcoin veterans for just the incredible amount of work that they've been doing. And recently they've been focusing on making sure that the land doesn't get bought up and torn out from underneath them because farms can't function and they can't sell, they don't have feed and they can't raise their cattle and stuff. And they've literally been getting hay and trying to make sure that the economy over there can stand back up and getting the real basic going really local, like what is actually happening there and what businesses and capital needs to actually go to helping keep this place alive. So kudos to both the work and then also just, I thought that was a great way to target, to think about how to make sure that they can actually recover from this. And we talk about that and fema and a bunch of stuff that's going on with government and how we found ourselves in this bizarre situation. And it was really good catching up with Marty. I love Marty and Matt. Those guys are great. Shout out to him. And also he was totally cool with me posting this in our feed. So I was like, we should. We should share this one out. I thought it was a good one. But we have a number of affiliates of just bitcoin services and companies that I really like. So I put together a small list and I'm just going to kind of keep with the show for anything that I'm using. So if you're just curious, for the companies that I work with and the business, the products and stuff that I use, you'll find that down there in the show notes you want to buy. Bitcoin got a hardware wallet to keep it safe. Bitcoin games huddle up is really cool. You got to check that one out. And also, I'll just remind you that any other zaps or donations that come in for the month will all be going to through October. We'll all be going to the NC relief and everything that's going on in trying to helping them get up off their feet. The western NC. So you can find links and anything to the content. Also to TFTC and Marty Bent, as well as my social. All that good stuff you want to find us anywhere. All that stuff is right down there in the description of this episode. And with that, let's get into this episode of TFTC with myself and Marty Bent. [00:04:07] Speaker B: Guy. This is 550. How many episodes are we in? [00:04:12] Speaker A: Damn. [00:04:12] Speaker B: 545. This is the first time you come on a palindrome episode for the first time. I can't believe it's taken seven years to get you on the show. But happier here. Not, uh. [00:04:23] Speaker A: Have I not been on the show? I guess I haven't. [00:04:25] Speaker B: I don't think so. It's, uh. [00:04:28] Speaker A: That's here. Yeah. [00:04:34] Speaker B: No, this is our first time now. You make me jog my memory. It's definitely. [00:04:39] Speaker A: I guess. I guess I can believe that. I guess that that's wild. Though. It does seem. It does seem crazy that we haven't done. You haven't been on my show, have you? [00:04:48] Speaker B: I don't think so. I think you've read some newsletters. That's a. Oh, yeah. [00:04:52] Speaker A: Read in a couple of bins. [00:04:53] Speaker B: Mm hmm. [00:04:54] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, shit. Cool. It's good to be here, man. [00:04:59] Speaker B: It's good to have you. I guess I was about to say good to have you here. Unfortunately, not the best of circumstances. I wanted to sit down and talk with you about everything that's going on in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. You're on the ground there in Raleigh Durham area not directly affected by it. But you're a North carolinian at heart, and I've been following your efforts on Noster and X, and it seems like you have a good pulse as to what's going on there right now. And I think that's why I wanted to talk with you. Obviously, there's a bunch of stuff being posted on the Internet, and though I think a lot of it is particularly the first person accounts of what's going on the ground is very valid, but I figured I'd reach out to you and get your perspective on all this, what's actually happening, and dive into the complete incompetence of the incompetence or malice of the government. In this particular situation. [00:06:02] Speaker A: I've come to a point where I don't. I'm not 100% sure if there's a big difference between the two. Incompetence and malice is like, if the results are the same, you know, does it. How much does it really matter? You know, and it's so hard to decide someone's intent, and there's a lot of just kind of, you know, these things are. These systems are filled with humans, and it's so easy to excuse or ignore or procrastinate on something that just doesn't really help your position, you know? And I think there is so much of this desire in government to be the one in charge that it's just. It's very easy when you institutionalize assistance, that it just becomes a disease, that it just becomes something that does nothing but harm. And I don't think it's very difficult for that to become a thing like, for that to be the consequence. And I think we're seeing a lot. There are definitely tons of posts on Twitter and things that are exaggerations or assumptions, I guess. And I think it's. I think the Persona of it, if you will, is worse than the reality, but I think it's closer to the reality than the official statements, if you get my meaning. [00:07:46] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think it's a very good point. Who cares if it's incompetence or malice? The results of the actions, regardless of the intention, is obviously pretty terrible. And I think that's been not a problem. But I think people waste a lot of time debating intentions or around this stuff. Is it incompetence is a malice. Occam's razor. It's like, all right, debate that. Just look at the results and try to figure out how to solve the problem at the root. Not even debate and fight over, squabble over whether it's conspiratorial malice or just pure incompetence by a managerial class that has become completely bloated and incapable of actually achieving what they should be and what they're stated to, their stated reason for basic functions. [00:08:42] Speaker A: Like, utterly basic functions. [00:08:45] Speaker B: And I think in the context of the last couple weeks in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, I think the most dismaying thing is you had this natural disaster and time is of the essence. And that was the most frustrating thing. Watching from afar was the time delay from when things began to when the government started actually moving. And two, double edged sword, very frustrating that the government didn't move. But looking at the positives, like, you don't need the government. Individuals took action immediately and got to work. And that was and has been the most inspiring thing out of all this. Trying to find light in the darkness is individuals from all over the country, particularly that area of the country, coming together and helping their fellow citizens. [00:09:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. For sure. There's this mixed bag between seeing how many, just the degree of resources that they are sucking out of society and being like, how are you not helping? Then to the flip side of it, just leave us alone. And if you could both not help and not steal from us, that would kind of be the optimum outcome. You know, like, just please leave us alone. Like, North Carolina still has. And it's one of the reasons I have a really hard time leaving is because there's still this really strong sense of, like, I guess, southern hospitality, like, of community here that, like, we will come to each other's Aidan. And there's also a bunch of county level, like, sanctuary city sort of mentality of like, we don't really care what the federal government says. Like, you have a second Amendment right, you know? And like, there is that there's a strong kind of, I am a north carolinian mindset and culture versus just, we are the United States. And let's beg for the United States government to do, you know, to accomplish anything. And I think that lends itself a lot to why the response on the ground has been so incredible and, and also why the overwhelming amount of anger that FEMA has showed up just to get in the way and that people do not like. And I wanted to be like, okay, it's really easy. And it's like, super good engagement farming to say the government has done this terrible thing or to misconstrue exactly what happened because somebody had their donations confiscated or redirected or something like that. But there legitimately seems, I've heard from enough people. And there are enough people who are specifically, especially being plugged in with the bitcoin veterans, which since we talked about this before, I wanted to give a shout out to the bitcoin veterans. These guys are anti government military. Vets are the greatest people on the planet because they are organized. They are, like, super focused. They know how to bring supplies, and they also know, they think of authority as this, like, okay, so this is where we're going to get. We're going to get this far based on where, whether police or when we run into FEMa. And then what's our strategy to get around. Get around them? And, like, people are literally showing up and being like, I have this aircraft. I have this helicopter. Where can we land? They set up a base of operations in partnership with, like, a Samaritan's purse location. And they're like, these are our landing zones. If it's rained recently, landing zone circumental is going to be wet. Like, these guys have, like, straight up. It's wild to look at this because I've been in this signal conversation. Like, I, uh, we raised on noster, um, like 65,000 in bitcoin, uh, which one of them came in as a whole bitcoin, um, and which was just, which was crazy. Um, like, just shout out to shout out to everybody who is raising. I'm still getting just zaps in constantly and I'm trying to figure out how much. I mean, I've basically just donated everything in that lightning wallet anyway. I had like a million sats or 1.2 million sats or something in it. So anything that comes in is basically just being forwarded that way. But I just put, I just sent $10,000 worth of it to the bitcoin veterans. And luckily as bitcoin, because they have a number of ways to basically offload to get it so they can make purchases. But it's been so cool seeing it because I can literally see exactly what's happening. They're literally like, okay, we need this many generators. Like, they're posting in this group. They literally just went to a house to deliver medicine to somebody that was. Just had a handwritten note on it. Just like, this person needs this medicine. They're running out, and there's just no roads. There's just no roads to anywhere. Like, so many. If you go to these areas, these mountain towns like Boone, blowing rock, banner elk, they're some of our favorite places in the world. We literally, like, every single summer we go up there and we spend some time we spend a week up there generally sometimes two to three times a year. It's so unbelievably beautiful. And they're like old, quaint towns which are really hard to find, especially in the US. Everything feels really artificial and fiat and it's so unbelievably sad because I saw an aerial shot of Boone and I could see our favorite places to go. The downtown Washington was absolutely gorgeous and it was just under like 6ft of water. The whole thing. And, you know, a small town like that is so like, I don't even know how you built back from that. Like chimney Rock. Chimney Rock. The whole, the main, really small town. But the whole thing was basically off of the main road which was right next to this little creek. Absolutely gorgeous. And the whole thing, like, the road, the creek basically went from a small creek to like 25ft high, like, just like a rushing, rushing river and there's no road. Basically, the buildings, the buildings aren't under 5ft of water. The buildings are under like 5ft of mud. Like just mud and rock for the buildings that are left. There's only a couple of signs where you can look and you'd be like, oh, my God, that was, that was a street. Like, you just look at it and you just think you're looking at just rocks and mud for, you know, a football field's worth of just this big open area and you're like, what? You don't even have a landmass to kind of relate to. But then you can see like one of the buildings and it's like, you know, a trading post, like a little store and there's like a sign on the front of it that's still there and you're like, holy crap. This whole thing, this was the main road through the area and a ton of these areas only have one road. Like, literally there's just only one road to access them. And there's whole, there's whole neighborhoods that have just. Their road is gone and they, they haven't been able to get out. They've just been stuck there for weeks, I guess now, I guess we're almost, we're going on two weeks since this happened. Um, and it's just, there's like 600 people unaccounted for, I think, still. Um, I was just. And, you know, that's like, but between the, the post coming in of like, um, between the posts coming in and everybody, everything being delivered and like all the awesome stuff, there's like a number of them coming in being like, we ran out of body bags. [00:17:50] Speaker B: It's completely fucked. [00:17:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I had a friend. Shit, my stuff went to sleep. Had a friend who knows somebody in one of the neighborhoods. Because one of the craziest things, and there's some wild footage of the big thing about why there was so much damage in this area. It wasn't like the hurricane was, I mean, it was a bad hurricane, but it was mostly that these areas are never hit with it. You know, they're not used to being, to having three years worth of rain dumped on them in a matter of hours. And you would think, you generally think, oh, it's the freaking mountains. You don't have a flooding problem, but when you have that much water rushing down like a steep hill, it's moving so fast. And if the waterways that are available don't have, don't have the, the capacity to manage it, it will just eat out of the side of the mountain, literally. And that's what so many of the images and video coming out are just showing. It's just, this river is just like, okay, well, we're just going to take this extra 40ft to solve our problem of getting the water out of this area. Um, and then they'll find some other random path. There's a video I saw of just a random mudslide. Somebody was just out on their thing just looking at, oh man, the damage is getting so bad. And then just this mountain of this avalanche, literally looked like an avalanche of just mud. And water comes crashing down to the mountain. You see the cars and everything go. Shockingly, the house was fine, but the friend who had someone in the area just was in the middle of the storm, like chaos. They have a pet and two kids and just randomly they hear just like crazy loud banging on the door. And it was just, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out. Just screaming at them and they're like, oh my God. So they just grabbed what they could and themselves basically got out, ran, got in the car and started moving. And basically this huge wash of water came down and just basically took the neighborhood. And they're driving and they go over a road, they're basically following anybody that they can see. And they go over a small bridge that was kind of the main entryway into their, into their neighborhood. And basically while they were still within visible range of it, just basically seconds after they get over it, the water was hitting the side of it so bad, the whole bridge just disconnected and went down the river. And then they ended up hitting a tree or something, fell on the road or something was in the road, and so their cardinal just was useless. And so they climbed out, you know, carrying their kids and their dog, and managed to make their way down the mountain to a fire station. And that was that. They're totally fine, but that's it. That's all they got. Everything else is gone. It's just crazy. It's just crazy. Water. Water is nuts, man. Yeah. [00:21:32] Speaker B: I mean, the videos of the rivers that took on a bunch of new water and just had containers, shipping containers, just getting impaled on telephone poles, that was the most shocking thing. You're just looking at it and at the river, you're like, oh, it's a natural river. I don't think people understand the, the force with which that water was moving. [00:21:59] Speaker A: Now you see the video of, and this was actually from Asheville of the house, just a big ass house just running down the river. And then it hit this huge tree and just crumpled, crumpled like a aluminum foil, you know, just like. And you get this loud cracking and creaking sound. Just crazy. I mean, and, you know, like, you build in the low areas. You know, you don't build on the, on the 45 degree slope. You. You build at the bottom where it's flat. That's where all the water goes, too. [00:22:36] Speaker B: One of the most disheartening things about this is, I mean, whether it's up in the mountains, North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, like this, this part of Appalachia, it's people who just want to live humble lives. And a lot of people have been overlooked in the United States for many decades now, are doing a great job just living humbly and having their piece of earth that was beautiful and getting completely demolished. And not to make this political, but it is just emblematic of everything the government's done over the last 50, 60 years in terms of turning our economy into a hyper financialized debt trap and really forgetting about the humble people in what many people would call the flyover states in the US. Not that North Carolina is one of those, but the rust belt, the Appalachia, that is. I mean, for me, I've lived in different parts of the country, lived in the low country in South Carolina. People are just trying to get by and they really just enjoy nature and living a simple life and paying into the system expecting that they'll get something out of it. And again, going back to what we open with is just like the lack of care. And obviously, everybody's been talking about the fact that the government, in the same week sending billions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars to foreign nations can't even respond in a timely manner when their own citizens are having their lives literally pulled from beneath them. [00:24:20] Speaker A: Dude, what is crazy to me, like, they basically said that you have to get approval and we have to do all this stuff. There's all this red tape. And so we can't do everything right now, but we're solving. And I can't remember who it was that basically gave this excuse. And this was about a small amount of funds being directed to help, you know, what happened in Georgia, South Carolina, in the appalachian area. And yet at the exact same time, we. On the same day, we sent 157 million to Israel. And there's no. There's no red tape. There's no. We don't have to vote on that. That just. That's just like default. That's just business as usual. And I'm pretty sure I saw you post about this too. I think you had the same screenshot that in September FEMA spent $4 billion. And I want to. I want to double check and confirm that because this just seems so incomprehensibly insane to me. $4 billion in September on Covid-19 response. Do we just. Have we just forgotten that resources matter? That, like, that means that there is $4 billion worth of stuff that people need no longer available to them? On Covid-19 in 2024. What in the fuck are you doing? My. My brother just quote unquote, got Covid for a couple of days. Where's. He's gonna send him a $100 check. What? What did he need? What the fuck, Covid like, I don't understand it. What are you doing? How do you spend $4 billion on that billion? A thousand million? It's just so bonkers. It's so insane. [00:26:40] Speaker B: Well, sadly, that. And the handouts are handouts, but the. The money, they are. It's almost insulting. When kamala came out. We're gonna give dollar 750 to anybody affected by this and assistance. Please go to our website and fill out this application. And by the way, the back end, this is $750 loan that you're going to have to pay back as well. [00:27:02] Speaker A: And at the exact same time, like the number of reports and confirmations of migrants getting flights to cities and rent paid for. In fact, I even read this is. This is bonkers to me, is that you don't see the problem with this is that I read one. I always try to go through the community notes because you always get the other political perspective. And one of the community notes was just laughable because it's so great when the community notes actually confirm that this is the truth. And so somebody was like, there's two different things that were, quote unquote community notes. And I'm just like, you realize you proved the problem. And one of them was that migrants were getting free rent for two years in this area. And the community note was that, oh, it's a partial assistance plan, and they're going to have to pay back a third of it and all of this stuff. And they gave, like, all these links to, like, the details. And I'm like, so. So you're saying they got free rent for two years and they got, like, a 77% discount on, you know, Washington. Twelve hundred dollars a month, $2,000 a month, whatever the. Whatever rent is in that area, plus a flight to that area and, like, literal hotels to put them up, apartments. And you don't think that's a problem? And understand, I am not even. I'm. I'm actually a far more open borders guy. I'm not. I don't have anything. Like, I'm not. I'm not quote unquote right wing anti migrant, but I certainly as fuck. Amen. Why are you spending money on migrants? That doesn't. That has nothing to do with whether or not you are anti immigration, but we should not be spending money on them. Like, that completely defeats the purpose. We spend money on us. It's our money, it's our resources. Why is it being given to someone that the people don't want to give it to? I just. I just cannot. And at the same time, the other, the other community. So the community confirmed that, yes, this is actually happening, that they will easily and quickly go out of their way to house migrants for two years and ship them to some particular place, like, literally travel, air travel and home accommodations for up to two years. But the us citizen who pays for all of that gets a $750 check or submission to their bank account, which they may not even be able to use because they don't have Internet and they don't have a road. Like, holy crap, how did we get here? How did we get here? And the other confirmation was the. It's so funny because, like, even if Trump isn't mentioned, Trump ends up in the community notes. So somebody was talking about how, like, FEMA spent a billion dollars on migrant housing and accommodations and travel and all of this stuff in the year, and Trump specifically said they stole the money to do it, which is hilarious because that's exactly what that means. I don't really care what your terminology is. You took a billion dollars worth of taxpayer money and you spent it on migrants instead of helping the us citizens, which FEMA is a disaster relief for us citizens. That's what it's supposed to be. And it's got, like, a $30 billion budget. Something absolutely bonkers. And so they confirmed that yes, indeed, this is how much was spent. But the community note was that, like, well, they budgeted for that, so it was, like, voted. It's like, okay, well, that's not the point. [00:30:55] Speaker B: I don't care if they've ever. [00:30:56] Speaker A: I don't care if it was planned that way. The point is that you're spending a billion dollars on migrants and you're telling us today that you don't have enough to help with the storm. Like, don't budget for that. I don't give a shit who wrote what on a piece of paper, who signed what or how official it was or which bureaucracy it went through. Who gives a flying fuck about that? I don't. I don't care. I'm. Who stamped it. It's a problem because it happened. [00:31:26] Speaker B: I don't know if you saw this, but, like, another. I mean, it's another example of how stupid our government is. I saw it this morning, and it was not the Babylon B account, but they, like their. Part of their relief effort was sending a bunch of electricity chainsaws up to the area that has had its grid demolished and doesn't have electricity. [00:31:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:52] Speaker B: So they basically have a bunch of paperweights. [00:31:55] Speaker A: That's great. [00:31:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:56] Speaker A: Well, luckily, the bitcoin veterans and everybody with a brain is taking generators, so maybe they can actually be used. [00:32:04] Speaker B: Yeah, well, let's focus on this, because that's why I wanted to talk to you about this, because I think this is a glaring example of the government's not going to come save you. You have to save yourself. And not only that, we are much more efficient and organized and capable of saving ourselves than the government will ever be of actually helping in these. And that's, again, going back to finding the light and the darkness and the silver lining of all this, I think the efforts by the bitcoin veterans. Samaritan's purse, the Cajun Navy. [00:32:42] Speaker A: Cajun Navy. That was the first donation that I put from the bitcoin was $2,500 to the Cajun Navy. Those guys. Those guys are solid. And they're basically bitcoin veterans without being explicit. Bitcoiners, in my opinion. And they're also very. I also love how much they shun what the rules are like, they, they've been joking when they get stopped or they get told that they can't do or fly in this area for assistance or whatever. They, they now call it free tours through the swamp. So, so it's like, oh, no, no, we're not, we're not providing assistance to this area, but we do give free tours. That's cracking me up. [00:33:29] Speaker B: I mean, we're laughing, but it's, it's a great example of the government coming in and preventing people from actually helping because they're saying, oh, we've got to do this. We've got to organize. Here's our list of vendors. Here's where you take the money. And we're going to let you know when and when not you can go and try to help these people. But the Cajun Navy is a great example. It's like, no, fuck you. Get out of the way. I'm going to go do this. You are, this perceived authority you have over me does not exist. And what are they going to do is stop them and arrest them. Some people have gotten arrested, but if enough motivated people just brings more attention to it, yes. [00:34:06] Speaker A: Barbara Streisand, effect 101. Please, please arrest somebody. We'll get three helicopters in place of the one that you stopped. Right. [00:34:17] Speaker B: And I think that's their biggest worry, the government, is that you can't have sovereign citizens proving that they can do the government's job better. Because then how we're gonna get these billions to send to foreign nations and to house illegal immigrants, how we're gonna justify all this spending? [00:34:36] Speaker A: I hope this is, and it's unequivocally true. It's so obviously true. You don't even have to compare resources. Like, you don't have to compare how much the $30 billion FEMA has and compare it to the results. Like dollar for dollar, it's probably one to a thousand. I guarantee you, I guarantee you the private citizens can do more with a million than FEMA does with a billion. I think one to 1000 may be an understatement because the overwhelming majority of it is about keeping up a bureaucratic apparatus. The institution has become so massive that it's about fueling and keeping the institution up. It becomes its own purpose. And one of the things that not only do, like it was Stefan or Steven, I think it's Steven, Steven Bruyette, who I've talked to a number of times. And he went out there very early on. He was like, and he has family out in the area and he packed up a truck and we were kind of, like, talking because I was trying to find somebody on the ground. In the absence of me being able to go out there myself, which I was hoping. I was hoping I could. Like, I felt like the best thing that I could do was just set up communications. Because when I was first trying to get in touch, my best friend actually lives out there. He, his wife, and they're like one and a half year old now. They live in Asheville. And I was pretty sure where they were. It was probably fine. But we didn't get up. We couldn't talk. We had no contact for, like, 48 hours. Um, and, uh, but my best friend works for. For search and rescue up there. So, um, I knew I'd be able to get good, relatively good info from him when. When I did get back in contact. And he ended up sending me a ton of pictures and video and stuff. And it's crazy how much of the video, um, which I've been meaning to post in the keat room that we set up and on noster, but, uh, how much of the video, like, it just looks like a waterway. And this is days. This is like four or five days later, there's still just so much water. And you think you're looking at, like, a waterway, and it's just a mess. And there's a building over here on the side. But then you look closely enough while he's panning or whatever, and then you see chunks of asphalt, and you realize this used to be the road. And if you scroll through, I think it's like Google maps. And you do, like, the landscape view or whatnot. They have the little red, like, dots for, like, this road is out. This road is out. And there was a video of somebody just, like, kind of, like, zooming in and out on all of these things. It's just hundreds and hundreds of these. And that's really been the big problem. And what the best of the private assistants have been really just. Apparently there's like a half a bajillion ATV's in the area now. Like, everybody's just running four wheelers all over the place, delivering supplies and trying to get contact to and from. That's a really big thing that bitcoin veterans have been doing, is they set up. I think it was Operation Libertas. What's his. I forget his actual name. There's Gary and Shane Hazel. But he was telling me that they have, like, 60. And it was updating as they were pulling sourcing materials. They ended up with 60 mesh tastic nodes. And what they're literally doing is they're going to all the national guard locations and Samaritan's purse and everybody who's up and flying and Shane is literally breaking down. This is how you set up and use the mesh tastic stuff and then giving it to them. And then even crazier is apparently, if I understood this correctly, this is really cool. But that they can set it up and it's running on the helicopter. So when they go up in the air, they're connecting nodes as they fly. And so, like, as they. And then they drop these down in new areas and they're just building a network to get any kind of communication in and out. And they also have a bunch of star links and trying to get a bunch more. This has been, like, the biggest thing for, like, damn, everybody needs a Starlink as a backup. And one of the things I've been thinking about recently is getting a satellite, either a satellite phone, like a texting device or whatever, or what are those things called? The ones that allow your smartphone to connect and send, like, low band information over satellite connection, but one or the other. But, like, literally sent it to all, like, buy it as Christmas presents, basically. And sending all my friends and family, you know, my close social circles, because it had been fantastic if I had been able to contact my best friend while he was out there. And I had thought about doing this, like, a year ago and, like, literally last year, and I had never pulled the trigger. And just because it was a. It was a bit of a chunk what I was looking at. You know, they're not like three or $400 a piece, and I'm trying to think about buying, like, eight of them or something, so. But never pulled the trigger and now wish I had. So I could have stayed in touch with them, but obviously they are. They are fine, and I've been in touch with them since, but it's all been, it's all been private citizens. Going back to Stephen, I was talking with him. I mean, I just sent him like, $100 of gas money to try to just help him out while he took the trip. But he came back with this after I was kind of like, we were going through updates and him setting up Starlink and that sort of stuff. He said. It's hard to describe, but people are less panicked gases. And this was five days ago now. So on the fourth or fifth, gas is getting easier to find. Power and water is on. For most of Black Mountain, which Black Mountain was basically inaccessible for a while. People are posted with water and food all along 70 through Swannanoa. So like. And 70 was another major one that has been wiped out in like a couple of different areas. He said people are just doing this spontaneously and there's just nothing government looking he hasn't really seen. He said very few people are actually using government quote unquote services, as far as I can tell. I'm sure it's appreciated where it's accepted, but most folks are tearing up and down the road on four x four s and ATV's, delivering water to neighbors and supplies. I'll be forever grateful for the sats. I wish I had taken more footage, but it all hurts so much that I'm torn between wanting to share the pain and wanting to forget it and tell no one what I saw. But yeah, it seems like the entire effort is like even if even where the government is there, it's just not enough for him to be like its of any significance on the ground. Its just people. [00:41:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Again, going back to this is their biggest fear, the posture. They exist and we need them to exist to come and help in instances like this. And if you think about the rhetoric, the political rhetoric over the last, over our lifetimes as millennials, been very divisive, like, you need us to keep the peace, because if something like this happens, everything will devolve into chaos. That's another silver lining of this all. It's really showed the massive beauty of the human spirit, which when push comes to shove, everybody's down on their dumps and they're going through a crisis together. People will band together and help each other out. It's not the narrative that the government typically puts out there. [00:42:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But, um, not luckily, the people show up, at least in, least in southern, southern us, people show up. Like the, the response was, it was really fast. You know, it was a long time before even mainstream media was even talking about it. Like, I can't tell you how many times, like, again, that was one of the big things is the few people who could get still like television signal or information through, they couldn't even see anything. You know, they're watching tv, they're listening to a broadcast, trying to figure out what's going on and what they should do and like, nobody's talking about it. It was just like talk about Florida for a day. And then that was, that was Helene and off to the next story, you know, off to how awful Trump is or whatever they were talking about. And it was like three days. All I could do is like, I was hunting Instagram and Twitter for updates because it was the only place you could get pictures. It was the only place that, you know, anybody could have, like, information trickle in. Like, when we were. I was trying to give information to a couple of friends who were both trying to get out and then another couple who were trying to get in. And it was just through a Facebook post that we finally found someone who took, like, what was normally, like, a 30 minutes trip was this crazy. Like, you had to actually go west and then south and do this, like, weird snaking thing to get out of there. But they. They found a road in and out and mapped it out. You know, like, these are. This is the long list of directions for our two hour trip to get out of the area. But, like, that's what. That's what people needed, you know? But then I've heard so many people who were just being. Who were just being stopped and who. One guy posted something about, like, yeah, I have state of the art, like, crazy good drone, thermal drone that could fly through the area and just look for people, you know? And he was told not to, that he would be arrested if he flew it. And I just don't. I guess it's just this sense that if that's your thing, you know, try to. I try to make sense of this. I try to make sense of this because I feel like we can understand people by just, like, looking at ourselves. And the only thing, I guess, in my recent history that I can kind of remember or relate it to as, like, a voice in my head that I was like, shut up. Was, you know, I had bitcoin audible, and I was reading bitcoin articles, right? Like, that was. That was the thing that I was just like, somebody needs to do this. And so I started it. And after a few years, you just kind of feel like you're the guy who does that, you know? And I remember there was another podcast that I don't remember which one it was now that started it and started advertising really big, and I was seeing it in my feed, and I remember I got this. This voice in my head, just like, I guess it was like, jealousy or ownership, you know? And there was this. There's this thing that says, you don't do that. I'm the one who does that. You know? Like, I got. I got, like, a little bit, like, ugh. Like, come on, this is mine. And. And then after, you know, thinking about it for 20 seconds like a sane human, I was like, shut the fucking. You gotta be kidding me. How could I possibly own the idea of being the one who reads bitcoin articles? Not to mention that I already have a list of like, 2000 of which I will never get to, as if there's some sort of scarcity in, like, being able to be the one who reads. I was just like, you know, like sanity was restored. But I remember vividly the fact that I had that response to it and had to shut up that little asshole in my head. And all I can think is that, like, you know, the people in FEMA or the people in government who do the recovery, how many probably don't shut that voice up, you know, who say, this is my job. What are you doing here with your stupid atv's and bringing in your drones and the entire environment of government and of licensing and of approval and, you know, did you get the permission for that? Where's your permit? So grossly amplifies that. That awful little voice in those people's heads. And I imagine after a generation, like, there's no shutting that voice up. That that's probably their normal mode of operation, you know? No, that I'm in charge. [00:47:46] Speaker B: That voice is definitely emboldened by the fact that they have guns and authority to use them if they want to. [00:47:53] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. And they seem to. I don't think anybody's been arrested yet. There's been threats. Yeah. [00:48:01] Speaker B: This drone example, it's like if. I don't know if it was a local official or a FEMA or federal government official, but if people that want to help, you're in a disaster scenario. There's chaos. I mean, there has to be some sort of unspoken agreement. Like, we're all in this together. Just if you have a drone here that can help us, because that's the other thing. Again, time was of the essence, the aftermath of this hurricane. I mean, people stranded without food, water, electricity. Like the. Like, I've done lifeguard training before. Like, if you have somebody in the ocean that needs to be saved, you literally have a two minute clock in your mind. It's like, yeah, I'm counting down for a 20 seconds, and if I don't get there before 120, it's likely that person's lost and apply that to this. It's like you probably have 48 hours at most to get to these people who are stranded, and you just have to. [00:48:58] Speaker A: And to have that be the zone where mainstream media isn't talking about it, the government isn't doing anything, and there's no response. And then what response is there is trying to figure out how to get around, you know, any specifically people being in the way? [00:49:17] Speaker B: And who's better equipped to do that than the local people that know the area. [00:49:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:23] Speaker B: Understand where to look and where they should be looking. [00:49:27] Speaker A: And there's another thing, too, is that, you know, the self righteous people on Twitter will always come in with a good excuse. And they're like, well, you're supposed to talk to air traffic control. Tell me you've never heard about whatever, I can't remember the name of it. The term for making sure you don't hit the system they have. Make sure you don't hit another helicopter. You know, tell me you never heard about that without tell me. And which I don't. I don't remember the name of it, but all I could think is that, like. But your response is like, you're justifying violence. You're justifying saying that you should arrest somebody, when obviously any basic, intuitive, sane person response would be, okay, well, then you go to the people that are showing up to help, and you inform them of this. You don't threaten to arrest them. You don't keep them out of the air. You give them a crash course for 30 minutes on what they need to be doing and how they need to stay in contact and who they need to stay in contact with. And you give them the information and the resources to do that. That's your whole job. And then you let them help, like. [00:50:42] Speaker B: And the sky's pretty big and open. It's like, just keep your head on a swivel. Make sure you're staying. You're keeping a good distance away from other helicopters. It isn't. It's just like common sense, lack of common sense. [00:50:55] Speaker A: We've forgotten why rules exist. We've forgotten why rules exist. You know that experiment of the monkeys where they have a bunch of monkeys in a room and a ladder and there's banana hanging from the ceiling, and when the monkeys start climbing up the ladder to get the banana, they hit him with a fire hose. And after a very, very short time, they all learn. You do not. Oh, specifically, they hit every monkey with a fire hose, not just the one who climbs the ladder. That's important part of the experiment here. And it's clearly not fun to get hit with a fire hose. And so what they do is they introduce a new monkey who does not know about this situation and the result. And as he starts to climb up the ladder, inevitably to get the banana, all of the other monkeys pull him down and beat the ever loving crap out of him because they don't want to get hit with a fire hose. And then they slowly do this. They keep swapping people out or swapping monkeys out. People might as well say people. And at the end of this experiment, they have a room full of monkeys that have never been hit with a fire hose. They have no idea why this is happening. But if you introduce a new monkey, they will, as they start climbing up the ladder, they will pull them down and they will be the crap out of them. And that's what I feel like has happened. We have built this system of rules and we have no idea why they exist anymore. We don't understand. We have, like, if your rule is about keeping people safe and there is any point at which the rule is not keeping people safe or it is specifically causing people harm, you let go of the rule. You let go of the rule you do not like. These are guidelines to make sure that there is no default harm being done. But the point is to help people. And the idea that there is going to be more damage or risk by letting someone, an additional person help with a helicopter because one person may get hurt or killed because of the possibility of a helicopter collision. When there are 600 people unaccounted for and you have 48 hours, you have not weighed the risk. You have not weighed the. Especially when people are doing this of their own volition. They know that this is nothing. They're not going to be roads. They are taking a risk to do this, to help. Like, you've misunderstood why any of this matters and what the hell the rules are for in the first place. It's to make sure society doesn't collapse. It's to make sure that people are actually doing things to benefit so that we are not wasting resources. And you are wasting resources, hurting people and destroying the very mechanism that we have, the very community value, and the hope of people coming in and trying to help other people in the effort of keeping the rules in place. If the rules are getting in the way, you ignore the rules. Authority for the sake of authority is just tyranny. It's just tyranny. It's nothing else. [00:54:19] Speaker B: I'm not sure if you saw, I mean, another great example of this, Washington St. Petersburg, where you had devastation there, too. And you had a bunch of volunteers and people in the waste management industry showed up and all the houses were leveled and they were doing their jobs to pick up the wood and take it to the landfill. And like on day two of doing this, they got to the landfill and landfill guys said, FEMA told us you guys aren't allowed to drop it here anymore. You have to go talk to them and figure out where their drop spots are. And so these guys go and find FEMA. And it wasn't immediately, I think it was like a day or two later, they're like, all right, we have all this debris we want to drop off where your landfill drop offs. They were like, oh, you guys are commercial vehicles. We're only letting individuals drop off this debris. We're going to need you to go back and drop it off in the people's driveways, and we'll pick it up over the course of a year. It's like, and the guy was explaining like, this debris is already developing mold. And you're just gonna have FEMA extend this pickup period, which we could probably do in a couple of weeks to a month, out to a year, as. [00:55:29] Speaker A: If it's better to leave it in the streets and in the yards than to have it in a landfill because of some arbitrary bullshit regulation. Just like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You know, it's so crazy. And it's also, it's also a racket. You know, I did this with Walker a couple days ago, which, which I think I'm going to post on my podcast. But I try to curse. Excuse me, I try, I try to curse. I try not to curse on my show as, or at least as little as I can. And if I say the f word, which inevitably happens, I tried to bleep it out. And so I did my little AI transcript of my conversation with Walker and typed in the f word to find it. And there were 87, 87 incidents. And I was like, oh, God. Oh, no, this is going to be a two hour job. But, so I will probably be posting it. But I, you can find it on his, his podcast, the Bitcoin podcast, if you're interested. But we were talking about it, and he had this post, which is one of those things that you, you kind of know the shape of this system, more scam, if you will. But it was a post from somebody who was saying, like, I've been in the disaster response relief effort for twelve or 15 years or something like that long time. And I'll tell you why FEMA does this and why there are so many regulations and restrictions around how you can help and why they block people. He said it's because government assistance goes to, quote unquote, preferred vendors. So they have a deal with Walmart to be. And I don't have, I don't know if it's Walmart. But just as an example, they have a deal with some corporation to be the preferred vendor to supply all of the generators and the toothbrushes and all of the stuff. And they get to list it off as like a donation. And it's basically just a giant government subsidy. And so FEMA works directly with them. And so it's competition if you come in and you solve the problem and they don't need to do it directly out of the pocket of whatever corporation is the preferred vendor in the area for those supplies. And it's a racket. It's a racket. It's just like war. It's a racket that runs off of people suffering is. It's massive money making because it's short term. $4 billion spent on Covid-19 is a great example, is that there's no. It's too fast and too immediately needed for people to complain about what things cost. It's an extremely opportune situation to grift. And basically the grift. You have two main forms of grifters. You have corporate partners with the government, and you have looters. And those are the two things that go in and do the most damage, because one in a broad sense and one in a targeted local sense, but it's literally a racket, like war. War is just about the contracts for the bombs and then the contracts for the rebuilding. Like, we're giving hundreds of millions of dollars now to Lebanon to help them rebuild from the bombs that we just sent. And we literally sent money to Lebanon and Israel at the exact same time. Yeah, it's insane to rebuild the neighborhoods that were bombed by the bombs we sent to Israel. It's a racket. And they do the same thing with disaster relief. [00:59:31] Speaker B: It's not only Iraq. I mean, it's just pure evil. It's like, how the fuck have we gotten so far away from. You're influencing me to curse and say the f word, but how the fuck have we gotten so far away from the end goal and the intention of what these governments are supposed to do? I mean, and this is. War is a racket's been talked about since the days of Eisenhower. Yeah, but it's so in your face now. [00:59:57] Speaker A: Who's the general? Boris. It's short book, but it's a good book. War is a racket. Smedley. Smedley Butler. That's right. I highly recommend that. That was world War one, I think. [01:00:14] Speaker B: Yeah, that's like. Do you think we're getting to a point where it's just so obvious that people, we use the word revolt, but say enough is enough. Like, if you look at my orcas, I'm not sure if you saw this, but yesterday it came out that a lot of the immigrant funding is happening through an organization that he sits on the board of directors of. Like, so you have this ngo that's getting money from FEMA, that's funneling money to the migrants, and he's on the board. That's a direct conflict of interest bordering on treason. I tweeted out yesterday, this man needs to be tried for treason. And it's so blatantly in your face. One example, DHS, FEMA, which we've been focusing on during this conversation with war, DOJ, Department of State, it exists there, too. It exists everywhere. Name your Alphabet soup agency. There's rackets involved. And it's becoming glaringly obvious to me, and I assume you as well, obviously, that we're in the loot, the treasury stage. Like, just get us into as much debt as possible, get as many tax dollars from the citizens that you can, and just fill the. The cronies pockets. [01:01:32] Speaker A: And it's so blood of the golden goose. [01:01:35] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's like, what I'm trying to discern right now. Like, are we in a bubble where we recognize this very. It's very straightforward to us, or do you. Do you have hope that people are waking up this as well? [01:01:48] Speaker A: No, it's definitely. There's definitely momentum against. And I think this is just kind of the. The expansion of, or the natural response to. I go back and forth between being kind of like trapped in the political atmosphere or mindset and the. And then kind of stepping back and seeing the really big picture. Like, our technology. Like, we are a networked organism and our networks decide what happens. All of the politics and all of the surface stuff is downstream. It just feels more relevant because it's closer to us culturally. It's at the social layer. But this is all downstream from what's been happening to communication networks. And a great example is the fact that I can get so much information from a signal group, from Twitter and Instagram when mainstream media isn't talking about this and how many people have become pseudo journalists in all of this, in this environment. And I think the shift to do these things and the shift to change course for what you are focused on and what you care about, like, in your life, it requires pressure. You know, like, it's really easy to procrastinate something that doesn't seem like a concern. It's not until, like, you know, you basically get punched in the back of the head by that thing you've been ignoring, that the change actually occurs, and it occurs in waves. And I think what we've been seeing has been the fallout of a 30 year shift to a different type of media, to the bandwidth, between you and I not having to be diverted through the news, through three broadcast agencies. And that's. That's exactly why. I mean, Hillary Clinton literally just said it out loud recently. She said that if we do not, if we are not able to censor and control these huge social media platforms, then we have lost total control. And she said those words, I just can't. Um. But it is about the. It's about the ability to communicate. And that doesn't mean that people change their minds immediately. It means that the exposure to a new idea, like, all this pedophilia stuff in Hollywood and P. Diddy and Epstein, you know, you first get kind of introduced to those ideas, like. Like, I was first exposed to those, like, ten years ago, eleven years ago, maybe. And at the time, I was like, that's crazy. That's bonkers. You know, it seems hard to. Really hard to digest. And then you see another thing, and you see another thing, and then the next year, and then another thing comes out, and then Weinstein gets arrested, and then there's a me too movement, and then another thing happens, and then Epstein gets arrested, and then he. And then he suicides in a, you know, no camera. Like, it just like one thing, piece by piece, and you're exposed to it. They don't talk about it on the news, but you're exposed to it because of your social circle, because of Twitter, because of Instagram, because of TikTok, because they cannot filter everything. The bandwidth and the scope of where communication is coming from is so vast. Like, even the censorship is usually about, like, they started censoring. Like, that was when. That was the first, like, serious shadow ban that I got on Twitter. Like, my account was growing heavily, and I was like, oh, damn, this is kind of crazy. It was the first time I was looking at analytics on my account. I was like, God damn, this is going all right, okay, I can get behind this. I was doing like 3000, 4000 followers a month for, like, six months straight. And I was like, all right, let's do this. And then I said something bad about insert pharmaceutical products, which was verified, by the way, posted my sources, and obviously, we now know to be completely true. And that month, I went from three to 4000. Every single month positive to, like, negative 75. And I never got, like, an official, like, you're not allowed. It was just. And I knew it. I knew it, too. Like, as soon as it happened, because, like, engagement dropped in the next couple of days, I was like, like this. My experience just generally changed on Twitter, and I was like, dude, what is up? And then, you know, the. The analytics happened, and it was just a recognition. I was like, ah, here, here. I let myself kind of get excited about this frivolous thing anyway, but it was just so funny because it was. It was a. It was a sobering moment of, like, how little. How little I control any of that. But the big thing is that, like, you got around that. That type of shadow ban or something almost immediately, because everybody started spelling vaccine at Vax, and then it was like, v a c k s I N e. You know, just like, they just changed the filters. The filters only work, so the jab. [01:07:06] Speaker B: The jab. [01:07:07] Speaker A: And then it was just like, memes. Like, you put it in a picture. Then the OCR started happening, and they started doing little tricks there. Like, the scope of things that you have to filter and watch is just so massive that there's. There's no control. And people wake up slowly. I think it's Charles. It's a quote out of. Oh, God, I hate it when I can't remember the name of the book. A group? No, group. Not group. Think crowd, something crowd. Jesus, I'll remember in a minute. Maybe badass at crowds, but no, it's. And it was after 2020. It was, like, published in 2021, whatever. But it was a quote of, people go insane in a group all at once, very quickly, and they only recover their sanity slowly and one at a time. And that's what networks do, though. Like, when you. When you have fundamentally changed that communication layer and you've opened up this bandwidth and exposure of ideas. Remember, the people that are most angry or most uncomfortable about an idea are often the ones that are realizing that they can't ignore it. You know about the Epstein and P. Diddy stuff. Oh, no. Hollywood isn't all pedophiles. Politicians aren't all just in this big, giant, like, mutually assured destruction blackmail ring. That can't possibly be the case. But then they get really, really mad at every single post that suggests it and provides evidence for it because they. Something in the back of their mind is being like, nah, dude, nah, dude. That's kind of what it is. [01:08:59] Speaker B: Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a. Yeah, a hell of a drug. People don't it's a fish and water thing. Obviously, we talk a lot about this in bitcoin. This applies directly to people's aversion to bitcoin versus the us dollar and other fiat currencies, is they don't want to believe that they've been sold a lie their whole lives. And it is funny that you mentioned the bandwidth and the network, and it reminds me of the early days of Rogan back in 2012, 2013. That was one of the major clips from his early episodes. Like, the Internet's like you're in a wide creek trying to grab all the salmon that are going to lay eggs. Like, you're not. It's like one individual trying to do that. It's impossible. Information is free now. And that's. I think that's the, one of the massive battles of our time, is just having the incumbent power structure come to grips with that and trying to figure out a way for them to realize their attempts to stop this information distribution and the sharing of information will be futile ultimately. And I don't know if we convinced them or just move our pieces on the chessboard in a way that makes it very clear to them this is not going to happen. So that we can limit the damage that they try to cause along the way. [01:10:20] Speaker A: I think they increasingly just kind of become irrelevant. You know, the worst thing you can do to a politician, like, you think about the framing and, like, what a politician goes for is they want to be liked, they want to feel important. And this is why one of the things that you can do to a politician that will anger them. And this is not all, mind you, like, there's a romp hall and there's like a very, very small group of people who literally just feel some sort of an obligation. But obviously they are one out of a thousand, maybe one out of 500, and something, and. But that what they chase is clout. And this is why one of the things that will anger them and make them hate people more than anything else is ridicule. But at the same time, that makes ridicule the most powerful weapon. Memes. Memes are not to be, are not to be undervalued. You know, they are, they are literal weapons in the social sphere. For. [01:11:31] Speaker B: I think I remember what you were. It wasn't a book, but the Academy of ideas had a two part series on mass formation, mass psychosis. The first was explaining what it is, which you alluded to earlier. Everybody goes crazy at once and then individually comes to terms. And the second part was like, how do you break through it. And it was like ridicule. Like, you literally ridicule the people trying to hold you down. And it's so effective. [01:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:11:57] Speaker B: And it's not only is it effective in pissing them off, but it's effective in empowering other individuals. You see that they're like, oh, that is funny. [01:12:05] Speaker A: The madness of crowds. [01:12:06] Speaker B: The madness of crowds. [01:12:08] Speaker A: I know I'd get it. [01:12:11] Speaker B: That's what I said. I said the madness of crowds. [01:12:14] Speaker A: Did you? [01:12:15] Speaker B: I think I did. That was godsad, wasn't it? [01:12:20] Speaker A: I don't know. I was trying to log into my audible real quick to scroll down my list. Well, if you said it, then that's probably what stuck in my head. But yes, the madness of crowds was the book that I was thinking of. And it's Charles somebody was the quote. [01:12:36] Speaker B: That's, I think, leading up to this election. I think that's becoming very, it's becoming very apparent that ridicule is having an effect. I mean. [01:12:50] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [01:12:51] Speaker B: Kamala is very easy to ridicule for being honest and trod somebody out. That was more ironclad, dude. [01:13:00] Speaker A: I can't believe. It's so weird, the dichotomy. It's so funny because you can see the people who are like, you can see which network people are in with how they actually communicate. Like, network in the sense of like, narrative network or worldview network, whether or not they still perceive the old guard as a form of authority or source of truth. And really, this is all about trust, right? Is that, you know, if a study comes out of New York Times, there's a huge, huge, huge number of people who are just like, okay, like, how much do I believe that study? And they've, they've seen too many times that the simple, simple reality. Simple reality that if you have something that's incredibly politically divisive and especially, quote unquote, science, science is so easy to buy because there's no money there. You know, if you're giving out grants for climate change, your study's going to find climate change. That's just how it is, man. Like, and I don't care. You can, you're going to be able to point to so many different things. That doesn't make it true. That doesn't make it true. That makes it grant worthy. [01:14:20] Speaker B: If you're, if you're given a budget to figure out who Satoshi Nakamoto is, you're going to figure out who it. [01:14:25] Speaker A: Is you're going to find because you're not going to. That's exactly right. Oh, God, that's funny. Peter. Peter Todd, right? [01:14:34] Speaker B: Yeah, it's Peter, actually. No, we shouldn't laugh. It's not Peter, but it's likely not Peter. But that is a perfect example of. We need a documentary that sends waves through the financial world. We need to discover who Satoshi Nakamoto is. [01:14:52] Speaker A: HBO. If you're using HBO as your bitcoin knowledge source, you already lost, man. You already lost. [01:15:02] Speaker B: No, it is a perfect example of all this. [01:15:04] Speaker A: Go buy rally coin on Coinbase, too. [01:15:07] Speaker B: Yeah. No, to your point, of other people beginning to get. I mean, my mom is a great example of this. I mean, related to what's going on in North Carolina right now. She sent me an Instagram post. One of the theories that the. One of the towns that's sitting on the lithium, she's just sent me that theory that's been going around like they needed to wipe this town off the world or out of the way so they get the lithium mines. She's like, do you think this is real? And I was like, I don't know. I doubt it. Maybe it could be. Government's done very weird stuff. But again, the point being, my mom is getting even, though slowly but surely. Slowly but surely, getting into alternative takes on these type of events. [01:15:57] Speaker A: The walls around worldview are really big and really thick. You know, like, it's a very, like, you build your identity around this, and you have to very slow. Like, you have to etch. You know, it's very much the spoon in the prison wall. Like, you don't. You don't just go blasting through. Like, if you just go blasting through one of those walls, you're like, it breaks people, especially if they're really deep. But that's just slowly but surely. And this is why when you back out ten to 15 years and you look at a 20 year trajectory, that's why I think the momentum going back to kind of a question that started this thread was, yeah, I think we're undoubtedly winning the. The war of the mind, I guess, is the way to put it. That doesn't mean that we win in the political sphere. That doesn't mean that we win on the ground, in every location. But it does mean that I think there is a natural response and also a very natural evolution of things have to be bad. You have to have the stressors of tyranny, especially when you. When you find yourself in a technological environment that has changed so, so vastly that. That none of the systems work the same. It's important to remember that 124 years ago, those systems that we put in place to protect freedom or to protect free speech, none of them apply anymore. Like, we have to build entirely new systems, because the avenues of power and control don't lie in the same place or in the same hands. Which is why nastr, bitcoin. It is the cypherpunks who have pioneered this. And all I can see is, on a 30 year timeline, what has the cypherpunk Persona, the culture, the worldview, done but grow? What has a trajectory that is that more in the common knowledge? I mean, of course it's still niche, it's still a corner, but it's a vastly larger corner than it used to be. And I think that is really where the heart of, you know, the fire shifts to a different place, when the technological environment is different, you know, when it changes. [01:18:38] Speaker B: Anything about our generation is coming up millennials, and we're both married, children, thinking about this stuff. But I remember downloading AOL via CD ROM onto my gateway desktop in the nineties. Then I remember Napster, when it blew up. I was around like eleven or twelve at the time. [01:19:01] Speaker A: I was a Napster fiend. [01:19:05] Speaker B: All the forums and chat rooms, we're native to that. And I think that's, I think maybe not us, but I think many people, and it's not all of us millennials. There's obviously where a bunch of us who never were really online growing up, but I think a critical amount of us were critically online growing up, and we were sort of growing up in this era, because I remember when it comes to bitcoin, specifically when I was radicalized by zero eight, the Middle east wars, Snowden, Julian Assange. When I found bitcoin, it wasn't earth shattering to me. It was like, oh, no, this is the solution. [01:19:47] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:19:47] Speaker B: And that was because of being very online growing up. And if you think about the cumulative effect of more and more people growing up with the communications network, just playing that forward another 20 years when we're getting towards retirement, and it's going to have profound effects, that's going to be the fish and water. It's like, no, this is the way media works, is the way we share information. [01:20:12] Speaker A: But I think. I think it's going in our direction. Like, without a doubt. And, you know, in the Howard Bloom book I've been reading most recently, or listening to. Been reading a book about thorium, listening to a book called the Global Brain by Howard Bloom, which I can't remember who recommended this one to me, but it's so good. And he talks about when there's such a cool story about bacteria and just kind of this layer of communication that we just clearly are not aware of and how literal generations will shift. Like, the bacteria doesn't even look the same. It doesn't have the same features. The structure of the body of the bacteria doesn't look the same. And when they find, when they reach out and they find resources, they will literally grow and start having infants. Like, the new generations will be a completely different type of bacteria that are basically built to stay in place and consume as many resources as possible. And so they build this huge static like, kind of collective group that is built to work together and consume resources as efficiently as possible and spread out. Then when the resources start to dry up, basically all of these pressures start to occur and you have tons of this bacteria start to die. And then literally there is a genetic shift and they start having the next generation start coming out. And they literally have these little tentacles, these tails that will get them to go out, and they go out on their own and they go in search of for food again. And it's a literal generational shift. Like generations and generations, it will look like one thing, and then when the pressures start to break down their community, they turn into something completely different. And then rather than wanting to coalesce and work together and consume resources, they're built to be efficient, to travel quickly, and to be on their own until, of course, they find resources again. So cool. But the idea here is that, and one of the things that he specifically brought up is that in the fires of the collapse of the last thing that has kind of reached its end, where its scale doesnt work anymore, it is actually in that that environment is a necessary part of the pressures that end up building the thing that is the solution. It's like you need the ashes necessary to grow the next thing, in a sense. And I think kind of my perspective, I kind of got quote unquote radicalized during the same zone that you did probably a little bit later. I remember in 2001, I was still in 911, I was still, you would have called me a hardcore Republican. And it wasn't until really 2008, 2000, 920 ten that I was really. It was after the great financial crisis that I think I was like really solid, like, oh, this is a scam. You know, this whole thing is just up in smoke. Because it wasn't, it was shortly before that, like, because I found bitcoin in 2011 and it was like blatantly obvious. You know, we were already austrian economic rabbit hole. I was bittorrent. And I'd found the cypherpunks at that point, which is funny, because my brother actually heard about bitcoin first in a conversation about the fed, whereas would have thought, like, me going down the cypherpunk rabbit hole, maybe I would have heard about it first. But we were both instantly down that. And it's such a great example, I think, of that collective mind is that the pressures build and you start to shift that worldview by the small, consistent exposure to new information and bandwidth to be able to communicate with people that otherwise would have thought they were alone in the world with their perspective. And you find out, oh, there's a hundred of us, we could do something. And then you start to build those solutions. That's noster the pairs, stuff like the pear stack, like with Keaton wholesale bitcoin. I think these things are. I feel like I've been tuned into that direction, in that worldview ever since then. And bitcoin was kind of like that first piece of the puzzle is like, holy shit, you can solve this. You know, like, this is actually fixable. This isn't just some big, insurmountable problem that I have to go through my life as a lonely libertarian defeated by the fact that the world doesn't care about what I feel is an obvious answer to our problems. No, there's actually a solution. And when you think about it, we're 14, we're 1515 years into it. It's moving faster than it's ever. Like, it's changing faster than it's ever changed. [01:25:45] Speaker B: In 2021, days will be 16 years since the white paper. Just crazy. [01:25:49] Speaker A: So crazy. So, yeah, the 31st, we're very close. [01:25:52] Speaker B: And that's the. That's the other beauty of it, too. Like, I mean, I was definitely on that island. I was in college at the time that I found bitcoin. And, I mean, I was studying econ, getting indoctrinated with keynesian neoliberalism, and went to a party. Not a party, it was a bar school. But my friend group partied a lot. And I did have that feeling of, I found bitcoin. And I was weird that I cared about econ in the first place, the banking system, and was really into Snowden and Julian Assange, like, Michael Hastings was around the same time when that Aaron Schwartz and was really particularly post middle eastern wars, like, radicalized. Like, this is all fucked. And was a bit of an outlier in my friend group. [01:26:44] Speaker A: We get drunk and be like, let me tell you about Hayek, you guys read Hayek. Right. [01:26:50] Speaker B: And then it was until I like Silk Road, I think is what got me in. I started reading about it, watching podcasts about it, and then found bitcointalk.org and I was like, oh yeah, there are people talking about this and like did make me feel comfortable. My island that I was on personally within my friends and family group. [01:27:13] Speaker A: It's like a weight off. [01:27:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:27:14] Speaker A: You know. [01:27:17] Speaker B: I mean when it comes to bitcoin, pair noster, Bittorrent, whatever it may be. That's the other beauty of it is you don't have to wait on the solution. The solution's there and you can act on it immediately. And that is the most empowering thing of bitcoin. It's like you don't have to wait. You don't have to feel the pressure of helplessness because you can't work through the political apparatus to get a politician in to vote and push the policy that you think is most advantageous for yourself as an individual in society at large. Like, it's like, no, you don't have to wait for any of that. You literally just opt in and it's there for you. [01:27:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And you can build. You can build like the. That's really like one of the biggest things. And it's an allegory. It's a perfect like mirror to the beginning of the Internet itself is. And I think this is discounted a lot too, is just how open the new solution or the new landscape for creating solutions is. And it's kind of like when YouTube happened is legacy media absolutely balked at it. There's some wonderful, kind of like the Internet is only going to be as good as the fax machine sort of quotes about YouTube from major broadcasts, broadcast media back in the day. And what they discounted was the fact that there was going to be a whole new era. Like it's, there is, there's not just high, high expensive national broadcast media. What there is now going to be is between that and home videos, there's. There are multiple markets that will now exist because the landscape now allows them to reach people. And this is the same sort of thing with like when it comes to payment solutions and applications for money and privacy and all of these things is that there has been more innovation, there's probably been more significant innovation and new business models and new ideas for apps and different ways to utilize some tool or payment network or lightning or noster in the last year in that landscape than there was in 50 years in credit cards, maybe longer. And it's purely because of the permissionlessness. It's purely because you had to have a banking license. You had to have a, to get. To get a bank. You couldn't just, you can't just like, make a payment card and be like, go try this. Like, you can do that with lightning, you can do that with ecash, you can do that with a fediment, with a federation of a multi sig setup. Like, how bonkers is it that, like, I quote unquote, can provide recovery financial services for people that I know and, you know, people that I own? Board would be like, okay, we're gonna do nunchuck and I'm gonna hold one of the keys and we'll just have this. This is, these are the devices that you need to keep track of. And if you ever lose one, just let me know. Like, and, you know, I don't charge for it or anything. It's just like, these are, these are people that I'm close to and I care about. I don't want them to lose their money. Like, but I'm essentially, I'm doing what would have been a bank's job before. There's no permission. There's no, it's completely open. Like, and I'm using some open source tool that somebody else built. You know, the people really underestimate the simple fact that if you just, if you have the environment and the pressure, there is no limit to human innovation. Like, we will just figure it out. Like, and I know that feels like a hand, wavy. Have faith. I'm not saying that don't build anything, because if you don't build anything or you don't participate, well, then it will just happen in spite of you and it will probably happen slower. If you had an idea that could have been useful, but nonetheless, humans will respond, you know, like, we will respond to stimuli. And if the pressure is there and the need is there, innovate. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? [01:31:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:31:44] Speaker A: And I feel like necessity is here. [01:31:46] Speaker B: It's here. And when you, particularly with bitcoin, lightning, e, cash, noster, I completely agree. The amount of stuff that's been built in the last twelve months alone is mind boggling. But then when you think about the combination, the different combinations of those different networks and those different protocols getting to materialize, it gets mind bending. We built a newsletter referral app using noster wallet, connect and lightning network and our ghost server. And it's like, hey, if you recommend the newsletter to a friend, and they read three newsletters, we'll send both of you 500 sets. And it wasn't until nostrawild connect allowed you to basically have people sweep sats from a wallet, like Albie or something like that, that that was possible. You had to connect these two protocols. And so we're only at the cusp of the benefits of combining all these protocols together. Like, if you thought bitcoin lightning was cool, just wait until you begin to mix these monetary transfer protocols with communication protocols and then these chomp protocols. It's going to get insane. [01:32:55] Speaker A: It's going to be nuts, man. It's wild. [01:33:00] Speaker B: Throw AI in the mix, you get the agents in the mix, you load them up with wallets. [01:33:04] Speaker A: Dude, I've been fuck. Not to go down the AI rabbit hole too much, but it's funny. It's extremely difficult, I increasingly think. I think OpenAI is gonna go under. I've been reading, and maybe I'm just kind of in a bubble with some of the stuff I've been reading. Um, but, uh, they seem to just be losing a staggering amount of money. Like, just an excruciating amount of money. And there does not seem to be a solid product for AI. Like, it's. There's this weird imbalance between how useful AI is in certain contexts and how unproductive it is in another that, like, I use it constantly, but I have found that 80% of my use of it is entirely local. And it's very small, extremely targeted things with little apps that I have built. Funny enough, with AI, like with an LLM, you know, with chat GPT or llama 3.1 or whatever. And, like, I think the future of AI is really, really bright. I think the future of corporate AI is not so great, which is wonderful, which is wonderful. I think open source is really going to take over. And I don't think OpenAI just raised $6.6 billion at the highest valuation ever in this extremely weird, we're half profit nonprofit. This totally bonkers situation where they literally only sold ppus. They sold, like, profit. That's not even equity. Like, just so. It's so weird. [01:34:50] Speaker B: Executives, except for Sam Altman. [01:34:53] Speaker A: Yep, yep. And I think that buys them, like, in New York Times was saying that their revenue was like 2 billion and they were estimating that it would be like three to 4 billion for the year. But so much of this is based on the fact that they're getting like a third of the cost for Microsoft server, Microsoft compute. So it's literally because they're being like, heavily, heavily subsidized. And I think that buys them like eight months, like all that money they just raised. If they don't, they just lose money. They just lose money. And it's why I've been a little bit slow to buy more GPU's, because I suspect there will be a big, big supply of GPU's this coming year, a 100s that I can probably get at half price. So we'll see. [01:35:53] Speaker B: It's following the bitcoin mining cycle that we went through in 2021, in my opinion, just the hardware side of it. But to your point about open source, Aihdenhe talked to Matt Hill about this. He's wholly convinced that the future of AI is people self hosting their own instances and just building there. And so I had gone back and. [01:36:16] Speaker A: Forth a lot, but I'm falling there too. That's where I've landed. [01:36:20] Speaker B: Like last week, I downloaded LM studio, put llama 3.1 on it, and then set up a cursor account and llama 3.1 on my MacBook Pro. I think it has an m one chip. Like, it was fine. It was maybe two or 3 seconds slower than using something like perplexity or chat GPT. And it had really good answers. And I was giving it a bunch of context. I made just a small app, had the help of Rob Hamilton, who was also holding my hand in DM's along the way. But it was like I wanted to see if I could something from scratch using a combination of LM studio cursor, try to create context in LM studio, and then use cursor to actually really tighten up the code. And it was a simple sec API app. It's like, I want to know if somebody files a ten k if they mention bitcoin. I haven't gotten it fully. [01:37:15] Speaker A: That's cool. That's a good one. [01:37:17] Speaker B: I haven't gotten it fully worked out yet, but I have the simple API call to recognize accession numbers for individual companies. So I know that I can use the key to look up information on individual companies. And we'll have to spend more, more time actually building out the functionality. But it was completely possible open source AI on my own device and was completely functional. [01:37:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I did a episode recently, I was using the llama 3.1, the 405 billion parameter model, so I couldn't run it on my own. I was running it on a of Venice AI, which MVK actually just pointed out recently. He's like, you know they have a shitcoin, right? And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. Are you serious? Say, does it shock you? Of course. Of course they have a shitcoin. Does it shock you? Um, I'm, I'm sad, I guess. I'm not shocked. I'm disappointed. I'm just disappointed. Um, but, uh, the, what I was getting at in the episode, because we've talked about, I covered a piece by, uh, Ashton Brenner. I don't know, I can't remember his name, but he was talking about how we were on the road to AGI, and it was hard to argue with his stance because he was basically just projecting out the last ten years of orders of magnitude improvements, just basically going, Moore's Law. It's like, okay, well, if this has held true for ten years, if we just project this out, like, 2027, 2028, like, we should be seeing something crazy. And so he had a really strong argument. I kind of was, like, wrestling with myself as to whether or not I accept his premise or not in the conversation in the takes afterward. But I've also found something is that I have dropped my anthropic and chat GPT subscriptions recently, last few months, and it's because llama 3.1. Like, there are times where I feel like I can probably say, okay, this one's better. This one has a better answer than this other one. But for the most part, I can't tell. And I actually have this. If there's no judgment and there's no, like, underlying goal, I have this thing. It's like, what's the value of a machine that is somehow, quote unquote smarter than you? And it seems like, okay, sure. Like, it seems like on the surface, if you just say that out loud, of course, of course it's going to be, like, worth infinite. It's going to be worth everything. But then, at the same time, if you cannot judge, if you cannot benchmark that it is actually smarter, or that the answer is better, and you don't know how to value whether or not that answer is better. It's like, I likened it to computer graphics in video games. Is that kind of, once the answers are indistinguishable, it's just about cost. And that's kind of where I am with the models. That's why I canceled my subscription with both of those other ones, because I just want an answer that I like, and that gives me the result that I'm looking for. And it's really hard to verify the result of this is smarter than you, or so, it's such a vague and kind of subjective claim. In the first place. It's like, in context of what? In what way is it more capable than me? Exactly. It just seems to be this kind of hand wavy thing that can't be defined. We're already hitting a point where we don't really have good benchmarks to even make a comparison between the things. And once computer graphics just kind of like got good enough for video games, like, that was the thing. Every single year, our graphics are better, our graphics are better. Our graphics are better. You lived in same generation, right? And then it was like PlayStation three and Xbox era, where it was like, nobody really cares about graphics anymore. Yeah, halo, the next one had like, better graphics, and everybody's like, okay. And they didn't go out and buy it immediately. You know, it was. Everything slowed down and suddenly you had retro games. Suddenly it became cool or unique to have old graphics, and it just became a non thing. Like, nobody really cares about graphics anymore. My graphics are just graphics. You know, I kind of think that's where we're getting with LLMs, and when that happens, it will be about how they can solve explicit problems. And I think ultimately it's a probability machine. It still just needs a program. But in reference to what you were just talking about with building your own little program in the SEC, that's why I started hope and I, a developer I've been working with, started devs who can't code, and it's on the YouTube channel, which I don't really devote much to, but I try to public, I try to publish everything to YouTube if I can, just for the sake of it. YouTube and rumble. But it's a fun little series that I only just kind of get the dabble in every once in a while. But it's because I've built like so many little, like, single purpose. I have become in love with single purpose apps. I've just like this just does this one thing and it just does it all the time, and it's just part of my workflow and I just need it every day. Like, I have my transcription app, like, just like on, on my dock, the one I've been working on. When I worked on last night, I told you, I, the f word was 87 times in that episode. I haven't worked every piece of it out, but I think it's going to work pretty easy because you can do a JSON file where there's a threshold for every single word in the transcript, and then with FFmpeg, you can actually just generate a beep. I think I'm going to have an auto censoring tool. Probably in the next couple days, if I can just get some hours to really devote to it, I can just drag and drop my episode into it, and it will push out a new audio with all the f word bleeped. And I wait for 60 seconds or so for it to propagate. But that's been the use of AI, and now I can't really tell a difference. I have to piecemeal so much of it anyway. It's just like, llama 3.1 does more than enough right now. [01:43:30] Speaker B: Yeah. It reminds me of just general search engines. It's like when you go out there, you're not asking the AI, well, you're asking Google's index, and by extension, asking the wisdom of the crowd, and you're essentially doing the same thing. It's like, I don't exactly know the answer, but I'm gonna look at this answer that is up here, high on the index, and say, all right, this is good enough. [01:43:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And the other big thing is that it really just kind of like, makes, especially since, like, LLMs hallucinate so much, because it's just a probability machine. You know, it's just guessing what an answer would sound like, which is usually really good. It's usually good, but it's so difficult to productize because it will affirmatively, it will confidently say something that it just totally made up. You know, it's not, it doesn't actually have thinking or reasoning. It cannot distinguish between something that was invented versus something that was probabilistically sounded good, because it all is. Probabilistically sounds good. But if you can get a context relevant result, it does mean that you can search through stuff on your own computer without knowing what the thing was actually called. You can. You can search based on how it made you feel or how you were thinking about it at the time. Like, if you save something of that's titled pharmaceutical drug lies, chart, whatever, and then you search for COVID vaccine data, you're not gonna get it, right? That search is not gonna turn that up. But if your LLM does a probabilistic search, if it just embeds all of your information, that will show up as one of the top results, because you are extremely close in the probability context window of that LLM. When you say vaccine and pharmaceutical, when you say chart and data, those things are close to each other. So it's actually, it is just kind of like a much more advanced search. So it's incredibly useful, but it's also something that's really hard to charge for. It's like, am I going to pay to search better or is somebody just going to put that in their service? And then I'm just going to expect that as the. That's what the free thing is like now. That's kind of where I think it's going. And that's why I think the small models are going to win. [01:46:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:46:10] Speaker A: Which is another hopeful thing, which is a very good thing. It's a very good thing, yes. Another one of those, like, bandwidth and permissionless building. Like, now you have more builders. Like, again, I'm a dev who can't code. Same, but I'm building, you know, as much as I can. But it's useful. An auto sensor tool that I'm sure there are people who would want that, you know? [01:46:34] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what the last weekend, the weekend project I did, it's like, all right, I can, like, I've known how to get into the terminal and hook up to my bitcoin node and use CLi to communicate with the node to figure out what's going on now. It's like, all right, I did that project and it was very disorganized, and that's like, the one lesson I took from it. I need to get a better perspective of how to actually organize your ide and the order of operations by which you create a file structure and where you save things. And that was the biggest lesson I learned from as a dev who can't code. [01:47:08] Speaker A: Like, trying to think about the engineering is how do you design it? What's the big picture thing? [01:47:13] Speaker B: But it was without AI, like, I wouldn't even have the context to understand. That's what I need to learn out, and that's the next step of what I need to take a step back and figure out how to do this. And it'll probably be much easier moving forward. [01:47:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, that's what I've been trying to. That's why I have hope. Hope is a developer, and that's why I have him on the show and talk to him a lot about it, because he kind of gives me that, like, how should you build it? Framework. And that's increasingly why LLMs can be really useful if you know the building mindset, because the LLM really wants to just give you the whole app in one app js. And what you need to do is know how to reference the different pieces, because if you can keep every single module and every single function under 100 lines of code, then make sure that your app js is just referencing that or loading in a different tool or a different module. LLMs are really, really good at producing 100 lines of code that work, but you have to know what kind of context to give in. It's like, this is my current file, this is the variable that we're working with. This is this. A bunch of different things I've been doing with. I'm building this little tiny apps thing that I've got, which is just basically combining a bunch of little apps that I've already built. And I'm trying to make a little interface so that they all work within it and I can drag a file to it and then say, make a transcription, after you make a transcription, archive this, zip it, and then delete the original file and then censor it. I could just have or convert this from Mov to web, optimize mp4 and I don't have to get out ffmpeg or anything like that. It's just like I drag it in there and then I run a command, and then if you build a thing in JavaScript, I can just add that as another function. So I just kind of build this little environment, and it's just this little sidebar thing that just helps me, and I just drag whatever I'm doing, and then I just say, run these commands, convert gift to webp, do whatever it is. And it just saves me from having to open up a terminal to do a bunch of little things and this really lengthy process. And I can kind of automate it. But if you know that kind of framework that you're working in, LLMs can build a crazy amount of stuff. And there's a bit of beating your head against it, too. Your progress is I have a different error code, but it's crazy what you can put together. [01:49:55] Speaker B: Are you open sourcing this? [01:49:58] Speaker A: I mean, of course it would be open source, but I'm wearing, look at my hat. But I mean, I built it on the devs, who can't code slowly and a little frustratingly. [01:50:15] Speaker B: Logan, are you taking notes over there? [01:50:19] Speaker A: But, yeah, I'll, I'll release it. It's, it's in pair runtime or whatever. So if I, if I seed it, you can just do pair run and then punch in the key and you can get it from me peer to peer with a pair stack. [01:50:30] Speaker B: Hand up. I need to get on pair. [01:50:32] Speaker A: Yeah, you got to check out pair runtime. You got to check out the pair stuff. [01:50:35] Speaker B: You're making it very compelling. Your, your pair. [01:50:38] Speaker A: Very. So my tiny apps thing, and I did this. I think in the, in the episode that I cut, I was running this thing on my Mac and my goal with that episode was to get to a point where I could just drag and drop a file and then run a function on it. I was like, okay, the easiest function that's not going to need to import Ffmpeg or whatever it is or whisper is copy, I'm just going to copy. I got to that point and I dragged a file to it and then I hit copy and then opened up a window and then saved it to a different location. I was like, ah, cool, it worked. But the really cool thing is that after I was done, because I built it with pair runtime, I said pair stage and did my app and then pair seed and it gave me a key. Now my MacBook is just seeding this app out into the universe like a Bittorrent. And I took that key, went over to my Linux machine and said pair run and punched in the key. And this is all just terminal. Obviously this can be obfuscated away very, very easily to a UI. But I said pair run and punched in the key. The app booted up. I dragged something from my desktop into it, it copied and I saved it to a new location on my Linux. I just, I built something that worked on Mac and instantly I could boot it up from my Mac, peer to peer on my Linux machine and do the exact same thing on Linux. And I don't think people realize it's again one of those things if you know where the tools are and you know how to use them. Like the seeds of our solutions to everything are already here. You know, like we just, we just have to, we just have to water the tree, I guess. [01:52:23] Speaker B: No, this is a very optimistic way and a hopeful way to the conversation going back to everything we've talked like, this is everybody, not everybody, but many people are very frustrated with the government right now, particularly with the response and the misallocation of funds. And it's very frustrating, very enraging, and I would argue evil to a certain extent. And you can rage at the machine or you can rage against it and actually build the solutions. This is it. Like build these solutions in the digital sphere that make you more productive and allow you to do way more to get better information out there that people in meatspace can consume and use to better organize and provide meats based solutions to solving these problems. [01:53:16] Speaker A: Hell yeah. [01:53:18] Speaker B: Thank you for doing well. You've been doing particularly these last two weeks. I know it's not easy for you and it's very close to your heart, and I think the move to action that you've displayed over the last few weeks is inspiring, extremely admirable, and I think what you've done is awesome. [01:53:42] Speaker A: I got a shout out to everybody who donated, man. Like, I can't believe everybody who's like, I just kind of did it on a whim because somebody asked me when I was doing posts, and I was like, okay, well, here's. I just made a wallet in nunchuck. I was like, all right, I'll do a new multi fig real quick and threw up an address, and I was like, and I'll divert all of my lightning there, too. And it was just like a flood. Like, like, every, every time I went back and checked, it's like, here's another $500. Here's another. Like, and some of them were coming in with, like, hundreds of 21 payments. Like, literally, it was just a flood. And I was like, holy crap, man. This is, this is crazy. And what's funny is that, like, my biggest problem hasn't actually had anything to do with fiat. I mean, with bitcoin, it's been how to move it to fiat, because everybody, like, takes PayPal, you know, like, Cajun Navy and the Henderson rescue and all of that stuff. And I was, like, hitting my main methods to get in, and I'm on a bitcoin standard, so, like, I usually hit my weekly limits, you know, like, to pay for things. And I've recently gotten my sister in law to accept bitcoin directly so I don't have to do a conversion for it. And luckily, I pay a lot of people in bitcoin so I can avoid a lot of it. But, like, you know, when, when it turned into 60,000, $65,000, I was like, I'm. I have, like, a $5,000 limit on cash app, you know, like, I'm suddenly running into. I'm trying to. I have to figure out a whole new way because as soon as it's not, and that was one of the best things about bitcoin veterans. And I got a shout out again. Please donate to bitcoin veterans. Follow them. They're doing updates. 90% of my information now is literally from bitcoin veterans. They're absolutely killing it. They're on the ground out there. Shane's been sleeping in his truck, and I'm probably going to be holding on to the bitcoin just so I can piecemeal it out because I feel like there's going to be this flood of supplies and resources. Some of them are even being overwhelmed. And I think five days go by that's going to dry up, and there will need to be resources again because it's going to go on for months. And it seems like bitcoin veterans are in this for the long haul, too. Um, so it's going to be good, but I can send them bitcoin. So I didn't have a limit, so I could donate $10,000 to them when I could see them buying generators and tents and, you know, this sort of stuff. Um, but just, it's been wild, especially with the last couple weeks. It's stressful, but so many people have been, have stepped up. So many people. It's crazy. It's just, like, super hopeful. It's hopefully hopeful. [01:56:28] Speaker B: You don't need taxes. Like, when shit hits the fed and people need money, like, this is perfect example. Like, people will give via charity. [01:56:36] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:56:37] Speaker B: From all over the world. That's why I'm landlocked in Texas and not able to physically get and help out. And so it's like, yeah, donate and. [01:56:50] Speaker A: Parker hit me up. He was like, dude, how can I help? You know, like, and he had a friend, he was trying to get in touch, and I was, and I was like, oh, yeah, sure. And, you know, I went out and filed a missing welfare check. Like, there are a bunch of different, you know, just getting sources, just getting shocking how important communication is. And I feel like it's, like, largely dismissed. That's why I was, like, super jacked about what the veterans were doing, because they, that was their first goal is like, let's set up communication. Like, let's try to get people connected. Um, and I think people really discount how powerful that as a first step is, but, yeah. [01:57:27] Speaker B: Well, keep, keep crushing it, man. I know it's not easy. It's a very shitty. [01:57:37] Speaker A: I've been sitting here, and the signal group has just been pinging the whole time. Like, I can barely keep up with it and just try to, like, go through every hour and, like, read. Apparently chinooks can hold a lot of hay. Somebody found, like, an enormous amount of free hay that people were donating. But, yeah, that's crazy. There's, there is a machine of community helping to make this happen. So. [01:58:01] Speaker B: Feels good. It does feel good. And hopefully, hopefully in a few months we can catch up and we'll have some great examples of disputing who will build the roads. [01:58:15] Speaker A: Exactly. Are you going to Logano? [01:58:17] Speaker B: I'm not going to be able to make it. [01:58:20] Speaker A: I'll probably see you early next year at one of them. Who knows? [01:58:25] Speaker B: I can't wait for that. It's always a pleasure, sir. Thank you so much for coming on, dude. Always good hanging. It was an easy 2 hours. I mean, not easy, but it flew by. [01:58:36] Speaker A: Was it 2 hours? Oh, shit. It was 2 hours. [01:58:41] Speaker B: All right. [01:58:42] Speaker A: Hell yeah, man. Thank you for. Thank you for having me, dude. [01:58:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:58:44] Speaker A: If you're listening, check out bitcoin audible. [01:58:45] Speaker B: That's what I was just gonna. [01:58:46] Speaker A: I was just gonna unchained and guys, fun and all that good stuff. [01:58:50] Speaker B: No, seriously, go check it out. Like I said in our DM's the an incredible resource for bitcoiners and future bitcoiners. If you're looking to streamline your zero to one understanding of bitcoin, nobody has read more about bitcoin. And then outside of your reading, just think guy explaining. Explaining bitcoin through an austrian lens. Guy is your guy. Go check it out. [01:59:14] Speaker A: Hell yeah. Makes you feel good. Warms my heart. Thank you, man. [01:59:18] Speaker B: Peace and love, freaks. [01:59:23] Speaker A: I hope you enjoyed that. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing to the show. Thank you for sharing it out. Thank you to everyone who's donated to this recovery effort and trying to get western nc up off the ground and who's just stayed, you know, who shows their. They care about it. You know, just talking about it is actually really important. So thank you all. If you're looking for recommendations, you're just looking for the bitcoin services that I use, the products that I use, and places or people that I trust in the space. I've just gathered a group of them, just affiliate links here in the show notes, places to buy bitcoin. Really cool bitcoin game that I love. A place for. Custodial, multisig with bitcoin on ramp and a number of other great things, it's an easy way to support the show. And you might find something that you really like because they're ones that I really like. So with that, we will close this one out and I'll catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. I am guy Swan. And until then, everybody take it easy, guys.