Chat_165 - Family and Focus with Aleks Svetski

[00:00:00] Speaker A: I think there will come a point where you. You get excessive. You. You swing too far on the individual side of the spectrum, and then it becomes advantageous to group together again, and you become, you know, more fulfilled, more happy, more culturally flourishing in collectives again. I think there's a. A resurgence of the desire for people to build tribes, communities, even, like network state, like, even micro states, and saying that we're going to do this and we're going to really group together, because getting ten thousand, hundred thousand million people, ten million people of a similar mindset, similar ideology, similar vision for the world is way more powerful than individuals doing it. [00:01:13] Speaker B: A lot is changing all at once, and it can be really hard to navigate, especially in understanding what we do and why we're doing it, who we're doing it for. It's funny, the last time I had Svetsky on, we ended up talking about how much our perspectives changed when we became fathers. And this episode kind of follows in that theme, but takes it back to the Bushido of Bitcoin, the book that he wrote, because there's an enormous amount of wisdom. I think that in hindsight, even him becoming a father after having written the book kind of reveals itself. And honestly, there was just way, way more to unpack in the idea, and especially in applying it to a world where AI is shifting things so rapidly. The idea of work is changing, where so many of us are getting burnt out on trying to manage and race to keep up with a hundred different things at once. I know I kind of feel like some massive burnout and how to get perspective back, how to step back, take a breath, and ask the most important questions again and take a moment to reassess. I think Svetsky always has a very interesting thought on this. And it's funny, for as long as I've known him, his mentality and his temperament has changed a lot since I first knew him. [00:03:01] Speaker A: And. [00:03:02] Speaker B: And I've always had a lot of respect for Svetsky, and he always builds really, really cool stuff. And we do talk about Zatzlantis and a bunch of the other things that he's working on, but this was just a really great overall conversation on kind of building a bridge between our two perspectives, because we're not totally in the same place politically, but we have so many commonalities in kind of what we see is the right action, the right behavior, and the right philosophy to have that. It's really interesting to see where we do disagree and why we may come to different conclusions. So I'll let That be our lead in and I won't go into it too much. And we'll get right into this conversation with Alex Fetzky. This is on the Bushido of Bitcoin. This is chat 165, I believe, family and focus with my good friend Alex Fetzky. Welcome to the show. I'm not going to do a lot of pomp and circumstance about it because we talk all the time, but I actually want to talk about the whole like feeling disconnected from like the Internet because I've, I've. My relationship, especially to X has changed a lot in the last couple of years and I, I'll still kind of like find myself because I, because I as a podcaster and, you know, content creator and like trying to push the Parad drive and everything is. I have to be up there to some degree, but. And I'll kind of catch myself kind of falling back into like an old sense of it, but it never stays long. I usually kind of get snapped back to reality from time to time. But it's weird how my relationship to it has changed. Like, I just don't take it nearly as seriously as I used to. I mean, it used to feel like I was only connected to the world if I was on Twitter, you know, unpack when and how your relationship to it changed. Because you talk about that a little bit in the book, actually in the Bushuto bitcoin a little bit. [00:05:18] Speaker A: But that was again, it was a. I think the biggest drastic change happened about six months ago, a little bit more. But I was going to say what, what you just mentioned there about not taking it seriously. I don't know if this is part of getting old, dude, or if it's something else, but I don't nearly take as many things seriously anymore when it comes to anything digital. I remember when I was younger, I used to love movies, for example, and I like the movies would really like impact me and stuff like that and I'd really enjoy. And you know, I just tried watching a couple movies in the last week and I was like, I just don't take it seriously anymore. I don't know what it is. So I don't know if I'm going through a phase or something, but I found that really, I wonder the same thing. [00:06:06] Speaker B: Maybe it's age because I've had a similar thing like, like, I find it funny that you bring up movies because I was, I mean, I went to school for film, right? And I was a movie fanatic. But I still do love a fantastic movie. But I do have a slightly different relationship with them and I do not, I do not watch movies at all. Like I used to. Like, not even close. Not even. Fact. The first time I went to the theater in a year was a. And this is probably mostly just because of kids, but. But I think there's also. I just went to see Hail Mary which I really, really enjoyed. Really enjoyed. Good movie. For anybody curious, especially if you've read the book, it holds pretty true to the book. But like I'm still, I'm still like a story fanatic. Like I love, I just love a good story. But part of me also just thinks that like a lot of the content is just shit or content. [00:07:09] Speaker A: But even old movies I went back and watched. Do you know what I'm. You and I have spoken about this in the past. Like I'm still enthralled by good stories on Audible, for example. So I will go back and I'm going back and listening to older ones that I've listened to many times. So I just did the Hyperion series again. Um, I'm going back through now and I'm going to start. I actually I redid Shogun again and a couple of the Asia series from James Clavell which were all bloody fantastic. Um, I think I'm gonna go through and do some of Steven Pressfield's again. Like I just did the, the Gates of Fire. So the, the one about Spartans and Thermopylae. Um, so like I'm going through back and doing like the ones I really love and they still touch me deeply. But I. Yeah, like a. Even old movies that I enjoyed now this one is a little bit cringe. But I think the, the, the Superman that Zack Snyder did with let's Name Henry Cavill was the best Superman ever made. [00:08:11] Speaker B: Right? [00:08:11] Speaker A: It was very good. Yeah, it was really well done. And I remember when I first watched that I really enjoyed it. Like I was like, oh, it was great. And I watched it the, the other day with Wifey and you know, she loved it. She was like, oh, this is really cool. You know, I never knew this existed. She's like, I don't usually like sci fi. And I kind of watched it. I was like, okay, this feels like a video game. And I was like super bored through it. Yeah. So I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe my taste changed a little bit. What. Do you know what I think I need to do? I need to go back and watch something like Braveheart or whatever, like something that is sort of Wrencher and see How I feel about it. [00:08:48] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the test. That's the test. Go back. Go back to the classics and try to find that. That Hyperion or whatever, which, by the way, I finally listened to at your recommendation, because I. I believe. I believe I was trying to start a conversation about it and you said, just listen to it. Yes. And. Which I hadn't actually hit the third one, so I'm just. I'm. I'm just at the. Just finished the second one. I ended up back on a couple other books, so I'll be coming back to it. But it's fantastic. I love it. Really love the first one. Really love the first one. [00:09:23] Speaker A: You'll cry by the time Endyman. Yeah, it'll shake you. Dan Simmons, in my opinion, one of the best writers I've met. [00:09:29] Speaker B: I'm. I'm kind of a. When it comes to that stuff anyway, I cry. Anything that, like, is, like, any, like, even slightly meaningful, I'm like, yes, that's so true. Oh, God. But, you know, one of the things about, like, Social and X in particular is I. Without a doubt, this is a piece of it. Like, I definitely changed when I became a dad, and I don't know why. I don't know what it is that just kind of, like, reframed just a little bit. And maybe, maybe it's just like, I was kind of, like, forced for real life to actually be real in here, you know, like, my attachment to those things is just like, man, you guys get. You know, I just, like, has this. I can't. I can't spread my focus on all of this garbage. And it's like, the world's just going to do whatever the world's going to do. Like, you know, aside from me trying to fix things for myself and for people I know, what the hell am I going to do about the war in Iran? You know, like. And. But in addition to that is I think the number of things that I watched and, or read and, or just saw going, you know, viral on X, which has sped up a lot, were just fake. You know, like, there's just a lot of stuff that is fake. And I think a lot of things that look real are fake now. You know, with the way tech has gone, it's just so obvious that, like. Like, I just. I. I genuinely think I can't trust any of it, you know, And I'm wary even of the things that seem to have, like, a strong basis. And it's why I can't. I can't, like, put a ton of value on all of it. Because it's like, how do I know that that's not just the algorithm, you know, like confirming my bias, you know, like, like just putting those things in front of me that I, I am like a little bit like, oh, maybe that's, maybe that's true, you know, maybe. And then suddenly I'm seeing a lot of videos about that and new evidence in relation to that. And all I can think is like, you know, the, the flat earthers who are so certain of this and they have like these videos and stuff in the pop up and the people who are like, like, I stopped and watched one of those stupid videos, they're like, do this five minute exercise and you'll be amazing. And like, I've got like 80 of them now. And it's like, do this with your fingers and you'll never get Alzheimer's. Like, Jesus Christ, people. You know, like, I have a hundred of those stupid videos in my feed now when I still kind of like stop and watch them. But now I just see them all as like it's all just, you know, there's no, there's no five minutes. Like, it's all, it's marketing, you know, like, it's just be. It's pay attention to me and, and, and I don't know if I'm more aware of it or if I'm just like older and desensitized and maybe it's just a lot of things, but I just, I just don't, I don't know. When somebody gets mad now about like some stupid little thing, I just, I just kind of like sit back and giggle. It's like, how are you so impassioned about this? Like one little thing that you just discovered 11 seconds ago? And you just, you just have this like emotional baggage ready to go to like stamp on to whatever the new topic or issue is. And you've got a, you got a violent opinion instantly and just, I don't know, it's amusing. [00:13:16] Speaker A: It really is amusing. And it kind of makes you laugh at yourself from back in the day. Absolutely. I wrote a couple of notes here while you were talking about speed Fake. When everything matters, nothing matters. Learn helplessness and microeco chambers. So I'll touch on a couple of those. So microeco chambers, I think that is totally a fucking real thing. I think the era of sort of celebrities that everyone knew is sort of over. Right. So everyone sort of had their own echo chamber. So, you know, when you and I were growing up, like the whole world knew Arnold Schwarzenegger right now, like, you know, if you're in a specific echo chamber, like if you're in like the hustle business, all this sort of stuff, like it's like you know, Alex Hormozi and maybe you know, Dan Co and a couple of those ones. And you expect everybody in the world to know them because they keep popping up on your feedback. And if you were to say that someone like for example, I told my sister, Alex Ramosia, she's like, who the fuck is that? Like, what do you mean you don't know him? He's like, you know, got millions of followers. She's like, so. And she tells me about, oh, do you know this person? [00:14:17] Speaker B: And you know, whatever micro fame everywhere, like yeah, yeah. [00:14:22] Speaker A: And it kind of creates this distorted sort of idea that everyone is as big as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump, which is really not the case, I think. Second is what you said about speed is very interesting. I think the Internet is, and this is part of a bigger theme that we can discuss on the show is I think the Internet and all the AI stuff kind of somewhat self owned itself in a way that it's become so fast that it's no longer, or at least soon enough it will be no longer, I guess, useful for humans. You will not be able to interact with the Internet without some sort of facilitator which would be a fucking AI agent because of the quantity of noise and information and shit that you have to deal with. So basically you will have an interface and then everybody else will have an interface. It's basically like, you know, we sort of become separated or disconnected from the Internet and our, our mechanism into it is through some sort of AI agent, insert whatever. Right. So that's kind of a, a very strange situation because then the trend is that everything basically becomes quote unquote fake because it's, you know, it's not really. It's. The Internet ceases to become a place where people connect. It becomes a broadcasting and filtering medium on both ways and somehow out the other end you hope to get some element of reality or signal. I don't know. [00:16:05] Speaker B: Yeah, and I don't know how you determine it. I don't know how you determine it anymore. [00:16:09] Speaker A: Yeah, like, yeah, [00:16:13] Speaker B: it's weird because, you know, it's part of, talked about this on the show a lot is like where, like when, when everything becomes so cheap to make, filtering and curating becomes such an insanely high value and then trust as well. And we've tried to think about that in the context of paradrive as well. Just because I feel like this idea of a public Internet is starting to fall away. And it's not that there won't be public. Public spaces, but that the value of public spaces is plummeting because you. It's so hard to control. Well, they're transforming or they're just changing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:16:59] Speaker A: My, my, my bet is that the Internet just becomes. The television becomes a broadcast and some. The public space becomes some, you know, hybrid or, you know, in real life kind of thing. Right? And I mean, this is, this is why I made the bet. This is why I pivoted to Atlantis into being an events and IRL community platform. Like, that's shifted the whole fucking business. Because when I first got into it, for those who are listening and don't know what the original incarnation of what we were building was, it was supposed to be a social network for sovereign individuals, travelers, bitcoiners, all this kind of thing. And I, the, the thread that I was pulling on, if you remember guy, was originally I wanted to go back to social networks, not social media. But the error I made was that I thought social networks would still exist online. And that's where I think it's changing. I think social networking as an idea, as a concept, or as an activity is moving offline or increasing. Like online becomes almost like the broadcast top of funnel medium. It's like how you get a message out there and hopefully disseminates somewhere Amongst the fucking AIs and the medias and the algorithms and everything like that. And, you know, it'll probably find its way somehow to the right person. But ultimately the actual network happens in probably more curated spaces or enclosed spaces, even online, you know, but fundamentally, the goal I think will be to [00:18:33] Speaker B: know [00:18:33] Speaker A: sort of bottom of funnel is meeting in person. [00:18:37] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I, I would actually agree with that. And that's, that's literally why, like, with the paracore and air drive thing that we're building, we actually designed everything around a building block that we refer to as a space, which is basically a private network. So everything that you do, you set up private networks for like over and over and over, just like stack hundreds of these private networks. Um, and like, that was the idea is that, like, if you, if the public space becomes such a mess and so difficult to control, the idea is that how do you curate your own private networks? Yeah, how do you do so in a way that you don't even realize you're doing it? You're just deciding it's essentially treat Everything on the Internet, like group chats, in messages. [00:19:22] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. [00:19:24] Speaker B: And, and so like that's what's happening on the back end. But the user doesn't know or need to care about how or why that's happening. They just need to know that they're definitely getting information from the people that they know that they're. It's absolutely being curated through this little, this little filter group, you know, and I think that's the way too, like when you can separate the data from the, from kind of the medium itself, so to speak. So I, because like, you know, when you go to a website or whatever, like I think like Ian Carroll and what's her name, Candace Owens, I believe, like set it up some website or whatever where you can like organize conspiracy evidence or something or they're talking about doing, I don't know, I haven't seen it, but I heard about this idea and it was funny because this was something that we had talked about with paradrive is like, what if we could like get a collection of stuff together. But the problem is that they're this central point of failure. Not only can they be shut down and they're the host, but it's like everybody has to create an account and then you have to know or wonder like, whose vote should I value or whose connection should I care about? And I was just thinking that like a combination of Noster and private networks are like a perfect, like peer to peer networks are a perfect use case or back end for this type of use case because you can, you can just weigh the people that you trust and their evidence. You know, like I could put something up and then have you be the one that says in this little group. Be like, no, this is totally an AI video guy. You're, you're, you know, like, how did you, how did you fall for this? This is not like, look at, look at Netanyahu's eyes or whatever, whatever this is. And, but like we can basically curate that for ourselves and then we can slowly add people to our group to make comments or add new information or their perspective on it. And, and I think that sort of thing is only most valuably, is only most valuable if you actually meet people in real life. Because like, you know, the only connections I really trust on online anymore are the people that I know I met at a conference and I know I, I remember like talking to them who they are level. And everybody else is just like, that might be a bot. You Y. You know, I speak to, I have like three Agents now for different things on my little Mac Mini that I work with. You know, other than the fact that they tell me I'm absolutely right all the time, I have no clear indication that they're computers. Yeah. You know, like, they. It feels like I'm talking to humans. And sometimes I even fall into, like, human conversational habits, you know, like. Exactly. And then I have to register. It's like, man, this is a. This is a mirror, man. It's like, this is a computer pattern reflector. I gotta. I gotta tell it to tell me when I'm wrong. God, you're absolutely right. When I'm just, like, musing on something, I'm just like, God, stop blowing smoke up my ass. Like, it just. I'm trying to figure something out, man. [00:22:49] Speaker A: That. That to me is the most frustrating piece of all of that shit. Actually, Honestly, I. I was just saying that to my wife last night, man, because I was asking it to, like, write me up. I was actually doing. Sorry, not write me up something. I was like, going back and forth and research, kind of trying to jam with it, and it keeps telling me, oh, no, you're right. Actually, let me tell you this. It's like, no, I'm not right. I'm just like asking you to, like, stress test this idea. Oh, sorry. No, no, you're right. Let me stress this. [00:23:17] Speaker B: You're right. I should trust this idea. You're right. I shouldn't just agree with you. [00:23:22] Speaker A: It's like, I want to kill you. A couple more things I want to throw on this, on this whole, like, getting offline. So two other things. So for me, the, the. I had kind of increasingly felt disillusioned with Twitter and online in 2025. And for me, the sort of the final straw was two things happening simultaneously. And for people who've listened to me on some other podcasts, I've mentioned this, but basically, son was born and around the same time. So around that time, I decided to take two weeks off. Like one week before and one week after to just, like, not go online and just like, savor the moment. We did a home birth, we did all that kind of thing. And. And I. I literally logged back in to tell the boys from Bitcoin News that, hey, you know, we had a podcast booked. And I was like, dude, I'm going to take another week off. Like, let's reschedule the. The meeting. And. And when I logged back in, it was right around the time when that Russian chick got stabbed in the throat. And, you know, the. [00:24:30] Speaker B: Right. [00:24:31] Speaker A: And and, dude, that, like, I think I told you last time, that shook me up. Like, I couldn't sleep for a week. Like, you know, I went in raids, posted all this kind of. And then, you know, the week after that, Charlie Kirk got shot, and then kind of the conversation turned there. And then all of that sort of stuff happened. And then a week later, some other happened. Everyone forgot all about Tariq, forgot about arena, and, you know, the world was on some other hysteria. And it was at that point that it kind of like dawned on me. I was like, you know, when. When everything matters. Like, I don't. Like nothing matters anymore. And you kind of touched on this before when you were saying, like, I can't care about everything. And that's really what it is. It's like the speed of. Not just the speed of general content and Internet and information and all this sort of stuff, but it's also the speed of hysteria has increased to the point where I. I don't think you can actually care about anything anymore. And what it leads to is something really dangerous, which is learned helplessness, because what you're seeing is a constant barrage of. That you literally cannot do anything about. You said it before, like, can't do anything about the fucking war in Iran or in Russia or this chick getting stabbed or this thing happening or this lying to you or this person getting hacked or whatever. Like, there's so much shit going on, and literally we can do absolutely nothing, about 99.9% of it. And it trains your brain to perceive the world as a place that you can't do anything about. And I read this really good article that by this Aussie guy. Actually, he's a very good writer. He called it Chesterton's. Chesterton's Microscope. Like, he gave it a moniker. And he just said, you've got telescopic thinking and you've got microscopic thinking. And telescopic thinking is basically think of what. What does the telescope do? You. You look through the thing and you take all the big things that are really, really far away and you bring them really close to you, right? So telescopic thinking is, you know, what the Internet does. Like, now we can see things happening around in the same second and kind of like brings all the stu away here. Microscopic is the inverse, right? It's taking all of the small things that are really close to you and magnifying them, right? And we used to be far more microscopic as a species, as a culture, as a society, and all this sort of thing. And this isn't to Say one or the other is bad. It's that, you know, when the whole world was very microscopic, it actually paid to be telescopic to know what was happening far away, because that gave you a major edge. I actually think we've reached the point in society and civilization where it actually pays to be more microscopic again than telescopic for a couple of reasons. One, because it trains your brain to. To undo learned helplessness like you. [00:27:32] Speaker B: You actually realize you have control over stuff. [00:27:35] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:27:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:27:36] Speaker A: You can actually know. So you, like, you know, people know more these days about flat Earth or whatever else happening, but they don't know their neighbor. Right? And their neighbor can have a bigger impact on their life than some monkey, you know, 10,000 miles away. Right. So, you know, if. If you can start to focus more on the things that are around you. So your family, local butcher, whatever. Right. Like, and, you know, sort of. We've talked about this in the past, you know, about localism and stuff like that, but I don't think the framing has been very tangible. I think it's been, you know, very nebulous. It's like, oh, yeah, localism matters. You know, go build a local community. What does that mean? I think this kind of mental model helps. It's okay, what is microscopic and what can I change? What can I influence? What is close to me? And how do I increase the number of microscopic interactions and focus points in my life because then I can actually improve something. And how do I decrease the telescopic ones? And that's actually been my personal journey. Over the last six months, I've been trying to move more and more and more and more in that direction because I just genuinely got to a point where I was like, man, I feel useless. In fact, the last point I was going to make was something about, I don't feel like I have a lot of advice anymore to give anyone because everything just feels fake. But we can talk about that next. But I'll pause here. It's like, when everything matters, nothing matters. Learn helplessness and telescopic versus microscopic and trying to shift back to microscopic so that you can rediscover the things that actually matter. Because not everyone. [00:29:12] Speaker B: I really like the telescopic and microscopic analogy too. Just because actually works at another layer is. And it's something I think about a lot as well, is, you know, everybody has their telescope and it's like, oh, look at this one particular thing in the sky. But then when you're hyper focused on one thing, or you credit too much weight or energy to one thing you realize, like if you, if you actually look up at the night sky and you take a, you know, prolonged picture of it, there's essentially an infinite number of things to look at. Like you can never, you can never run out of another thing to check. And it's like, you know that girl getting stabbed, which is crazy because it was in Charlotte. It was like my brother in law lives there, like a bunch of people I know live there. Um, and it was a, it was a tram or whatever that like he had taken multiple times, you know, it was in his area. Um, and it's like. But then there's like, there's cities where it's like dozens of homicides every single day. You know, like, like if you, if you're focused on every murder that happens everywhere, you could literally do that 10,000, you could spend every five to 10 seconds watching another one. All day, every day, forever. And what do you get? What do you gain? What do you fix? What can, what, what's all that energy? And the, you know, the eventual, after three days, the psychosis that you develop from it or just utter desensitized, you know, like, like what, what do you actually get from that? Like, you can just, you can watch forever. Forever. It's like, it's like trying to say like, oh, I can find stuff on YouTube or whatever, but there's like a hundred hours of YouTube uploaded every second. So like it's not possible to watch YouTube, you know what I mean? And like the state of the world is that same thing. And you know, we, we make this error in like applying so many different ways. We try to oversimplify, simplify everything and we try to focus on that. We put our point, our telescope at like one thing and it's like, this is why. Or it's like your cholesterol's this measure, this is why you're unhealthy. Just take a cholesterol pill. Or, you know, somebody tweeted this, this is why the market collapsed. You know, it's like, it's like we so drastically oversimplify these vast complex systems that there's nothing to actually point at. We just kind of like correlate stuff. And it just, just, it's, it's crazy. And, and to realize what wasted, how much energy we waste. [00:32:12] Speaker A: Well, this, this kind of ties into. The other thing that I quickly mentioned is that, you know, people have been asking me, oh, you know, when are you going to write again? You know, when are you going to come back online? Are you going to Do a podcast, you know, and, you know, I kind of. My. My response at the moment is, you know, and this response might change, but I feel like I don't have any. Anything useful to say and that is related to what you just said. It's like, you know, when I was a bit younger, I was so certain. It's like, you know, it's because the central banks are printing money. That's why we have all these problems, right? And then I, you know, wrote Pursuit of Bitcoin. I kind of debunked that for myself. And I'm like, okay, well, fuck. This is actually way more complicated than what I thought. And then it's like, you know, it's because of. People don't have virtue. And then, you know, I'm a little bit older now, and I'm like, well, you know, it's not just that either. It's fucking all sorts of other things as well. And it's just, you know, I don't know if it's because of sort of. The older you get and the more you sort of. You. You've seen so many things, you realize that it's never one thing. It's never so simple, you know? And, you know, advice really is. I mean, there's basically, like, 10 principles for life which have never changed, you know, since the beginning of time until now. Right. And, like, I know I almost feel fake or I feel like I don't have anything really useful to add to the world anymore. That's maybe not a right way to put it. It's like, I don't. [00:33:41] Speaker B: You don't feel so certain enough that you can tell somebody else how to do it. Yeah, yeah, I get that sense. [00:33:49] Speaker A: And it's. And, like, you know what I'm gonna do? Get up and, like, tell people how to do this or that or whatever. It's just. It's all, you know, basically, nobody knows anything. That's. That's the real reality. You know what I mean? Like, nobody knows. That's it. That's it. [00:34:07] Speaker B: And everybody who does is pretending. [00:34:10] Speaker A: Yeah. And. And it all just feels like a big racket. [00:34:14] Speaker B: Yeah, man, we are all monkeys throwing at a wall. [00:34:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And I. You know, this is sort of why I kind of made the decision to, like, go internal again. Maybe it's somewhat related to, you know, Peterson's. Clean up your room, because, you know this. [00:34:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I think about that all the time. Yeah, I think about that shit all the time. Is it. Like, who am I? Like, I'm telling. Telling people how to run the government or this, that or the other. And like, no, I can, I can have a. I can have a thought about, like, whether or not, like, you should enslave people about a simple moral principle, but my room is a mess. You know, like, before you're ready to plan how the world is going to work for everybody else, you know, like, clean your damn room. You think you got the master plan for anything more complex than a 10 by 12ft, like, square that you. You sleep in? [00:35:17] Speaker A: Like. [00:35:18] Speaker B: No, you don't. No, none of us do. In fact, I think it's a folly to think that you actually can plan it, like, precisely at all. [00:35:28] Speaker A: Precisely. So, yeah, anyone thinking about that, you know who. Anyone who wanted to ask me is, like, I. You know, like, literally last week someone was like, weren't you gonna write that second book, follow on from Bushido? I was like, yeah, kind of. But I don't know what to say. Which is a. Which is a strange period of my life, honestly, man, because I always, like, growing up, you know, my 20s, 30s, everything, like, you know, and I'm still in my 30s kind of. But on the, on the later half now, I always had so much to say. You know, I wrote fucking millions of words on bitcoin on this topic, on that topic, on all this, sort of. And I, I just don't care as much anymore. And it's. It's a weird place to be because I've cared so much all my life. And it's this, this is another sort of thing. Thing I've been battling with is the line between apathy and care. And, And I don't know where that is. I'm sort of exploring that because it's very easy in this state to just get apathetic about everything, like, just to not care. And. But. But I don't think that's healthy either. I think that is somewhat dangerous. [00:36:44] Speaker B: You can just as easily neuter yourself from things. You can actually do something about that. [00:36:50] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And. And I think also just a. A really important condition for being human is to actually care about stuff. So, you know, I don't think it's healthy to, to get increasingly apathetic. And, and, you know, I've, I. I haven't fully come out of the apathetic stage. Like, I'm, I'm. But I'm trying to find where, like, selective care is. And it's a. It's an interesting experience. You know, I'm curious to know if you sort of have any similar feelings at all in your journey. [00:37:33] Speaker B: I do I don't think I, I wouldn't call it apathy in, in kind of like how I see my shift. I think it's more like I'm being more deliberate about where I care because. And, and I don't even mean that specifically of like I only care about my kids or something. I mean it in the sense that like, I can still argue and value my principles, but I, I focus. And maybe vibe coding actually I think has had like a big difference here because there are things that I'm just like, if, like if I don't like it, like if I'm that concerned about it, like I can just go build a thing, you know, like I can just go do it myself. Granted, I'm also hiring people to help me turn it into something that's not vibe coated slop, so. But which dudes, the, the tendency, my own, just a little aside, my tendency to want to build everything all at once is so stupid and unhealthy. But I, I have a really good back end guy who, who keeps me so grounded. He's like, dude, you just designed like 10 different things and like what you got? We gotta, we gotta reel this shit straight back in, my dude. Which is actually super nice because the AI just keeps telling me I'm absolutely right. But yeah, I, I think it's somewhere in this middle ground between telescopic and microscopic. Right? Is that okay? What, what can I change at those out of small or very local area and then give to the people that I care about or kind of work with the people I care about that might have some middling effect, you know, and, and I do also think just in a general sense that like kind of keeping up to date on I guess, concrete things. Like it's less about like, oh, this big abstract, vague thing of like this country controls this country and this thing is, you know, World War 3 starting, but more just what tools do we have available, you know, Politics in general. [00:40:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I think politics in general sort of fits in that category. I think politics is like masturbation for the mind and it makes you think that you're, you're discussing things that matter. But I think in the end, you know, unless you have a, the ultimate [00:40:21] Speaker B: participation trophy in society, right, Is that you think you're doing something but nothing is actually happening. Like people are just using you from every different direction. [00:40:31] Speaker A: I think unless you have the capacity to influence, you know, or, or have a high degree of power, like, you know, unless you're an Elon or a Trump or something like that. [00:40:40] Speaker B: You know, that. That. [00:40:41] Speaker A: That makes sense. Like, you know, that's. That's politic in the. In the truest sense of the term. But raging on Twitter like a dork is like, unless also you have, you know, 10 million followers on Twitter, in which case, you know, you. Your. [00:40:56] Speaker B: You. [00:40:56] Speaker A: You know, your word carries some weight. Right? So. So it's sort of the, you know, politics has to be. [00:41:03] Speaker B: It's an influence game. Either you. [00:41:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:41:07] Speaker B: Either you have the power or you're being used for the power. [00:41:10] Speaker A: Correct. [00:41:11] Speaker B: Yeah. But it's funny. It's funny that you actually brought this up or this change in perspective as like, potentially contrary to kind of your perspective in the Bushido of Bitcoin, because it seemed like you were talking about this a lot in Bushio of bitcoin, or at least I was kind of in like a tertiary sort of sense. You know, you were talking around the idea because so much of it is like, I mean, if you. If you apply the virtues, this is kind of where you end up in. In a certain. In a way, you know, like, there's. There's do. What. [00:41:50] Speaker A: Where do you end up? Sorry? [00:41:53] Speaker B: Like, I think it informs this type of. This perspective of, like, I guess be humble in the context of, like, what you think you can control and focus more locally. Focus on what you can actually do something about possibly. [00:42:12] Speaker A: I don't know if I made that as clear in the book, though. I think in the book I was very focused on being action oriented and like, basically sort of, maybe I kind [00:42:25] Speaker B: of conflate the two. [00:42:27] Speaker A: Maybe, maybe. And I think maybe the. The piece of maturity that I've laid on the top is that be action oriented in the things that you can actually be action oriented about. Right. I think the. The Bushido was probably a little bit more generalist in that sense. It was like, okay, you know, you. You need to be doing, not just reading, right. You need to be acting, not just thinking about stuff that. I think that was one of the big messages is that, you know, virtue is an act. It's not a. Like, value is something you. You desire, and a virtue is something you enact. And that was sort of one of the core messages of the book. [00:43:08] Speaker B: Speak of virtue. Virtue signaling is an oxymoron. [00:43:12] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. So I think now that I'm, you know, going through this sort of next phase of development as a person, as myself, I'm thinking now it's like, okay, well, there's so many things I could act on. Let me try and figure out what Is the, what is the few things that I should act on that will have the, the, the highest meaning or biggest impact? Because I can't act on everything. And, and maybe that was the, maybe that was a flaw in Bushido actually that I can potentially point to is that I think Bashido was very grand in its, in sort of the aspirations. It was like, you know, you can act and you can bend the universe and who knows, maybe that is true. Maybe, maybe I'm in a slightly low energy state now where I, where I'm a little bit disillusioned with how much of the universe you can bend. Or maybe I'm being more practical now in the sense that hey, you know, my universe is smaller and I'll bend that piece. So I'm still, still sort of exploring around this idea. [00:44:16] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm curious how you. One of the things in the book in particular that has stuck with me and I have not properly, I don't think I've properly implemented, but I really want to. And I kind of changed my perspective on kind of things in the past is this idea of rituals and kind of the value of like legitimate danger in, in like a challenge, you know, especially when growing up. Like, it's funny, I've made the case and like I've made the case to like my wife and my sister in law about dueling which like. And I've. And every time when every once in a while they come up and like, you know, I thought that was so crazy but you kind of got a point like. And I'm like, I mean he, he kind of lays it out like in a really interesting way that I hadn't truly considered is, you know, if you're, if there's absolutely no consequence to what you say and you can always all float it onto somebody else and any action in response to what someone says can never be justified. You get people who will just say bullshit and who will just endlessly harass and who will endlessly virtue signal and nothing's ever like it degrades into like total and complete talk. Like patheticism, you know, like, like anybody would just say anything and there are no consequences. And it's like, nah, you know, it should be, it should be kind of on a spectrum and like it should be dealt with locally like constantly offloading. Think of how much, how many bad things have occurred and how much like authoritarianism has occurred in the world because we always think it's somebody else's responsibility to deal with who's right and who's wrong. You Know, like we've always offloaded this responsibility to some other person or some authority. Like how learned. How much learned patheticism does that create in the world? [00:46:37] Speaker A: It's the most French patheticism. [00:46:42] Speaker B: And I don't know. There were there. There was kind of like that theme in a couple of different sections actually throughout the book that had me. It definitely had me thinking it definitely. It's enough so that I still like will like we'll randomly talk about it and I keep telling my wife, you should just listen to it. You just like knock it out just so you can. Just so we can debate or we can talk about like this issue or this thing. Because it also changed. It made me think differently about government. Not, not really kind of about the moral principle behind it and what I would see is the. The natural evolution of society, so to speak. But it did make me think differently in how like what the role of a leader is supposed to be, so to speak. [00:47:31] Speaker A: Because [00:47:35] Speaker B: I don't think it's so much. You know, actually, before I go off on some like rant, why don't you kind of give maybe a general overview of. In fact, I don't even know which virtue it would have fallen under. I guess. I guess this would best basically be under respect. [00:47:55] Speaker A: I don't think that was in the virtue section. I think that was in. In the other sections. [00:48:01] Speaker B: Okay, exactly. [00:48:08] Speaker A: I. I wanna, I wanna say a couple things. First of all, I'm curious on your. So. So that was one. The dueling. Dueling might have been. Yeah, you're right. Maybe dueling was in respect somewhere there anyway. Too hard to remember. Too many. Too much time. [00:48:29] Speaker B: Since where it was doesn't matters less. [00:48:34] Speaker A: The one that I was actually more curious about was your. How you like where you're sitting on the. On the might is right section. Because I know that one is. [00:48:47] Speaker B: Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:48:49] Speaker A: That one I felt was. Yeah. More. More interesting than. Than a normal one. [00:48:56] Speaker B: Yeah, there's. There's a back and forth dynamic with that one for me is I definitely. I was surprised by the argument. I was surprised by the argument because it did. Because I thought I was going to disagree with it for most of the section and I didn't because, you know, there's. I think it's a. Jordan Peterson, I think actually has like some really cool things talking about how like you need to be. You have to be powerful because you cannot be a good man unless you're powerful. [00:49:40] Speaker A: Dangerous. [00:49:40] Speaker B: Dangerous or dangerous. Excuse me. Dangerous. Because if you can't actually do harm, then you don't get any points for not being harmful. You know, like if you're, if you're so weak that you can't actually do anything of consequence, then you can't just be a good person by default because you can't hurt anybody. It is only through having the power to do harm and choosing not to that you can actually be virtuous. And this, this idea of. So there's a part of might makes right that, that I think is powerful in the sense that if you actually have the confidence and you have the conviction and you can actually go out in the world and do something, then if no one is willing or able to even challenge, Then why. Why would their lack of conviction be? What's the way to put this? That's really hard to explain without like falling into kind of like a political sounding context. [00:51:03] Speaker A: Yeah, can I read a, a section from a recent essay? I don't know if you know Bennett's phylactery on. He's a, he's a Utah based guy, He's a writer on Substack. Have you ever come across. [00:51:16] Speaker B: Don't know his name. Don't know the name. [00:51:18] Speaker A: Man, he's so good. He's so good. All right, I'm gonna read an excerpt from one of his essays that he wrote, wrote a couple weeks ago. So there's a section here. It says, in other words, politics is violence. So it includes direct violence, like fighting wars and killing criminals, but also taxation, regulation, which are backed by the threat of violence. It is definitionally the domain of coercive power processes. Markets, meanwhile, are the domain of power processes beneath the aegis of the political, where the role of force is occulted. Neither party, in a market translation applies coercive force, but only because an unseen third party applies force against both parties, ensuring their respective property rights, enforcing contracts, et cetera. What makes a libertarian a libertarian, morally, spiritually, temperamentally, is the belief that there ought not to be any outside power process. So this is the interesting part. So he says, libertarians reach the important insight that all politics is violent and thereby conclude that politics is illegitimate. As such, the heart of this moral frame is that power, I. E. Force, aggression, coercion, is definitionally evil and definitionally contraposed with freedom, which is good. To the degree that power is exercised, freedom is abrogated. Huge swathes of people who call themselves conservative, virtually everyone we would call a sympathetic normie is actually libertarian in this dispositional sense. The Republican politician, if he is animated by any ideals at all, is animated by libertarian ideals. Small government Construction, constitution, rule of law. These are all different ways of saying I should not be in charge because no one should be in charge. We should all play by the mutually agreed rules so that all transactions can be voluntary, reciprocal. To be clear, their stupidity on this point is the only reason they are not leftists. In fact, the stupidity is almost, but not quite the only thing that binds the anti left coalition together. I'll explain why in a second, but first let's talk about why this is a stupid things to say and believe. The first problem is with this frame is that power, like matter and energy is conserved. The problem was well understood by the Romans 2,000 years ago. We can say that a ruler should obey the Constitution, but this constitution cannot be obeyed. It does not have an intent. Except maybe James Madison, and he's not here to explain himself. So someone has to evaluate whether the Constitution has been obeyed. Is it James Madison intent that is sacred? Should we conduct a seance? Maybe we accept that Madison was a mere mortal. Is there such magic words in themselves something God breathed? Even then Scripture is not itself self interpreting, which you know which prophet or priest is authorized to discern the divine from the will, divine will from the words and why them? No matter what theory you have about what the Constitution is and what it means, in the end you are left alone with the words on the page. Theocracy doesn't mean rule by God, it means rule by priests. Rule of law means rule by lawyers. No matter what Rube Goldberg machine we construct to govern us, it will be composed of human beings. And in the final analysis, some human being has to decide what to do. Power is always conserved because someone always decides. That point to me was just so fucking important because like you can try and build all of the sort of the frameworks around, but the rule of law is still going to be the rule by the lawyers. Like the interpretation matters. And the interpretation is. This reminds me of Nietzsche's famous old, old quote. He said there's no such thing as the right interpretation. There is only the interpretation backed by the most power. Right? So then he says the second problem with this frame is that power and freedom are synonymous. Because someone always decides there's no such thing as being left alone. Leave me alone as a command. And the power to command works the same regardless of its content. Either you are strong enough to make uncooperative people do what you want, or you are not. The man who says I just want enough power to defend my rights is in fact saying I want enough power to impose my will on everyone who disagree with who disagrees with me about what my rights are. You may insist on using power defensively, but you cannot insist on having power defensively. A gun means the same thing in a home defense as it does in a home invasion. Do what I say or I'm going to kill you. There's no special category of pure, righteous, nap compliant power that works the other way. The tribe across the valley wants your land, you want to keep it. These are symmetric, mutually incompatible claims and they're not self enforcing. Someone who's going to decide and in general that person is not going to be you. Because threats to individual rights come in the form of mobs or armies. Virtually every person who has ever lived on this earth has owed their freedom, such as it was, to a guarantor, a sovereign who organizes collective violence. And by definition this cannot be a voluntary agreement because the whole reason to outsource your security to a sovereign guarantor is that he can deploy more coercive power than you can. That's what you pay him for, so to speak. So if the sovereign lacks the power to revoke your freedom, then he also lacks the power to defend it. There are reciprocal expressions of the single capacity. And then he kind of finishes like, this doesn't mean that your relationship to the Karen Tour must be abusive or even adversarial. You know, in fact, being ruled by a sovereign who shares your values and political interests is what most people actually mean by freedom. Right. And this comes into, you know, people like Bukele and stuff like that. Right. He is a father to his people. This is, this is where monarchy actually comes in, is that you have a relationship to the sovereign that is not or ideally not abusive, adversarial, but you kind of like end up back here. And this is kind of how I, he articulated, I think actually better than I did in, in Bushido. But he kind of like points to the, the, the, the one that landed so much for me was the, you know, theocracy meaning rule of. That doesn't mean rule by God, it means rule by priests. And you know, rule of law doesn't mean rule by the constitution or the law. It means ruled by lawyers. That part landed so hard for me. I was like, holy. That is so true. Because in the end that there, there isn't. Everything is an interpretation. [00:57:20] Speaker B: People. Yeah, it's just people perception of who you have to listen to. [00:57:25] Speaker A: Yes. [00:57:27] Speaker B: And this is where I like, I go back and forth and this is where I really like this section in the book because I Didn't agree with it completely, but I couldn't disagree with it in a lot of ways. In a lot of ways. And this section is a, is a good example as I think it does a very good job of defining a lot of the pieces and how power actually works and the idea that power can't be. Even though you can choose to use it only in a defensive sense. It's the same thing either way. You know, like it's, it's whether or not you have the power to govern yourself or to, to choose or enforce what you want for your life over someone else's power to control you. But then in the same sense when you have this like, like even if we set aside the morality of, from a kind of libertarian principle concept is I think you have such negative fallout from power imposed on other people's lives because you're acting on information that only the other person can know. In, in the sense that like, like a market, like I think violence is almost universally a market distorter, not a market signal because it's purely within the human realm when the, or the social realm, so to speak. When the market itself is attempting to assess value judgments against all the things that the universe is trying to kill us. This is exactly why when you have a government trying to control the market is it event it eventually just gets out of balance against like when you, when we just decide, you know, when we commit financial fraud at a staggering scale, all it does is it just leads everybody to go into debt and we over consume ourselves until the whole thing collapses. Right. And that's because the violence is actually putting more influence over the market than the actual value and need of the individual thing. So it keeps telling us to do things that are self destructive. It keeps giving us the signal and the incentive from a monetary perspective to do things that are destroying, literally destroying stuff and to not change our behavior, to actually not run out of shit, which is the whole point of the market. So, so but then when it comes to like might make right like if you can't defend that, if you don't have a system in place or the technology doesn't enable you to actually defend it, then it doesn't really matter. You know, like the Constitution and this is something that was a point driven home well before all of this was that the Constitution is just a piece of paper. It can't stop anybody from doing anything. It's got nothing to do with any of this. It's just, it's little more than kind of an ideological framework for how to how to convince people what they're, what they should actually stand up for. You know, is it like, okay, at what point are you going to be loud and get in someone else's way? It's like, well, here's a list of excuses for you to feel justified in doing those things. Like, here's, here's something that like, oh, someone has infringed on your freedom of speech. Well, then actually stand the up and do something about it, you know, like, and, and it's like, it's like somebody wrote down permission for you to be mad if this happens, to actually exert some power in defense of yourself. And so, but then we grew up in a society with learned helplessness and nobody, nobody takes that power and look what happens. We get run by a empire of pedophiles. [01:01:08] Speaker A: I think. Yeah, I mean, the purpose of a constitution is to create a, a list of rules, hopefully that people will collectively agree to abide by and then establish some sort of sovereign power that can enforce those rules, because that is the only functional way to do it at any sort of scale. Right. The, the, the pie said about the market, you know, is, is an interesting one. I, I, I, you know, in my time as libertarian, I started to believe that, you know, the market comes before politics, like economics is upstream in politics. But, you know, I've, I've come to believe it's the other way around actually, because the political framework defines the, or the politics defines the framework in which the market can operate. Because the politics, which is also somewhat downstream of culture, I guess they're kind of close in the stream, establishes what the value of the market is or at least the direction in which the market will go. Right. So if you remove the politic from it, you can very quickly become like Vancouver, which is, you know, India in Canada. Right. Because they will very quickly interchange or what's happening with Europe right now. You know, like the immigration stuff, it's, it's economically more viable, quote, unquote, to just import third World, you know, people in, because, hey, they, they cost less, it's easier. And you know, we don't have a, you know, like the, I used to be so against the concept of a nation state, for example, but I've, you know, done a full 360 on or 180 on that. Sorry. In a sense that, you know, the [01:03:04] Speaker B: nation actually, and I still believe exactly what I used to believe. [01:03:11] Speaker A: But, you know, the nation as a concept is, you know, reinvigorated itself in my mind, especially after writing Bushido is That, okay, the nations job, its existence is to put not the market first, but its people first and then the market second. And if you have to sacrifice one, you, you sacrifice the economic reality because in the short term it might hurt the economics, but in the long term it maintains the, the civility or the cohesion of the polity, of the people whom the market is serving. Right. So it puts people above the market. And that to me is sort of the, that was the big shift for me when I was, when I was battling with all these ideas. I was like, okay, you actually like, the market is subservient to the people that are in the market. And if you don't contain the, the people or the polity, you know, around some sort of standards, then you disintegrate them. And then the market ultimately in the end will become just fucking slop, which is basically what the Internet became. You know, this is what we're talking about with public spaces. You know, the Internet is like the ultimate sort of open market and everything has just become fucking sloped. Basically everything, everyone is in there, everything is like, there's nothing interesting. So what we do is we go and create private spaces or curated spaces. And what is a nation state? It is trying to establish a curated physical space for people of similar race, DNA, biology, beliefs, values. That's really what the nation is. Natio. The word means of same birth, of, of same kin. Right? That was what it was, that was what these imaginary lines which we laughed at for so long as the Batarians, that, that was actually what the purpose of those things were. It was to say, you know, we are French and we have a particular way of being, we are German, we have a particular way of. And we are English. And you know, it's very easy to recognize a French person from a German person, from this person, from that person, because they have different values, different ways of living, all this sort of stuff. And that is actually a good thing because then you get some sort of cultural and racial diversity, which is great. [01:05:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:05:31] Speaker A: And you know, the, the market shouldn't break those, those boundaries down that you know, the market can act as a, as a, as a mechanism to trade amongst those things, but it, each territory should have its own rules around the interaction. And this is actually a, a funny way where, you know, me and Safety had an argument about this, but I was actually pro the tariffs, even though they were economically didn't make sense, but they made, they made political sense, which I ended up being of the opinion that it was more important because it was it was the right poker move, it was the right short term pain for a, for a long term, for a long term gain. But anyway, I'll, I won't go into that tangent, but yeah, this has been, [01:06:27] Speaker B: this is where I, I, I, I really feel like I don't have, it's so hard to actually come, like there's, there's no good solution, you know, because like, like, you know, reading like Confessions of an Economic Hitman and like kind of these parts of history where you actually see or find out like I, my, my stance or thoughts on immigration have changed a lot in the last few years. And in both senses, actually at both ends of the spectrum, I think very differently about it. And I do kind of fall into this whole, like a nation should have an identity. Because, because specifically. And, and it's not even so much that I can find a hard principle as to why. Like I, I haven't fully explained this to myself yet because, because I still have, I still have principles that contradict this. But I also cannot deny how enemies you use this against us. Like is you literally flood a nation with immigrants to destroy it. Like, they actively and explicitly do this because they know it will destroy freedom, they know it will destroy market stability, they know it will obliterate culture and a religion. Like this is a, a useful and valuable tactic to destroy civilization, to destroy a society and a nation. Which means that it must be defended if you wish to keep it. The question is how? Because you can run just as much into a problem, you can run into the same problem defending it. Like I would say the reason we have such a terrible immigration problem is because of the government we created to defend it. You know, like because of the, the apparatus of the nation and the coercion of the political apparatus. We've invited it as opposed to protecting ourselves from it. Like we have an engine of economic fraud built on top of it where it literally feeds back on itself to cause the problem to destroy the country. [01:08:46] Speaker A: I don't know if it's a cause. I think it's an accelerant. [01:08:51] Speaker B: Okay. [01:08:52] Speaker A: That's my challenge. It's, I, I don't think it's a cause. I think it's a, it's a major [01:08:58] Speaker B: for anything that it ends up being doing. [01:08:59] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. So if you, if you start to have the idea that hey, border should be more open, we should let everyone in and all this sort of stuff, then the, the money printing will accelerate the, out of that. If you have a, you know, let's say a closed border Policy and you, you know, print a bunch of money, then I think what you do is you probably just implode your own economy, you know, so it's like, it's, it kind of has an accelerating effect on, on, on the different sides. Right. So it's never good to print the money. But I think there is a, I guess Japan is kind of somewhat of an example of that, you know, so Japan took the option of keeping their borders closed and keeping a relatively homogenous society and culture, but they printed more fucking money than anyone ever. They remained a very productive society too. And they have very different problems than Europe has. Right. Europe took a very open border policy. Now Europe's being overrun by fucking third worlders and stuff like that. Japan doesn't have that problem. Japan sacrificed somewhat their economy, their internal economy, but they kept, you know, the cultural cohesion to some degree, at least to a much larger degree than the West. [01:10:18] Speaker B: Most of the Western. Yeah, most of the Western world. As much as you can in the Internet age. [01:10:23] Speaker A: Exactly. So, so Japan, you know, is still pretty safe. It is still, you know, it has this sort of cultural vibe like Japan is Japan and there's nowhere else like Japan in the world. Right. It sort of still has that. So I think it's, you know, as you get older you realize that everything is, you know, trade offs. Right. But I think those were a healthier set of trade offs than the, the sort of, the, the blindly, you know, Canada, for example. Canada is a disaster of fucking trade offs. [01:10:55] Speaker B: Yeah. This is, this is actually exactly why bitcoin is such an interesting wild card in all of this. Because bitcoin actually removes something from, from the politic. [01:11:14] Speaker A: Yes. [01:11:14] Speaker B: Like it removes the biggest feedback system of politics from politics. [01:11:21] Speaker A: Yep. [01:11:22] Speaker B: And, and this is, this is, this brings me all back to kind of like why I, I genuinely believe, like, like, so when you say that market is actually underneath politics or I guess, yeah, politic is underneath the market. Like the, the market doesn't exist without the politicians is. I actually would agree with that in the sense that if you cannot ex. If you cannot know or have an expectation that you'd have normal social interaction with somebody, you cannot trade with them. You know, you cannot. Like if, if you're, if you're worried that someone's going to take out a knife and just stab you in the chest, there's no market taking place. [01:11:57] Speaker A: Right. [01:11:57] Speaker B: You have to first agree on the rules by which you're actually going to interact with each other. [01:12:04] Speaker A: And someone needs to be able to enforce that. That's the sovereign. [01:12:06] Speaker B: And it does. That's the thing is that I think the sense, the, the my moral and my kind of like, structure of what libertarianism is in my mind is that we should be. We should shift toward an era where we should be shifting toward technology that allows us to each be our own sovereign. Is that like, I can simply defend myself. If you do not behave in the way like that, if this turns to blows, I will just kill you. You know, like, if you, if you start a fight with me, I can defend myself. We go back to dueling and we go back to dueling is that if we constantly offload this responsibility, we only make ourselves weak and invite subjugation. And. But the, the powerful thing or the really crazy element about Bitcoin is that stops a huge collective feedback loop from things continuously getting out of control because there's an invisible fraud that feeds it. You know, like so many people talk about, like, oh, we got to put in energy for environmentalism and all this stuff. And I've always, especially since I've kind of gone down the Austrian economics rabbit hole, is that I've seen this as such a total waste of time because I could spend 10 years devoting every minute of my attention. And you know, in the, in the micro sense, it wouldn't be a waste. It wouldn't be like, oh, I'm not doing anything of consequence, but if you don't fix the money, it doesn't have any. You, you're. You might as well throw your telescope away because, like, you could spend. You could spend your entire life. You could spend your entire life doing every micro thing you could for the benefit of environmentalism. But if the government can literally in two days force through a $2 trillion spending bill, they erased hundreds of thousands, no, millions of lives, entire lives worth of effort, lives worth productivity, lives worth of productivity got shifted into whatever the hell they wanted. Like everything that you attempted to do, someone literally, like by typing some crap on a piece of paper and then signing it, undid all of it, or basically took in another direction, you plus a million other people worth of. You have absolutely no influence. And anything that you did, produced, then got used for their. For their means. Like, it's such a profound slavery through fraud that it makes any attempt to micro direct society completely arbitrary because the money printer can undo it so quickly. Like it will just force incentives the other way. And you'll never actually have a la. You'll never have a societal effect. You'll only ever have a local effect. [01:15:12] Speaker A: So a couple Things I want to say there. Yeah, I think I used to use the word slavery a lot. I, I hesitate to use it these days because it's just too heavy and it's just thrown around too much. [01:15:23] Speaker B: I, I think it's, it's the Euro racist of libertarians. [01:15:28] Speaker A: Yeah, it's basically what it, I, I think it's, I think it's more accurately should be just framed as stealing. [01:15:35] Speaker B: And sure, I think a slavery is like, or, or stealing is like short term, post slavery. Is it like I worked for a week and then you stole it from me? You just turned that week that I worked for myself to be a slave to you. So. But yes, sure, it's that it's just stealing from people. [01:15:54] Speaker A: It's exactly. So, so if we, if, if we call it theft, then basically we can agree very quickly that, you know, any, anytime you have more theft in any sort of economic system, it's going to degrade. Right? This is why theft is generally much lower in high trust societies and high trust societies are generally more politically stable because they are comprised of people with similar race, values, beliefs, theology, etc. [01:16:27] Speaker B: Right. [01:16:27] Speaker A: So when you have a real fucking mishmash of people who do not trust each other, you increase the likelihood of theft because people don't like, they don't trust each other, they're not of the same values, they're not of the same race, they're not the same creed, et cetera. Right? So this, this is why the, the political container is ultimately extremely important because it sets the environment within which you will get, you know, either theft or, or not theft. So the, the problem obviously with central banking though is that it bakes theft into the general system, so then it makes the political efforts more impotent. Right? You can try and do all of this stuff that is very necessary to maintain the, the cultural cohesion of your nation, but it'll still grind you. And that's basically what happened in Japan, right? So Japan was it, it did all of this work to maintain cultural cohesion. So it is still a safe place to live, it is still a productive place, it is still all of that. But it stole from all of its fucking people and it, it burnt them out. Right? Whereas in the west we kind of somewhat did a double fucking whammy. I guess the US is a little bit more protected because it exports the inflation, it exports the theft. So the us, you know, very intelligently just steals from fucking everybody, not just themselves. Whereas like Europe is the real basket case in this. [01:17:55] Speaker B: Exactly. [01:17:55] Speaker A: Very smart. Europe is the, the, the. The funniest basket case because these idiots, not only did they go open borders, they opened their. But they also printed money and they stole from themselves and they got stolen by the US and basically Europe kind of is kind of like literally, you know, the, you know, that meme with that white chick and the five black guys? That's Europe, right? Europe is that white chick. So, you know, they print money, Europe prints money. The immigrants come in leftist policies. Like the whole thing is, you know, a, a gang bang. But what, What I kind of wanted to. Wanted to say here is yes, bitcoin is very important because it removes the, the. The monetary piece out of the, the political game, which is extremely important because what it does is just kills that layer of theft. Super important because so, so it kills structural theft. And that was the big point in the book. I always said, like, look, bitcoin is the keystone. You need that. But it's not the only thing that matters. So all of the other stuff that matters is very cultural, political and behavioral in nature. [01:19:05] Speaker B: It only enables the other things to actually make the difference they ought to be making. [01:19:09] Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly. And, and it sort of, you know, I always used to be very much fix, you know, fix the money, fix the world, but it's, it's not actually that simple. It's fix the money and fix the culture character and therefore fix the world. So it's kind of a, It's a, It's a, It's a cohesive thing. [01:19:31] Speaker B: Yeah. But the, the book I'm actually writing, the way I try to explain it, because it is very much, oh, fix the money in the world will just be fixed. And it's not. I think it, the, the way to think about it is that if you fix the money, we actually can fix the world. But you still have to do it. [01:19:46] Speaker A: You still have to. [01:19:47] Speaker B: It's that if you don't fix the money, you're not going to be able to fix it. You. But if you fix the money, you can fix it, but you don't. Fixing the money doesn't just fix it, you know. [01:19:59] Speaker A: Correct. Well, at least I would say even now that I'm, you know, a little bit more maybe jaded by existence, I would say you have a shot at fixing it. [01:20:08] Speaker B: You have a shot at fixing it. [01:20:09] Speaker A: Exactly. We never, I don't think we ever fix it. I think we're like. The very nature of existence is that we're always fixing something and then some. And then breaking something else and fixing something else, breaking something else. [01:20:21] Speaker B: If the Money. If the money is broken, you're gonna go, you're gonna constantly run into. Feed negative feedback loops that take you in the wrong direction. If the money is, if you actually fix the money, then you can actually be on a constant path of progress with all the ups and downs and the problems and pains that that will always come with. But it's just a direction. It's directional. Yeah, exactly. [01:20:45] Speaker A: It, it makes the, it makes the people. And this is what I said, remember in the book, I was saying it like, it doesn't. Bitcoin is sort of a, a framework for excellence, if you remember that, me mentioning that in the book. So, so framework for excellence meaning that if you approach life through the lens of excellence, not fucking equality, let everyone in, participation, awards and all this sort of gay shit. If you do that, you're actually going to lose even harder on a bitcoin standard. Whereas if you approach life and existence and politics and power and all this sort of stuff through the lens of excellence, virtue, etc, you're actually going to win harder, which is great because that's what you want to do. Because at the moment the people who approach through virtue and excellence, they still win, but you have a larger number of fucking retards winning in the current system because they can participate in the fraud somehow. Right? So that's the structural shift that I see bitcoin enables, which is not meant to be nice. It's not meant to be equalizing, it's not meant to be pretty. You know, you, you, you are still going to get losers. You're gonna get hard losers and you're gonna get mega, mega, mega winners. But it'll like, the winners are better quality. [01:22:12] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:22:12] Speaker A: And the losers are lower quality. And I think that qualitative element is really important. And that's the, that's the framework for excellence that, that bitcoin is. I wanted to touch on two more points. One is bazaars, ancient bazaars, right, which are marketplaces, you know, from the beginning of time. Like the earliest, earliest bazaars like in Egypt and Persia and stuff like that, you know, always almost operated as their own sovereign jurisdiction all the way to the modern times, is that you enter the bazaar and you are bound no longer by the general sovereigns rule or the sovereigns that around the bazaar, the bazaar was a meeting point where a new set of rules exist. And still though, and this is sort of, I think part of the crux of the, you know, the libertarian free market argument is that, hey, the bazaar is the, the archetype of what we should do everywhere. But the. What has failed to sort of is often failed to be realized is that the bazaar is actually the sovereign within that piece of territory. And it's often it exists by virtue of the agreement between the sovereigns that surround it. So there's an agreement between the sovereigns where they meet and they say this territory here is where we will do trade. And then it enables that to occur in the absence of those sovereigns. It is very hard for a place like that to exist because some fucker will come and raid it, basically. So we kind of can't escape the existence of a sovereign. And this leads into the next point I wanted to make where you said, you know, I think technology can lead us to an age where, you know, the individual can, you know, get sovereign. I just don't think that's practical. I don't think we ever reach that age. [01:24:15] Speaker B: Well, I don't think there's an end game to it. I think it's a. It's a forever trend, you know, Like, [01:24:21] Speaker A: I don't know if it's a forever trend either, dude. I think it's a, like a limit, [01:24:26] Speaker B: you know, like the having. Like, like there's no, there's no actual conclusion to it. It's just your. Because I think humanity naturally, like progress is the seeking of that, right? Of what is the seeking of more autonomy? The solution, solutions to problems? [01:24:45] Speaker A: Like, I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it's. I think it's more cyclical than that, man. I think there will come a point where you, you get excessive. You, you swing too far on the individual side of the spectrum and then it becomes advantageous to group together again and you become, you know, more fulfilled, more happy, more culturally flourishing in collectives again. And I think it'll shift back away from individual. Because the. It matters how you're measuring the stuff, right? Um, if you're, you know, if you're measuring like quality of life right there, there's like maximum collectivism, which is communism. And you know, that is bad. But there is maximum individualism, which is being a insult at home, you know, with a billion dollars. Right? Like there's, you know, and I'm being facetious, obviously, but there is, I think there's a resurgence of the desire for people to build tribes, communities, even fucking like network state, like, even micro states. And saying that we're going to do this and we're going to really group together. Because getting ten thousand, hundred thousand million people, ten million people of a similar Mindset and similar ideology, similar vision for the world is way more powerful than individuals doing it. [01:26:22] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:26:24] Speaker A: And I think that there will, you know, the pendulum will swing and then it will get to a point where a lot of people are doing that and then the delta again will be being more individualist in nature. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe the argument could be made that the technology kind of maybe shifts the window of the spectrum more towards the individual side, because you can do that. [01:26:56] Speaker B: It certainly changes the environment for where and how those networks come together. Like without, without a doubt it does that. And I've always kind of pictured it in my mind as this two steps forward, one step back cycle where you gain more autonomy and capacity to actually have influence and power just because society at large is doing that. But it leads me back to this idea. Like when you mentioned the bizarre. I thought that was a really good element because kind of this idea of libertarianism that I've always had or have kind of grown into over time was this sense that the natural state of society's evolution is to Balkanize around these kind of like little bazaars and fiefdoms and groups and like micro nations that simply have such small barriers to exit that a bad one cannot be sustained for too long. That the. And, and that is like the sense of freedom in the sense of sovereignty. Right. Is do I have the. The capacity to easily exit from this situation when it becomes some. When. When the collective basically starts going against me? And, and I think in that same sense is that you end up, you do end up developing standards of politic in the sense of like the use of violence, simply because you have to figure out how to get a whole bunch of disparate people and cultures to work together. Because cooperative environments, your cooperative agreements are more valued like their win win agreements are better than win lose every single time. [01:28:34] Speaker A: Right. [01:28:34] Speaker B: The just evolutionarily speaking. But the problem is, and Knutz von Home talks about this, I think it was in his first book, is that collectivists will always win over Balkanizers, over individualists, because they're explicitly willing to give up their beliefs or their standards to just be part of the group. And that group will eventually grow big enough from a bunch of people who don't really care what the standards are. They just want to listen to the same authority. That authority becomes so powerful that it can take over any small competitor. [01:29:09] Speaker A: That's somewhat true. There's also the group that is really strongly aligned. So the Spartans, the Romans, et cetera, where it's not. Just. It's not just a bunch of monkeys. [01:29:20] Speaker B: That sheer number. [01:29:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's actually functional number. And you know, Germany is a great example of that. You know, like there's a, you know, Germany rebuilt itself between World War I and World War II because of that reason. There were both. It was a collective and it was very well organized. And you know, this is why sometimes, like just the blanket statement that, you know, all the collectives are just a bunch of retarded people is not really true. And you learn that a lot from history. Yes, it is. [01:29:50] Speaker B: Don't gaslight me. [01:29:53] Speaker A: You know, the, the, you know, the Spartans are the, the best example that I, you know, always sort of think back to even the samurai. Like, like it wasn't you that was important, it was the man beside you. Like you got you. You were, you were punished far more severely for dropping your shield than your sword. [01:30:11] Speaker B: Right. [01:30:11] Speaker A: So it was certainly a collective environment, but it was far more aligned than what you would call a. I don't know, like the modern nation state made up of a bunch of people who don't like each other and who don't know each other. Right. That's very different. [01:30:30] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know. I'll tell you what. I, One of the things I, I walked away from after the, after the book [01:30:42] Speaker A: was [01:30:45] Speaker B: I was less confident in a lot of the conclusions I had come to, but I think I was more confident in some of the reasons and direction. And I think as I've. As I've gotten older, I've generally thought more that way. Is that everything is just a direction. Like almost to the sense that there isn't a conclusion to anything there. There's no real hard. There's no end, there's no solution. There's, you know, Thomas Owl. Right. [01:31:17] Speaker A: Is. [01:31:17] Speaker B: There's not even anything as a solution. A solution doesn't exist. It's just a trade off. You know, it's a question of which trade off and trade offs changing over time. [01:31:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:31:29] Speaker B: And it's also why I don't believe in this whole idea of this singularity and AGI and all this stupid. Is it like this is, this is totally at odds with everything that I know about everything. And value is only relative. It is explicitly relative, which means that it's just going to change what the value spectrum is and where it lies. It doesn't. It cannot possibly just make it so that like everything's done. Like that's, that's idiotic. Because whatever it does done, whatever it does complete will just be the thing that is of no value anymore. You know, like, like. But it will always just be compared to the thing that's more difficult. [01:32:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean that's what the, what we said before about like there's only a couple rules in life, right? So one of the rules is everything is a fucking trade off. The other rule is there's, there's directions, not destinations. Another rule is that, you know, value, all value is relative. Another rule actually is all status is also relative as well. Like, you know, it was cool to be online 20 years ago. It's not cool anymore. You know what I mean? [01:32:32] Speaker B: Dude, you're online. [01:32:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like you know now. Like in fact in, I actually think in the next five, 10 years it's actually going to be cringe to be online. It's like you, you're still online. Like you do really, you spend half hours. You're a loser. Yeah, exactly. Like, I think the ultimate status symbol in the next five, 10 years is like you are a complete ghost. Like you don't have an Instagram or Twitter or anything like that. You just like live entirely in the real world. Like being fucking Amish is going to be a status symbol in the next five, 10 years. [01:33:03] Speaker B: So it's like it already sort of is. My. We actually had two neighbors that just moved away like a couple of days ago like from our cul de sac, like, like, like a house over. And one of the things is I really like them. We kind of like disagreed on some politics but they were like super, super grounded and it was like really fun to talk to them about stuff. And they, they saw me as like this, this dude who's always in like the new tech and like online. But I also don't like, I'm not like drowning in social media. But that was like the crazy thing is they literally didn't even have Internet. They did borrow my and or like one of our neighbors Internet from time to time, like to use it. But they were super and they were like our ages, they're same age and. But it was, it was just funny and like we would, it would be really interesting the conversations that we would have kind of around that topic. And, and it was definitely something that I was like, that's so awesome. Like part of me, part of me is like how do you live without, how do you function without the Internet? But then like another part of me is like that's boss. You know, like even for someone who uses it so much, I'm like like you gotta like really have your together to do the world without the Internet. You know that. [01:34:23] Speaker A: Actually, you know what that reminds me of? I was in, in the last essay I wrote like a little while ago, I think it was a couple months back, I talked about this concept of mental obesity. And I, I likened it to. [01:34:34] Speaker B: I love that analogy, dude. [01:34:36] Speaker A: It's, you know, the industrial revolution gave us unlimited food and we all became fat of the body. The information age gave us unlimited information and made us fat of the mind. [01:34:47] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:34:47] Speaker A: Like, I swear to God, even if it's like the amount of information is. [01:34:51] Speaker B: You have brain fat. [01:34:53] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, brain fat. Get this, this is the even more important part is even if it's good information. [01:34:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:35:00] Speaker A: Doesn't matter. Like, like eating a kilo of steak is fine. Eating 10 kilos of steak isn't going to like make you more healthy or make you more intelligent or make you, you know, increase the nutrient absorption. Like there's a limit to what you can actually absorb. And I've really started thinking through this. It's like, okay, I'm. If the Internet just died tomorrow, I'm pretty sure I have absorbed enough information of how to live, what to do, how to think, all that sort of stuff that I could be fine for the rest of my life. So therefore, should I not go on a complete information fast? Like I don't want to know anymore, I don't want to hear anymore, I don't want to do anything. Because I think this ties into another sort of element of, of the mimetic nature of human beings. It's like, I don't think any of us have a single original thought anymore because everything we are consuming is defining what we are regurgitating. So I think the only way to even think, because we don't think anymore, we don't think, we just parrot. Everything we fucking do is a parroting of something else, of something someone else said. [01:36:05] Speaker B: There's such a constant flow of information that there's no time to have a novel thought because you don't do your own creative destruction and exploration of the thought of the, of the ideas you're just getting. You already have a flood of a new one come in. [01:36:19] Speaker A: You know, so maybe the only antidote to this is to go on a diet, which means no more information, no more reading, no more socials, no more nothing. And to deliberately become hyper ignorant to the point where you can rebalance your system and take the time to actually act on all of the knowledge that is up here. So this maybe ties back into Bushido, is like, you know, so much already. But how much of what you know have you actually acted on? Yeah, 1%, if you're being honest. Half a percent, maybe. What about the other 99 of that, you know, that you haven't acted on? What? Is more information gonna help you act on that? No, it's not. It's just actually going to decrease the percentage of stuff that you know that you're going to act on. So therefore becoming more mentally obese is useless. Like, so. So anyway, that's kind of where the idea came from. Maybe it's useful. [01:37:21] Speaker B: No, I really like that. I really like that way of thinking about it because, like, I think it's clear the, the unhealthy consequences of like how we have, how our information environments have like gone. And I think there's a massive pushback happening. In fact, this is something that, when, when you shared with me that thing about like Satlantis and like in person events and the demand, that was crazy to me because in fact, actually pull on that thread for a minute, go ahead and kind of like lay out what you were looking at and seeing. And I'm curious kind of what's happened like last year too, because I, I would expect this trend to, to really keep going just because at least in my personal life, I feel this way in the sense that like so much more and more online is just, I'm just whatever about, you know. [01:38:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:38:25] Speaker B: And I, I can't help but get the sense that this is a broader trend. [01:38:29] Speaker A: Yeah, the, the statistics point to the experience economy blowing up in every direction. And experience economy, you can basically put anything from hospitality to travel to wellness to sports, sports to events to social clubs to going out to whatever like basically doing in the real world. Like the evidence suggests that that stuff is all blowing up and increasing quality and increasing quantity. Like the, the same kind of fervent sort of, you know, improvement, pace of improvement that we had in the tech world over the last 20 years is actually going to come now into the world of atoms. You know, fucking Peter Thiel was like, he's always so ahead of his time. You know, he was the one who was originally talking about like, you know, we got the 140 characters right, so we had like so much innovation in bits, but nothing in atoms that is about to like. Or it's in the process of shifting really hard, even things like space and, you know, defense and all this sort of stuff, like a booming from an investment perspective, from an activity perspective, because digital is just going to become more and more and more and more infinite. And you can't make physical infinite. You know, like physical is fundamentally infinite, like in the universal sense, but in sort of the day to day sense. Like it's, it's, it's hard to do. So whenever you have quantity in one dimension, quality will migrate. So it's like quality and value both migrate to zones of scarcity. And that is going to manifest in my opinion, in this boom in the experience economy. And like with events in particular, and this is why we did this with Atlantis, we're like, okay, we got out of the content game, we dropped all the fucking content posting and all of that nonsense from the app and we said, let's just build the best events app. And then we kind of took it a step further now, which is okay, events is useful, but events is sort of step one. What do people actually want to do with events? They want to build a, in real life community or an A, or a social network offline. Right. And so what we're building now is a community layer to the platform so that you can simultaneously build a community run events. You know, maybe if you want to run it more professionally, like, you know, if you're a creator or a brand or something like that, you can create membership tiers and you can generate, basically you can build an offline SaaS process product which is, you know, a members club or something like that. That's really what it is, you know, and that's not for everyone obviously, but you know, that's sort of what we're going after is like, how do we help people build community through gatherings? And you know, we, we want to establish a platform for that. Simple. Easier said than done, obviously. You know, like I'm, I'm betting more on the trend than, than how it's going to be done. Like how it's going to be done is going to much more messy. But the, the general trend there is events, gatherings, travel, wellness, hospitality, all this sort of stuff is exploding because the online world is decreasingly human. [01:41:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I like that idea that like quality ne, like it migrates towards the scarce. [01:41:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:41:55] Speaker B: And, and it's funny too because there was a part, you know, I think looking back when I was younger, I saw this, like, oh, you'll be able to do everything on the Internet and you'll be able to have any experience or whatever. And it never registered or never really thought about the fact that it just makes that type of experience less valuable, valueless. You know, like it makes it not worth anything. And there will be this aggressive drive Back to the real world. And I do think we're seeing it. Like I'm. I. I just went to watch my first movie in the movie theater for a really, really long time just as a. As. As a birthday present because we got two kids and it's really hard to [01:42:39] Speaker A: go to the pres. [01:42:40] Speaker B: Hard to go to the movie theater. But like I had a great time. I had a great time and I'm like, all right, aside from my absolute sick of traveling, from the logistics of traveling like I do only my online world has, has basically coalesced into kind of how I thought about Pear Drive. It's to just a bunch of little private networks like, and the public one is just kind of like let me go see what psychosis the world is on about today. And then I'll just kind of get back out of there and I just talk to. I, I essentially have nothing but a series of group chats and everything that I do. Like, I have our family chat, I have the bitcoin, the Raleigh bitcoin chat. I have a bunch of people working with bitcoin and AI you know, like it, it just, it's just group chats everywhere on like six different platforms and even Noster is basically just a group chat because. Because it's a really small crew. It's a, it's a, it's a. It's like. It's just like a group chat with 10,000 people who all give a. About the same thing. And, and that's kind of how I see things going. It's. It is this sort of like network Balkanization, right? [01:44:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:44:04] Speaker B: Is the, the ability to easily or to, to. Basically it's just so big and there's so much stuff. There's no way to filter or make sense of the public anymore. [01:44:18] Speaker A: So you gotta, you gotta cut it down and you gotta like strip it down to. Yeah, yeah, man, that's. And I think that sort of is the, the another life rule for people here. Remember we said before, what did you say, like trade offs directions, not destinations. Value migrates, quality migrates. I think this one is that the, the. The pendulum will always swing, right? So when you have a, when you're in sort of. When. When one thing is over indexed, you know, the, The. The opportunity. The opportunity also migrates along with the value. And in fact I think the, the opportunity migrates before the value migrates. Right? Because. [01:45:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, necessarily so. Yeah, yeah, necessarily so. [01:45:06] Speaker A: And. And you sort of. That's where the puck is going to go. Or at least you make the Bet there and you either win or you lose. Yeah. [01:45:16] Speaker B: And I think it's also, I think there's also an important lesson here in the idea of like fixing society. Society and, and you know, finding, finding the perfect place for it is that I think you have to over index. You know, like, I think when, when we discovered bacteria, we over indexed on, oh, bacteria is the cause of all of our problems. And you discover viruses and oh, viruses are the cause of all of our problems. And like, oh, you know, whatever the next thing is, it's toxins, it's poisons, it's heavy metals, it's plastics. And once you discover some concrete relationship between A and B, you want to then apply A to C, D, E and G, H, I and everything. And, and it's actually in the over indexing, it's in the over steering because like society, because it's an aggregation of everybody's value judgments. You know, it's this attempt to kind of have this collective sense of direction. I don't think you can actually tell you've over subscribed until you have. [01:46:27] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. [01:46:28] Speaker B: I think it's actually in the over steering that you actually are able to recognize that something is off course. Because we're all driving blind, right? It's like you're in a plane where you don't actually have any way to tell that you're, you're, you're going up, down, level left or right, you have, you have no horizon to look at. And it's just kind of like, oh, we have to correct, we have to pull up because literally everybody in this is like leaning forward. You know, like you just, you have to, you have to see the, the incorrectness and the consequences of a bad decision or direction or a standard in order to find what the new one is or the, the better one is. And because we're all flying and two reasons because we're all flying blind, we're, we're explicitly trying to make sense of information that cannot be individually acquired. Wired like the compute task itself. It's not even like a matter of intelligence, but you just cannot compute the information. And then the other sense that like nothing is static. So even if you are driving perfectly, the horizon will shift and you won't see it. You know, like, like the, the environment shifts out from underneath you to the point that you might not even have steered off course. The course just changed. You know, like the road changes at the same time. [01:47:49] Speaker A: So, so, so the, the, the final rule for people here, for life is that society is basically Stevie Wonder driving a car where the road is changing. [01:48:02] Speaker B: Yes. On a. On a really long and windy road. [01:48:07] Speaker A: Yep, yep. Stevie Wonder on psychedelics with the road. [01:48:12] Speaker B: Your opportunity is to know which way the road has gone and steer your car before everybody else does. Yeah. [01:48:22] Speaker A: Wild. All right, man. Anything else you want to hit? [01:48:30] Speaker B: I actually have another show in, like, 15 minutes. I didn't leave us enough time. You know, let's. Let's think on this. We'll come back to it. We'll be talking again in a few months. How you doing, though? You doing all right? Doing good. [01:48:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm good. I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. You know, I'm just. [01:48:54] Speaker B: How's the kid? The kid's great. [01:48:56] Speaker A: Kid. [01:48:56] Speaker B: And the wife, he's the. [01:48:57] Speaker A: He's the highlight. And wife is great, man. She's, you know, she's. She's fully healed up. She's just starting to get back into training and movement and stuff like that. So she's on her nice bottom journey. You know, for me, it's, you know, like, I. I'm on this personal journey now of, like, trying to come to terms with, you know, my new identity, not just as a dad, but also as this, you know, as someone who is not so certain about everything anymore. You know what I mean? [01:49:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:49:27] Speaker A: So much. Like, I used to have so much more certainty, and, you know, it's. It's a strange feeling not being as confident around particular things. And I'm. And I'm, you know, I'm wondering how much of that is a phase. How much of that is, you know, maturation. How much of that is also just like, me being pissed off at myself because I. I made very much the same mistakes, as you mentioned earlier, about, like, wanting to build 10,000 things. You know, you remember what Atlantis started off as this big, massive thing. Oh, build us basically build Facebook from. From, you know, standing start. So from zero. [01:50:05] Speaker B: From zero to Facebook. [01:50:07] Speaker A: Absolutely idiotic. So it's like, how much of that is, you know, my. My disillusionment and pissed offness with myself, and how much of that is like a valid, you know, wanting to withdraw and change as a person, all this sort of stuff. So it's a. It's an interesting time for me personally. It's a. It's a time of discovery and a time of reinvention. I feel like, you know, when I came into 2026, I was like, yeah, it's going to be the biggest year. I'm going to pump this and that. And, you Know, I think part of, like, bitcoin also crashing and like, changing a bunch of my plans as well, because I had, like, price point in my head. I was like, okay, Bitcoin needs 250. I'm going to do this. I'm going to buy this land. We're going to start building a house, all this sort of stuff. [01:50:44] Speaker B: And everybody starts expecting that. And that's why I think that's where I were getting the nut kick, everybody. Yeah. Expectation will screw it up. It'll reverse it every time. [01:50:55] Speaker A: My wife calls it counting apartments. So she was like, you idiot. She was like, you counting all the apartments you were going to buy before you for the eggs hatch. [01:51:03] Speaker B: Wait, [01:51:06] Speaker A: so literally, you know, like, all of this stuff is kind of made. [01:51:09] Speaker B: You counted the apartments for your bitcoin hatched. [01:51:15] Speaker A: Oh. So 20, 26 is a. Is a year of more of reinvention and reflection for myself than. Than what I thought it would be. So we'll see. We'll see. It's an interesting time. [01:51:28] Speaker B: How old your boy now? [01:51:30] Speaker A: Seven months. [01:51:31] Speaker B: Seven months, dude, I'll tell you. So my little girl is going. She's 11 months. Excuse me. 13 months. And I'll tell you, 11. Just. Just write it a year. Literally full transformation. Like, the existence of this human alters entirely. There's a whole. There's like three new layers of communication. The number of. Oh, my God, it's. You're gonna have so much fun. It's so hilarious. [01:52:04] Speaker A: Oh, my God. Seven. [01:52:06] Speaker B: Seven months. You are about to get into it. You are getting. You're getting. You're so close. I need to. I need to hear about it. You're gonna have to send me pictures and stuff and video. [01:52:17] Speaker A: It's been so much fun watching this little. Just like, develop a personality, man. You know, and he'll like. [01:52:22] Speaker B: Because he, you know, it'll be there at 12 months. It'll fully be there. It'll fully be there. [01:52:29] Speaker A: He is so much fun. Like, in the. In the morning, like, he'll. Now he's like. He's starting to, you know, build up the dexterity in his hands and stuff like that, you know, so he can do stuff, you know, like, I'm sleeping. I sleep with an eye mask on because, like, I like darkness. And he would just, like, slap me in the face and take the eye mask off. [01:52:45] Speaker B: Little, like, what's wrong with you? Look at me, Daddy. [01:52:49] Speaker A: Yeah, he's like, just looking at me, smiling. Hey. Hey. [01:52:55] Speaker B: Oh, my God. That's hilarious. Yes. [01:52:58] Speaker A: It's the best, you know. When people tell me they, you know, they don't want to have kids or, you know, this, like, all the excuses that they give, it's like, oh, you know, it's like selfish to bring them into this world. And it's like. It's like, shut the up. Shut the up. Literally, you're a loser. [01:53:14] Speaker B: That's how I feel about it now, man. That's how I feel about it. We're gonna go for number three. Not yet. Not yet. We got a ball, but, yeah, we're gonna have a lot of kids. [01:53:26] Speaker A: We're gonna wait till it's about a year and then. And start thinking about number two, and then. Yeah, man. Gotta play catch up, but it's the best. [01:53:34] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, man. I do. Thanks for coming. Thanks for hanging out, man. [01:53:39] Speaker A: Absolutely, bud. [01:53:40] Speaker B: Always. [01:53:40] Speaker A: Always. [01:53:41] Speaker B: Wait, am I gonna. Am I gonna see you anywhere? Prague, maybe? You doing Prague now? I'm going to Prague. I. So I've actually got that one on my docket for next year probably because I. I try to do at least one international, and I'm trying not to do the same ones because I did plan B to Switzerland twice in a row. And I was like, that's not. I need to at least just branch out a little bit, try something different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:54:08] Speaker A: I. I promised myself I wouldn't do Prague again, but then wifey got a visa to go and spend some time with her mom in Spain and, okay, hang out with a little guy and everything like that. And I was like, all right, well, let's go to Europe. So we're gonna go there, and we're gonna go to our favorite place in the Alps in Italy. And then I looked at the dates, and we're literally going to be in Italy the week before Prague. And I was like, okay, it. I'll extend three more days, and let's just go there. [01:54:37] Speaker B: Nice. So. [01:54:38] Speaker A: So I think. I say this every year, but I think it's going to be the last Prague one. But we'll see. [01:54:42] Speaker B: Well, just let me know. Let me know which ones you're going to go to, especially, like, on the international circuit. Are you even going to the bitcoin magazine? The big one in Vegas? Not me neither. [01:54:54] Speaker A: I don't know. [01:54:54] Speaker B: I can't do. Wait. The bitcoin conference is, like, enough is. Is already, like, a lot, you know, And I think when you put Vegas on top of it, it's like, I don't. I just don't know if I can do that. I might go. I might go next year, depending on like the state of Pear Drive and like the project we're doing just so I can share it, you know. But man, I'm a little burnout. [01:55:24] Speaker A: Yeah, man, it's a beautiful vibe. I, I long, long, long, long, long, long for the days of 2019 when, you know, you and I first met in person. All that sort of holy. We were so lucky. That was like the golden, golden age of, of bitcoin. [01:55:38] Speaker B: I wish you could tell you were in the good old days while you were still in the good old days. It's truth. It's true. All right, man, well, we need to get our kids together. We need to, we need to figure out how to be in the same place and get them together and hang out. Go hang out with Uncle Spky. [01:55:56] Speaker A: It'll be so much fun. We'll work it out, man. [01:56:00] Speaker B: All right, man. Talk to you later, man. Yes, peace. Thank you guys for listening. Shout out to Svetsky always for the cool ass stuff he builds and for his perspective on things. Always a good friend, always a good show. I'm going to be keeping a really close eye on what he's doing here in the coming months. I, I really do think Sat Slantis with a kind of a kickoff in what I believe is another layer of this and thinking about Nostr differently and what the protocol actually serves, I genuinely believe it's best understood as the solution to PGP is that it's a public identity system and payment registry that should be thought about as an organization layer. And I think he has a really, really fascinating pull with something like satslantis and this idea that people are going back to the real world, people are looking for authenticity and they're sick of the AI slop. And I also think we're on this timeline, we're in this era where everything is moving so much faster. And I don't mean that just in like, oh, tech is moving faster and we're spread ourselves thin across many more things. I think literally the timelines of trends are moving faster. Where, you know, bitcoin is getting. Things are stretching out and becoming slower where big moves that you used to see on daily charts now happen on weekly charts. I really think the world and technology and our lives are kind of going the opposite direction. Things that used to take weeks, months and years now take days, weeks and months. And because of that, we're probably accelerating to a point in which we're just in a different world. We find a new normal, we find a new plateau and build on a new set of primitives. In a new type of environment. And that's why I, I like having Swetsky on. I thought this is a really good conversation to just step back for a second and if I had any suggestion for you guys is take a day off, take a day off. You know, I think it was Brad Mills who, he's in a bunch of the AI groups and he was just like going super hard on a million different AI things and trying to be on the front and grabbing all the different tools and all this stuff. And then his grandmother got in head on collision. And that's a horrible thing to have as a wake up call. And seriously, I hope everybody's okay. I haven't, haven't kept up with it, but that's a hell of a thing to kind of bring your perspective back to the real world. And it gave him some pause to go back to what was real. And I think we could all benefit from that. Not from having something terrible happen, but from a little bit of perspective and to remember to step back, to slow down just a little bit and get your bearings so that you're. When you're in a world where you're constantly having to run a million miles an hour, if you get off by just, you know, 1% in your trajectory, you can get way off your target very, very quickly. And you might save yourself a year's worth of correction if you stop, take a moment, go outside and reflect today and correct that 1%. So anyway, that's a little. I hope that's some kind of useful advice to just take a moment and get your bearings, because we got a lot to do and a lot to build and we live in crazy times and we have a lot of people to build for. So. Yeah, this is bitcoin audible. I am Guy Swan, and until then, that's our two sets. Sam.