Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: And so that's what we get morning, noon and night from the beast. A constant flow of news designed either to a deflect anger at your party by excusing disowning. What abouting underperformance and incompetence as normal, or b to create anger at the other party by highlighting their relative underperformance and incompetence, all while generating engagement for the big tech and big media heads of the beast. It's all perfectly rational, all perfectly optimizing. Fortunes are made, power is gained, but over time, you have to make bolder and bolder claims to create anger at the other party. You are forced to respond in kind. If the other side escalates, the narrative attacks like using mustard gas in World War One, until eventually the entire game breaks because the anger youve created cant be contained by the rules of the game. And thats when you are well and truly in the great Ravine, the best in bitcoin made audible. I am Guy Swan, and this is bitcoin audible.
What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who's read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we got a bit of a sobering episode today. This was actually released by Ben Huntley on Epsilon Theory, which I'm a big fan of his work, and we've actually read a couple pieces by him. He will release stuff for free every so often. The blog itself, the bulk of the blog is behind a paywall, but really fantastic writing. Always have. Always enjoyed it. And this piece he specifically made free. And I think it's just because it's an important, it's an important piece and I think it calls for much needed self reflection.
And I think he puts the argument incredibly well. He always has had a knack for really interesting writing style and a really impactful writing style, and I've always appreciated that. And if you do not follow and or you want to subscribe, I will have the link to social and the blog itself in the show notes right down in the description. And I highly encourage you to. And there is a lot of free stuff on the blog if you just want to explore. And I cannot remember what other pieces we have read on the show. I think he did one specifically in defense of bitcoin or something like that, and I'm pretty positive I've read that one on the show, but I'll see if I can dig up some because it's been, it's been a really long time, but a big fan, big fan of his writing, and I hope you guys really enjoy this one. And I also hope you seriously consider the message, because I do think it's important. And we cover a little bit in the guys take afterward. So with that, I don't waste any more time. Let's go ahead and get into this piece by Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory, and it's titled this is the great Ravine by Ben Hunt.
This is all going to get much worse before it gets any better.
In the Dark Forest, volume two of the three body problem science fiction trilogy, Si Xin Lu mentions almost in passing a 50 year period of immense social upheaval, destruction, and ultimately recovery across the globe. He never goes into the details of this period that he calls the great ravine. He basically just waves his hands at it and writes, yep, that happened. Why? Because the great ravine does not advance the plot. It's there. It happens. But there's nothing to be gained by examining its events. Like the cultural revolution of Siu Shen Lu's real world history, the great ravine is ultimately just a tragic waste. A waste of time, a waste of wealth, a waste of lives. There is nothing to be learned from our time in the great ravine.
It must simply be crossed. And cross it we will.
Eventually, we will come out on the other side of our great ravine to discover a new age where these small liberal virtues of personal autonomy and the small c conservative values of social community are reclaimed, where inspiration is rekindled, ingenuity is rewarded, and integrity is recognized. I know these words don't mean much to most people right now. They never do on this side of the great ravine. But I promise you that one day, they will again.
But until that day, which I think is probably decades away, some version of an FN scar armed Jesse Plemons asking for our papers and a political loyalty test is a hundred percent part of our american future. Hell, it's a part of our american present.
The truth is that there's no stopping our collective march into the great ravine, fueled by our sadness, transformed into focused anger at the other party.
The truth is that political violence on party lines is inevitable when everyone knows that, everyone knows the other party is an existential threat to the real America. Why? Because this is a very stable political equilibrium. Just not a pleasant one. More to the point, no matter how many empty words are spent over the next few days denouncing political violence, these guys and their surrogates are never going to stop saying the words that not only encourage but demand political violence.
Tweet from Joe Biden. Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation. He's a threat to our freedom. He's a threat to our democracy. He's literally a threat to everything America stands for.
Elon Musk those who oppose this are traitors. All caps. Traitors. What is the penalty for traitors? Again, subtweeting the save act from Speaker Mike Johnson.
Tweet from Marjorie Taylor Greene we are in a battle between good and evil. The Democrats are the party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent, unborn, violence and bloody, meaningless, endless wars. They want to lock up their political opponents and terrorize innocent Americans who would tell the truth about it. The Democrat party is flat out evil. And yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.
I mean, I definitely could have included some additional incendiary team blue surrogates here, like maybe Joy Reid's greatest he's a fascist hits. But there's something so special about the richest man in the world saying that anyone who disagrees with him on the election security legislation should be arrested and executed for treason. As for Marjorie Taylor Greene, she's certainly showing a calmer, more restrained voice since Saturday. You think any of these people, least of all Trump, are going to tone down their rhetoric once he's back in the White House? L o L.
And it's not even these guys, not really, anyway. These guys are just the most visible manifestations of the beast, the monstrous hydra of big politics, big tech, and big media that leads us to focus anger at the other party that devours us whole as it marches us headlong into the great ravine.
I'm not asking you to fight the beast of big politics, big tech, and big media. Honestly, I don't know how you would. This is the end of an age, the fen de siecle, the period of time where the beast is strongest because it is everywhere and invisible all at once.
Big politics, big tech, and big media are the water in which we swim. We are totally immersed in the common knowledge that the enemy is the other party. And until that common knowledge is weakened substantially, any direct challenge to the beast is a suicide mission, a noble suicide mission, like charging a fascist machine gun nest in the Spanish Civil War, but a suicide mission all the same.
No, I'm not asking you to fight the beast. I'm asking you to see the beast. I'm asking you to see how the beast feeds on our anger, which it has renamed as engagement. I'm asking you to see how the beast transforms our sadness into anger with stories, which it has renamed as news.
That is Cory comprator, who was shot in the head and murdered as he shielded his wife and daughter with his body at the Trump rally on Saturday night. Comparator was 50 years old. He was an engineer at a local plastics manufacturer, and he served as a volunteer fireman and fire chief in Buffalo Township, Pennsylvania. His neighbor of 20 years, Paul Hayden, said he knew I was a Biden fan. I knew he was a Trump fan. But we never let that come in between us. Hayden recalled fond memories of riding dirt bikes with comprator to paraphrase a steely Dan song, I cried when I wrote that paragraph. The events of the great Ravine are positively drenched with sadness, a profound sorrow that washes over you again and again and again if you are a thinking, feeling human being. But soon you discover that sadness is not your only constant companion in the great ravine. Anger is there too.
Above is a map of the shooters vantage point on the left, at most 165 yards away from Donald Trump on stage. By now you've seen the video of the sniper team that killed the shooter, trained to take down guys a thousand yards away. They were locked in on the guy. Locked in on a guy with a rifle, lying prone on a roof, aiming at Donald Trump. Locked in before he fired a shot. And yet he shot. Apparently there was a local cop who went up on the roof, got intimidated and backed down. By now you've also seen the video of the Secret Service agent who was clearly overwhelmed to the point of not being able to holster her gun. Im sure there are reasons, im sure there are procedures. Im sure everyone did exactly as they were trained. Dont care. This was bullshit and it made me so freaking angry.
Photo of the Uvald police meet our SWAT team just like Uvald. Man, I can hardly look at this photograph without waves of anger just washing over me. Sadness at the beginning. But pretty soon I exchanged my sadness for anger and once I did that. Woof. To be clear, I'm still angry. I will never not be angry. Just like Epstein's death while in federal custody. Sadness and shock at first, followed by sheer white hot anger. Was it suicide? Was it murder? I don't care. An unlucky accident like this is the one thing that a non corrupt state must prevent. It's the non corrupt states one job to keep Epstein alive for trial. And everyone knows that. Everyone knows this is their one job. It is impossible to violate this common knowledge without premeditation and malice, without conspiracy and criminality aforethought. It is impossible to have an unlucky accident like this in a non corrupt state.
It was after epsteins death that I started saying b I t f e, burn it the f down because I was so angry at the necessarily corrupt system of wealth and power that would allow this to happen. And once I started saying it, I found myself saying it more and more about smaller and smaller things. Often things that were presented to me as news rather than things that I had really thought about myself. I found myself saying it more and more about things that I discovered later were coded as team red or team blue things I was slowly but surely led from a shared sadness over a terrible event, to an inchoate anger with the overall system, to a focused anger at specific people and institutions.
Sound familiar?
I think if we're being honest with ourselves, we've all gone down this path over the past four or five years, where we start with sadness over terrible events, move to a generalized anger with the system, and ultimately end up with a focused anger at people and institutions that are surprise, somehow all associated with one political party or another. And as part of this process of more and more focused anger directed at the other party, we find ourselves surprised, spending more and more time with social media content and machines that distribute that content.
This mediated transition from sadness to generalized anger to focused anger is entirely intentional. It is the optimized algorithmic solution to a duopoly of two political parties and an oligopoly of a handful of giant tech and media companies who want to minimax regret their status as the most powerful institutions in the world. What does minimax regret mean? Its a decision making strategy for games where you minimize your maximum regret. And it's a concept and application that will be immediately familiar to financial advisors and anyone else who deals directly with the sadness and anger of clients. Financial advisors are of course responsible in one way or another for making money for their clients. And an outsider might think, whoa, the maximum regret for a financial advisor must be losing lots and lots of their clients money. But those outsiders would be wrong. Losing lots and lots of your clients money is indeed regrettable. It's very sad. You're sad, your clients are sad, everyone is very sad. But so long as other financial advisors are also losing lots and lots of their clients money, like happens in every bear market or recession, it's not a maximum regret. Why not? Because while your clients may be very sad, they are not angry. Or at least they are not angry at you. They may be angry at the market, or they may be angry at the economy, but they won't be angry at you.
What makes a financial advisory client angry at you? It's not losing a lot of money when everyone else is also losing a lot of money. It's losing a little bit of money, or even making a little bit of money when everyone else is making a lot of money. That's what makes clients angry. Shared underperformance is fine because that's just sadness. Relative underperformance is not fine because thats what generates anger. This is true for every professional career and every institution, from finance to politics to medicine to law to tech to education to sales to administration. Whatever client means in whatever human field of endeavor you want to examine, you will not lose your clients if they are sad with you. You will absolutely lose your clients if they are angry at you.
Every ounce of modern institutional activity is designed with these principles in mind, particularly in largely zero sum. My rewards come at your expense and vice versa. Duopolies or oligopolies like politics, tech and media one underperformance and incompetence are absolutely fine so long as your clients believe that it was not relative underperformance and incompetence, but underperformance and incompetence because you followed standard procedures or acted prudently, or inherited the problem, or because you share the underperformance and incompetence in a what about the other guy sort of way. Your client will be sad, but that's fine.
Two in a system with a winner take all payoff structure and a captive client base like american politics, you maximize payoffs by creating client anger at your competitor, not by efficiency and performance gains that reduce client sadness across the board. Your competitor has to deal with Max regret, and that's great.
So that's what we get morning, noon, and night from the beast. A constant flow of news designed either a to deflect anger at your party by excusing disowning, whatabouting under performance and incompetence as normal, or b to create anger at the other party by highlighting their relative underperformance and incompetence, all while generating engagement for the big tech and big media heads of the beast.
Its all perfectly rational, all perfectly optimizing. Fortunes are made, power is gained, but over time you have to make bolder and bolder claims to create anger at the other party. You are forced to respond in kind if the other side escalates the narrative attacks like using mustard gas in World War One, until eventually the entire game breaks because the anger you've created can't be contained by the rules of the game. And that's when you are well and truly in the great ravine.
Earlier, I wrote that I'm not asking you to fight the beast, but to see the beast and the way it feeds on our anger. An anger created and transformed out of sadness.
Well, there's something else I'd like for you to see, something I'm asking you to see about yourself.
I'm asking you to see yourself as an autonomous human being, brave enough to own your anger and your sadness. Brave enough to refuse the beast when it offers to exchange your well earned sadness for a delicious new anger that is not your own and which is not well earned and which fuels you into actions that you never thought you'd be a part of.
Actions of anger for which, in the end, you will not forgive yourself yet. Maybe the oldest story in the book, that offer of the beast as you find yourself stumbling through the great ravine. And it's maybe the oldest question, how we get to the other side without becoming the baddies ourselves.
The answer, then, is the answer now. We make a. A community of those who see with clear eyes and love with full hearts. We protect our autonomy of mind and our community of spirit. We teach anyone who will listen can't lose.
You know, there's something.
Maybe it's about the world I grew up in and the perspective and, you know, everything. Every time things got heated, it seemed to roll itself back.
But when I read this piece, there was something about it that just kind of struck me. When I look at the debt situation and the structure of everything makes it so unbelievably clear that there's not. There's not going to be a everything calms down now moment that one side feels like, oh, it's pushed too far. And now let's. Oh, the election's over. Let's chill out now. There will be minor respites between the ramping up of everything, and that's a. That's a pretty sobering thought we're about to experience.
Quite, quite possibly. I mean, I don't know of. I mean, I haven't looked at hard numbers, but at least in recorded history, very, very possibly the largest debt collapse ever. And I'd be curious what the roman empire numbers were from a relative basis compared to where we are in the western world today. And I don't mean it just in the US. I mean it basically across the western world.
And as things get harder, if the beast is still at the center of fueling where our anger is directed, it will have no option but to send us into a civil war, because the alternative is for us to send. To send us into a war with them. The unraveling of this is going. I mean, look at it. Look at what has happened. They will not be able to get away with printing less money ever, no matter who is in the office. It will not happen. It will not happen unless the dollar becomes not the world reserve currency anymore. It takes us back to the triffin dilemma in economics. Is that the only way for the global reserve currency to actually meet foreign demand, especially when you're in a fractional, it's so, it's so amplified by the fractional reserve system, which is also spread across the entire western world. You must have net deficits, the net creation of more dollars in order to pay off the debt. If you don't, if you do not have that externally and internally, just because of our debt situation, but if you do not have that externally with foreign nations, you, you directly send the entire globe into a massive debt default, into a crisis.
Every single time they have kicked the can, all they have done is increase the bill that become, that will eventually become due. And to rope it in, to rein it in and stop running deficits is to call it due. And as someone who.
It's amazing. I found myself trying, like having to check myself when I too easily identify with Republicans. Because Republicans aren't conservatives. They're not the number of Republicans that are the exact same thing that I very often direct at the left. Like, there's a lot of cultural left that I disagree with, and I. A lot of very socially accepted, like, explicit Marxism. Explicit. We're going to redistribute wealth. We're going to tax everybody a hundred percent and do all social safety nets. You bet you have to censor anybody who says this. And like, ridiculous thought control and literally putting words into other people's mouths that if you don't refer to me this way, you're. You literally should be jailed. You're a, you have committed hate speech. By not using my adjectives or my pronouns. Like, that stuff is so fundamentally and principally against common sense and the most basic concepts of human rights and the fact that someone owns themselves and so horrifically contradictory to what they claim. The reason that the, the claim of demanding it from someone else is. But then at the exact same time, I watched Republicans ban tick tock.
But the beast does such a good job of making that seat next to the Republicans look cozy, like it's the one that's aligned with me by explicitly putting those things that they know are my hot button issues right in front of me and saying, this is only the other side, they are using Internet profiles of us to funnel us in one direction or another because it keeps me there. It gives me something and someone to point at for my anger. And anybody who's listened to a rant on this show knows that a lot of this shit makes me angry. And I'll tell you, the line from this article that had me basically had me go, God damn it if that is not true, and it's something that's so hard to stay cognizant of, is I'll read the quote. Says, the truth is that political violence on party lines, that's the big thing, is that they are across. It's explicitly at party lines is inevitable when everyone knows that. Everyone knows the other party is an existential threat to the real America. Why?
Because this is a very stable political equilibrium, just not a pleasant one.
And that's what really had me sit back for a second.
That's a very. What we have now is a very stable political equilibrium that benefits them.
And it brings to mind, specifically, I think this is really important to understand, is that Republicans and Democrats have been no different as a party. They have been no different. And they've explicitly used cultural issues, issues that are clearly controversial, and explicitly those that cannot be meth, that cannot come to terms. Because as soon as they are made into the. They are brought into the political sphere, it becomes explicitly violent. This is why you have to have freedom. This is why you actually have to have basic human rights, is because cultural issues can't be solved with. They are explicitly social issues. You have to allow for social differences. You will never, ever, ever get everybody onto one cultural page where everyone's going to do the same thing, value the same things. Just the nature of how our personalities are different cannot achieve that. Just looking at the Myers Briggs understanding how people reference or frame things in the world based on whether they lead first in thinking or they lead first in being extroverted or introverted, or feeling or judging. That alone should make it so perfectly scientifically clear. There will never be a way to codify opinions or codify cultural values in a sense that we are all going to be met on the same page. Which is exactly why this is left out of politics. Because it's a permanent, intractable conflict. Which is exactly why you do not introduce it into politics. Because the only thing that you can do for subjective judgments and subjective cultural values and decisions is to live and let live. All you can do is just say, you do your thing, and I'll do mine. Please just leave me alone. That's it. That's the only way that you can have peace in a social atmosphere, as long as you can agree on fundamental rights on the most basic things. And it's also explicitly why those most basic things has to be the shortest possible list, because it requires the least amount of convincing. This is why the Bill of rights was on one sheet of paper. And this is why a two party system has to bring these subjective conflicts into the political sphere. And they have to position it as if the left is doing this and the right is doing this and that. These are the important issues, because it is the only way they can create permanent, intractable conflict that makes us hate each other and ignore the nor, that they are destroying the country. To forget that the system is fundamentally broken because we're distracted by the cultural differences of the other party.
It is a misdirection. It is literally a misdirection by a giant apparatus that is desperately trying to get us to hate each other. And it is so hard not to hate someone who hates you. Like, when they have been convinced that because you don't support them, you're in the other party, it pushes you in that direction. It's so crazy how often the human psyche does this, is that we push ourselves into these buckets or into these teams who aren't even, like, how many times that if I disagree with someone on the left, they believe I'm right, like I'm specifically on the right, or that I'm explicitly a Republican? Because in their framework, if it's not, if I'm not one of them, I'm just one of the other guys. And then you actually fight. Like the. The natural human response is to then defend, is to then dig your heels in and argue back. Within their framing, you find yourself identifying towards the right merely because you have to defend a claim from someone who has framed it as if it's from the right. So even attempting to stay out of it, you get roped into it. It's crazy. And all of our media, all of the tech, all of the algorithms are designed to reinforce this, because it is reinforcing. It makes them money to do so, because they control what is in front of us when it is in front of us. And they see every reaction, the time it takes, the amount of attention we give it, and the quote unquote engagement that they measure on charts and they modify the size of the post, whether it auto plays in front of us, the little tricks of the algorithm to keep us there. We are not in control of our experience, and it directs us into this, these boxes.
And there is only one outcome. As things get more and more difficult, as the debt problems get bigger and bigger, as the inflation gets, inflation gets worse and worse, the hate and the white hot anger at the other team, at the other party will just keep getting bigger and bigger as long as we are in their apparatus, as long as we are in their fences.
This is, this is explicitly why. And it's so easy to forget this, because it's easy to get attention.
It's easy to, when you kind of, when you engage, you know, it's not only that gives them engagement, it's not only that it gives other content and other people and, you know, perspectives on the right and perspectives on the left, the other party's engagement and extends out their content. But it's true for each of us as well.
Is that something that directs the hate at the other party, is the content that's actually going to get the likes and the retweets.
I call myself on Twitter having a particularly angry day and, you know, liked a bunch of the, all the stuff that's coming out about Diddy and the crazy sex trafficking empire, that, that guy, basically the Epstein of the rap music industry, the music industry in general, and the number of people that were connected to it. And, God, it just makes me. That is one of those things. Just like the Epstein in, in jail. God, just so angry. Just incredible that this has gone on for decades and decades and nobody has done anything about it. And, in fact, it has been completely open. Like, people in power, people in the positions to do something about it. No, they know. They have known for a very long time, and they have done nothing. I went down this spiral one day, and I, and I caught myself, I realized how angry I had become at the, at the, quote, unquote, news that was fed, that was put in front of me. And I was mostly being, even though the diddy thing is what had kind of set me off, uh, first thing in the morning that day, uh, a ton of just like, Trump Kamala, Trump Kamala, Trump Kamala. And it was always, you know, it's like 80% right leaning in my feed, probably on Twitter, just because I'm very, I have a very right leaning bubble. And then also in bitcoin, there's pretty widespread support of Trump, just because Trump has come out trying to befriend bitcoiners and the bitcoin industry in general, whereas Kamala and the Biden administration, basically, everybody in the Democrat party has been very explicit about being an enemy. So definitely leans republican and or right leaning content. But in order to trying to get myself out of the mindset, I was like, okay, I want to do an experiment. I want to, because I realized that all I had seen was all this awful, awful stuff about Kamala. There's the worst clips of Kamala of, you know, anybody on the left and then the worst clips of Trump and anybody on the right. And it was basically this, this constant interchange is that if there was a terrible video of Kamala saying something stupid, which they're both stupid buffoons, like, they're all. It's, it is. The whole system is, has no hope. But regardless, what I was looking at and kind of reflecting on and being like, why am I letting myself get trapped in this? Why am I allowing this framing to guide how I think about it? And, you know, anybody can take edits of, you could take edits of my show. I've said a thousand stupid or incorrect things on this show. Hands down. Hands down. If you took the dumbest or the biggest, you know, moments of awkward pause or where I said something that was just kind of, what the hell does that? Especially in live shows where I'm being interviewed or interviewing somebody else, it's so easy to just spout off just a bunch of empty nothing by accident or because you lost your train of thought for a second. If all that ever happened was that I saw those individual edited clips of myself, how easy would it be? Or anybody saw that, how easy would it be for the narrative of me being the enemy of the world to just complete buffoon that? Who could ever, like this podcast, the stupidest podcasts in the whole world. They would have content for months and months and months. Every day. You could put a clip in front of them for like, four months, and they would be convinced there would be no, absolutely no fathomable way to undo that impression. You could piece by piece, you could 1% it, just ramp it up every single day, and I would be the biggest moron that they had ever heard of. And I noticed that's what I get. That's what every political thread was. It was. It was either, you know, something awful about Kamala, and then somebody posted, like, here's a picture of Trump, and Epstein was a comment about Trump, I'm going to be a dictator day one. And then, oh, here comes in, well, Kamala's going to take all our guns and understand it's not even important about whether or not any of that is true. That's not the point of the exercise. The point is, is that we are competing to hate the other side. It's that mini Max idea, mini Max regret that he talks about, which I thought was really cool, because I had never really. I think I kind of vaguely heard the concept before, probably in passing in a book or something, just because there's a lot of economics and some finance books that I've read in the past, but I hadn't thought about it in the context of politics. And the fact that that's such an important part of the political game, is to deflect, is to always have an excuse for your side and always make sure that you have to ramp up the anger at the other side. You have to make it even worse that if this side is a fascist, well, then this side has to be Mao. You have to out anger, out ridicule the other post. And so my experiment was to do a post and be like, what's the, what's the best thing? Like, prove to me. Give me a video of Kamala doing something useful or saying something smart. Give me a video of Trump doing something useful or saying something smart. Like, I'm tired of hearing about who I want to, who I should hate and why I should hate them. But tell me why I should actually be hopeful or actually like one of these candidates. Now, of course, I have reasons. Bitcoin is basically my one.
If I was a voter, I would be a single issue voter. It would be Ross Ulbricht. And which one's better for bitcoin? But just for the sake of the conversation, for the sake of the sanity of the discussion, I was just like, please, just give me something good. Give me something positive about either of these candidates. And, you know, what was funny about it is that nobody participated. I got, like, a couple of, like, I got two half decent Trump things. Like, there was the one about Trump and basically creating the ceasefire, and, you know, no american soldiers were killed for, you know, some span of time. And it was specifically because of Trump saying this to the head of the al Qaeda. I think there was one other thing, like, he, like, he bought a car for, paid for somebody's house because they, I don't know, did some, some just, like, general in person interaction with Trump at some point. And I even retweeted it because, you know, it's very easy to, for something to just kind of get lost in the mix. But basically, like, it was. It was as if, like, nobody cared. I don't know, maybe it's the engagement algorithms is that's making sure that you know, it doesn't get in front of anybody because it's not productive. It's not going to be engaging, because hate is the thing that gets people to respond. But it was funny. I actually had more hateful comment, like, more of exactly what I was saying. I did not want of just like, oh, well, what about this? And it was like some anti Kamala or is like, oh, I think. I'm pretty sure I got the picture of Trump and Epstein again somewhere in that post. And multiple people commented, a couple of people commented. It's like, yeah, you're not gonna. That's not gonna get anywhere. This is, this is a hopeless cause. And that was pretty much accurate. But it goes back to my point that even our content, even our framing is changed because we get social reward from participating.
You know, when everybody's insane, when everybody drinks from a poisoned well and goes bonkers, then the only way you're gonna get it, you're gonna get claps from anybody, is if you say the same insane thing that they all say. The only way you're going to be part of the group is to drink from the well, too.
The only option is exit.
We cannot fix the beast from inside the box that it's putting us in.
I want to read his last sentence again.
It says, we make a community of those who see with clear eyes and love with full hearts. We protect our autonomy of mind and our community of spirit. We teach anyone who will listen.
This is why NaSTR, this is why bitcoin, and this is also why it is only technology. It is only fixing the disincentives of technology and how we communicate and how we, how we trade and exchange, that actually has the fundamental solution to this problem. And it's so easy to get lost in the surface, to get lost in the political and cultural game, because the more likes you have and the more retweets you have makes it seem like you're making more of a difference. You're getting a bigger audience. It feels, explicitly feels more rewarding because we are looking for a social reward, thinking that we are fixing a social problem. But what we need to be fixing is an incentive problem that alters the social landscape. This is why noster feels different. Yes, there's a more cohesive community over there, but it's also. It's also a place where you can control the algorithm. It's also a place that is not owned, that is not altered by the incentives of a platform owner, by the incentives of a beast that needs, that cannot gain power and cannot make money. Without that engagement, and without that constant feedback of more and more anger and larger and larger escalation between you and the other party, there is no central entity that explicitly gains its power and capital by standing on top, by depending upon that stable, ever escalating political equilibrium.
Our only option is to build our own community and our own communication networks.
I've been listening to, I don't remember who recommended it. I think it was somebody on Oster, actually. I've been listening to a book called the Global Brain. It's by Howard Bloom. And one of the things that he said at a little ways into the book, I can't remember exactly which context it was, but it was talking about how there is the appearance of collapse, there is this appearance of the collapse or the destruction of a system. And actually, I think this was in reference to bacterial communities and how when the bacteria, there were actually eras, there were actually generations of bacteria where bacteria would breed and actually have offspring that were built to stay in place and consume as many resources as possible because they had found, found some excellent food source. But then it would literally expand until it had consumed up that entire resource. And then, as it would start dying, it would actually trigger the bacteria. It would trigger a response in the bacteria to have offspring explicitly not from a purely evolutionary sense, like there's some sort of variable or just kind of probabilistic alteration to the genes or mutation, but purely that this was a cycle that continued to happen, that they would have bacterial offspring that basically grew a whip, this thing that allowed the bacteria to move around and actually seek out in a far more agile and more robust and more individual fashion, where the bacteria that would stay in place and was built around consuming, making the greatest and most efficient use of its resources that were found, it would then have a generation of offspring that, as that was collapsing, that would be built around, searching out, not working in a crowd, but searching out in order to signal again to the bacterial colony when new resources and new food were found. And then when that signal was achieved, they would aggregate, they would consolidate again, and then yet again, the next generation, we would cycle back, and they would have multiple generations of bacteria that were built to stay in one place and consume resources as efficiently as possible. And one thing that he said about this that I thought was really interesting is that this is something completely natural in systems of life, in systems of order, that you see all of the time, that in the actual collapse, the creation of the thing that is going to solve the problem, that the collapse always just looks like a failure. It always just looks like just utter hell, but in it actually are the conditions necessary to actually create the thing that will thrive. And that even though it's necessarily a seed, it's necessarily something small, it's necessarily a singular change in perspective or technology. And every single collapse comes with it happens during the collapse. If you are looking very closely, it would all just completely end if the solution didn't already exist as the collapse occurred. It can't happen after the collapse. The new systems are built with the collapse. And I think that was a really interesting thought and really prescient to where we are today is that bitcoin was built on the morning after the global financial crisis on the back of the profoundly corrupt and insane bank and corporate bailouts, while the middle class and main street got decimated. That nastir and the pair stack literally grow in the ashes of those burned by the centralized platforms. There is no solution in hating the problem more than the other guy, or finding someone to hate more out of one of two options that will result in no meaningful solution anyway. The solution is building a community that does it right, that sets the incentives right from the beginning and make that foundation strong enough to simply make it through the great ravine to just persist. This is always something with bitcoin that the crypto and fiat minded have never understood. It is built simply to survive, because that is the most important. It needs to be resilient enough to simply make it through the storm, because we are in a storm, and I think it only gets worse for an unfortunate amount of time going forward.
And like Ben Hunt said is we don't have an option.
We don't have an option. We have to win.
Like Dave Smith said, and this sticks with me every, all the time. I think I've mentioned it a couple times on the show now, is that I can't be. I cannot be black pilled. I have kids. There is one option, and it is to win, and we will not win it inside the boxes they build for us so that we throw stones at each other. As much as I wish it would be, I don't think it will be an easy road.
This. This quote from the article, why does Sao Xin Liu basically just wave his hand at the great ravines and say, yep, that happened?
Because the great ravine does not advance the plot. It's there. It happens. But there is nothing to be gained by examining its events. Like the cultural revolution of Sichen Lu's real world history, the great ravine is ultimately just a tragic waste, a waste of time. A waste of wealth, a waste of lives. There is nothing to be learned from our time in the great ravine. It must simply be crossed. And cross it we will.
I guess this episode is just reminding myself and then asking you to stay focused on what actually makes a difference and to know the difference between what feels like it's making a difference and what is actually making a difference, because the beast is literally designed to trick us into confusing the two. I'll leave you with a reminder, actually, also from Dave Smith, that I think cannot be too often repeated because it's easy to forget where we came from and just how much we have been directed into this and how much the system feeds on a very, very narrow narrative for reality and specifically one that is not true and is not representative of the real problems.
So if you want to get a discount on your cold card, I got a code right there in the show notes. Should have another affiliate link or two. Great way to support the show. Thank you guys for listening, and I'll leave you with the wise words of Dave Smith.
Until next time, everybody. Take it easy, guys.
[00:52:06] Speaker B: Go track how many times the word racism was mentioned. And around 2012, it shoots up. Yep. Social justice shoots up. Transgenderism shoots up. White privilege shoots up. This was forced on the american people. Why are we having these conversations now? The people did not wake up one day and decide, we want to have a national conversation about chicks with dicks. That didn't happen. This wasn't an organic movement. It was all of the most powerful people decided, this is what we're gonna talk about. And why was that? Look, when you're failing on policy, you pivot to a culture war. You pit people against each other. So they're fighting each other. We had, in this country, we had an Occupy Wall street movement where leftists were standing outside of big banks screaming, we are the 99%. Right wingers had a populist movement called the tea party where they were outraged about the bailouthouse rollouts of big banks, unsustainable debt, government spending. They don't like that. That's not what the powers that be like. Look, they like you fighting about issues like abortion. Now, I'm not saying abortion isn't a very important issue. It's a very important issue. But us fighting about that issue doesn't scare anyone at the Federal Reserve. It doesn't scare anyone in the CIA. They don't care if you fight about that issue. They love you fighting over transgender bathrooms.
[00:53:14] Speaker A: Yep.
