[00:00:01] Privacy is not a bunker. It's not cutting every wire, ghosting every friend, and hoping the grid forgets that you exist.
[00:00:09] That's fantasy. Romanticized exile. For people who don't understand surveillance capitalism, the truth is simpler and harder. Privacy doesn't mean isolation. It means selective trust.
[00:00:26] It means sharing tools, not data. It means building small, resilient networks, local or digital, that can function even when the system breaks or betrays you.
[00:00:40] The best in Bitcoin made. Audible I am Guy Swan, and this is Bitcoin. Audible.
[00:00:58] Foreign.
[00:01:03] What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin. Audible I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, and we're actually getting into a really short piece today that I loved. This was written by a ghost, which I think I have his. I think he has his noster stuff, if I'm not mistaken. Up here.
[00:01:26] I'll find it. I'll find it and get it in the. In the show notes. But it's something that I have conceptually had a really hard time with for a long time, and my brother too. We all. We kind of have. I loved the. The line that I did at the beginning of this, the idea of romanticized exile, which I'll talk about again in the guys take. And the more I dig into this, the more I realize how much of a dead end that concept of it really is and how different. Simply being deliberate about building out your local network, your social network, and this includes even in the digital world of just like it can be global, but being deliberate about building out that network and having control over your access and communications on those networks. That this is actually extremely different from this idea of romanticized exile, where you're just going to do everything.
[00:02:21] And something we talk about in the kind of the economic theory on this show a lot is just having a network of 10 to 15 people who kind of all do their own thing, who can specialize in where you can trade with someone that you have a far higher degree of trust with, especially when things get really crazy or there's government lockdowns or anything like having access to that network, especially in the local context.
[00:02:49] It doesn't just like add 20% or 50% to what you can accomplish or what you can get access to. It is literally an order of magnitude. It's like multiple doublings of what you can actually get, what you can access, who you can trade with, the reach of the different skills and specialties that you can get. Like, it is literally, you get to see the effect of what an economy with good money, with good connections and real trust can accomplish in a local environment so directly that you realize just how expansive. Like when you think about expanding that out to a million or billion people like begin to do that and try to rely on that small network in some way and then realize just how unfathomably massive it would be to try to imagine what that looks like at the scale that we actually see society. Because that local first network is so much more valuable than I think people give it credit for because we're so used to just relying on Amazon or the grocery store or Google Drive or whatever it is. And the thing is is those tools aren't always there. And more importantly is when things get really rough, those tools won't they, they can decide that you cannot do or say or buy something that is actually your preference and reflection of your actual values. It is there only by permission and that permission can be taken away. And we've seen it more and more in recent years. So this piece was just really good.
[00:04:24] I think this is a super important message especially for a lot of people in this space who I think have that romanticized exile picture of it. And we'll, we'll get much deeper into it in the guy's take after this. This show is brought to you by Leden IO. If you want to get access to your Bitcoin's value without selling your Bitcoin, you can get a secure proof of reserve Bitcoin backed loan. This is a super powerful tool, especially in a bull market. Check them out. I have a referral link down in the show notes. Don't forget you can get 10%
[email protected] this is about red light health. I've been going down this rabbit hole quite a bit and I've been shocked by how much my light exposure has affected my ability to sleep and my energy levels during the day. If you haven't started down this, you need to and you get 10% discount with code Bitcoin audible if you want to know what's going on in the world of money and financial freedom and repression, just, just recently in the latest Financial Freedom report, the Venezuelan bolivar is falling by 13% per month. They're now forecasting 530% for the year. That means that if you were paying $5 for a gallon of gas at the beginning of the year, it's $31.50 at the end of the year. There's no better resource for staying up on what's going on with this than the Financial Freedom report by the hrf and I have massive respect for the work that they do and honored that they would support my work. And lastly, if you want to build on a new web and build unstoppable tools, Synonym has built Pub key. That's P U B K y. And they released the beta of the Pub Key app, which is just an entirely new way to envision how to build out the web in a far more resilient and open way. Check out the app, get an invite, and I've got my Pub key down there as well so that you can give me a shout out when you get up there. All right with that, let's go ahead and get into today's article and it's titled Building a local network with your neighbors without being weird about it, written by Ghost Privacy is not a bunker. It's not cutting every wire, ghosting every friend, and hoping the grid forgets you exist.
[00:06:46] That's fantasy, romanticized exile. For people who don't understand surveillance capitalism, the truth is simpler and harder.
[00:06:58] Privacy doesn't mean isolation.
[00:07:01] It means selective trust.
[00:07:03] It means sharing tools, not data. It means building small, resilient networks, local or digital, that can function even when the system breaks or betrays you.
[00:07:18] Stop thinking solo.
[00:07:21] The trap is thinking you can do it all by yourself. Store your own data, filter your own news, grow your own food, run your own comms, host your own site.
[00:07:32] That's not privacy, that's burnout waiting to happen.
[00:07:36] Resilience isn't about being a lone node. It's about being in a network that doesn't collapse when one piece of it goes down. And no network doesn't mean X followers or a telegram chat full of people you don't know. It means neighbors, people who will notice if you disappear.
[00:07:56] People who've earned access to your trust, not your location data.
[00:08:01] These neighbors might be physical on your street down the hall, or Digital in your DMs, your blog comments, your community server doesn't matter. What matters is mutual reliance.
[00:08:15] Share tools, not data.
[00:08:19] This is the pivot. You don't need to overshare to collaborate. You just need protocols, agreements, a little OPSEC awareness. Some examples Share garden tools, not your calendar, trade books or zines, not your Kindle login. Host a Bitcoin or Monero node, not your transaction history.
[00:08:41] Pool money for a community owned server, not a group Google Drive.
[00:08:46] Build systems that distribute capacity, not identity.
[00:08:51] Share gear, skills, storage, hosting. Avoid systems that log who did what and when. Use dead drops. Local only chats encrypted notes. In short, trade assets, not footprints.
[00:09:07] Make it normal.
[00:09:09] The phrase without being weird about it matters. You don't need to larp as a cold War spy or start printing manifestos.
[00:09:18] Stay where you are.
[00:09:20] Low key, grounded.
[00:09:22] Hey, want to split a VPS to host our stuff? I've got extra seeds. Want some? Can I borrow your drill?
[00:09:29] Want to use Ashigaru with my dojo?
[00:09:32] These are normal human interactions. Don't make them a lecture on digital sovereignty. Make them habits.
[00:09:40] Weird is trying to get your neighbor to install tails just to borrow your printer. Don't do that.
[00:09:47] Resilient is greater than redundant.
[00:09:51] Redundancy is backup. Resilience is fallback. Clouds can be redundant. Five drives, three regions, 99.999% uptime. But they're not resilient. One subpoena, one breach, one revoked API key and you're locked out of your own life.
[00:10:10] Resilience is local first community hosted, peer supported. It doesn't break when the upstream breaks, it adapts. That's real decentralization.
[00:10:22] You want a network that can share files with Dropbox, chat without someone else's servers, swap currency or value without banks, get news without platforms, function when DNS goes down.
[00:10:34] That's not paranoia, that's planning. And it only works if your network exists before the need hits.
[00:10:45] Internet friends count.
[00:10:48] Don't get romantic about proximity. Some of your most trusted people might be across the planet. That's fine. A digital local network can still be resilient if use decentralized tools. Avoid putting all your trust in cloud services and keep shared protocols alive. Weekly syncs, backups and keys.
[00:11:10] The point is intimacy, not GPS coordinates. A high Trust thread with five people beats a Facebook group with 5,000.
[00:11:19] Build, small build, deep build now.
[00:11:24] Final thought.
[00:11:27] Privacy without people is a prison.
[00:11:30] The system wants you isolated, it wants you distrustful. Because disconnected individuals are easy to manage and easier to sell to claw it back not just your data, but your network.
[00:11:44] Start with one neighbor, one trade, one shared tool.
[00:11:49] Keep it simple, keep it human.
[00:11:52] Because when the cloud fails, your best firewall is friendship with a protocol ghost.
[00:12:01] Real quick, I want to shout out. This show is brought to you by Ledn IO LEDN IO. If you have bitcoin savings and you do not want to sell it and you need access to fiat, getting a bitcoin backed loan is actually an insanely useful tool, especially in a bull market where just a couple of months can make an extraordinary difference in how much it costs you. In the context of your bitcoin, over the Last two to three years, I have been doing a lot of investment into the house just to finish the house, finish the basement, finish my studio. And I knew it was a bad time to sell bitcoin and I do not. My house is a liability. I'm not investing in this. I invest in the house because I want a better house for my family. But I'm not thinking that this is earning me money. It doesn't even keep up with inflation. I've got a video on proving that that's exactly the case, if you're not sure about that. But because of that, I took out a bitcoin backed loan to accomplish this and it has saved me an extraordinary amount of bitcoin. Granted, I knew we were in a bear market and that we were coming back into a bull market. So I had high assurances of that. And of course read the fine print. Bitcoin is very volatile. Be careful, like don't do any, don't over leverage for the sake of overleveraging. But if you have to do something like this or this makes sense. This is one of the simplest and safest ways that you can do it. Check out LEDDN IO. I've been a customer for a few years and I've been super happy with their service.
[00:13:29] All right, so this was a really good piece and I think this is a really important and good message.
[00:13:38] It's funny, this is actually something that Svetsky talks about in a whole section in the Bushido of bitcoin, which I really, really loved, talking about how you need to find your tribe.
[00:13:51] Because the whole idea, and this is, this is something that's so lost on, I think kind of the bitcoiners and libertarian and cypherpunk movement. It's something that I was wrong on or failed to recognize for a really long time and something that, you know, my brother and I would always muse about. Like, I always had this perspective or this idea of just being quote, unquote, fully sovereign is that like I was just going to own all my stuff. I was going to be off the grid and all of this stuff. And I loved the term this is what. And this is like really close to the beginning of this piece. But the idea, the idea of romanticized exile is that you would exile yourself from society and position this as if this was a great thing, when really what it is, is the, the goal, the point, not only of privacy, but really of sovereignty, is that you control the networks of trust that you are participating in. That. This is not something where you're just joining this big blob of hundreds of thousands or even thousands of people on some Facebook group that you don't know, but that you're building an explicit group of people that you know that, that you build long term connections with and, and specifically that you have mediums which you control and, and which you can mitigate trust issues outside of explicitly those things and people that you trust.
[00:15:17] Like that is the point of Bitcoin is to actually allow us to build tribes again.
[00:15:23] And this is yet another thing actually in Bushido, Bitcoin, this is kind of what that whole section actually is about is that tribalism is actually a massively good thing because what tribalism does is it actually encourages diversity. Whereas fiat and central bank and this like continuous global expansion and ever scaling up of the corporate system and the political system to encompass more and micromanage more and more stuff. It is this powerful tool that this massive, overarching, pervasive system of homogenization is that everybody has to be the same, everybody has to have the same health care plan, everybody has to go to the same school and learn the same curriculum. And it actually dumbs everything down and it increases the risks and damage of mistakes because everybody is making the same mistake in the same system with the same imbalance at the same time, which means that it's going to literally going to do as much possible damage, damage and have the greatest possible fallout because it's going to scale to the largest possible size before it finally breaks. This is a huge problem and it's completely at odds with the whole point of diversity. Diversity is about diversity and trust, Trust circles, diversity and culture. And to build your own, build actually a tight knit group like he references, he talks about like the band of brothers is that basically a small group of extremely dedicated, virtuous and value aligned people can literally change the entire world. And even if you are building a digital network, you're building a network online. Go meet them, go be out in the real world, be in person with them, do things with them, like do real things. Learn and train together.
[00:17:13] And as Ghost mentioned, build independent networks. Build parts of your, of your networks, of your, your system that aren't reliant on the platform, that aren't reliant on the provider. And this is really what, this is a huge part of my thinking and why we're building Pear Drive and why I think peer to peer is so important because it's not really about like making. I mean it would be great obviously to have everybody do everything peer to peer and like you know, everybody's, but nobody's going to care about that, right? Like you just. What you need to do is you need to solve somebody's problem that they can't solve in some other way or you just solve it so much better that it becomes the obvious answer. But the point really is to have small closed networks where you can share and control access to all of your stuff and your content and your media and your password backups and you can know exactly who it is that you are depending on to keep that network alive. And when, when Google goes down, when Amazon goes down, or just you don't even want to trust these institutions, you want to be extremely selective about, about what you share with them. Because think about the fact that you have to like how many people listening to this have a Gmail account, how many people listening to this have to use Apple icloud just because they have default, they have, you know, some subset of icloud. But then how many of you, and you all know you're, you're probably all thinking this right now. How many of you actually trust those companies or think that they're not doing something dishonest or Amazon, good Lord. AWS runs so much of the web. Almost every service that you're buying a VPS from or you're buying a web space from is actually just a fork. It's just an arm of Amazon Web Services.
[00:19:08] It's like a mining pool that pretends it's not bitmain, but that is actually just bitmains running what the hash is. It's faux decentralization. It's the reselling of somebody else's service in a new package. And same thing happens all over the place in the fiat world. I really think this is, granted this happens in every market anyway, but I think it's way worse because of how the structure of financing and the, the kind of lock in of how the system like fiat just literally makes everything bigger. It makes it sustainable, apparently sustainable because it's literally subsidized through the creation of new money, through the creation of debt and quote unquote, credit worthiness, which just means creation of more money for people who are bigger. Like think about it. If your credit worthy, if your credit worthiness is based on how big you are, how much, how many customers you have, how large your network is and how, how great your assets are, but then you are creating money out of thin air as debt, then the amount of money being created isn't attached to the amount of, to the limitation of resources that are available.
[00:20:13] It's just connected to your supposed credit worthiness, which means that people who are massive and actually don't have any great capacity, they don't have any much less likelihood to have significant growth because they're already big and thus would necessarily not have the greatest return on that capital.
[00:20:35] Actually get the best possible interest rates and get a staggeringly larger amount of money printed out of thin air and allocated to them, which then becomes self fulfilling. Because now what do you do when you don't have any better idea? It's not like Google has an infinite number of good ideas and if you just give them more capital, they'll just create an infinite number of good ideas. No, they have like two good ideas and 20 really shitty ideas.
[00:21:02] And if you require them to actually be frugal and actually spend the money that they earn, they'll only invest in those two ideas and maybe three or four others that sound decent or have a unique possibility to be truly innovative or interesting in the space. But then 15 really just dumb ideas simply don't get funding. Which is exactly what should happen. We should be extremely careful about where we waste resources because those resources are explicitly being taken from everyone else in the economy.
[00:21:34] So what actually happens when you just give them essentially unlimited funding and they can just keep taking on loans and acquiring more things? Well, instead of just they don't have more. It's not like you give them more money and suddenly they just have this explosion of way better ideas and more innovation and outside of the box thinking. No, they actually get locked into their way of thinking because they just have an unlimited amount of capital to keep fighting and expanding the way that they're doing.
[00:22:00] And what are they going to do with all the extra capital? They're just going to buy up their competitors. So not only do they have the feedback loop of getting more money than everybody else, because they have more money and getting it at a rate that makes no sense whatsoever and is not actually.
[00:22:15] Would nobody would ever legitimately loan them money at 1% or 0.5% interest? That's bonkers. Nobody would ever give it. What of your resources would you give up for a.5% return?
[00:22:30] Would you lend your lawnmower out for that, you know, $2,000 lawnmower for $10 a year?
[00:22:39] Like you can't mow your lawn because you were literally loaning this out to somebody else. Those resources are yours and you're letting someone else use it. So now you have to rent a lawnmower or hire somebody to mow your lawn. And you're doing this, you're giving up this resource for $10 a year, and your lawnmower is immediately worth like $1400 at the end of the year because it's been used for a year like nothing, no real resources anywhere in the world for anybody would ever be loaned out at 0.5% interest. And yet these massive corporations are getting $50 billion loans like just absurd amounts of money at 0.5% interest, which lets them buy up lawnmowers, which lets them buy stores, which lets them buy competitors, which lets them buy infrastructure. Because when they don't have any other ideas, what do they do? They just expand. They just eat up everything else. And the whole startup community just shifts from, oh, I'm going to build something that lasts, I'm going to build a better product or a better design for this infrastructure or this system, and then I'm going to compete, I'm going to be big. And now, now the entire thing shifts to, rather than building something that lasts and building something that's actually really great, they just build until they're big enough for Google to buy them. Think about how insane it is that we're all being for just to own, just to own our connections to other people.
[00:24:01] We have to use companies that we literally don't trust to read all our shit, store it all for us, and literally harvest us for every ounce of metadata and interaction data and conversation data and payment data and location data, like every ounce, ounce of every bit of information that they can get from our lives for the explicit purpose of manipulating us back into needing to use their products and services and trapping us on their platforms. Literally, literally rage baiting us to stay on social media, simply owning your own network, owning your own connections to other people with a simple protocol or a simple tool is damn near a revolutionary act when you consider how things are set up today.
[00:24:53] Another line from this article that I just loved was build small, build deep and build. Now, you can read so much into that in the idea of building small and deep. But this is why I've actually found, I've actually thought that things like E Cash and Fediment like this, this kind of incessant like, this inability to detach ourselves from the realization that the point, the point of Bitcoin being trustless is that so we can choose who to trust again.
[00:25:30] It's so that the systems that we have to use to make our connections are trustless, so that it's our choice and it is entirely dependent upon who, who we trust. It's our ability to trust that determines how we build and establish connections in our networks. Fediman is such a great example of, of local first. Again, it's not, it's not a perfect system, but it's such a good example of, you know, what, 50 or 100 people, which is actually a very sustainable like local community. If you could build a level of trust with the closest group of people that you are value aligned and goal oriented with that you could build a payment network just within that community.
[00:26:18] You could essentially create a sort of banking services that makes it where it's actually a sustainable and meaningful practice. It's a meaningful operation that could be profitable that you could provide to 100 people.
[00:26:33] Like that scale isn't, is nowhere near in the realm of reality when it comes to the way we think about banking and finance today. Like if you don't have 2 million customers, you're dead in the water before you even get started.
[00:26:47] And this is really where I've felt all great innovations actually what they all do is when they open it up to either a provider or a publisher or a creator or, or an entity trying to accomplish something in that middle ground where it doesn't make economic sense to actually provide it. You know, like before the Internet, when you're talking about media production or providing a service or trying to reach out and find customers, and you basically can only find customers in your local area or within driving distance, the threshold for how many people have to be interested in what you are selling or doing is so, so so much bigger.
[00:27:34] Like you can't possibly sell a niche thing at a local store that only has 100,000 people in the entire country who might be interested in it. Because that probably means in your town or city is you've got, you know, 100, maybe, maybe if you're in a huge city, you've got a thousand at best, at best that are in, you know, driving distance. And how many of that thousand are actually going to even know that you exist or would make the trip and forget it. If you're talking about a small town, you've got one person. You can't run a business with one customer. So what did the Internet do?
[00:28:16] It opened. It connected them to millions and millions and millions of customers such that if you had a hundred thousand customers that might be spread out all across North America, but you, you know, make, I don't know, you make yarn plushies of Dragon Ball Z characters. But then you find yourself in a Dragon Ball Z community or Reddit forum or something and you Post it and suddenly you have like a thriving business. Because every dork who likes Dragon Ball Z and wants like a little big headed plushie for their little son, their, you know, their baby boys, like you're gonna like dragon ball Z2 Kamehameha, man, suddenly you have access to this, this market that literally could never have been sustained without this new infrastructure, with this, without this new ability and way to connect to people. They were the horses, they were the, the middle of the road, service provider, content creator, product builder that couldn't possibly exist on the old standard of infrastructure, in the old tools that existed, but could suddenly be served in the new world of, in the new way that these things are being provided. And that's exactly what I, that's how we're thinking about Pear Drive. Is it like, okay, what's that middle of the road? What's the, you know, the startup that is used to paying $500, $1,000, $5,000 even in web server costs, just in hosting information, even just for their businesses or just for, you know, a small subset of customers. And the difficulty of trying to scale that. What if you could solve that problem in a peer to peer way where they had no infrastructure costs? You've completely changed the game for how they even provide these tools and services.
[00:30:03] And what if you could build a game where you could actually land over the Internet, where you can actually connect and play with each other directly without needing a central server from the game host? Some of you might be old nerds like me, and you used to play LAN StarCraft games where you didn't have to be connected to the end and everybody, everybody's like on the same, the same lan, everybody's on the same local area network and then you can all just play starcraft together. What if that's just the way that you could do gaming?
[00:30:34] What if you could literally have it where 20 people could get together and they could play a game together and they could be on the Internet, they could be on a LAN at the exact same place, but they didn't have to connect to battle.net in order to play the game. The game could just live on its own, just like a board game. Like if you get a physical game of something, the people who made the game, like, you know, monopoly.com doesn't have to keep running in order for people to play Monopoly. Monopoly. Like we just, we can break out Monopoly at any time of the day and we could just sit down and we can play Monopoly and nobody has to know. It's. It's quote unquote, our network because it exists in our living room. You realize that almost none, like no games, no software today exists like that.
[00:31:27] Almost all of the games or products that are about like interacting or working with people, like connecting to other people.
[00:31:36] If the central server, if the game company is no longer profitable and they shut down, you might just not be able to play the game anymore with other people. And then you have to wait a few years before some random dude hacks it together in this like really clunky way. And you know, a bunch of nerds who really love the game will, you know, get the classic, they'll come back and they'll, they'll try to play it, they'll try to reboot it and you know, people make a bunch of little Raspberry PIs with retro, retro gaming console cases that they 3D printed. But that will be 1/1,000th of the market that the game originally had because it's just the die hard enthusiasts. What if you could build it so that the market never left and whether the host, the game creator was there or not, you could just still just always play the game.
[00:32:25] Like Minecraft and stuff is like that, right? Like you can just like I hear about people hosting Minecraft servers all the time.
[00:32:32] I've a little bit gotten away from the core idea here, but it's really about just controlling and building your own networks. And I do think, even though Ghost specifically mentions that it doesn't have to be your local neighbors, right? You don't have to know people in your apartment building or the people down the street across the cul de sac, et cetera. But I think there should be some of that. I think 2020 really showed how important that is, that without that you can still have a very serious problem. Even if you have a very strong global network, a digital network of people that you trust and you want to work with, not having a local network, which is also much harder, it's a much bigger problem to solve and it's a much more difficult and slow moving thing because it's not easy to find people with the same values.
[00:33:25] There's a clash of values a lot of times and it's not easy to deal with people who believe something different, differently than you.
[00:33:32] But I think this is like part of the thing is that we've gotten really bad at this. But I also think there's going to be some pretty hard times.
[00:33:40] We've begun to see and have dealt with some hard times in the recent past and it's very possible that those are likely to continue.
[00:33:51] But the good thing, the good thing about a hard times, if you're, if you've ever been a.
[00:33:56] And if you've ever been in the line waiting at the DMV or in line at.
[00:34:02] These are both like very recent and very like, ooh, I want to punch somebody right now. Thinking about it. Examples. But in line waiting to talk to customer service to get your flight changed because you didn't even get delayed, but it took you an hour, they made you go back through security before and you're connecting and you waited for an hour just to show your passport and explain why you were in Switzerland. And then you literally missed your flight even though you had a two hour layover.
[00:34:31] When things are really. When there's a very explicit problem or there's a lot of struggle, there's actually a shocking amount of camaraderie between you and people you don't know. It's very easy to establish a connection with people. This is something that I think people have a really, really backwards view on, which is so funny to me is when everything's really, really great and there's not that many very deep struggles, like, like really difficult things to deal with. I think we actually become more and more distrustful. And then we talk about these. We make, make these dystopian movies and stories where everybody's an absolute lunatic and they're all tyrants and they're all, you know, biker gangs who want to just run around and discriminately murder and rape people.
[00:35:16] And we have examples sort of of that in the world. We have like these really bad political systems and all this stuff. But I think it's actually a misunderstanding of where that comes from because the manifestation of those things are when you have trust systems break down at large scale where the disconnect between people is so vast. This is why it's so deeply tied to political systems. But in a local environment, when something is going wrong, when there's a house in the neighborhood on fire and everybody comes out to see or to help or figure out what's going on, there's a shocking amount of camaraderie. The amount of. The amount that people will work together or immediately. It's like this. You have this sudden and very kind of like deep connection on everybody understanding. It's like a set of values that just kind of manifests in the group because you realize that all other differences are kind of set aside. They become lower on the hierarchy scale of importance than the immediate problem right in front of Us and everybody is on the same page and has the same values about the fact that we want to solve this problem, we want to figure out what's going on, and we want to figure out what can be done about it. And I don't mean to say this in that, like, oh, terrible things will just make people nicer.
[00:36:38] That's not exactly what I mean, but it's a.
[00:36:41] I think it does lend itself to understanding why humanity is so unbelievably resilient. And it absolutely aligns with the bad times. Create great men when you have to struggle or you have a specific problem to fight, you find out who you can trust and you also realize what really matters.
[00:37:04] You develop a different hierarchy of concerns.
[00:37:09] But in general, this is something that I've really been wanting to work. I've been slowly working on trying to build a, you know, local community. And I wish I really need to get out to the Raleigh meetup and hang out with those guys more often because they've even saved me so many times, so many times. I, I will. And that's, that's also another thing is don't be afraid to like, reach out and ask for help.
[00:37:31] And then it puts you in a position where you're like, I need to be there, I need to help out when somebody else needs something.
[00:37:40] And that alone can just start to build a long term connection. But go meet bitcoiners.
[00:37:47] There have got to be some in your area in some way. Meet your neighbors that aren't bitcoiners and don't worry about them needing to be bitcoiners. But I'm saying if you're, you know, if you have a very explicit set of values and you, you can get connected to them and maybe it's the Orange Pill app or the meetup, you know, go to a bitcoin meetup or something, whatever it is, just try to engage in your local first and then start to branch out and think about how you can own your own networks, own your own connections in some way. You know, use NOSTR as a backup, use peer to peer stuff if needed. And like says, don't be weird about.
[00:38:31] Don't like, try to force it on them. Just use it where it makes sense to use it. And this partly goes in line with something I've talked about quite a bit on the show is try to be that person for your group. And a call to all the builders out there is to build hosting solutions like, what is it like? I love the idea of, you know, even though this is like, totally. You know, nobody's gonna. You're not gonna get this when you're just reaching out to random neighbors. And I love it the. The make it normal section where he says, I want to use Ashigaru with my dojo.
[00:39:06] I could just go ask my neighbors, oh yeah, man, you want to use Ashikara with my dojo? He'd be like, I'm sorry, I don't speak Japanese, but that's a great example of the kind of the Fediment set up and thinking about building a local community and just having like going and finding like your friends, your, like the audio nauts or whatever, you know, like your crew and getting them together and then being like, let's all run a mixer together and, and pool our funds so that we each gain privacy in a selective place or in a way where we can be extremely selective about who we are allowing we're sharing those tools with and what the other platforms and services and things that we're too often trapped in can actually see or know about what we're doing.
[00:39:53] And Funny Bitch might actually be a good example for this, especially if you're talking about local neighbors just trying to get simple. That's a great just like, backup thing. It's like, hey, you want to message over bitchat? And they're like, wait, what? And just like, well, it's actually just a really good thing if the Internet ever goes out or the power ever goes out in the area that we can still just hit each other up, send messages. I'd actually like to test that out and some of my neighbors might actually entertain me on that one. They. They're always like, kind of like just a little bit interested in some of the like, ridiculous tech crap that I do. But anyway, I thought this was a really great piece and just got me thinking about stuff. And I think it's a super important message to really just more than anything is to. To remember that like, we need to build our band of brothers. Like we need to be building our own local networks and our own local structures and running our own stuff. And it is not about not having anything. It's not about being fully sovereign and closed off from everybody. It's about being selective and filtering who you trust and what your fallback is. I love the idea of resilient is better than redundant. It's not about being redundant. It's about having options.
[00:41:11] Especially in the context of, you know, the government lockdowns and stuff is the number of times where you need. It's just good to know Somebody who has chickens.
[00:41:22] And it's just good to know somebody who has a farm and, you know, raises cattle. It's just good to know somebody who, you know, messes with a lot of electronic stuff. You can just go out to meet with a small group in order to help plan or make decisions about things or look for access to other contacts. A very small cohesive network in a local area stretches way, way further than you might think. And if you're eager to contribute and be a part of it and help other people, the amount of things that you can usually get in return, like people wanting to return that favor and help you out.
[00:42:03] There are certain times in life and certain events and things that can occur in which that is literally an invaluable resource. And you can actually be invaluable to someone else who might think that there is no solution or no option for them in which you actually have something that you think is really easy or is very simple to get a hold of or simple to do that they just don't even have any idea about.
[00:42:32] Especially when it comes to this space and this technology, like so many people are confused.
[00:42:38] So build local, build small, build deep, and build now. Because if you don't have it, if it's not already set up, when time comes that you need it, it's going to be a thousand times harder to try to get something out of it by building it. When everything, when there's, when there's literally it's in the middle of a problem.
[00:43:00] All right, we'll close this one out though. Thank you guys so much for listening. Don't forget to check out Leden. If you're not taking advantage of this, it doesn't work and it's not best for every single situation.
[00:43:11] But there are some situations where you just need access to it. Especially if it's like a time limited situation where just loaning, getting a loan against your Bitcoin can be so valuable. Like it is such an incredibly useful tool to not have to sell bitcoin and then buy it back. If there's a situation where you just actually just need the fiat for some span of time, or you have something where the interest rate, like I've just invested in something where the interest rate made sense for it, where I knew I could beat the interest rate, but I did not want to get rid of my bitcoin. But you have to use a trusted company that's been doing this for a long time and is very clear and that you can know your bitcoin architecture.
[00:43:54] There are two companies that I trust enough to do that with and LEDN has been my main for a few years now. I've actually got a referral link now that you will find down in the show notes. If you want to check it out then also get your circadian rhythm, your hormones and your energy level right by controlling your light exposure and your light health with Chroma. That's Getchroma co and a 10% discount with code Bitcoin Audible don't forget to sign up for the Financial Freedom Report. The best way to stay up on freedom and sovereignty tools and news around financial repression around the world and pubkey. If you are trying to build some of those tools that let you control your data and control your access to networks and your friends, Synonym has built PubKey so that you can do exactly that. All the details will be found right down in the show notes.
[00:44:46] The trap is thinking that you can do it all by yourself.
[00:44:51] Build local and build now and I'll catch you on the next episode. Take it easy guys.
[00:45:10] I'm not sure they're is anything more fierce or powerful in the world than a group of virtuous men with a common vision and the highest of standards. Like Alexander the Great and his Royal Guard. A handful of men together on foot and on horseback reshaped half the known world in the span of a decade.
[00:45:33] Alexander Svetsky, the Bushido of Bitcoin.
