All right. Hey there.
This is from Constant and you're listening to Bitcoin for
Millennials. Together with my guests on this
podcast, I go on a journey to discover how our current
financial system works, why it's flawed, and why Bitcoin is the
most relevant technology that you, my fellow millennials,
should understand and adopt. In this episode, I'm joined by
Alexander Svetsky. He's an author and entrepreneur
who ran numerous ventures in the past 15 years.
And together with Mark Moss, he wrote and published the best
selling book on A Communist Manifesto and is now working on
a next book called The Bushido of Bitcoin.
He also founded the Bitcoin Times in 2018, a limited once a
year published magazine covering bitcoins current affairs.
And he's currently building an, well multiple open source AI
tools for the focus on the spirit of Satoshi, the world's
first Bitcoin centric language model.
Well that's that's a lot of stuff man.
Welcome. Thanks man.
Yes, I have a disease which is I can't sit straight.
I can't sit in one spot too many.
Things Isn't that also what Bitcoin makes you do?
A bit like you want to contribute to it.
Yeah, you wanna. I mean, Bitcoin.
Yes, it does. It absolutely does incentivize
wanting to do bigger things with your life.
And I think that's something with we'll discuss in today's
episode, but something moderns have lost.
You know, we've sort of been, you know, psyoped into valuing
average instead of excellence. And you know, everyone's,
everyone's taught that it's, it's OK, you know, just to be
just average and do just enough, right?
And I think I find that a disgusting way to live.
I really like like the memes, but it's said at the same time
like these memes of it's a specific name for like carving
of statues where the statues have like a like a veil, right,
or they're they're wearing something on their head, do you
know what I mean? Like it's this old, like Greek.
It's like a certain way of of creating sculptures, as if
someone is wearing something over their heads, like a cloth
or something. Do you know?
This. No, I don't know it.
No, I'll send you a picture. But like people send these
memes, like why don't we do this anymore?
Like, it's just like this crazy amount of time that people spend
on a statue, right, that just lives for a few thousand years
and we are still marveling at like how how did they do that?
I think that that is to your point, right?
That we don't really know how to how to do that anymore are also
not really incentivized to take I don't know a year or two just
skull you know creating a sculpture.
So yeah, totally. Yeah.
Beauty takes time and we we we don't want to invest time in
anything anymore. Yeah, definitely.
So we'll dive into that. But first I wanted to ask you,
how did you discover Bitcoin and what made you not get it
initially? Oh, I I was a gold bug back in
20 between 2008 and 2012. I was a crazy gold bug, right?
I was into gold silver. I was playing that stuff.
I was watching Max Kai as a Doug Casey, all these crazy people,
Mike Maloney, etcetera. Talk about gold and silver.
Because I had. I had taken my scholarship
money, I was studying civil engineering.
I took my scholarship money, I put it on the stock market, and
I lost everything, basically. And I spent all this time trying
to figure out how was I so stupid.
And that's where I sort of found like, gold sound money as a
concept. And it was around that time that
I first thought about Bitcoin, I believe.
I don't know, I I remember where or how.
Maybe it was Max Kaiser jumping up and down on a couch or
something, yelling about Bitcoin, but.
I can remember that also. Yeah, it was something.
But I honestly, I never took it seriously.
I was like, yeah, whatever. Sound money, right?
I've got my gold, I've got my silver.
That's all I was interested in. So my life took me a different
direction. I was on an entrepreneurial
path. I was building businesses, I got
into tech, I was building startups, all sorts of things
like that. And it wasn't until 2015 again,
that late 2015, early 2016, that a friend of mine said, hey bro,
you know, like you heard of this Bitcoin thing.
And I was like, yeah, I heard about that a while ago, like, is
it still around? And he's like, yeah, bro, you
know my my friend made, you know, $1,000,000 overnight from
I was like this guy talking about.
And we, you know, we we get into this conversation.
I look at, look up Bitcoin and I see it's something like 500
bucks or whatever it was at the time.
And I was like, holy crap. Like I remember this being at
like dollars or something like, you know, something of those
sort of that that range. And you know, that obviously
interested me in it. And I started going down the
rabbit hole and I've got this sort of meme that I say to
people, it's like I came for the money, but I stayed for the
money. So like when you, when you start
to understand like what the money actually entails, there's
there's a bigger, there's a bigger thing at play here,
right. And and yeah, that like, as I
started going down that rabbit hole, it was particularly, you
know, 2017 where I really became a Bitcoin maximalist.
You know, I realized there was something special, something
important, something unique here And here I am today writing,
going to businesses, doing all sorts of stuff in and around
Bitcoin. Nice man.
Yeah, it's interesting. That number go up obviously is
for a lot of people the thing where they where they get into
Bitcoin. But then when you realize that
it's actually so much bigger, could be so much bigger but
already so much bigger than just you as the individual, right.
It's so fascinating also to, I don't know how you, how you
experienced that, but for me, like sometimes I end up
somewhere in just my rational thinking and then I think like,
no, it can, it cannot be that big, right.
And then I watch other people talk about their own journey and
then they add up in the same place and then I think like, OK,
well maybe there's some merit to it still, right.
So you do need to see that other people you know who you respect
or or or you enjoy their thinking that they end up in the
same place just to keep your own, well, almost ego in check,
right? In a in a in a good way,
there's. Yeah, there's either definitely
something here, or we are the most ridiculously stupid group
of cultists in the history of humanity.
It's literally one of the two. Like, it's like it's one of the
two extremes. There's no middle ground here.
Yeah, 100% agree. I once, once someone told me,
yeah, the CIA made it and this and this and blah, blah.
I said, well, if the CIA made this and this comes out and it's
all bad and all doom and gloom and whatever, then I think I
have to live in a cave and like, I don't know, like go away.
Like I would be honestly, like I would have fooled myself.
So I fully agree, man. Like it's it's a zero or
everything, right? Yeah.
Let's talk about the stuff you did, man.
I love the name on Communist Manifesto.
Thank you. It's a book with Mark Moss where
you argue for a society structured around natural
capitalist principles, dynamic inequality.
I would love to hear what you what you mean by that and social
mobility based on individual merit and competence.
That's something I I really like.
You know that that's, you know, equality of opportunity, not
outcome, right? What inspired you to to write
this? Yeah.
So the the the book came about as a as a joke initially.
So we were Mark and I were in Salvador kind of between the
Salvador Bitcoin announcement and the implementation.
So I think it was like July 2021 or something like that.
And he, he just asked me, we're having lunch and he said, have
you read the Communist Manifesto?
And I was like why the, why the fuck would I do that?
And he's like it's really bad. And I said, I'm sure it is Mark.
I said, why would I want to give myself brain cancer by reading
this. And he's like, you know, he
goes, did you realize it was like the the one of the most
widely read socio or sort of political economics books in
history. And I was like, damn, bro.
I was like that explains why the world is so dumb.
And you know, he sort of just said as a passing comment, you
know, someone should write a rebuttal to this or, you know,
something similar to this that offers a different perspective.
And you know, I said to him, I was like, you know, maybe we
should do it one day and we kind of left it at that.
And it was 6-7 months later in Austin.
Like I some things have changed in my life and I had a bit of
time up my sleeve and I hit him up.
I said, hey dude, let's write this book.
Let's lock ourselves in a room in an Airbnb and let's sit down
and do a book Sprint. And we wrote the bulk of the
book in a week and coming into I wasn't sure exactly what we're
gonna write. Like we started off kind of
doing like a rebuttal chapter by chapter, point by point.
But then kind of the book took on its own life.
So the only thing that emulates from the original Communist
Manifesto is like the four chapter structure and but but
other than that like we it's it's its own manifesto it lives
on its own and the the name also came about as a joke because we
weren't sure what the name it we're going to call it the
Capitalist Manifesto, the Libertarian Manifesto, the
Individualist Manifesto, the Sovereign like well we're
throwing out these names we're like and then they all be like
they suck You know we're we're sitting there with with Mark's
wife and she kind of it was just really funny she goes why don't
you call it the Uncommunist Manifesto.
And we kind of, like, looked at each other like, damn, that's
pretty good. So we how?
To uncommunist yourself, basically.
It was, it was great. And we were like, OK, let's just
roll with that and and yeah, the the book sort of, I'm actually
very proud of it. Like it's a very easy read it,
it takes, you know, you could go sit there and spend years
reading Rothbard, Mises, you know Austrian economics,
libertarian philosophy, like all this sort of stuff.
Or you could in an hour and a half read the Young Communist
Manifesto and get basically a a really well written.
And I'm not just saying well written to blow smoke up my own
arse, but I I think Mark and I really did a good job of taking
these complex ideas and making them simple and kind of
extracting four or five like key ideas that people can walk away
with that can adjust their frame of reference the way they view
the world. And and I I I'm actually in the
process of trying to get the book into Malay's hands for his
cabinet because like he's going to have a big job of trying to
re educate the Argentine public on these principles, these ideas
and something like this. Like, nobody's going to sit down
and read a Rothbard textbook, you know, or maybe a few people
will, but not not a mass amount of people, but people will read
90 minutes of a book. And you know, this, this could
fundamentally shift the way people think.
So hopefully it becomes that kind of thing.
And and yeah, that's basically the premise of the book.
We can dig into some of those points.
Yeah, awesome. Yeah.
I wanted to ask you about the concept of dynamic inequality
and why it's so important in the manifesto.
Yeah, so I mean, I think equality is a scam, equality of
all kinds is a scam. And we'll we'll talk about this
next, which is I think it's not only equality of outcome which
is bad, but equality of opportunity is also stupid.
So you know what for me fundamentally is important is
inequality. Now when I say inequality, I
mean variance, I mean, you know, I mean diverse outcomes, I mean
hierarchy, I mean excellence, you know, so all of these
things, which fundamentally I mean life, right?
Like, show me something in life that is equal nothing.
Like, you know, you look out, you know, I'm looking out of the
ocean. Now.
The ocean is not flat and equal. Like there's, you know, waves up
and down, like I'm looking at the mountains.
Like, you know, we as human beings, we, we are different,
You know, like we, we look different now.
You know, even in a game, if you have a fair game, like a
basketball game, if the rules are fair, the outcomes are going
to be unequal. That's what you want.
You know, you want a winner and a loser, right?
So, so life, anything that is living, anything that is alive,
seeks inequality. That which is dead for example
or or or death oriented seeks equality.
Like equality is a state of flatness and of death, right?
Like you know, another good analogy to think about is.
That's no growth. Well, exactly and and well and
no growth literally means death. There's no like so.
So this is what? Like, this is a Tony Robbins
thing that I learnt many years ago.
He said, like, you do not get to pick between growth and no
growth. You actually have to pick
between growth and death. Living things are either growing
or they're dying. There's no, like, stasis point,
right? So the the example I was going
to use was you. You look at colors, right?
Like red, blue-green, blah, blah, blah.
Like all these different colors are unequal.
They're different. If you take all the colors and
want to make them equal, you mash them all together and what
do you get? Gray, right?
Like so, So Gray is the color of communism, right?
Gray is the color of death. Like flatlining is the color of
death. So what you need in a functional
alive society is inequality, but it needs to be dynamic.
So like you can't have static inequality, meaning.
All right, I'm a central banker, I can print all the money I
want. And you, middle class, whatever,
producer, consumer, whatever, it doesn't matter.
You get robbed. And we create this static
inequality where you end up with smaller and smaller and smaller
and smaller percentage of people who have everything, and the
larger and larger and larger percentage of people who have
nothing, right. And that that's a recipe for the
breaking of a functional system, whereas dynamic inequality
creates a robust functional system.
And nature is full of dynamic inequality.
All of nature is like that. Humanity.
I shouldn't say humanity. I should say the modern version
of the, you know, the kind of collectivism that we've tried to
create is an attempt at creating is an attempt at trying to
create equality and ending up with static inequality because
of how stupid that attempt is. Yeah, it's like I had to think
of the word nature, too. In general, it's fascinating.
I like the quote. Have you ever see a tree stop
growing? You know, it's the same thing.
Like it's there's no tree that wakes up, you know with the sun
and things just today. I'm not going to do anything,
right. But yeah so and and where that
tree seed fell now on the side of a rock for a nice plane with
water and and you know all the nutrients and whatever, like
that's the that's the chaos of life.
Right. So when you just shared this I
also have to think of nature. But isn't the problem more, And
I like what you said, like it's the modern human thinking where
we can like exclude ourselves from nature because we can think
or, you know, construct some rationale as to why we are
outside of nature, Right. Isn't it something like that as
well, that that's kind of hubris in a sense.
Yeah, yeah. I write about this a lot in the
upcoming book The Bushido of Bitcoin.
I talk about what I call physiopsychology, and this is a
bit of a Nietzschean idea in some senses, that we've tried to
separate the mind from the body, right?
And the body is the thing that connects us to nature, right?
You know, the body is this biological thing and.
And to a degree, the mind is either a extension of the body
you know or something. But you know the mind is also
natural but it you know it, it has this tendency to create this
separation from you know, nature, the body.
And you know, I mean it's even in our language, you know mind
over matter, right? It's like, no, it's mind and
matter together, right? Like these things are
fundamentally, inextricably linked.
And and yeah, it's it's just you're spot on when you say like
we've we've created the separation and we wonder why we
are no longer connected to you know, reality.
Yeah, you know, that's the consequence.
And so you also talk in a book about individual autonomy, like
how does that help people or society shape different economic
structures? Like why is it?
Is that because a lot of people are dependent right now?
Yeah, so, so this one, I mean, you know, I've, I've come to
believe that some people just are fundamentally incapable of
autonomy. You know, like if 2020 taught me
anything is like some people are literally living, breathing in
PCs, You know, they they they can't think for themselves and
like they're just zombies, right.
But you know, generally speaking, generally speaking,
humans are adaptable and we either adapt to being
independent or being dependent. One of the two, right?
And a great way to think about it is our smartphones, right?
I remember when I was young, before the smartphone, I was
doing door to door sales. I was knocking on doors.
And this was before we had Google Maps.
Like such thing didn't exist. We would get given, like we had
those big St. maps, like the big fat books, and before going out
what we called on the field, before we'd go out and knock on
doors, we'd take the street map photocopy and then we'd mark out
what our territory was and pass it around to each salesperson.
And you would, you would like, learn the territory somehow,
like bodily wise. Like I could get dropped in any
suburb, anywhere, and I just knew my way around.
I didn't need a map. I didn't need Google Maps.
I didn't eat shit. These days you drop somebody in
like the middle of a capital city with signs everywhere,
they'll be lost in 5 minutes without Google Maps, without
their phone. They'll freak the fuck out.
They'll have anxiety. So it's like we adapt to, yeah,
as I said, dependence or independence.
And you know, more broadly speaking, we adapt to freedom or
slavery. Now each one comes with a cost,
right. Freedom and independence is
messy. Like it's, you know, it's it's
not clean. It's not like it's not sterile,
right. It's not a you know you can't
control everything but you it, it is a environment for growth,
right, like the the jungle where the things grow the best is the
least controlled environment, right.
Whereas you know if you want to control and sterilize
everything, sterile by definition means dead.
You know you have a environment of dependence like everything is
controlled and those environments are not conducive
to life. So we we have to pick a
direction and that direction really matters, you know, in the
same way as, you know, if you're looking W, if you're facing West
and looking for a sunrise, it's just not going to happen, right?
Like it's it's fundamentally impossible.
So, like if you want a society that grows, you have to face in
the direction of growth, autonomy, independence, freedom,
etcetera. Yeah, it's nice.
I I what I like is that also about Bitcoin to to to link it
to Bitcoin. Like I think Bitcoin really
shows you that. It shows you that there's an
opportunity to act different in your life, maybe take that
responsibility, right, and be more sovereign and the fact that
it actually you even become aware of it, right.
Because I think personally, like I was very unaware, right.
In general, I say, you know, if you grow up as a millennial in a
Western country, then you're probably pretty unaware of how
you know how else you could live your life, for example.
And it's really about, you know, short term preference or kind of
like the easy choice is hard life, Hard choice is easy life,
right? Because what you say about the
the freedom that that means you have to fight in a sense.
And if you want to be complacent, you don't have to
fight. But then like all yourself
sovereignty, like everything is gone, right?
So there's kind of this, do you take the easy path or do you
take the hard part, hard path. But I think in Western societies
in general you you are not really, you're not even forced
to think about that. You know if you I thought about
that actually in the COVID times, you know here was pretty
OK. But I saw pictures from India,
for example, where people who worked in cities had to go back
to the rural, rural areas that they came from, right?
And there was like 50,000 people or 100,000 people at the train
station waiting. And I I read all these crazy
stories about, you know, siblings with their dead mother
on a motorbike for 300 kilometers.
I was like, damn, you know, like this.
This exists currently in the world like these.
These people have to think about these things every day, right?
Because if you don't, if you are complacent, you know, that could
be the end of your life in essence, right?
And in in a Western country, you could stay in bed all day and
nothing happens basically, right?
So you're not you're not forced to think about it.
You adapt. You adapt to your environment.
That's what humans are. We're adapt.
We're we're adaptation machines. And so how can you get to a
point where you see that other option?
Is that only when you have a problem?
Yeah, I mean the, I think there has to be a catalyst and you
know, each of us, I mean life's not smooth for anybody, right?
We we've all got some sort of challenge, some sort of problem,
right. And you know, you, you know, in
in, in in some way shape or form life is going to throw you a
curveball. It's going to challenge you and
it's what you do. It's it's, you know, it's a
classic personal development kind of thing, right?
It's it's not what happens to you, it's what you do with it
that matters. You know you can be a victim or
a victor and you can take ownership take responsibility
once again of of the situation and you know then do something
with it. So you know fundamentally
speaking like we, we live in a world absent responsibility.
I've, I've wrote a article a couple of years ago called
responsibility go up technology, right.
So everyone talks about NGU and I said well look, you know
that's cool and all it's important gets people in.
But you know you come for the NGU, you stay for the RGU, the
responsibility to go up. And you know I kind of framed
Bitcoin as you know it's most important thing is it's not
freedom money, which I mean it is freedom money, but that's not
as important. What's more important is that
it's responsibility money or responsible money.
And you know I've, I've said this many times as Bitcoin's
most important impact on civilization is not that it's
going to help the weak and bank down bank.
No, no, no. It's going to relocalize
economic consequence that is more important than anything
else. And and not even just a little
bit more important like, I'm talking fucking orders of
magnets. It's the 99% of Bitcoin's
importance is the relocalization of economic consequence.
Every other benefit is the 1% doesn't fucking matter like in
in. You mean distributing it across
the layers again? So yeah, I mean.
From the bottom layer back back up.
What? What do you mean by that?
As in the the you said economic. Localizing economic consequence.
Yeah, exactly. So do you mean that in a
geographical way? I was thinking more about the
consequence of the four cantillionaires to abuse, you
know, how money is created. It's not there on that low on
that level that's kind of. Yeah.
No, what where I went, what what I mean specifically is
localizing economic consequence, meaning that when an individual
makes a decision inside an economy, so an economy is just
made-up of a bunch of actors, agents acting, their actions
have an economic consequence and that economic consequence should
be paid by the actor, not by other actors.
So that's essentially what I mean.
So the world we live in at the moment has zero localization of
economic consequence. Someone can go on print money
and the consequence is distributed amongst everybody.
So in other words, like if I'm a central banker, I can play the
game of I'll jump off a Cliff and instead of me dying, Bram
dies and I jump off a Cliff again, and then somebody else
dies. So what does that teach me?
I can jump off as many cliffs as I want and somebody else fucking
dies. So somebody else is always
paying the bill. Bitcoin will ensure that the
that consequence localizes. Now it's not going to be perfect
because it's impossible to get perfection, but the more that
localizes, the more you get 2 effects.
You get positive reinforcement for good behavior and you get
negative reinforcement for bad behavior.
That simultaneously creates a corrective mechanism in society,
in civilization, so that the good is kept and the bad is
either corrected or removed. That is so important for a
functional system. And that's what Bitcoin does to
the to the to the world. Like, if you like, I'll give you
an analogy, If you lost the pain receptors in your hand, you
could put your hand in the fire and you could literally burn off
your hand and you wouldn't even fucking know.
And that's the world that we're living in at the moment.
We are eroding our capital base. We're eroding out the
civilization that we have and we don't even know because we just
keep printing money and we cover up the losses.
Yeah. And and that's, that's what
Bitcoin does. It makes it makes losses real
again. And that's so important.
I find it so fascinating that it's not like that, right?
I mean, it sounds so simple and at the same time I think like,
why? Why is it not like that, right?
But it is maybe also because of the human nature that we kind of
just touched upon, right? Like if.
I don't. Have to think about it then,
yeah. Why would I question it, right?
And especially if it just works for me and I still don't have to
think about it, right? I mean, yeah, so it makes sense.
When or how? How do we achieve a more like,
more more of something that's really a meritocracy then?
I mean, like Bitcoin plays a big factor in that, right?
So like, you know, we, we can have a social revolution, right?
We can have a political revolution.
We can do all this sorts of stuff.
And you know, this has happened many, many times throughout
history, right? We've had the the debauchery of
the currency and you know that goes hand in hand.
Like people say, the root of all of the problems is the money
printing, and I disagree with that.
I think the root of all the problems starts culturally
upstream. That's where the cancer starts.
And honestly, it's the introduction of concepts such as
equality and democracy, right? As soon as we start to make
things average, we move our gaze from ascendance and excellence
to average. And average is the first step
towards death. This is Brie Love and I were
discussing this so. So that directionality is really
important now. That leads us to inevitably
printing money, and then printing money just accelerates
the the destabilization and the the the debasement of
civilization, right? So what ends up happening is
civilization falls apart. We have a revolution.
We restart things. We're like, OK, now we've got to
do things better. We've got to do things
different. And here we go again, right?
And we enter a new cycle. Now, Bitcoin specifically might
save us from having to repeat these cycles over and over again
because it makes it so that acceleration point never
happens. And we are in a position where
it makes like there is a better reward for better behavior and
there is a consequence for poor behavior.
And once you, you know, establish that or create that in
a society, you have some corrective mechanisms.
So you know, Bitcoin fundamentally is like a really
key, important part. But add to that, and this is,
this is what my book is about. You know, the Bushido of Bitcoin
is what are the virtues, what are the principles that we must
embody, that we must inculcate in ourselves, in ourselves
first, It's very important so that it becomes a part of our
culture, so that we have a strong culture that actually
excels on a Bitcoin standard. So, so the way you can sort of
think about the peshito is like, OK, we have a rulebook in the
current world. The rulebook today is get into
banking, get into fucking tech VC.
Like figure out a way to get into politics, central banking,
whatever. Find a way to lie a cheat,
steal, be cunning, whatever. Right now.
Not everybody does that, but a large amount of people do that.
Or it tells you, you know, the rule book is be a fucking
consumer. Just buy shit, you know?
Or you know, invest, Invest, invest, invest, invest, invest,
invest. Right.
Like, so we, you know the the modern playbook is a playbook of
stupidity, right? The Bitcoin playbook.
You know to get ahead on a Bitcoin standard, I believe
you're going to need to have principles like justice, like
courage, like loyalty, respect, excellence, responsibility,
compassion. Like so.
So the whole point of the book is I said OK, what are the
principles, virtues we need to establish and develop in
ourselves as individuals. So that I believe is the sort of
the two pronged approach. Is Bitcoin fundamentally fixed
the economics and you fix the framework for the world, but
then it's within that framework, how do you excel?
And that is by establishing a culture of made-up, of
individuals who have a strong set of virtues.
And then the question is, what are those virtues?
And that was the exact point of the damn book, is let's identify
what these are, let's look at where they were successful
throughout history and what we can do to bring them forward
onto a Bitcoin standard. Yeah.
So that's really how we apply. I kind of see it like this where
if Bitcoin is the base layer of truth, right.
In that sense, I see Bitcoin as like engineer truth.
If that's always just the truth on which we built, then you are
basically talking about how we apply Bitcoin as a tool or how
we use Bitcoin as a tool to to build that Bitcoin enabled new
society based. Like how do we apply the tool of
Bitcoin, right? Because Bitcoin does force us in
a sense to implement this kind of reward and punishment system
as you said, right? You can only profit, quote UN
quote, from Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin can only give you value
when when you follow the the base set of rules that everyone
can see, right? And if you try to mess with the
rules, then you won't get anything out of it basically,
right? So that that that incentive is
already built in. But you talk about, OK, how do
we actually integrate that and then build together?
Yes, to A to a degree. If I was to rephrase it, I would
say like you're 100% on the right track.
There's these principles that make Bitcoin special.
And then how do we take those principles and use Bitcoin to
then establish a better society? I I would say we will succeed
when we've forgotten all about Bitcoin.
So when Bitcoin kind of dissolves into the background
and nobody like you and me are not writing Bitcoin books
anymore, not doing podcasts, nobody gives a fuck because you
know, like, do you, do you see people today doing a podcast on
the Internet? Like, it's just the Internet,
right? Like we'll use it.
So when when we stop talking about Bitcoin, that's when we
know it will have succeeded because it becomes this
framework. And then it's less about using
Bitcoin. It's more about, as I said,
cultural principles that operate best on the framework that
Bitcoin establishes, the socio economic framework.
Would you define that as some sort of Age of enlightenment in
a sense then? Yeah, you could call it that.
You know, I think it's definitely a new age.
I mean, this is where we can tie it to some of the stuff that
I've written about Nietzsche, right?
So Nietzsche, you know, 150 years ago predicted, he said,
you know, and he did this at a time when the Western
civilization was at its peak. Like, you know, you had Germany,
like, you know, Wagner, like, you know, Europe was winning big
time, right? Like it was the peak of
civilization, he said. You know, while you idiots are
all partying, I'm telling you that civilization is going to
fall apart. People like, you're fucking
crazy. What are you talking about?
And his whole point was we are letting in these ideas of
equalitarianism, of average, of, you know, democratic thinking.
We are, we are shifting our gaze from excellence and what's going
to happen? And he said it's going to take
many, many generations. It's going to take a hundred,
200 years, but we're going to enter the age of what he called
the last man. And, you know, millennials, You
know, today we might understand this last man concept as the MPC
or the lemming, right? Or the masses.
And he said, you know, we're going to enter this age of this,
this cynical person who wants to just tear down everything that's
beautiful and turn it all into rubble.
But he said also from that age, from that time, a new archetype
of person will rise. And he called it the Ubermensch.
You know, the Overman. And, you know, I write about
this in my latest piece on the Bitcoin Times.
I call it Uber Money. And I say that.
You know what Nietzsche was essentially missing was this
framework of excellence, which is a praxeological framework,
which is a monetary network, which is Bitcoin enables,
establishes a framework for that kind of an age to rise up.
But that age will only rise up from an age of complete
shamelessness and debauchery and stupidity.
So, so we're kind of at that point now.
I don't know how bad clown world is going to get.
It's probably going to get worse before it gets better.
Even worse. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's
going to get worse, but from that will rise.
What you're kind of thinking of this Age of Enlightenment or the
age of, you know, the the the early stages of the Ubermensch,
the age of the Ubermensch. So the Ubermensch needs this
Uber money. I also saw you talk about
Bitcoin as energy money, but it's kind of you.
You combine these Nietzsche ideas and Bitcoin.
Can you share a bit about that? Like, how do you end up with
Uber money or energy? Money, I mean energy, money, if
anyone's ever listened to your stuff, sailor stuff, whatever,
they'll sort of understand, right?
Bitcoin is conservatively sound, right?
You can't print more of it. You can't create more of it.
It's, you know, it's fixed in supply, blah, blah, which what
what it mimics is essentially energy.
You can't create energy, you can't destroy it.
All you can do is transform it and you know, transmit it,
right. You can harvest it, harness
that, that. You're not creating anything.
So. So Bitcoin kind of shares that
relationship. And you know, physicists call
energy the currency of the universe because in many ways
everything is made-up of that. So, you know, Bitcoin is a
currency, right? Like, that's what it does.
And it, you know, allows you to transmit time and energy over
space and all this sort of stuff that, you know, we've heard
sailor talk about millions of times.
The the point here is that you know it.
It's not to to say literally speaking that Bitcoin is energy
money, but metaphorically that is a powerful metaphor and it
and it works. So I then relate that to this
idea of Uber money, which is OK. If you have an energetically
conservative money something that you can't corrupt, then you
have that framework. Like I I said this on a recent
podcast, I said if reality could be defined as that which is
irreversible, then Bitcoin is the real estate money we've ever
had. Because Bitcoin is irreversible,
right. And that kind of a framework
establishes a need for excellence.
And excellence is the pathway to the Ubermensch.
Like excellence over generations, you have to breed
the Ubermensch. That gives you an anchor.
That gives you an anchor point in the future, right?
Like, that's what I meant with engineer truth.
I think we say the same, right? It's irreversible.
So it just is in a sense like time is right and we can prove
that it is because you know, we have all the validators and all
the code. It said like it's it's so
transparent that you can prove that it just is.
And yeah, once you accept that, then you can set an anchor point
in the future because you know that what you are operating on
is truth in a sense. And so you can head towards that
direction. So does that make sense?
That's kind of how I created in my mind.
There, yeah, you can use it as a magnet or a catalyst either way,
right? So a catalyst pushes it, or a
magnet attracts, and it's some mix of both.
Yeah. And so you talk about these
ideas in this new edition of the Bitcoin Times.
I think I said it correctly. It's a limited once a year.
Magazine. You nailed it, right?
You nailed it. It's the 6th, 6th edition.
Yes. Why do you focus on energy now?
What's what's the? Yeah, the relationship between
Bitcoin and energy. I think you just mentioned it.
Why now about energy? Yeah.
So I mean the each year is a different theme, right.
So last, the, sorry, not last year, but the year before we
did. The Austrian edition, you know,
the one before that was kind of like a futuristic edition called
The New Hope. The one before that was the
Promethean edition. The one before that was the
sovereignty and sorry, sovereignty edition.
So like, each one has a theme. And last year there was just
this growing noise around like energy, FUD, climate
catastrophers. The world's going to fucking
end. We're going to boil the oceans,
you know, everything's going to die.
Like, you know, we're boiling in Europe at 36°.
I was like, I grew up in Australia like normal summer Day
was 45, none of us boiled. When I was younger, 36° or 32
was like a yellow on the map and now it was like a super dark
red, which is fascinating to see, yeah.
So, you know, I just got sick of all that garbage and I was like,
man, you know, let's, let's do the energy edition.
Let's let's write about this and there's six obviously fantastic
writers in there. Parker Lewis did the foreword
Andrew Myers, who's doing incredible work with a company
called Satoshi Energy. He's like linking up large scale
energy producers with with the Lightning Network and enabling
them to price their energy in real time and sets.
There's Gideon Powell who's comes from a oil and gas
background. His dad was one of the early
wildcatters out of Texas. He writes this incredible piece
on human ingenuity. And like he he quotes this guy
called Julian Simon who has a fascinating economic take, which
he says there's no such thing as finite resources.
So the only thing that's finite is human ingenuity.
So, like, we're we're not running out of molecules, we're
not running out of atoms. Like, you know, there's an
infinite amount of those. What we're running out of is
ideas and capacity to be ingenious, right?
So like, that's the only limiting factor.
We're never going to run out of oil molecules.
They're all there. Carbon atoms are all there.
So it's our capacity to extract that.
So he does a piece, Brian Git, who's a, he's kind of like of
the Alex Epstein sort of crowd. He did a fantastic piece on
nuclear and how that can solve a bunch of problems from modern
computing. There was Drew Armstrong.
We did a really deep piece, like if people like stuff from like
GG and, you know, really deep thinking about physics and like
the nature of existence. He did one called on entropy.
And then yeah, I did a piece that kind of explores this
relationship between energy, Bitcoin excellence and
Nietzsche's ideas. And, you know, it's it's quite
philosophical, you know, it'll get people fired up.
But yeah, it's a it's a different.
Different angles. So we we do this once a year.
These essays are purely published for the Bitcoin Times.
People can buy it as a collectible if they want.
They can read the essays online for free on our sub stack.
And this year I'm also going to launch Amazon paperback edition.
So that way it's cheap like because the collectible, the
collectible is expensive like it's about 100 bucks a pop, 100
bucks a copy. But it's like it's it's priced
in sets and there's only 2100 printed and they've got a code
on the back. So like actually for people
listening, I'll show them one. So I obviously have #1 of 2100
and you know the the set, so that's this is edition.
So that's three, this is 4. So that's one of 2100.
So yeah, people can pick that up or you know the the Amazon
edition when it comes out. But yeah, the idea is like
timeless, beautiful content that will inspire people, make them
think and and give them what they need to understand about
Bitcoin. Yeah.
And I think you just touched upon it the, the subject of
abundance of energy and and why it's so important, is that what
you mentioned with regards to, yeah, we have all these, we have
all these building blocks. In essence, there's no finite
supply. Now now that we're talking about
something like is is just the idea of there's finite resources
and thus it's all going very bad.
Is isn't that just like a prime example of like the the downward
thinking that you? That.
You mentioned before, right? It's like, Oh my God, I I cannot
do anything. I someone else has to do
something or the earth has to change whatever it's doing and
then I'm safe, right? This is kind of the the apathy.
Yeah, it's the it's the victim. It's the victim.
And apathy is a great word. Like it is the apathetic victim
mindset that is like you know that that is the cancer that is
destroying the world. Like the the the cancer of the
world is not fucking climate change.
The cancer of the world is, you know, this brain dead idea that
we are powerless to do anything about it.
Not the case. Again, could stem from the fact
that if we place ourselves outside of nature, then
obviously we would end up at this place.
Yeah. I mean, we do need to
understand, like there's a link to nature, but we are, I think
in many ways the Apex manifestation of nature.
So we need to remember that too. So, So there's some people who
are like, oh, you know, nature is everything.
And, you know, like humans are insignificant, right?
No, we are significant. We are definitely like, we are
both a part of nature. But like if you think about it
like this, it's like life, you know, so, so you've got energy
then life is kind of the, you know, the hand reaching out.
And you know human beings are like the fingertips like we we
are the very, we are the very tip of life.
We are, we are the the, the highest most complex, most, you
know, sophisticated manifestation of life which
itself is the highest, most ordered sophisticated
manifestation of energy. And you know, energy is the
thing, it's the substance, right, that that that animates
everything. So like we we need to recognize
that and you know, we need to live with that.
So that doesn't mean we disconnect ourselves from
nature. We we are a part of it.
But we we need to understand that we are creators, We build,
we produce, we create. And you know, we we, you know,
if, I mean if you take a loser's mentality, don't don't be
surprised that you fucking lose, right.
Right. So you need to.
I agree. Yeah, 1 + 1 = 2, you know.
Yeah, and you just, you just mentioned like the ingenuity.
How how does human ingenuity play in the context of of
Bitcoin and energy? I mean, there's so many examples
already of people, you know, capturing methane and optimizing
grids and all these things like what are, what are your thoughts
there? Yeah, I mean, it's it's
incredible like, you know, like just just the things that human
beings can come up with, like both stupid and intelligent is
like beyond, you know, you'll never be able to put a cap on
it, right? Like, that's human ingenuity.
We come up with things AI can never do that.
Like we are, we are fundamentally creators,
creative. And the things we'll come up
with the the gaps will close. Fascinating.
And as you said, like down to things like, OK, there's we
flare gas. So let's put a Bitcoin.
I mean actually one interesting one that I saw a little while
ago was this spa in New York. They, you know, they have heated
pools. So what they've done is they've
got these, you know, miners that are immersed in liquid and that
liquid heats the water and then, you know, they run the spa, the,
the, the heated pools and the heated water in the spa comes
from the miners. Brilliant.
Absolutely fucking brilliant. Like I looked at that.
I was like, damn, I want to do that.
I literally want to build that in my own house so that I have a
hot tub and it's powered by miners.
Like, brilliant. Most of all it's just really
cool. But yeah, it's it's, it's funny
how how stupid and brilliance is.
Have you ever read the Kibalium? You know that like about the
hermetic principles, like as above, so below, as below, so
above, like the like. It's about these universal
principles. But they say like, like there's
a Law of polarity as well. And it's like like brilliance
and stupidity is not, it's the same thing.
It's just a different intensity of the same thing, right?
Like calling colds or or or light and dark, right.
And well, sometimes also really stupid And sip ideas actually
are pretty brilliant, right? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. It's like excitement, anxiety,
right? It's like, it's like, exactly,
they're they're shades of each other, right?
Exactly. Yeah.
Oh, shade, that's a that's.
That's a better word. Yeah.
And so do you also talk about
like the environmental concerns or at least what what people
talk about? When they?
Talk about Bitcoin. Yeah, Marty Bent did a whole
piece on that. I forgot to mention him,
actually. So he, he did a piece on that
where he basically debunks the whole ESG narrative and all that
sort of stuff. It's fantastic.
He uses Germany as a great example of, you know, of a
country who on paper has increased their energy capacity,
you know, with all of the renewable energy crap that
they're doing. But in reality, they actually
haven't, that they've, I think they're on paper, energy
capacity is double or triple what it used to be like 20 years
ago, but the real difference in energy use is only up 2%, which
means, like, that's the maximum they can actually use out of it.
So it's like it just shows like the the, the, the lie.
And his whole essay is built around this idea of it's time to
come back to reality like we've just been lying to ourselves.
And if we continue lying to us, oh, something's going to break
and it's going to be catastrophic.
Yeah. And so if we talk about the
Uncommunist Manifesto and Bitcoin, and we talked about
meritocracy, I also wanted to ask you if if there's an ideal
society and there is a meritocracy and we have this
dynamic inequality, is then capitalism the system?
Or like, how? How do you view that?
Is is that the most fair type of system than you could use?
Or is is there something else? Pretty much like I think you
can. So in the book we boiled down
capitalism to not a political modality but a natural process,
right. So if you look at, if you define
what capital is, capital is things and stuff, right?
So there's there's kind of three forms of primary capital.
You can call it time, energy, natural resources, right.
And you know, what we do as human beings, as as a living
species is we take these building blocks and we try to
use them as efficiently and as effectively as possible.
So that is by definition the process of capitalism, right?
Like if you take your capital and you use it as efficiently,
as effectively as possible, that's just fucking normal.
Like, right, You know, that's not a political thing.
It's nothing fancy. It's just like all living things
are performing this natural process.
Of capital, about a squirrel and and like him collecting all the
food for the winter, It's basically that.
Yeah, he's doing capitalism, right?
So yeah, so, so that's. So that's like the process of
capitalism, right? Doing stuff with capitalism.
Then you have the political thing, right?
And the political, like, you know, if we know that capitalism
is a process, works using things and stuff, energy, resources,
time as efficiently and effectively as possible, then it
would make sense to build some sort of political model, you
know, or political process or political format or structure or
governance system, whatever you want to call it, that as closely
as possible either emulates or enables that natural capitalist
process to occur. And if you want to call that
political system capitalism, sure, that's fine.
You know, we can call it capitalism, the process,
capitalism, the politics, right? That's fine.
You know, I don't think we can ever build a political model
that is purely capitalistic as so, as, as, as close as possible
to the process, right? Because by, you know, when you
build a, you know, a social process, you by definition have
a layer on. It's kind of like the map and
the territory, right? The map will never 100%
represent the territory, but it can get close.
So what you want to do from a political governance standpoint
is you want to build something that as closely as possible
resembles the capitalistic process.
And you know, Bitcoin goes a long way to this.
And let's tie it back to what we discussed earlier is Bitcoin is
the real estate money because you can't reverse it.
You can't, you know, so it localizes economic consequence.
So therefore you have a system where you are fundamentally
incentivized to use your capital, Bitcoin as efficiently
and effectively as possible. So.
So it kind of that ties everything.
'S a good deal, yeah, yeah. And also to earn it or play a
part of allocating that capital, you are incentivized to not be a
tourist, right? As a lot of people are tourists
in jobs or, you know, stuff like that.
So you have to add value to create value, to capture value
or something like that, right. Like you.
Yeah, it's forced. It's a forced incentive in a in,
in a sense interesting. So how do you see if we combine
these things like on communists, we're talking about energy, Like
how do you see the future for Bitcoin and and the application
in the world? I mean, it's very bright.
Like it's going to continue on. Like I wrote a in fact, I'll see
if I can find the passage here quickly that I was just, I was
writing a section for the the Bushido of Bitcoin, which kind
of just basically summarizes why people should have Bitcoin.
So I'll just read it, I said. All that being said, but don't
be stupid. Betting against Bitcoin is quite
possibly the dumbest social and economic decision you could
possibly make. Doubly so if you have agreed
with the rest of this book and want to work towards A making
the world a better, more beautiful ascended place and B
if you want to have a lineage that lives on to benefit from
that world, ignoring it is not far behind.
So if you do not hold Bitcoin, and when I say hold, I mean
actually hold it not some ETF for instrument, you should
change that now. So like, you know, my my message
there is basically like, you know, don't be stupid, quit
ignoring it. You know Bitcoin's going to
continue to grow. It's not just a technology that,
you know, these Myspace idiots say it's like, Oh yeah,
Bitcoin's all technology. No.
Bitcoin is a socio economic, technological socio economic
phenomenon. It's all of these things
combined. Like creating a new money takes
centuries, naturally speaking, and so Bitcoin, Bitcoin's gonna
compress that in a short period of time and if you're sleeping
on it. Because it's technology,
basically. Well, because we live in a
digital and technological world and because it, it interfaces so
well with that, right. And you know, that just means
it's going to, it's going to grow at a much faster rate
because it's not a physical object, but it has a
relationship to the physical world through energy.
So it's like this beautiful, like elegant blend of all of
these things. And yeah, to to sort of sum up
that line of thought and to finish this up, it's, you know,
sleeping on Bitcoin, ignoring it or betting against it.
They're all just dumb decisions. So don't be stupid.
Get some Bitcoin, learn about it and, you know, make your life
better. Heard American Huddle.
There was a video of him where he talks about, you know,
adopting Bitcoin is self love, right?
And basically. What you just?
Said like if you, if you ignore it space, you basically hate
yourself. And I it's so funny when I hear
myself say these things, right. Like if I think about like five
years ago I was already into Bitcoin.
I never thought like oh these are really things I'm going to
say and believe. But like I'm there, you know,
like it's so funny. But I in general I think that's
what Bitcoin makes you do like once you see it, it's really you
cannot Unsee it and and you are also you feel incentivized.
I think that's the best that's that's a good word to also do
the contribution right. Like that's why I started the
podcast. That's why you're writing it's
it's a mutually beneficial game instead of a 0 sum exercise with
you know some random people that you don't even like.
You know it's feel it's way more than technology.
I love that you said that. Awesome, man.
Well then I'd love to wrap up with my last question that I ask
everyone. And that's what's a core belief
that you will never let go. I know.
No, because I have many, that's why.
All right. I think the OK, let's let's just
pepper this one in. I think the opposite to
communism is beauty, and I think this is poorly understood.
But you know, beauty is ascendant.
Beauty is the ultimate low time preference pursuit.
It takes time, effort, energy, sacrifice, courage, duty,
loyalty, respect, justice. All of these, the all of the
greatest virtues combined, required in order to build,
produce, create something beautiful.
And I think it's the highest pursuit.
It's right up there with the concept of the ineffable or God,
right. So beauty for me is the opposite
of communism because communism represents everything that is
ugly, everything that is death, dying and decaying.
So yeah, I encourage people to think deeply about that one
because, you know, most people tell you the opposite of
communism is capitalism, which, you know it is.
But you know, fundamentally speaking the the, the thing that
the thread that runs through that is beauty.
Yeah, love that, man. I think that's a great ender.
I'll make sure to link to your social your website.
We didn't even talk about Spirits of Satoshi.
Maybe next time, but I think that's very, very cool
Experiment. So I would definitely encourage
people to to check that out. And yeah, thanks so much for
coming on, man. Thank you my friend, really
appreciate it. Cheers.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, it would be amazing
if you could rate, review and subscribe on the podcast
platform of your choice. It will help us educate more
millennials on the importance of Bitcoin.
You can follow and connect with me on Twitter.
I'm Bram K That's at BR AM K, and if you are or know someone
who has an interesting perspective on Bitcoin that's
worth sharing, hit me up. I read and reply to every single
message. I appreciate your support and
hope you'll be here for the next episode.
Thanks for listening. Bye.