There's a mechanism inside the money you use everyday that's
designed to keep you too busy, too anxious and too confused to
ask the one question that would free you.
And the question is very simple. What is this stuff actually
doing to me? Not to your wallet, but to you,
to your mind, your time, your ability to live a life that
means something. Hey, everyone.
I'm Bram Konstein, and this is Bitcoin for millennials.
And in this episode, we're going somewhere that most Bitcoin
content never goes. We're not talking about price.
We're not talking about charge. We're going to talk about what
Fiat money does to your consciousness.
And by the end of this, I think you're going to see your
relationship with money as something completely different
than you thought it was. If you're enjoying my content,
it would mean a lot to me if you could subscribe to the channel
and like my video to support my journey.
Thanks a lot. Now let's dive in.
Every single day you make a trade, you go to work, and you
exchange something that is absolutely irreplaceable.
Your time, your energy, your attention, your creativity, the
hours of your one and only life for units of a currency that
somebody else controls. You didn't choose this currency,
you didn't vote for it, and you cannot opt out of it.
And the people who manage it can create more of it whenever they
want, diluting the value of every unit that you have already
earned. You're trading something finite,
something you can never, ever get back, for tokens who supply
is determined by committee decisions in rooms you'll never
enter, made by people you'll never meet, serving interests
that aren't yours. I call this the life energy
trade. And once you see it for what it
is, you cannot Unsee it. Alan Watts, the philosopher,
nailed this back in the 60s already.
He said money relates to real wealth the way words relate to
physical reality. It's a symbol, a measurement,
not the thing itself. And he used this incredible
analogy. Imagine you're building a house
and one morning the boss shows up and says, we can't build
today. There are no inches.
And you'd say, what do you mean no inches?
We've got wood, we've got metal, and we even got tape measures.
Yeah, but you don't understand business.
We've been using too many inches, and there's just no more
to go around. That would sound absurd, right?
But that's exactly what happened during the Great Depression.
From 1929 to 1939. Every physical resource was
still there. The brains, the labor, the raw
materials. Nothing had been destroyed.
There was just a sudden absence of the measuring tool, the
symbol, not the reality. And Alan Watts argued that this
confusion isn't just an intellectual mistake.
It's the defining error of civilization.
We're eating the menu instead of the dinner.
We've confused the map for the territory and the measurement
for the thing that's being measured.
And that confusion doesn't just lead to bad economics.
It captures your consciousness. It shapes what you pay attention
to, what you chase, what you worry about, literally how you
perceive reality. He put it this way.
If you say that getting money is the most important thing, you
will spend your life completely wasting your time.
You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on
living. That is to go on doing things
you don't like doing, which is stupid.
Now you might be thinking, OK, but that's nice philosophy.
But is there actual evidence that money is doing something to
people's minds? There is, and the data is
devastating. When central banks create new
money and they create a staggering amount of it.
Like the Fed's balance sheet went from 900 billion in 2007 to
8.9 trillion in 2022, a nearly 10X increase in 15 years.
That money doesn't arrive equally.
It enters through specific channels like banks first, then
financial institutions, then asset holders.
These first receivers spent new money at yesterday's prices.
By the time it reaches ordinary wages, prices have already
risen. And this is called the Cantalon
effect. And I call the downstream
consequence of it the extraction loop because it's not a one time
transfer. It's a continuous compounding
drain. And the numbers are staggering.
During the pandemic, the world's 10 richest men doubled their
fortune to 1.5 trillion. That's about $15,000 per second.
The top 1% captured 63% of all new wealth created since 2020.
And meanwhile, real wages for working people barely moved.
But here's where most economics discussions stop and where I
think the real story begins. What does this extraction loop
actually do to you psychologically?
A study published in Science in 2013 found that financial
scarcity literally reduces your cognitive function by roughly 13
IQ points. Not because poor people are less
intelligent. The exact same person tested
when stressed about money versus when not performed significantly
worse. Financial worry doesn't just
limit your options, it limits your mind.
Money has been the number one source of stress in America
every single year since they started tracking it in 2007.
Not health, not relationships, not work, but money. 72% of
Americans feel stressed about it, and somewhere between 50 and
67% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
The median American has about $7850 in liquid savings. 40 days
of income, one car repair away from a crisis.
Always and perpetual. And when you zoom out and look
at the full picture, roughly 75% or more of the average person's
income goes to maintaining the system.
Taxes. Housing and debt service, the
invisible inflation tax. There's nothing left.
No margin for building, no margin for creating, no margin
for becoming. No margin for having the time
and space to go on your inner journey.
I call this the bandwidth trap. You're stuck at the base of
Maslow's hierarchy. Safety needs survival mode.
And the higher levels, the ones where you find purpose and
meaning and self actualization, those become luxuries.
The system keeps you running so hard that you never have the
bandwidth to ask the deeper questions.
Who am I? What matters in this life?
And one thing that has become very, very clear to me is that
this is not a side effect. This is all by design.
Now, everything I've told you so far, the data, the wealth
transfer, the cognitive damage and the bandwidth trip, most
people stop here and think they understand the problem, but the
problem is way older than central banking.
And once you see that, the solution becomes obvious.
Ancient wisdom traditions identified exactly these
dynamics thousands of years ago, just in different language.
And when you map them onto modern monetary policy, the
precision is almost eerie. Let's start with Buddhism.
There's this concept called Tana.
It literally translates to 1st or craving.
The Buddha identified it as the root cause of all suffering.
Not desire itself, but this compulsive, unquenchable craving
that drives the mind from one object to the next.
Basically to never be satisfied and always reaching.
The dama pada compares it to a monkey swinging through trees,
grabbing 1 branch only to release it and seize another.
Always grasping but never arriving.
Literally. And everyone can feel that,
right, that you should be doing more, earning more, and
optimizing more constantly, day in and day out.
Now think about what an inflationary monetary system
does. It structurally requires
perpetual growth, so also perpetual consumption and
perpetual desire for more. Your money is losing value, so
you'd better do something with it, Spend it invested, leverage
it. Because if you just hold it,
you're getting poorer. The system doesn't just allow
craving, it mandates it. I call this institutionalized
Tana, a monetary architecture that turns the Buddhist
diagnosis of suffering into economic policy.
The system engineers the craving and then sells you the cure,
which is more consumption, which feeds the craving further, and
so on. Basically an infinite extraction
loop applied to your consciousness.
Now you might be thinking, OK Buddhism is 1 tradition, maybe
the parallel is a coincidence. But it's not just Buddhism.
And this is where it kind of gets wild.
Lao Tzu, the foundational Taoist philosopher, wrote about a
principle called wuwei, usually translated as effortless action
or non interference. The idea that natural systems,
when left alone, tend toward harmony.
Chapter 57 of the Doubt the Jing says The more prohibitions you
have, the less virtuous people will be.
The more subsidies you have, the less self reliant people will
be. Central banking is the exact
opposite of Huawei. It's constant intervention,
adjusting interest rates, expanding and contracting
balance sheets, managing expectations, manipulating yield
curves and providing forward guidance.
An entire institution built on the premise that the economy's
natural rhythms need to be managed, controlled and
overridden. Lao Tzu also wrote in chapter 75
that people starve because those above them eat too much tax
grain. That is the only reason why they
starve 2500 years ago. The Cantalon effect described in
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Taoist lens, as precise as they are, they only describe part of
what is actually happening. And there's a deeper layer.
The Hermetic tradition, the kibali, on this mysterious text
rooted in the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, describes
what it calls the principle of rhythm.
Everything flows, everything has its tides, all things rise and
fall. The measure of the swing to the
right is the measure of the swing to the left.
That's the boom and bust cycle, described with precision
millennia before anyone coined the term business cycle.
Every artificial boom plants the seeds of the next bust.
Every swing in One Direction stores energy for an equal swing
back. And the Kibalian says the masses
are swung backward and forward like a pendulum.
But those who understand the principle learn to rise above
the swing, to basically neutralize it, to become movers
instead of being moved. And then it describes the
principle of cause and effect. And this is the line that
stopped me cold. The masses of people are carried
along, obedient to environment, the wills and desires of others
stronger than themselves, moving them about like pawns on the
chess board of life, Pawns on a chess board moved by whales,
stronger than their own. If that's not a description of
how monetary policy works in this day and age on all our
populations, I don't know what is.
The Federal Reserve raises rates and millions could lose their
home. They print more money and wealth
transfers upwards. They tighten and businesses
close. The masses don't choose, The
masses get moved. Now hold that, because there's
one more tradition that ties everything together, and it's
the one that, when I encountered it, made the entire picture
crystal clear. The ancient Gnostics had this
concept of the Demiurge, a powerful figure who created the
material world and convinced everyone it was all there was.
His power depended on keeping people ignorant, focused
entirely on material survival, and able to recognize their own
inner divinity. And the Demiurge had enforcers
called archons. And the crazy thing is that
Archon literally translates from Greek as ruler or authority.
That's not a coincidence. The Gnostics deliberately used a
political term to describe spiritual oppression.
These Archons maintained control through what the text described
as forgetfulness, distraction, and fate.
They kept people in what's called a condition of sleep or
drunkenness, souls trapped in cycles of material existence,
the wheel of reincarnation, and never able to escape because
they never woke up to what was really happening.
Now I'm not asking you to take any of this literally, but as a
philosophical lens, as a metaphor, I think it's damningly
precise. A monetary system that forces
you to trade irreplaceable life energy for token someone else
dilutes at will, that keeps you focused on material survival
through engineered scarcity that uses forgetfulness.
I mean, most people have zero idea about how money is created.
And also distraction, right? Consumerism as a coping
mechanism for the anxiety the system itself creates to prevent
you from asking deeper questions.
And that traps you in cycles. Debt cycles, boom and bust
cycles. The paycheck to paycheck loop.
And that mirrors the Gnostic will of reincarnation very
precisely. And what was the Gnostic answer
to all of this? Gnosis, A word that literally
means direct knowledge. Not belief, not faith in
authority. Personal, verified understanding
of reality. You didn't need a priest or an
institution to mediate your relationship with the absolute
truth. You needed to see it directly
for yourself. And right there, that's where
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Bitcoin score ethos is don't trust verify.
That's gnosis applied to money. You don't need to believe the
Fed. You don't need to trust your
bank. You can run a full note and
independently verify every single transaction ever made on
the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin time chain is a
transparent, mathematically secured record of reality that
anyone can audit. No priests, no intermediaries,
no authority standing between you and the truth about your
money. I call this monetary no direct
knowledge of your own financial reality, verified by you, not
granted by an institution. When you store your life energy
in Bitcoin, you're storing it in a container that no one can
dilute 21 million coins forever. And that cap is enforced by
mathematics and distributed consensus, not by institutions
with agendas and people you will never see the face off.
And the rules of Bitcoin are extremely hard to change.
This was proven in 2017 when 95% of minors signaled for a
protocol change and the notes run by ordinary people all over
the world said no. And the rules held.
And bitcoins fixed protocol. The predictable having every
four years the absence of any committee adjusting supply its
rule way encoded in software. A monetary system that follows
natural rhythms instead of fighting them.
No intervention, no tampering, no meetings to decide what money
should cost. Today there's this Daoist
concept called poo, the uncarved block, representing things in
their natural, uncorrupted state.
Field money is the carved block, shaped entirely by human
artifice, limited by the forms imposed on it.
Bitcoin is way closer to poo. It's unchangeable, unfakeable,
and uncarved. And then there's the option to
keep Bitcoin in self custody. 12 words in your memory.
That's your private key. No government can seize it.
No bank can freeze it. No court can confiscate it.
Your value, decrystallized product of your finite time on
this earth, truly belongs to you.
The Gnostic tradition thought that every human carries a
divine spark, an inner sovereignty that no external
authority can grant or revoke. Bitcoins private key is a
material echo of that idea sovereignty made tangible For
the first time in monetary history.
You can hold your own value completely without anyone's
permission. The bandwidth trap breaks, the
extraction loop ends, and the monkey stops swinging because
the branch stops dissolving. So let me bring this all
together because the synthesis is the most important part.
Ellen Watts said the ego and money are both concepts,
symbols, useful abstractions that become prisons when you
forget their abstractions. The Fiat system captures your
consciousness in exactly this prison.
The Buddhist would say Fiat money amplifies Tana
structurally mandating the craving that causes suffering.
The Taoist would say central banking violates wuwei, forcing
intervention where natural order would serve better, and the
Hermetic tradition would say the masses are moved like pawns
because they don't understand the causes moving them.
The Gnostic would say the Archons maintain control through
forgetfulness and distraction. All of them are pointing at the
same thing from different angles, and all of them are
pointing toward the same solution.
Wake up, see directly. Verify for yourself.
Stop trusting the authorities who benefit from you being
asleep, Buckminster Fuller said You never change things by
fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new
model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Bitcoin is that model, and it's not just about saving your
money. It's about giving you back your
time, your attention and your cognitive bandwidth, your
ability to think beyond plane survival, your sovereignty over
the value of your own life. That is not a financial
revolution. That's a revolution of
consciousness. It starts with 12 words that
nobody else controls. Thanks for listening to this
episode of Bitcoin for Millennials.
If this one hit different, if it made you see money in a way you
hadn't before, share it with someone who needs to hear it.
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I hope to see you for the next episode.
Bye.