The creators of this fantastic Bitcoin film discuss the process that went into crafting it.
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[00:00:07] CK: What’s up, everyone? How’s it going? We’re here to discuss and tease apart Tomer and Matt’s awesome, movie that they made and released today. We also want to talk about why today and not yesterday, as well as every other aspect of Bitcoin that you talk about in the actual video.
Before, just want to talk a little bit about Bitcoin 2022, ultimate Bitcoin event in Miami next April 6th through the 9th. I believe, I got to see and meet many of the people who are on stage at Bitcoin 2021. A lot of history was made at that event. We feel honored to be a place where the Bitcoin community gathers and makes history and continues to make history with Bitcoin. As Tomer illustrates amazingly inside of this beautiful film, too. You can use promo code satoshi to get 10% off. If you pay with Bitcoin, you get another $100 off. Yeah. I think, ticket prices will go up. Buy your tickets low. Prices are going up. They’re programmed that way.
Yeah, come meet Brekkie. Come meet Tomer. Come meet all these amazing Bitcoiners in person at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami at the ultimate Bitcoin cultural event. All right. That’s it for me. Tomer, Matt, what is up?
[00:01:24] MH: Hey everyone.
[00:01:25] TS: Hey there.
[00:01:26] CK: Let’s just jump into, Bitcoin is Generational Wealth. I guess, Tomer, do you want to discuss the story behind the film and we can start from there?
[00:01:34] TS: Sure. The other person to keep an eye out for his Louis Liu, who funded the project for Mimesis Capital. If he shows up and asks to be on stage, please invite him up. This production really begins with Louis reaching out to me. Louis runs a family office. He recently just posted about how his family’s history is one of these families that was ruined in 1948 in China, when the communists took over. He could tell his story.
He was enjoying my articles. He enjoyed one that I’d written about a work of art that he’d collected. We got to talking to each other. He’s in Taiwan, I’m in Canada. The Internet is a wonderful thing and Bitcoin draws us together. He asked me if I would write an article on generational wealth. He told me a little bit of his family story.
I was moved by it. I knew that there was something there, but it was a really hard topic to cover, because I didn’t have the full idea of what in the movie, for those who’ve already seen it. I was really struggling with, how do you write about Bitcoin being good for multiple generations of families, when it hasn’t even been around for 12 years at the time, or 13 years at the time?
I struggled with it. It wasn’t until we got to talking and I realized, you know what? My wife’s family was also ruined in the mid-1940s by World War II. It turns out, I know a lot of families that had to rebuild from scratch. That was the seed of the idea for the article. I said, look, if I can go back in time, maybe I can project forward in time. I talked to a lot of Bitcoiners, who are filled with hope and who just aren’t filled with hope, like empty hope; who are working hard to build the future. We’re speaking with a Canadian here, who works for the commission that’s studying the small scale nuclear reactors and is taking the bids from one. He was teaching me about that.
I talked to Untapped Growth, and he’s doing the regenerative agriculture for Bitcoiners. I talked to Fractal Encrypt, who’s making all this beautiful art. I talked to lots of people who are homeschooling and educating. I did a whole podcast on the separation of state and education. I could just see all of these things coming together. I put them all into this one essay that I wrote for him. Then, just before I shared it with him, I was having a therapy session and I read it to my therapist, or my coach.
As I was reading to him, I said, “Wow, this would make such a better movie than an article.” I presented it to Louis and I said, “Do you think we could make a movie out of it?” He enthusiastically supported it. The next morning, I reached out to my new friend, Matt, who I met at a Toronto Bitcoin meetup, and told him about this. We started working on this project together. I don’t know, Matt, if you want to jump in. This is where you entered the picture.
[00:04:16] MH: Yeah. Yeah, it was a great intro, Tomer. The way I got involved was, I had been going down quite far into the Bitcoin rabbit hole. I literally told my creative partners, because I run a little production company and animation studio. I told my creative partners, I was like, “Guys, I have to do something in Bitcoin. I don’t know what it is, but I just have the desire to contribute to this thing in some way. I don’t know how.” I had that in my head.
Then I shortly after saw that there was a Bitcoin meetup happening in Toronto, that Brandon Quittem retweeted. It was at this amazing, cool tea house called Bam Pot Tea in Toronto. They were having this meetup, so I thought, “Okay. I’ll go to this meetup and see what happens.” I immediately connected with all the Bitcoiners there and met Tomer. I had read some of Tomer’s writing already, so I knew a little bit about his approach to everything and to his takes and perspectives and we connected.
Then he brought it up. Or actually, I made a little Bitcoin meme talking about how much I love Bitcoin. I showed it to Tomer and he liked it. Maybe that percolated and said that I could do some video. I suppose, he had this opportunity to make this into a video, and he came to me and said, “Hey, do you want to try to tackle that?” That’s how it got started.
Then, the first draft of the script was about a 30-minute read. I was like, “Okay, maybe we can pull this down a little bit and make it more suited to the screen.” We hacked away at it for a couple of days and brought it down to something we thought would be maybe closer to 10 to 15 minutes. From there, we just got started on the production with everything. Yeah, that’s the origin story of how we got connected and my involvement.
[00:06:20] TS: To me, this is a story of Bitcoiners finding Bitcoiners. Louis found me. I found Matt, and we found each other through Bitcoin meetups. I guess, that’s the interesting thing. There’s so much talent and desire to be creative in this space that everything seems serendipitous in this whole thing. We’re also eager to work and contribute to Bitcoin, that it turns out not to be that hard to find people and to – I’ve always said this about Bitcoiners and I continue to experience it with all the Bitcoiners I work with.
Everyone is so committed that they give their very best and they do their very best job. I’d seen some of Matt’s work. Matt is a part of this group called Shy Kids. They have this wonderful video with the people who ran this two-shop loved. It’s called I love everything. I think, I love everything, too. Matt and I can – he’s actually witnessed, I’ve done this wonderful three-minute music video. I don’t know if you want to tweet it, Matt, a link to it, and then you can share it in the nest when you get a chance, when we’re talking about something else. It’s a three-minute just delightful, benevolent, fun tune that you won’t be able to get out of your head. It’s fun to watch the video, because it was the video that made me think, “Oh, you know what? It’s a lot of different shots, documentary style in a sense,” that, I think is very light and our thing is heavy.
I had a sense, Matt could absolutely do this and ran it by him. From there on, when he and I got together to start working, as he said, when we edited the original article down by about 35% to 50%, we just did it in one afternoon together in his condominium. We recorded a rough draft right there, then we got together the next week in the studio when he’d already selected a lot of the music, and I recorded the narration, which is a fun story, which we’ll talk about at some point during this the session, because I know a lot of people have written to me about how much they liked the quality of the narration. There’s a story behind that, too.
[00:08:08] B: I wanted to ask Matt, the creative process for this – Can you maybe talk a little bit about how you put this film together? Because you use, I think, mostly stock footage here and the way you did it is it’s a really seamless flow from very old stock footage to this new, very hopeful stock footage. I just want to compliment you on the editing. That was the first thing I told Tomer when he showed me an early cut that I was blown away by the editing. How did you approach the script and then go and find all the footage? Was the script just the narration, or had Tomer, did you give notes on, “Oh, I think, a shot of X, Y, and Z might be good here”? Or, how did it go from script to actual film?
[00:08:45] MH: It was a bit of a messy process. These things, you start off with a really wide casted net of footage, and then hone it in over time, when you find the right shots. What we did was we had the Google Doc – we had a doc of the script. As we were cutting it down, we made comments beside each line like, “Oh, this maybe this shot could have some footage of rockets taking off, or this shot could have footage of families doing some farm work. This shot could be old footage of people struggling in the horrible conditions after the war.”
We had rough ideas of themes for each line and each era. We had this idea of different themes and a rough idea of the shots. Then basically, my team and I, we spend probably a week just scouring the Internet. There’s a website called internetarchive.org, where we found – and it’s all public domain free footage. We just scoured that for the old footage and probably had about a 150 clips. Slowly selected down the ones we thought fit best with all the – with the narration.
Then as we went through the years, we just, we ripped again hundreds of YouTube clips from news casts of the 2008 crisis and all of the stuff happening there. Particularly in 2008, there’s footage of Usain Bolt and the Olympics. We wanted to not only just have footage that touched on the themes, but also just the mood of 2008. Thinking back, it felt like a hopeful time of triumph of humanity or whatever. We wanted to paint a little picture of that and touch on the moods of the era.
Yeah, 1948 was stock footage of really old stuff. Then 2021 was all YouTube clips. Then, as we went into the future, 2048, 2109, that’s all just really good stock footage that we were able to find online. Again, that was just a process of casting a wide net of possible shots we could use. Then slowly whittling down to our favorite ones.
[00:11:15] TS: I would add, this went through a bunch of iterations. Matt did a first cut of it that I would say, it was probably 60% to 70% of what ended up largely in there, and he showed it to us. We actually watched it. The first time I saw it was at another one of these Toronto meetups, at the same place, where it was late in the evening, by the time he’d got the cut from his audio team. There were maybe only 10 of us there, but we watched the first cut of this video and all the music was already there. It was pretty awesome.
I want it to make it more awesome, because there was a scene with the agriculture. I’ve been talking to Untapped Growth and we had stock footage of cows, and some of them were fat. Some of them more have had. I reached out to Joel, who’s Untapped Growth. He sent us all those beautiful pictures of the cows that you see roaming the fields, which are actually regeneratively raised [inaudible 00:12:07] cows.
There were lots of these other shots, where we started reaching out to other people and we brainstormed some of the areas that were clumsy. I think, the thing went through three revisions before it got to this final, most polished state, or that its released state.
[00:12:23] MH: Yeah. All the titles, the years 2048, those are all things we animated ourselves. Then graphic scene where it’s showing the 2009 chance on the brink of bailouts, seeing like we created those graphics. Yeah. It’s probably 90% stock footage and stuff like that. Then the last 10% is stuff we animated in-house.
[00:12:49] TS: Part of how we edited the script, Matt had a vision for the Bitcoin black hole destroying all the evil in the world early on. When we were editing the script, he was like, “Make sure to leave lots of stuff for the black hole to destroy.” Gone, or the monocrop cultures. Gone is this. Gone is that. That’s why the script contains so many of these.
I’ll actually be publishing the original article, the longer one that Matt mentioned. It’ll be first privately available, because I write for Swan Bitcoin, a private newsletter, private clients. I’m going to be publishing it in there, in early November, November 12th. Then within a few weeks, we’ll release it on the blog to everybody else. We want to make a really nice production of the original article itself, too. Then once it’s nicely produced, we’ll be able to share it out with everybody else.
I think, we’ll be lucky if we get a couple of thousand reads of that. We’ve already got 11 or 12,000 views of the video, because videos are just so nice. For people who want to go deeper and see what the original concept was, it’ll be there for them pretty soon, but we’re focused on the movie for now.
[00:13:48] CK: Tomer, you chose to release this movie today. Today’s the day after the day, which most people think is white paper day. Can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:13:59] TS: Yeah. I’ll be totally a 100% honest. I thought, October 31st, while it’s Bitcoin white paper day, and I wanted to release it on October 31st. I met with the team at Swan to talk about this just a few days ago. There was confusion, because many of them have this, the book of Satoshi. It says that the white paper was released at 7:15, or at this time, the exact moment that we started this meetup on November 1st. There was confusion, but they held the book up. I didn’t trust them, because I’m a Bitcoiner. I say, “Don’t trust. Verify.” But they showed me the book.
They also said, it was much better to release a movie the day after Halloween, than on Halloween when everybody’s at a party, which won the argument in any event. There was all this confusion. It felt like, one of these Mandela effects, the Berenstain Bears, everyone’s like, “What’s going on here?”
It turns out that Satoshi did send the Bitcoin white paper to the Cypherpunk mailing list on October 31st. I think, that’s the official date, but that the remailer did not send out the digest until 4:15 Pacific time, November 1st. That’s where the confusion was. There may be some other of my colleagues on here who can clarify that a little bit.
[00:15:10] MH: For both, right?
[00:15:12] TS: Yeah. All the best. What this made me realize is before the launch of Bitcoin, we didn’t know what the fuck happened. We just didn’t have a reliable time chain.
[00:15:20] MH: Time was meaningless.
[00:15:22] TS: Now we know. If we said, it was the least of a particular block, or in a particular transaction. There it is. It’s in that block. It’s not, oh, it was sent at this time and received that. I’m like, this is the confirm time and that’s that. It reminds me of Gigi’s article, Bitcoin is Time. He points out in there that in the digital realm, we never really had any sense of time, or certainty of what came before and what came after. We do now, thanks to Bitcoin. we don’t have to deal with this terrible crisis, everybody.
I think, I have to apologize for the promise of releasing it on the 13th birthday of Bitcoin’s white paper, because in the end of the day, I was mistaken that – I was correct and then mistaken, and now I’m re-corrected. It was yesterday.
[00:16:03] MH: But what the heck?
[00:16:04] TS: We all had to wait an extra day.
[00:16:06] CK: That’s a great story, and some nice history there. Y’all were referring to the movie without really teasing it out for those who may not have already watched the film. I think, it makes sense to actually go step by step through the progression that you tell in the story, Tomer.
[00:16:24] TS: I chose to start the story in 1948. The year is 1948. I could have started plus or minus one or two years from there, but I wanted to start with the last time we had this terrible collapse in our civilization, which was World War II. World War II was a world war. We Westerners, who I think are most of the audience here tend to think of it as something that took place predominantly in Europe, but it took place in Asia as well. It has devastating effects all over the world. Millions, tens of millions of people died in horrible ways.
It was really, when you look at it in a historical lens, it was just a continuation of World War I, which was equally horrible. So much was destroyed, like buildings, bombed cities, firebombed, atomic bomb was dropped on – It was a terrible time of devastation. We can’t imagine the horror. Those of us who had grandparents, or great-grandparents, who were around and lived there and told us that tales, they were shocking.
My wife’s grandparents were interned in concentration camps. They were lucky to survive. The stories that they tell are – When I say they were lucky to survive, they were a hundred times where the odds were 99% that they would die. They’re at the extreme end of lucky for what happened and living by their smarts. They left Europe with nothing. In her case, they came to Canada in the belly of a boat. Her mother was born just before and carried as a baby in the compartment of a boat. They had to build everything from scratch. Louis tells a similar story of what happened in Asia.
I wanted to concretize, yes, civilization falls and it fell not too long ago, and we had to rebuild. The danger of it comes, and everyone talks amongst Bitcoiners about Weimar Germany and how the inflation led to the collapse of the civilization and created the openings for the tyrants to step in. The money has a lot to do with this. Wars were fought over gold and wars were fought over money and wars ended when the money ran out and you couldn’t pay the soldiers anymore. It was always war over money.
I wanted to stress that, and I wanted to show both the devastation and the spirit of rebuilding. Because part of what I’m headed for in this movie is we get to rebuild. What if we don’t keep getting torn down? What if we actually managed to rebuild and maintain the rebuilding and not see a collapse and fall and devastation? That in the short little article that I wrote for Bitcoin Magazine, it was like, what happens if we have an unfallible civilization, built on the shoulders of an infallible money?
That’s why I started in 1948. I wanted to really remind people, or demonstrate to them if they hadn’t seen it, this isn’t a recent history. The people who lived it are now all dying. They’re all passing away, but it shouldn’t be forgotten.
[00:19:16] CK: Louis. I think, this is a good spot for you to jump in, just because we haven’t really gone into detail into the future that Tomer sees and illustrates in the film and the article. Do you want to chime in with maybe, your personal story around your family name to rebuild and the opportunity you see with Bitcoin?
[00:19:35] LL: My story is simple. Tomer mentioned in 1949, I think, there’s a lot of turmoil and chaos had been around the world, especially in the Asia and Europe, when World War II started. My family suffer aftermath when there’s a two parties fighting a civil war in China. We all know, was a national list versus communist.
Nationalists actually defeated. They escaped, retreat back to Taiwan. Taiwan during that time, was guarded by Japan, by the Japanese, and they got defeated in World War II. They left Taiwan with defeated. Then nationalists come to Taiwan and basically, confiscated every resident’s wealth, and we have this law being implemented, where all that is going to be belong to the nationalist party. The wealth being redistributed, centered on the high guard of the nationalist party.
That was the background. My family has suffered around the historical moment. Older than is being confiscated. We pretty much lost all the wealth. Start from zero. We spent a couple of generation to rebuild that wealth back. That reminds me, founder, historical background. We really shouldn’t be feel safe, because there’s a lot of historical evidence that it might happen again. I’m not saying, be pessimistic about it. At least, we need to defend ourselves against a situation.
In modern time, after COVID, there’s a lot of tension between Taiwan and China. I’m starting to see this conflict happen again. If that happens, as a Taiwanese, or as someone in deck house situation, you need to find a way, a tool, a technology to escape, or isolate yourself from that situation. Bitcoin gives that opportunity and solution to that problem. Which that inspired me to contact Tomer, and later, Matthew to construct this film and bring this concept to the light.
[00:21:46] TS: Yeah. I think, one of the other things that really inspired me about this story is Louis is a young guy. He’s attuned to this, and he doesn’t want to see this happen again to his family. He has recognized Bitcoin and invested substantially in Bitcoin. He’s not a larper. He’s the real deal. He’s taken his family off its wealth, its family wealth and secured it with Bitcoin. That’s very real. Because many people would say, that’s a huge gamble. You should diversify into real estate and companies and this and that and the other. I don’t know exactly what his portfolio is, but I know he has a lot of Bitcoin, or he’s heavily about investing in Bitcoin.
It’s that kind of commitment that I think, is what paves the way for me then to start thinking about, but there really are families that are serious about Bitcoin, and they’re serious about it and in preserving it, and that leads me to the next thing. I don’t know if you wanted to add anything about your conviction and your timeframe around Bitcoin, and how you told me your story, Louis. Maybe you can, if you want, and then we can move forward into the story.
[00:22:51] LL: Sure. It got me really star thinking when, there’s a geo-political conflict between US and China. That conflicts between Taiwan’s nationalism and obviously, communist party agenda. If that happens, there’s an urgent sense of where to park your wealth.
I think, not a lot of people actually thinking about it. They think this is just something that might just go away. I don’t think so. I think, there’s a real threat in these certain instances. You need to be prepared for that. In the around, past two to three years, I convinced my family to park most of the cash, if not all of the cash, into Bitcoin.
We saw this COVID crisis calming. There’s no way to do actual business during the COVID time. What are you going to do with your asset cash, or how do you store your wealth? That become the real problem. Also, essential threats coming from communist party. The only way to store your wealth, or to protect hard earn money for your family business, or whatever is to try to find this type of hedge that’s available to everyone. If I’m American, I won’t be able to access to Taiwanese stock. If I’m Taiwanese, I might be not able to access to American stocks.
Bitcoin’s type of asset that pretty much everyone around the world can access to it. It’s globally tradable. It’s better store value than gold. That’s makes us to think, this is probably the only solution to navigate this problem.
[00:24:32] TS: Yeah. Thanks, Louis.
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[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[00:25:31] TS: Here we have a big problem that keeps happening in the world, which is our nations keep falling, their currencies keep failing, and it’s real, and it’s serious, and it’s the same devastating story over and over again. That’s where this begins.
If you want me to keep going on, the next chapter is unavoidable, right? 2008. That’s the moment in history where Bitcoin shows up on the scene. That’s what we’re celebrating yesterday. Someone was mistaken today. I really want it to be able to share the contrast of all of these things that were going on. It was a time of extravagance. It was suddenly, also, a time of surprise ruined. I know, suddenly, there’s a financial crisis. I was there during the financial crisis. I didn’t hear about Bitcoin. I didn’t hear about Bitcoin until 2013, and I’m an early adopter.
I really wanted to highlight, Satoshi is my hero. I wanted to highlight what it was that Satoshi did as well in it. I wanted to tell the story of 2008. We’re having a great time, but suddenly, everything, we get a rug pull, and the people in power use it to take advantage. The banks that failed, didn’t fail. They were too big to fail. They got the bailouts. None of them paid any price. Nobody went to jail. Nobody personally was fined. Even if you were fined, it didn’t affect your career. It really demonstrated the true two-class system that we have, or those of us who work and suffer the consequences of our failures, and those of us who don’t really work and don’t suffer the consequences of our failure.
It bothered Satoshi too, obviously. Because he, when he launches Bitcoin, first of all, he’s got the motivation to create it, all right, and the genius and the brilliance that those of us who study it are just blown away by how someone created an invention so effective, and so principled, so disciplined, and made himself part of this invention, too. Like, his anonymity, his pseudonymity is part of what Bitcoin is, along with his disappearance, which comes later in the video.
It’s incredible. He toils alone in darkness, in pseudonymity. I really wanted to portray that in the article that I wrote. We ended up having a really nice demonstration of it, I think in the video, which this is one of the things that we went back a second time around. I can’t remember even what was exactly in the first cut of the video, in that part where we say, “Meanwhile, in the dark, deserted recesses of the information high network that now spans the globe, low an engineer toils.”
[00:28:01] MH: It was just the white paper.
[00:28:02] TS: Oh, it was pictures of the white paper. I said, the white paper didn’t quite even existed yet. He was writing code. He was toiling, writing away code. I’ve found the pre-released version of the code. It’s still on SourceForge or somewhere. Or it was on bitcointalkforum.org. There were all these old copies of all the source data. We put it in there and Matt just edited it so beautifully, of like, here’s the code of how a transaction goes in and how a transaction goes out. It goes out into a public key and this and that, and then just speeding up the scrolling of it, to demonstrate the volume of work that Satoshi did. That’s how the 2008 portion of the video ends.
I find it quite moving myself, because it ends without those words. He’s trying to create something that may serve as money, that will never be corrupted by tyrants, liars, fools, or thieves, whatever the exact order of the description there was. That’s what Satoshi did. We’re all really grateful for it today, those of us who appreciate the power of invention.
[00:28:59] LL: I think, Satoshi create a hope for millions of families in 2008, which a lot of family lost hope. Wealth gap destroyed. There’s really no solution to that problems. What we’ve done is money printing. Bitcoin really offers that hope, or you can say, the solution to the money printing problem, which costs a lot of chaos. Even nowadays, governments, politicians still using the same method to solve the problem, which is the problem itself is the money printing.
I think that clips in the film, really showcase the transition that in the modern era, when stuff become very bad, that’s in 2008. Forward to now, 2020, the COVID crisis, which the problem become bigger.
[00:29:52] TS: If we’re going through it, I this takes us to the third part of the video, which is the year is 2021. It’s now. The whole thing is just to say, the world is in turmoil once again. Everything that we were – 2008 was just a practice run. It’s feeling a lot more, like the things that led up to 1948. We have a world in turmoil again, and it’s a yucky world. Without Bitcoin, it’s a world without hope. I don’t know where else anyone looks for hope. I’m happy to be corrected. Someone, raise your hand and tell me what sign of hope exists besides Bitcoin. We’re the only optimistic subculture that I’m aware of. Everybody else’s feeling the nihilism and the despair creeping up.
Mark Zuckerberg offers us a vision of the future, where there’s no smell, there’s no taste, there’s no touch, there’s just low-res video and audio of something strapped to your face in his metaverse, and the world economic foundation offers us a future where we’re eating bugs and owning nothing, and living in pods. It’s not a pretty picture.
Bitcoin is offering something different. That’s really all I wanted to stress in the 2021 portion of the video. It’s, we need to talk about the here and now, because it’s being made for people in the here and now. The here and now, aside from Bitcoin, doesn’t look optimistic. Then, I didn’t want to talk about what might happen in the next few years.
I think, this was one of the things that I thought was somewhat clever about the formulation of the piece. It’s not trying to talk about the details of what we do in 2020, in August of 2022, or in September of 2023. It says, we have a lot of work ahead of ourselves, but let’s take a look at what the final product of that work is. Let’s leap forward to a 100 years from when the video started, or when the story started in 2048.
Let’s look at all the things that Bitcoiners are actually working towards, and that when our money takes over, we get to work on the things we want to work on. Because our money is money for generations, it’s indestructible. It’s unstoppable. It’s unseizeable. It’s incorruptible. We’ll be able to work for generations and our work won’t be stopped. We won’t have fools who are also tyrants steal our money, steal our capital, destroy our businesses. We’ll actually be able to keep them running for generations.
What are we working towards? It’s amazing how Bitcoin changes you. It changes you to want to work for the good that will go beyond your lifespan. For those of you who are in the crowd who are new Bitcoiners, you may think I’m crazy. For those of you who are longtime Bitcoiners, you’re all nodding in agreement.
It just takes time for you to see it, but I was able to just looking at the inspiration of the people who are doing things already in Bitcoin and seeing where the technology was headed and knowing what I myself would want to work on and support and seeing how many Bitcoiners are trying to build these citadels that have all of these things in common; access to clean energy. We talk about stranded energy, clean energy building, right? Just, everywhere that Bitcoin touches. Clean energy comes up. The talk of regenerative agriculture comes up. The talk of better education.
Again, we went through the industrial revolution and we industrialized everything into mass-produced facilities, including humans. Or the whole education system is putting people into a assembly line. You go through kindergarten, then you go through grade one. Then you go through grade two. Everybody goes through the exact same process. You’d learned the exact same thing at the exact same time, everywhere in your country in the world, because that’s what your nation mandates as the learning experience. It’s an industrial approach to raising human beings.
I personally don’t believe we’re widgets to be raised industrially, so that we come out the other end of the machine all shaped to the way that a country wants, but not in the shape that we were meant to grow in. These are all the things that I saw for Bitcoin. I wanted to say, let’s leap over the challenges and turmoil that we have. This is meant to be the inspiring video. Let’s show the outcome as a work to inspire people. That’s what the 2048 chapter of this thing is. It talks about all these industries.
I had even more industries I wanted to talk about, but there was a time limit. I wanted to talk about medicine and healthcare and mental health, which I think are all going to be things that become so much better than they are today. Time is limited, so focused on the ones that we had and painted this beautiful vision of life, of agriculture, of education, of being, of choosing your profession and doing what it is that you want to do, of clean energy generation, and of housing just being available. Because that’s another one of these areas that I just think is so tragic today. The only reason a house costs a million dollars, instead of $200,000 is because there’s two bidders for it, and a bank is standing behind each one saying, “Here, take another $800,000 of debt.”
If the banks weren’t there offering all this free debt, then people would only be paying $200,000, or whatever the right number is. They’d be paying a lot less. We’re all leveraging our houses with five times debt to one times equity, or whatever the number is. Or four times debt to one times equity. That’s all because of the money printing. That’s the only reason. We all become enslaved in paying our mortgages for forever. They do the same thing with education, with college education, where it used to cost $10,000, $14,000 when I was in university. Now it costs $200,000 for no good reason, other than that they’ll lend you that much money, so that much money pours into the system.
I really want to envision a time when there’s nobody who will lend you that money, because nobody’s going to part with their Bitcoin. That was the 2048 piece of it. The 2048 piece now blends in with the final piece, which is the 2109, which is now a 100 years after the launch of Bitcoin. That one for me was just putting the cap on the story to say, a 100 years after Bitcoin’s launched, it hasn’t fallen. It hasn’t failed.
When you have sound money being sound for a 100 years, what can you imagine? The families that actually are responsible and take care of their wealth and take care of the people who help them earn their wealth are dynasties. I just couldn’t think of any other word. Matt found all of these beautiful imagery to go along with it. There’s peace in the world, because there’s nothing to fight wars over when there’s productivity and agreement, right? We don’t have different currencies. We don’t have trade wars.
If you think of all the things that we call wars, even though we have real wars, with real bombs, and real guns and real casualties, but we have all – We have the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the trade wars. It’s just this endless framing of everything is war. To me, Bitcoin really changes it. For those of you who read my writing, I’ve recently published a piece called Bitcoin is a Declaration of Peace. It just says, with Bitcoin, I don’t need to be at war with anybody. I can either do business with them, or leave them in peace. We don’t mean any harm to each other. Maybe at some other point, I’ll have an opportunity to share that with this audience.
That’s what I really wanted to end, and just leave it with this division of this beautiful planet that we all live on, living in harmony with it, living in harmony with each other, and knowing that we can rest assured, that the evil forces of monetary debasement have no power here anymore on this planet, because we have Bitcoin.
[00:37:23] CK: I love that. I think, that there’s a lot of topics that Bitcoiners are interested in, that you touched on in the film that maybe we can dive into. I’m curious to hear from Cory and Stef. Cory, I know that you’ve always been a big supporter of Tomer, but big in supporting this film and pushing this out. Where does this resonate with your vision for Bitcoin and why you back this movement in general with your time and your energy and your company?
[00:37:48] CoK: Oh, man. Lots to bite off there. First of all, just, congratulations you guys, especially to Tomer and to Louis, anybody else that was involved in this. It’s absolutely beautiful. My DMs are blowing up. Telegram groups are blowing up. This one is having a serious impact.
A lot of us have turned our attention toward the future and where Bitcoin can go. Obviously, the longer you’ve been in the space and the more comfortable you are talking about what Bitcoin is, and being capable of getting people you care about, at least somewhat invested in it or whatever, your mind starts to turn toward the future.
I think, people like Tomer and Gigi and John Vallis, and so many more, obviously, going way, way back, just a few, top of mind for me, are thinking about what the world is going to be like 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 50 years from now. I love that these futurists with a Bitcoin affinity are charting a path through their imagination and through their vision and having some fun with it, and thinking about it.
I think, some of these guys that have the time and put in the time are living in the future. Then, it gets to be the situation where we’re like, okay, the future is actually here. It’s just not evenly distributed. We do have friends of ours already living in that bright, orange future that that I like to talk about.
I aspire to have a little bit more time, maybe after solon, or after salon hits a steady state. I can bump up to chairman, or something like that. For now, I’m just so heads down. When I get to just take a breather, I watch 35 minutes of this machine greens, or 15 minutes of the generational wealth piece, or some of the other beautiful stuff that’s coming out now. There’s just more and more of it all the time. It pulls me out of the weeds and makes me appreciate the movement that we’re part of.
[00:39:30] SL: Yeah, sure. I think it was really great. Tomer did a great job with, I think, writing it well and all the imagery and the visuals really came together. I think, it’s interesting, because we talk about this idea of Bitcoin. Obviously, we’re all bullish on Bitcoin. We think it’s going to literally millions of dollars per coin. It’s not really about that. It’s more the social change, the cultural change. I know, it’s one of those things where obviously, people get this feeling of, “Oh, I’m here for the money. I’m going to buy this coin. I’m going to get rich.”
Honestly, and truly, it’s not – it’s actually about making the world a better place. That truly is, I think, conveyed in the piece as well in the video. Because you really get that sense of, “Oh, no.” It’s actually about what are the relationships we’re going to have with our family and our community, and the way we’re going to treat each other and treat all the people, as opposed to nowadays, where it’s, fiat and Keynesianism have turned this world into a dog eat dog world, when it doesn’t have to be that way.
Right now, it’s like the “leaders,” many of whom are, very corrupt, whether they’re some corrupt bureaucrat or politician, oftentimes it’s the worst rise to the top. we’re just living in a world where the system is set up in such a bad way, that for the most part, obviously, there’s certain exceptions out there. For the most part, it’s the worst rise to the top in the current Keynesian paradigm.
A lot of the economic paradigms that we’ve been under are acting as apologists for that. Instead, we’re trying to challenge that and say, no, we’re switching that out and we’re replacing that with our own vision. What do we think it’s going to look like? Along with being a Bitcoiner, it’s almost like, there are certain other things.
Look, I get, not everyone agrees on every aspect of it, the Bitcoin. The Bitcoin carnival thing and eating lots of meat and being into regenerative agriculture and being into, let’s say, homeschooling, or other more alternative ideas that are out there. Maybe not all of those things are going to come true, or be the way, even though I may personally have a belief, or a view on those things. The video sketches out a few ideas and obviously, some of the imagery and stuff is there showing that. It’s there to sketch out a vision. It doesn’t necessarily mean, it’s going to all go exactly that way. Yeah, great job. Thanks.
[00:41:43] B: I just had a question for Tomer and for Stephan also. Tomer, you talk about citadels sometimes and Stephan, you sign off your podcast with See You in the Citadels. I think, for a lot of people, or maybe a lot of people outside of Bitcoin, there’s this misperception of what that actually means. That it’s this selfish thing that, oh, we’re going to lock ourselves away from the people without Bitcoin. I don’t think that’s what it means at all. Tomer, I’d love to hear what does a Bitcoin Citadel actually mean to you in the context of this film?
[00:42:08] TS: Listen, that’s a great question. I think that there’s going to be a lot of diversity to these regions. It’s cute that we call them citadels. It’s like a big word for city as well. I really view them as natural human place – in the state of nature, human beings are like hunter gatherers, and we live at peace with nature. We don’t live very long. We don’t have very much technology to aid us, but we rest – We’re not working for anybody else. We gather our food and then we rest. They recently found some artwork as someone carved a duck out of out of wood 30,000 years ago. It’s some very ancient piece of art, because hunter gatherers actually had time, probably, to start creating an early art.
Then, we develop agriculture, which means we develop jobs and we develop property. When we develop jobs, there are some people going to say, “If I can get someone else to do the work, maybe I can not do the work. I can be in charge of him.” The idea of management comes in, and the idea of slavery eventually comes in, and the idea of someone getting the benefit of somebody else’s work creeps in. At the same time, that the idea of trade is developed. There’s these two sides to specialization.
There’s the positive side of, we can each specialize and create something, but there’s also the dark side of it, where people take advantage of it. We also develop technology and technology is a double-edged sword. We’re all terribly addicted nowadays to digital technology. We. don’t play on the road and in the grass as much as we used to. To me, these Bitcoins citadels, it’s this amazing thing about this technology of Bitcoin, as it is very organic. It doesn’t say, you need to stare at the screen. Although, many Bitcoiners stare at the screen a lot, but it doesn’t say you need to stare at the screen and manage this. It’s money that you don’t have to manage.
If right now, we all are staring at other screens, of what’s the price of this stock? Or what’s the price of this? Or what’s my house worth? With Bitcoin, it’s steady. Your wealth is preserved. You earn your wealth by doing work that you think is valuable, that other people agree is valuable, and you choose to stop working when you’ve earned enough. It lets you actually judge what is enough and what isn’t.
I see these citadels as very natural places. Exactly as Matt depicted them in the video, people not plugged in. Maybe using some digital technology here and there, but enjoying nature, enjoying life. I think, I’m grateful to mark Zuckerberg for providing the perfect contrast to what I envisioned as a citadel, which is his meta, which is this, you live in a low-res, boring cartoon with nothing satisfying going on here. You’re clean, I guess, and you don’t get your hands dirty. You don’t build anything. To me, these are very peaceful places. They’re not like, citadel sound like they’re armed places. We live in peace.
I’m 51, and I remember being a kid in the 1970s was a pretty peaceful experience. Sure, there was a bully here and there. Sure, you broke your arm, because you did something stupid riding a bicycle downhill with no hands. It’s not utopian, but it’s real and it’s real human. You fall in love with somebody. Sometimes you fall out of love and you get your heart broken and you learn from that. That’s a human experience. It’s not sitting on a couch, surfing the Internet, never really interacting with another human being. That’s what I really can’t wait for.
It’s also, where you’re not so obsessed with money that you’ll sell your soul, and then you’ll do evil to earn a buck. That the only thing that matters is making a buck. I watched our civilization turn, get twisted from you earn your money, so that you could buy the things you wanted. There’s no limit on the amount of money that you chase and your worth is measured in the amount of money that you possess, which is completely preposterous. Your worth is your soul. Your worth is your personality, your friends, your value to other people and their value to you. That’s what’s worth.
People just get obsessed with brand names and fancy cars and all these things that really don’t provide any happiness. The only joy they provide, which is a very sick form of joy is they create jealousy in the people who don’t have them, who desire them. When they get them, the only thing that they’re chasing is causing jealousy in somebody else. That’s not a healthy way. It explains to me so much of the mental illnesses that exist in our civilization. We can just let go and be ourselves and not worry that we can’t be ourselves and we have to chase money, because you’re either on team makes all the money in the world, or a team gets all the money in the world stolen from it. Those teams are gone under the Bitcoin standard. Everyone’s on the same team. I earn what I earn, and I choose what to do with it.
[00:46:43] SL: Yeah. Sure, man. The thing with citadels is – Actually, for anyone who’s not clear, it started from basically, a meme post on Reddit. I think, it was 2013 or 14. Basically, it was a time travel, who is coming back from the future to warn everyone to want everyone to not do this whole Bitcoin thing guys, because otherwise, it’s going to end up really bad. They were saying that all the rich people who would have to live in these citadels. I think, they even call out the Winklevoss twins back then and saying, “Oh, they were under threat of the assassination and things.” It was a very dark vision. That was the initial post.
I think, the citadel meme has become more a – Bitcoin, it’s a bit more like a Rorschach test. You see what you want to see in it. If you’re coming from a certain point of view, whether that’s anti-central banking, or the Cypherpunk view, then you see in Bitcoin what you want. It’s a bit like that. I think, citadels are like that. People have their own idea of what is a citadel. Some people think of, it’s going to be this Ready Player One, via metaverse thing. Other people think of it more, oh, it’s just your home and you just defend it, and that’s your citadel. Other people think of it more like the going gold, a gold sculpture, this idea of older, productive people moving away to separate themselves from the collectivists. That’s another conception of it.
I think, yeah. I guess, if I had to spell out what I think it’ll be, I think maybe it’ll start with maybe a little bit of this whole idea of rich people trying to get away and protect themselves. I think, genuinely, I think it will expand out and it will become more this open and expansive, prosperous world that we’re going to live in. You would just go and live in different zones, or different areas based on what you want, what you believe, what you think is cool.
The perception as well of less of the boring and monotonous task, it will be more the things that you enjoy doing and things that relate to human connection. I think, that’s a few ideas around what it might go towards, as opposed to drone work, if you will.
[00:48:43] TS: Yeah. It’s funny. I think, you’re creating a citadel, a temporary citadel anytime you’re around a bunch of Bitcoiners. You meet up at a meetup and that feels like the citadel. I feel like, it’s the same thing as saying, “See you at the finish line, or see you at the after-party, or something like that.” You create this little community where you have a ton of trust. I always think when I get together with a group of five, or 10 Bitcoiners, or something like that, you have so much common ground.
If they pronounced Stephan Livera correctly and can name one or two of their favorite episodes of Tales from the Crypt, or something like that, can tell you their favorite chapter from the Bitcoin standard, then you can assume a lot about that person. You don’t really need to talk about Bitcoin all that much. You can test a few ideas for 10 to 15 minutes and the other six hours that are going to fly by, it’s just going to be about life and plans and fun and all kinds of other things.
I don’t think it’s this end destination. I think, life is a journey. You got to enjoy it along the way. Folks that are realizing the concentration of Bitcoiners in places like Austin and occasionally around conferences in Miami are more and more people moving to Nashville, or at least stopping by. Us as poor folk stuck here in Southern California, making sure that we get together for barbecues at Andy’s house once a month, or down with the Orange County people, that is the citadel. It’s a rolling party of Bitcoiners. where you feel super comfortable being yourself and knowing that you’re around other people that are on their version of basically, the same journey. You share tons of time with them, and you can trust that they are generally have high integrity and becoming higher integrity all the time, because that’s what Bitcoin does to you.
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[00:52:19] CK: Cory, I think you touched on a topic, which is what Bitcoin does to you and in the film and in Bitcoin Twitter, and in along Bitcoin discourse in general, Bitcoiners are not shy about how bullish they are. How Bitcoin is going to fix a lot of aspects of society that are corrupted, or flawed or any, anything that you could point to. Tomer, I want to dive into what’s wrong with food and nourishment? What’s wrong with education? What’s wrong with a lot of these themes and what does Bitcoin have to do with food? I think, that’s a good place to start.
[00:52:55] TS: Sure. I’ve been around for a little while. The food today does not taste the way the food tastes when I was – It tastes less good, less natural, less sweet. Of course, there’s so much packaged food and processed food, things that come in packages that last for a really long time, that are low-nutrient. I think, this has a lot to do with the money. The desire to squeeze every last penny out of the productivity and essentially, the nationalization of the food supply, because we have – they’re called different names in different countries, but there are different boards that supervise and have regulatory authority over different types of agriculture.
The first time I became aware of this was when I went to [inaudible 00:53:33]. I got married. I went on my honeymoon to Hawaii, like so many people. As we were driving around, there was just endless sugarcane. I remember, the taxi driver is telling us, “Oh, yeah. The government pays people to grow sugar cane. They really want sugar here.” I never thought about it again.
Fast forward 25 years, and everybody’s got too much sugar, and it was the government that was paying everybody to produce sugar. I live in Canada, where we have these wheat boards and these milk boards and they buy all the wheat in a nationalized way and they invariably, cause too much of it to be produced and they ended up dumping tons of it. They don’t even give it to the starving countries overseas. The same as done with milk. They overproduce the milk by over-hormonizing and injecting the cows with all this stuff. We just ended up with all of these crops. Everything’s grown to industrial techniques, every chemical that we can put on it to get the yield up as much as possible, because we sell it by the pound.
We don’t get to experience the quality of food that we used to experience. There’s lots of studies that show devastating impact on the quantity of nutrient per pound of food. It’s way down. It’s hard to even get the proper amount of nutrients. You look at the civilization. We’re out of shape. It’s important that you exercise, but it’s also important that you eat right. It’s hard to eat right when all the food is low-nutrient, or processed.
This is partly, because everything has been mass corporatized and then regulated to the nines. What ends up happening is all these very large corporations that are very inhuman and focused just on next quarters, bottom line, and not really about the health of the people.
They themselves become part of this machine that is just manufacturing everything to the tightest specifications, rather than to the specifications of quality and craftsmanship. We eat wonder bread, instead of fresh baked bread. We eat all this really ridiculous processed stuff. The fruits are grown to last forever over long shipping techniques, rather than to be eaten fresh locally, where they’re grown.
We’ve just made all these choices that are bad choices. They’re hard to get out of, because big business, which succeeds at the benefit of the fiat system, because they’re the only ones who can afford the lobbyists and the lawyers, that just drive the craft person, the farmers who are local and organic, largely out of business.
Again, I don’t actually even claim to be the expert on this, but I’m pretty confident about much of what I’ve just said there. I know, sometimes, by opening your eyes, I know with my tongue, because I taste the food, and I know with my eyes, because I look around in the population. The leanest of us now is what we used to consider the most out of shape amongst us before. Something’s gone wrong.
[00:56:18] MH: You’re a 100% with everything you just said. There’s also this larger, almost mythological approach that we take in general. We were talking about war earlier. If fiat incentivizes war, our psychology in that system tends to take on the characteristics of war. We approach everything through this warring mentality. With regard to food, so much of the nutrient deficiency that we see in so many people’s diets is because of the food they eat. That food is that way, because we’ve destroyed the soil. Why have we destroyed the soil? Because, oh there’s these pests that are invading the field, so we got kill them. We have to drench these chemicals all over the soil, so we keep this one-eighth population out.
If you contrast that to the regenerative mindset, it’s okay, there’s this pest that’s coming. It’s coming in and it’s destroying all of our crops. Instead of immediately reacting and invoking the warring mentality and thinking, what do we have to kill in order to make our crop yields be more efficient? The mentality is, what do we need to shift in the total ecological landscape in order that our food production will be in harmony with those pests?
It’s getting out of hopefully, and I think we tried to paint this in the future 2048, 2100, 2109 moments in the film, where it’s, we’re doing a regenerative approach. The whole approach there isn’t trying to get rid of everything that bugs us in food production, but it’s like, how can we mold our food production to be in harmony with the nature around us? Yeah, I just wanted to add that there. That it’s the system that incentivizes us, for the farmers to make as much crop as possible. It’s also the mentality that the farmers used to solve the problem, which is oh, well, we got to put some chemicals on it immediately, instead of invoking the more regenerative mentality of what can we do to shift our overall relationship with the environment around us to come into harmony with it? I don’t know if that made sense, but –
[00:58:59] CK: Makes total sense. I love even the mentality of war on aphids, or whatever. Mark, I don’t know. I’m sure you have a lot to add to this conversation. We were talking a little bit about citadels and maybe this definition of citadels. I know that you’re putting on a conference and you educate people a lot about, how to navigate the short-term of instability potentially coming up. I don’t know if you have anything to add regarding – maybe how Bitcoin changes this dynamic of chaos and volatility, and gives for once, a reliable store of wealth that could potentially, actually make it through that kind of a situation.
[00:59:37] MM: Yeah, for sure. I think about Bitcoin in obviously, a bunch of ways. It changes one of the oldest problems that mankind has had since the beginning, which is obviously, massive, if you can fix that. That’s the problem of how do I store and secure my wealth, right? My value, whatever you want to call that, your property. Protecting your private property. It’s the oldest problem, right? Someone’s going to come take my chickens and then people band together. Then, you have villages and cities and kingdoms and countries, etc.
For Bitcoin being able to allow you to store your private property in a way that doesn’t require any security, any capital to do that, as well as being portable, it’s hard to imagine how big of a shift that makes in the world, but it’s massive when it takes away that oldest problem. A few of the ways that I think about it is that it creates certainty into the future. The more uncertain things are, the harder it is to plan. You don’t plan. You can’t plan ahead, and so we see that today. I don’t know what the laws – I heard Cory talking about California. I’ve been hiding out in Puerto Rico, but we’re thinking about going back to California next year, but I don’t know what the governor’s going to have the laws be next year. I don’t even know next month. We can’t live under this uncertainty.
Having Bitcoin, where we can store that wealth in a way that we can be certain, that it can’t be inflated away, see stolen, can’t be censored, blocked, stopped, etc., it creates that certainty that we can now have that foundation to build our lives on. It gives us that base. I think, we’ll just start to see amazing things being built onto that, with that uncertainty gone with that base.
That’s a couple of ways that I think about Bitcoin in regards to the citadel. I’ve personally thought about the citadel as a place that I would probably go with other Bitcoiners, and probably have to hunker down. I know, you just referenced that. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about maybe where the next couple of years go. Unfortunately, I think, the next couple of years probably continue to get a little bit worse, more authoritarian control. They’ll try to push back. The people will push back.
I think about the citadel in a sense where it’s probably something I’m like, looking at setting up. Texas has been on my radar. I’m working on a piece of property in Mexico right now. I’ve thought. It’s like, where could I go to hunker down? Then, I know Cory talked about just where you have your Bitcoin people around with you. I can tell you firsthand of moving from California to Puerto Rico and losing my whole community, it was super hard. I know, Christian, I think you’re moving as well, or you already did, and you’re figuring it out. Losing your community is super hard. Anytime you can plug into a group of Bitcoiners, it’s instant community.
I think, it’s because we align on values, right? That’s how people align. Bitcoiners hold the highest values, and we align on those. It doesn’t matter the race, sex, religion, sexual preference, whatever you want to split people up on, but those core values that Bitcoin aligns people on.
I think of the citadel is having that place that I can go hunker down, that could be defended. I like to think of it in terms of defense. Bitcoin is the perfect defense. Defend that private property, but with other Bitcoiners. I think, I’m hopeful that there’s plenty of them being sprouted up, not just around the country, but around the world.
I know people down in El Salvador now. I could go hunker down in that citadel or whatever. I think, they’re popping up more and more. It’s encouraging. I think, we’re going to need them. I think, people should continue to think about those. People should have a backup contingency plan. Insurance is a pain in the ass and it’s expensive until you need it. While I’m the eternal optimist and the future is better, man, a lot of things could go wrong between the next couple of years. As far as energy crisis, food crisis is happening. Supply chains are breaking down in a really big way. Bitcoiners are prepared. Bitcoiners are the ones that are thinking forward, thinking about the future. Anyway, I’m glad to hunker down with them anytime.
[01:03:11] CK: In terms of in terms of Bitcoin fixing this, obviously, we talked about the soil, but we also see people push back on fitness, pushback on education. You went on stage really passionate about rethinking those subjects, and again, why just the money come into it.
[01:03:29] TS: I’ll say one more thing, because this one I’m really passionate about. I’ll let others tackle some of the others. To me, I think we really missed on education as a civilization. Again, it’s because we socialized education and standardized it and removed it from the free market. We don’t actually have a free market for education. Even private schools tend to be forced to teach a nationalized curriculum, or at least a state-mandated curriculum. We don’t get to experiment as we do in other things with what’s the best way to raise a human? What’s the best way to teach a human being? Should we let kids who are really not interested in math by grade two, just let it go? This kid doesn’t want to do math. He loves drawing. He loves building things with his hands. Let him pursue what he wants, rather than force him for another seven or eight or nine or 10 more years to feel bad about himself, because this one subject is not something that he likes.
Or, why not let people learn at their own pace? Why is it that every kid in the world needs to learn the same thing at the same time, as the kid next to them? Our belief that this is the proper education system is completely faith-based. It’s our faith. The government somehow knows what’s right, but how do they know it? They’re not running experiments to see what’s better and what isn’t, and they’re not certainly not letting us choose freely.
I think, we’ve missed the mark so wide on education that we almost need to start to reset and just give a lot more freedom to teachers and to students and to parents to really figure out how children will grow. We’ll make mistakes along the way, but we probably won’t be making as big a mistake as we are making right now, where national test scores aren’t going up. We’re not getting smart. There’s no question that we’re not getting smarter. I think, education’s a flawed system.
When the state is defunded, because it can’t print money left, right and center. So to will public education. I know that seems a terrifying thing. Oh, my God. What if we don’t have public education?
We have the Internet education. My kids both went to read before they entered kindergarten, before they entered the public education system, because we had a computer in the house, and they had little phonics, CD-ROMs, because we’re a little on the older side before the Internet. It’s just not that hard to get education into kids’ hands, without it being necessarily sitting in a classroom and writing the letter A out 30 times on this particular day of the week, and then writing the letter B 30 times on the next day of the week, and learning to read it only the prescribed rate, which is too fast for some kids and too slow for others. I think, education’s a mess. It’s a mess, because it’s nationalized and won’t be under Bitcoin standard.
[01:06:08] LL: Yeah. I want to share something. I completely agree with Tomer here on the government education, or this common day education. I want to bring it back to family. I think, family education is very key to the success of a child. I think, my father and my grandpa did a great job educating me since I was very little, before I even went to kindergarten, or went to higher education.
They always educated me differently. Well, we even used to kitchen school. That deeply impact me, instead of going to university, or learning about different subjects that you’re really not interested in. I’m the type of student that I don’t really believe in the education system. I love to study my own stuff. I love to, early on, why can’t the kids invest in this 12 years, or 14 years, which I actually did that. If you’re following the traditional educational system, you never really find your true passion after you graduated from university and started work 5 to 9. Then, you really lost in that society. I think, that’s a really important point to point out. I think, family education is really important, as key to a successful life.
[01:07:16] SL: I think, a big part of it is just that fiat has the states so much larger, and that it just has taken away a lot of the social consequences for things that we used to do as families and communities. That is why now it’s like, it cuts against the family, the community, and in favor of our allegiance to our new overlords in the state and this bureaucracy. That’s what it creates.
I think, that’s what a lot of Bitcoin people are keying into. They’re talking about this idea of education and not government education, but just rather, private education, or family education. However you want to call it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a private school. It could just be even like, local family co-op education, homeschooling co-op stuff. I think, there’s lots of different ways to think about it. While it might superficially seem scary, there’s actually a lot of reasons why the homeschooling makes a lot of sense.
I know a guy who’s really well-known in the homeschooling community back in Australia. He’s a libertarian guy talking about homeschooling from that point of view. He makes a lot of really good point around that stuff, that sometimes it’s about when that child is ready for a certain thing. He was saying, for some of his children, actually, technically learned to read a little bit later than normal. By then, they had way more than caught up by the time they did get it. It’s less of a one size fits all approach.
[01:08:36] MM: The other thing I would say with that is, while that sounds great, having that individual approach, where what you were saying, Stephan, where different kids could be ready for different things. Unfortunately, most parents don’t have the flexibility, or the ability to do those types of things. The fiat money system has made it so hard to get ahead. 50 years ago, you could have one income in the family and have that American dream. Today, two incomes can’t really do that. The parents are gone. They don’t really have the time to do that, which is really unfortunate. So much is learned just being at home with the parents. Of course, if the parents are good examples.
I think, Bitcoin is really doing a lot to change that. I’ve been encouraged to see, it’s almost like, anybody that comes into Bitcoin gets those orange-colored lenses and see the world differently. I’ve seen a lot of people jumping into the education space, starting homeschool pods and things like that, which I think is really cool. I have two kids. They’ll certainly never go back to a public education system ever again. We’re actively looking for solutions like that. I think, we’ll see a lot more of that.
One thing that I’ve been thinking of is that, if we go back to basics, like entrepreneurs, everybody really, we earn money for providing value, right? Providing a valuable, good or service to somebody else. Serving their needs. The fiat money system has made the system where everybody’s gambling on Dogecoin, or shib coin, or whatever. They’re trading – options trading. The stock market exceeded a stock trading. Everybody’s trading. Everyone’s trading currencies. None of that provides any value to anybody. There’s this culture that’s been built up, where we can make money. We can increase our US dollars without ever providing any valuable, good or service to the marketplace.
Then, we’re going to make all of this US dollar trading a bunch of worthless stuff, without adding any value to it. Then, we’re going to take those dollars and then we’re going to go try to buy the value and productive goods of other people. It’s created this system where everybody’s trying to cut corners, everybody’s trying to cheat. You see it in the public education system as well.
They keep talking about, “Oh, we need to raise money. We need to raise money for the schools.” But the schools have plenty of money. It’s the way the system is set up, where the top teachers, they never get kicked out. They take all the money, the administrators, etc. Yeah, this fiat system has just created this whole system. Fiat is a system of theft, lies and deceit. It’s just poisoned every institution, caused the entire world – All the millennials today are just trading whatever they’re trading on Robinhood, not adding any value to anything. It just permeates every area of society.
Education is the most important, because basically, at the base of everything is your education. Were you taught the right food to eat? We talked about diet being more important than exercise. Are you eating the right foods? Do you know what your body needs? That’s education. Do you know what money is? Do you know how to work? Do you know how to save? Do you know how to provide value? Do you know how to communicate? Do you know how to accomplish tasks? That’s all education. It’s an important topic. I’m glad that Bitcoiners are talking about it. I’m even more glad to see Bitcoiners working on solutions for it.
[01:11:30] CK: Yeah. One of the things that we’re not educated about is just what money is. I feel like, Bitcoin’s a forcing function for a lot of things, but I think it’s a forcing function for financial literacy in general. It might even have a similar effect to literacy at that the printing press had. I think, they’ll have a similar effect to financial literacy.
In terms of financial, just understanding wellbeing, who has cosmic ideas around what this might look like? I know, American HODL has given several speeches, where he talks about there’s being the asset allocators of the future, and only allocating capital in ways that actually do good and actually move things forward, and a lot less speculative than things are today. I’m curious, who here has thought about that?
[01:12:16] TS: By the way, it could be a lot more speculative as well. It’s just that the risk-reward tradeoff is going to be a much more carefully inspected and decided upon, because our base asset is just so much better, now that we actually have real money. Yeah, everything will be on a spectrum, and you still may take that one in 10,000 chance of become a million X, pay off on sometime you start up. You’ll not feel required to push way out on the risk spectrum, the way that people are today, where everybody has to be a hedge fund manager, basically, just to stay abreast of inflation.
[01:12:52] LL: Cory, are you on that – [Inaudible 01:12:53] Cory. What’s going on over there, man?
[01:12:57] CoK: Man, this is [inaudible 01:12:57] and my three-year-old is almost four. She’s getting heavier and I’m pulling her in the wagon. Yeah, anybody on my team knows a couple of times a week, they’re going to get breathy, Cory. It’s not pretty.
[01:13:10] SL: Something to add to what you were just saying, Cory is also, yes, it’s true around the speculativeness of it. I think, a big part of it is just regulation. Right now, government is so big much, and there’s so much regulation that you can try little, new ideas. You’ll get shut down. You’ll get stopped.
Every now and again, some bureaucrat regulator comes out and invents some little crazy – some little sandbox idea and says, “Yeah, look. You can go and experiment in here.” I’ve done that in Australia. I think, there was an ASIC regulatory sandbox. The reality is, the current system, it just – the incentive of it, the system of it drives towards. If you’ve got a lot of money, you can lobby, you can influence, you’ve got credibility in the halls of power. You can influence things and keep them your way. Whereas, if you’re the challenger, you’re the upstart. You need an ability to be able to compete without necessarily having to take every little box that the current government wants you to.
A part of that plays into whether it’s KYC, AML, anti-money laundering laws, or whether it’s other regulations that apply in education, it just applies in so many different fields. I really think we are going to be moving into a world, where entrepreneurs will try lots of crazy ideas. Then the best ones will get replicated by everyone else. All the people in the market will then take those on and give it a go. We are really going to have a lot better.
I don’t want to be, what’s the word? Like a Pollyanna, or just say, everything’s going to be perfect, but we should be rationally optimist, that we should be cautiously optimistic about how things will be under a Bitcoin standard.
[01:14:39] TS: To put a little more flavor on that, I want to say this was everybody’s favorite should be Bitcoiner, who hates us because of his ego. I think, he probably have something about – it was a study basically, about which kinds of rich people don’t mind. Basically, the middle-class and the lower class absolutely hates rent-seekers that get to the top, that are just careerists and empty suits, or whatever. They love entrepreneurs. They love people that actually take risks, but have skin in the game. Now, I’m thinking about it. It’s probably just the opening chapters of skin in the game that it shows the study that somebody did.
It totally makes sense. I think that you’re going to see Bitcoin, because it is so much more like equity, it is so much more like the ownership society that I’ve started talking about 20 years ago, if you were following us politics. I think, you’ll see a lot more people actually starting things and trying to make things that actually last, and not just playing this startup VC Ponzi game, where everybody makes out okay. Even if it’s not successful, just like a lot of these altcoins, which is the natural progression of the way VC has been going for the last 20 years.
I think, you’ll see that go away. People will have skin in the game. Probably a lot more like the engineer that builds the bridge and is required to move his family under the bridge for the first year. He truly does have skin in the game. It’ll be like that. Because if you lose people’s Bitcoin and you didn’t give it a lot more than the college try, you ain’t going to get another shot.
If you treat their Bitcoin like digital gold, and you try your hardest and you’re open and communicative, like the way that Bitcoiners are in general anyway, you’ll probably get shot after shot. If you’re a good entrepreneur, you’ll be able to try a bunch of times.
[01:16:21] CK: I like the idea that Bitcoin actually lets you take more risk on. Because really, if you’re not a debt slave, then you can take risks. You can have some savings to rely on, so that way, you can do something that’s a little out there and take a risk. There’s always greater fractals to that.
[01:16:37] TS: Being very long Bitcoin at this stage in Bitcoin’s development is incredibly entrepreneurial. Literally, everyone who has a lot of their personal net worth in Bitcoin, or is stacking irresponsibly, or whatever out of their paycheck, that’s an entrepreneurial decision. You’re doing something that is against the grain, that is against the advice of almost everybody around you, that is unlike most of the other people around you. It’s very entrepreneurial. We’re raising a generation of entrepreneurs and they’re just called Bitcoiners.
[01:17:06] CK: Potentially, future out capital allocators, too. We’ll see.
[01:17:11] MM: If you think about the fiat money system, it’s such a horrible store of value, so it’s forced everybody to find other stores of value. You didn’t really see a lot of stock market activity pre-1971. Most people, it was left for the professionals. If you think about all the progress that’s been made by these entrepreneurs that are out there, trying all these things, like what Cory is saying, they need to be able to store their value somewhere, so I could be the best cancer researcher in the world. The money that I make, it sits in the bank and it loses value, so I can’t do that.
Then, I’m forced to allocate that capital. I was forced to become an investor. Now, I can’t just be the best cancer researcher. I have to now spend half of my time trying to figure out how to be an investor as well. Instead of being the best cancer research in the world, I’m 50% of that. Think about the brain drain that’s been lost over the last 50 years, or a 100 years even, of people that really can’t even devote the time, or their creativity that they need, until Cory talks about taking that risk. If we could store our wealth in a way that can hold its value, can increase its purchasing power even better, then we can focus. We can specialize on all those things on solving those problems, the highest value problems.
I think, we get back to a massive explosion of innovation and progress like we’ve probably never seen. Many of us have talked about this Renaissance 2.0 scenario, where you have this explosion of information and enlightenment. At the same time as you had that sound money for 300, 400 years. We’re getting into that. We get that sound money. We have the information. The Internet age has kicked that into overdrive. We talked about that in regards to education. Now, we have a globally recognized sound money and a man, things can just blow up for the better. It’s going to be amazing.
[01:18:55] CK: I think, we’re almost at a time – RW, he’s done some awesome stuff for Bitcoin Magazine, as well as his own personal newsletter around this idea of citadel. I’m interested in his thoughts there. Then maybe afterwards, we can each take a turn to do last words and close it out.
[01:19:12] SL: I love it. I love being a fly on the wall, CK. I appreciate you bringing me up. There’s one idea that I’ve heard is dancing around as we talk about the things that are causing trouble, the things that Bitcoin fixes in a future world. Just to contextualize where we are now in history. I really get the sense that the people who are Bitcoiners now are folks who have had their hand on the stove for a little too long.
The Citadel is not so much something that I want to build, because I want to go to war with the current fiat system. It’s because all I want to do when my hand is on the stove is take my hand off the stove. I have to go somewhere that I can primarily practice asymmetric defense. That’s really what it feels like to me now. Now that we’ve gotten popular in the last cycle, we’re starting to get now more credibility, but we’re making friends and a few enemies along the way.
Cory, I was sad to see sad to see Taleb go in full rage crit as well. Where I really think we are now with the idea of a citadel is figuring out what asymmetric defense looks like. What I’m really excited for is that generation that comes after, because that’s where we really start to be capital allocating. That’s where we start to be producing the next level of idea. That’s where I think the Bitcoin world is something that we really see and live in.
[01:20:24] CK: I do agree with that framework that this time, it’s about asymmetric defense and then maybe the future is capital allocation. Louis, you want to start us off with your closing words and just thoughts for the audience?
[01:20:38] LL: Sure. I’m really glad this film has a very great release, big thanks to Tomer and Matthew, of course, to help me out execute this, into this beautiful creation. I hope, every family who suffer out there, it’s not that there’s no hope. There’s this solution called Bitcoin. I think, every family who suffer from inflation, government confiscation, or regime change, they should think about store wealth in Bitcoin and move to somewhere else, if that’s an extreme case.
That really brings down to Bitcoin’s generational wealth, where Bitcoin is still the only option. [Inaudible 01:21:15], you can give it to your kids, give it to your grandkids. This is a beautiful idea. It’s a very low-time preference, long-term thinking. I think, around that idea, you can build a peaceful civilization, which that Bitcoin enable, or in some sense, enforced, because we couldn’t use violence to take other people’s wealth anymore.
In that way, you can create this love and peace between each other. That will be my closing remark. I think, Bitcoin is generational wealth, and I think people outside of the Bitcoin, or inside Bitcoin community should really think about it, just not just a speculative media, or problem. It’s more than. I think, it really offers those hope to millions of families. I think, that will lead to Tomer and after you to close it up.
[01:22:04] MH: Yeah. I think, every now and then humanity stumbles across these new technologies and discoveries. People here have the understanding that this is something that is on par with something akin to the printing press and fire and these sorts of things with regard to how much it’s going to transform the world.
We’re just in this very unique spot right now, where all of us are a little at the front of the transition. We’re serving as midwives in this transition to a new society, because all of those technologies, they always transform the culture in extremely profound ways with regard to print. As soon as we had letters written down on a mass scale, that ushered in the enlightenment. These major shifts happen when we have these paradigm shifting technologies.
This is a paradigm shift in monetary technology. We don’t know exactly what that’s going to usher in. To get back to the film, what we were trying to do here is in some ways, point a shining star with something to aim at. It’s like, we have this new technology and there’s all these new possibilities opening up and it’s transforming people in strange and interesting, synchronized ways. The culture is starting to form around it. We’re saying, “Hey, maybe this can be what the culture looks like.” It’s not going to be the dystopian future that is so prevalent in culture today.
Every holiday Hollywood movie is this scary future where the AIs have taken over and it’s horrible. We’re offering a different version of that. The Bitcoin culture is a different version of that, and it’s more hopeful and optimistic and brings us back to nature a little bit and is a reunion of relationships with other human beings, deeper connections, and so on. That’s what we’re we were doing with the movie.
[01:24:30] CK: Awesome. Thank you for that, Matt. Tomer, close it out for us. Tell people where they can find the –
[01:24:36] TS: It’s in the nest, right up top in the left most thing, Bitcoin is generational wealth. Search for that on YouTube. I want to bring people back to the mood that the movie left them in with something that I wrote recently that I haven’t shared publicly at all. It’s short, so it’s perfect for finishing words. I call this short piece My Dream. It’s tied to this and it doesn’t mention Bitcoin or anything at all, but you know what it is.
It goes like this. “I dream of a place. In it, I dream of my family, happily smiling, enjoying nature, enjoying friends. They’re occupied with doing things they love. Occupied in those things. Learning as they do. Cleaning and working. Two indistinguishable, really. I as well, I’m in this place, enjoying nature, my family, our friends, my work, my play. We have not become isolated nor have we rejected our connection to people all over the world. We remain attached to humanity and civilization. We enjoy the music, the film, the games, and the art it shares with us. We enjoy the lessons it has to offer. We enjoy things. We import into our place in exchange for the things we export. We take part voluntarily in experiments to see if new techniques of education, agriculture, construction, and wellbeing are more or less effective than old ones.”
“We share the results openly and honestly, with no ulterior motive to deceive others for our, or anyone’s benefit. Our ambitions are lofty, but they are not greedy. We wish to project the joy and love we experience onto many others, both now and into the distant future. We wish to force no one to trick no one. We just wish to demonstrate the joy can be achieved. We do it by living an openly joyful life.”
“Our family business is love. This is my dream. It is not a reality. Not yet. I have to make it a reality. Everyone in my dream must do that, too. That’s the part that is in many ways out of my hands. This is because I will not force my family into my dream, a dream that I claim is one where everyone is voluntarily a part of it. But maybe, just maybe, I can show them my dream a little at a time and they can begin to dream it, too. Maybe, just maybe, they can help reshape it by telling me what they dream of, to make it an even more appealing.”
“I dream of that. I dream we dream together and make real together. That’s what a family is. It’s a dream coming true. Share the dream, made of love between all with each one making the other’s joyful realization of their dreams a reality out of love.”
“I propose this. Let us build a dream together. Let us find a place in paradise. Let us visit it at first, our dream land, let us develop it, let us see what we can make of it. Let us start dreaming, building our dreams up in this place. It is not a business. It is not an investment to make money. It is our dream.”
[01:27:41] CK: Damn. Bitcoiners are deep, y’all. Get me every time. That was fantastic, Tomer. Thank you so much. All right. Hey, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Yeah, follow, subscribe to all of these folks. They’re all doing fantastic work. That’s it from me. Peace.
