A group of movie-loving Bitcoiners discuss parallels between our current society and the society in “V For Vendetta”.
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[00:00:08] CK: What’s up Lauren, how’s it going?
[00:00:09] LS: Hey, how are you? I’m pretty good.
[00:00:12] CK: Really excited to have this space. Waiting on Svetski to join. If you can, it’d be great if you shared the tweet linking to your article to the top here.
[00:00:22] LS: Sure. Let me do that one second.
[00:00:25] CK: While we wait for Svetski and while Lauren is pinning her article to the top, I just want to really briefly introduce this space. Both Lauren and Svetski wrote articles about how Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto and this, I guess, freedom fight that we’re fighting, all ties into the story of V for Vendetta and the 5th of November. Wanted to get on a space with both of them to discuss. Really exciting stuff. I’m really excited for this conversation.
It’s going to be a short one. Just one hour. But it should be action-packed. Before we get into it though, want to tell you guys about the Bitcoin Conference and Bitcoin 2022. Svetski just sponsored in a big way with Amber, so that’s super freaking exciting. Amber is doing some really great things, but Bitcoin 2022 is the ultimate Bitcoiner gathering in Miami, next year, April 6th through the 9th. Four-day event. Bitcoin only.
On the last day, we’re going to be having a Bitcoin music festival. You GA ticket gets you into all of that good stuff. We also have a lot of awesome VIP experiences as well. Go to b.tc, check out the site and go to Bitcoin 2022. You will not regret it. Svetski, welcome to the chat. How’s it going, my man?
[00:01:42] AS: Yo, what’s up buddy? I heard you say, it’s going to be an hour conversation. Why the hell did you invite me? I can stay for three hours.
[00:01:49] CK: Yeah, it’s going to be tough, but I’m going to try to reign you in and make sure Lauren has a shot to talk, too.
[00:01:54] AS: Oy, I actually did a short article. Can you believe that shit? What the fuck.
[00:02:00] CK: Yeah. Hey, let’s just jump right into it. Maybe Lauren, I want to give both of you an opportunity to talk about your articles. Lauren, maybe you want to start us off and talk about your article and then Svetski, you can follow up.
[00:02:11] AS: Absolutely.
[00:02:12] LS: Yeah. I started doing threads on Twitter about comparing films to Bitcoin, and I thought it was – and I work in film and I’m really passionate about film, but I’m also really passionate about Bitcoin. I thought it would be just something fun and lighthearted and a different comparison to Bitcoin and the value of Bitcoin. The first one I did was on The Matrix. Then, I think, V for Vendetta was my second one. It was just something fun and a different way. I think right now, Bitcoin, isn’t a big narrative battle.
I know, there are films out there being made that are not being made by Bitcoiners and people who genuinely want to put the right narrative out there, just more for profit. I think, this is another good way. I think, Bitcoin Twitter is awesome, but it’s only going to reach a certain audience. I think, we need to look into other mediums to tell our narrative.
I thought this would be something fun. I basically wrote the article, talking a little bit about the background of how the film was made. It was based on a book that was a little bit more graphic than the novel. They changed the film to be a little bit more about freedom versus being an anarchism, and also, another difference between the book and the film was that they incorporated a lot more influences than just the book. I know, a big influence was George Orwell’s 1984.
Again, it was a big influence on just individual liberty, versus state control. That’s the basis. It started off with just background history of the film and then getting into some different points. I took quotes from the film. After each quote, I just dissected it and analyzed it a little bit, on a sense then I compared the – to Satoshi and his fight for freedom and what the problem was and why he started to engage on this battle and how us as Bitcoiners have this responsibility to engage in the network.
At the end, if any of you, I don’t know if everyone’s seen for V for Vendetta, but V was never unmasked. We know Satoshi is never unmasked, which I think has great symbolism and that we are the ones carrying on Bitcoin. It’s all of us. V is us, Satoshi is us. This is a movement. It was fun. It was lighthearted and that’s a direction I went with it. Yeah, I guess that’s short overview.
[00:04:34] CK: Cool. No, I think that was a great overview. Anyone who hasn’t read it, it’s pinned to the top. Aleks, I guess I want to give you a chance to react to Lauren’s article and then maybe you can jump into your own.
[00:04:47] AS: Yeah. I haven’t had a chance to read Lauren’s. I’ve been jumping between conferences and stuff. Lauren don’t hate me. I think, I don’t know. I don’t have enough context to really comment.
[00:04:56] CK: All right. Let’s jump into your article. It definitely had a different tone, but very much of the same ethos.
[00:05:01] AS: Yeah, my tone is always similar across the board. What I wanted to do this time was just something short, sweet, and a reminder as to why we’re here in the first place. What actually inspired it was the TabConf, a speaking gig that I had to do. What’s his name? Mike Tidwell invited me. He’s like, “Hey, do you want to open the conference?” I was like, “Yeah, fuck it. Sure. Let’s do it.”
I was trying to think of what should I speak about. I looked at the data, thought, “Oh, shit, it’s 5th in November.” I have watched these event at a maybe 20, 30, maybe even 40 times. My favorite movies are basically, V for Vendetta, Braveheart, The Matrix, Fight Club, The Last Samurai, Legends of The Fall. That era then, I call the golden era of film, 1995 to 2005. That’s peak film, peak meaning, peak quality, peak, everything.
Yeah, I noticed the 5th of November and I said to Tidwell, I said, “Look, I know this is more of a technical conference,” but I said, “I’m not going to really add much value to the conference from a technical standpoint. Where I can add some value is to remind everyone why we’re here.” It was just, I sat down – Actually, no, I didn’t sit down. I was in Dominican Republic with my girlfriend and she was coughing, poor thing had pneumonia and she wouldn’t shut the fuck up, because she kept coughing.
I was like, “Goddamn it. I couldn’t sleep.” Then just something hit me. While I was asleep, basically, while I was in bed, I just quickly wrote up the talk in in five minutes. I was like, “Okay, this looks good.” Next morning, I got up. I cleaned it up a little bit and then I thought, “Shit, this is a nice little punchy article, actually.” Anyway, I put it together and the whole premise, if no one’s read it, it’s literally five minutes. It’s a reminder to think about Bitcoin as a much larger phenomenon than just another financial product, but just another way to get rich or make some money. It’s not just another fucking fourth turning event, like a cultural phenomenon. It is so much greater.
We’ve seen echoes of what’s happening in society today, all throughout history. We keep repeating the same mistakes. For me, Bitcoin represents a step change in that process, and something that we can stop repeating the same ridiculous cycles that we’ve had in the past. Yeah, that’s what my goal was, to remind people, remember this is the 5th of November, the Bitcoin, I think I called it the Bitcoin revolution and plot. This is hopefully the time where we can actually, we don’t have to blow up any buildings. We don’t have to do anything like what Guy Fawkes was trying to do in the absence of Bitcoin. We can do it in a way that fixes everything, but empowers everyone along the way. There you go. That’s my 2 cents.
[00:07:43] CK: Awesome. No, thanks for the background there, too. Neil, you’re on stage right now. Curious what your thoughts between the connection between Bitcoin Satoshi and then this story behind the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes, V for Vendetta.
[00:07:55] NJ: Yeah. I think, V for Vendetta is the perfect movie right now for what we’re going through. I remember when it came out around 2005, 2006. It was right after the US went to war in Iraq. A lot of the parallels, there were a lot of parallels into the movie about waterboarding prisoners and patriot act type stuff. Now we’re dealing with a virus that there was a lot of conspiracies behind. There was manufactured, or whether it occurred naturally.
Obviously, V for Vendetta, they released the virus to scare people. Not that I’m saying that’s exactly what’s happening now, but we have governments definitely overreaching and using scare tactics on their citizens. At least, that’s my perspective. It’s really poignant to, like I said, what we’re going through. Bitcoin enables us to break away from this fear. Whoever controls the money, controls the people that rely on that money, and Bitcoin frees us from that. Hopefully, it will prevent things, like V for Vendetta, dystopian type scenarios from playing out in the future.
It feels like right now, a lot of us are living through that depending on where you are in the world. I really think Bitcoin is going to stop that from happening in the future.
[00:09:20] CK: Just to continue this conversation – Wait. Svetski, do you want to react to that?
[00:09:24] AS: I was just going to say, it’s funny, all these movies almost became instead of a warning, they became documentaries as if the moron parasites like, watch them and they’re like, “This is a great idea. How about we release the virus and fuck everyone over, and then pretend like it was not?” I don’t know. I just find it hilarious. It’s funny, because I always used to call V for Vendetta a documentary. I remember, Nick Carter wrote a couple of really brilliant articles a couple years ago, and one of them, he wrote, which I think he published on his own blog, and the other one was in the Bitcoin Times edition two. They both opened with a quote from the movie.
I don’t watch shows. I don’t watch TV. I haven’t had a TV for 20 years, at least. I don’t do any of that stuff, but movies have always been a big part of my life, because I just – I love storytelling and these ones in particular, and for me, V for Vendetta just holds a special place in my heart. I don’t know, hold a special place for people like Ross Ulbricht as well. It was one of the things every 5th of November, him and the crew on Silk Road would watch that together. It’s a special thing.
It is already well-embedded in our culture. When I say our culture, the Bitcoin culture. What we’re seeing is elements of those warnings actually playing out around us. Unfortunately, people are still fucking sleeping. I don’t know, maybe we need to get more people to watch these movies. I know everyone that I hold dear to my heart. I basically, forced them to watch V for Vendetta and a series of other movies. I don’t know if I had a point there, but I just wanted to say that V for Vendetta is not a movie. It’s a documentary.
[00:10:52] CK: Lauren, do you want to jump in?
[00:10:53] LS: Yeah. I’d love to add to that. I think, another really interesting aspect of the film is when V goes into the newsroom and he hijacks it, and he goes on this 10-minute monologue. The basis of the monologue is not him necessarily placing blame on the government. He’s actually placing blame on the people and saying, “You guys need to wake up. Yeah. You guys need to wake up. This is in your hands. You guys are sitting around and letting them get away with this.” To me, that was really interesting. I think, that’s also the basis of Bitcoin. Look, it’s in our hands. It’s our option to opt in. By doing that, we’re taking things into our own hands.
Coming into point with financial literacy, I think most of our world is very financially illiterate and that’s in our hands and that is that’s our fault. If we can’t educate ourselves and look into what’s going on, then we are just sitting by and letting things happen. If we take things into our own hands and that’s on us. I think, that’s why what’s so cool about Bitcoin is that we’re finally at a point where we can do something about this and it’s not like these tactics, which are, they say, his tactics were very terroristic. Bitcoin is the most peaceful tactic we’re ever going to have to fight such a big-scale problem. I think, that’s what’s so special, but it’s up to us ultimately.
[00:12:09] CK: I like that point too, because this is the world that we’re seeing right now is that these encroachments are coming. Two weeks to slow the spread, and when are the people going to stand up and say enough is enough. If they keep complying, then isn’t it on them to some degree? It is a battle that is up a hill, because we’re seeing on Twitter, all these videos of protests, but no mainstream coverage of them. It does feel the chips are stacked against the people to some degree here.
[00:12:37] LS: Totally. Yeah. I definitely think so. It’s only going to do so much, but I feel Bitcoin – It’s simple. You just buy Bitcoin, you opt out of the current system and you opt into one that’s for the people. I think, it’ll take care of itself. I think, that’s what’s so cool. That’s how the film ends. V, he dies and ultimately, the people take over from there, and they have that incredible shot where everybody’s in a V for Vendetta masks, which is so powerful. I think, that’s what the stage that we’re in right now with whether it’s –
I don’t talk too much, just because I work in film and I’m not working in Bitcoin full-time, I don’t talk too much about politics and vaccines and masks. It’s just not something I’m comfortable with doing for where I’m at career-wise. I think, ultimately, my beliefs are that Bitcoin is going to fix a lot of these problems in the end. I just focus solely on Bitcoin. I think, Bitcoin is going to work its way out with all these other problems in the world. Yeah, I think this is the best thing. I think, we’re at the stage right now. I think, if we just keep focusing on this, things will go in a better direction.
[00:13:39] NJ: How you said V sacrifices himself at the end. Satoshi, although he didn’t necessarily die, we don’t know what happened. He did disappear. He said, “This is out of my hands.” He left it for all of us. It’s the same thing that a V did in the movie.
[00:13:52] AS: It’s the symbolic nature of the act. Exactly. In the same way as Guy Fawkes, his act was symbolic. The movie, V’s act is symbolic. It’s the exact same thing here is that Satoshi’s mood was symbolic. Does anyone actually know the first time – I think, this would be hard to pinpoint, but when the V for Vendetta meme started being attributed to Satoshi, does anyone have any insight on that?
[00:14:16] CK: The original issue of the Bitcoin Magazine in 2012 has a person holding a sign saying, “The corrupt fear us. The honest support us. The heroic join us.” He’s wearing a headscarf and the Guy Fawkes mask. That may have been the first time, but that may have also just – maybe it was already a thing. I came in 2017. I’m a little late to that. Maybe Mr. Hoddle, or some of the OTs. Hoddle would have more insight. Definitely in 2012, the connection was really being made in the front cover of the original Bitcoin Magazine had the Guy Fawkes mask.
[00:14:51] AS: Yeah. It’s so fucking iconic. It’s just, I don’t know, for me, probably the three most relevant films to Bitcoin are probably on – Matrix and V for Vendetta are probably the two that stand out. Fight Club’s up there with them as well. It’s just uncanny and unfortunately, these days, the dribble we see coming out of fucking Hollywood and film is just, it’s a disaster. Everything is dripping with cringe and –
[00:15:16] CK: Cringe or bullshit remake.
[00:15:18] AS: Yeah. That’s it. Exactly. There’s nothing authentic. There’s no movies with meaning anymore. It’s fucking pathetic.
[00:15:23] CK: I agree. I stopped watching movies a few years ago, so maybe I’m just ignorant too, if there is any movies with meaning.
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[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[00:16:27] CK: We got Alex McShane. We have Clancy. We have Humble Warrior all joining. Clancy, I want to go to you. You are the artist who actually did the art on both of these pieces. I’m curious, what’s your impression of the connection between V for Vendetta and Bitcoin?
[00:16:42] CR: Hey, guys. Sorry. I’m at the Apple Store right now. It might be loud, but I think, it’s one of those things that it represents anonymity obviously, but also, I think the symbolism of V being the people, like he never reveals his face. It’s one of those things where it was the perfect alignment of what he represented and the people and Satoshi. You can’t go wrong. I don’t know if that makes sense.
[00:17:10] CK: Humble or Alex, you guys want to jump in?
[00:17:13] AM: Yeah, I think to me, I read like, it’s hard for me to say who is and was not a Bitcoiner. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, Pete Rizzo’s take on it. I liked the mask, because it strips that need to pin an identity on a Bitcoiner. In the end, we’re all either pro Bitcoin, for each individual moment, or acting against it, and our individual influence. I think, is like orthogonal to Bitcoin’s performance. I do like that removing the human aspect from Bitcoin through the mask.
[00:17:45] AS: That comes back into the symbolic nature of this movie, Satoshi, Bitcoin itself. You can’t kill an idea. It also reminds me of just another element of Bitcoin and its transformation of money into information. It’s like, whenever people ask me about, oh, what if this happens and what if that happens? What if they make Bitcoin illegal? It’s like, anyone can do anything and they can hamper it and they might be able to slow it down. The Internet, for example, is not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is information. Internet is just the information transmission medium.
Yes, should the Internet fall apart fucking everywhere, it will be very difficult and impractical, impossible to send each other Bitcoin around the world, live in the way we do now with the Internet. Fundamentally speaking, Bitcoin doesn’t really stop. I mean, if that happened, we’ve got much bigger problems to worry about, because everything else would fucking stop as well. Planes have stopped falling out of the sky.
It’s just like, the U S government or any power that be in the same way as they cannot kill an idea, whether it’s let’s go to Brandon, or whether it’s whether it’s the number zero. You can’t turn off numbers, like you can’t turn off a fucking word. You can’t turn off a letter. It’s not going to work. You can’t just turn off Bitcoin. That symbolism, I think, is really – I don’t know. It permeates Bitoin’s race on data, and it’s something that I think a lot of people underestimate about Bitcoin and just its resilience.
Money has become information. It’s no longer an object that is either physical, or issued by someone who can turn it off and turn it on at will and tell you what to do with it. No one can tell you to stop thinking about the number zero. It’s not going to fucking happen. That to me is the ultimate thing that you can’t stop. The V for Vendetta message is of that ilk. That’s what it’s telling people.
[00:19:32] CR: Yeah. I love the quote from the movie. It says, beneath this mask, there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask, there’s an idea [inaudible 00:19:38]. Ideas are bulletproof.
[00:19:41] AS: 1000000%.
[00:19:42] CR: That’s why I also love the argument, when people say, “Oh, Bitcoin’s a scam. The CIA started it.” There’s all these arguments going back. All this playing with the real Satoshi, and he comes out and wants to move his point. It doesn’t matter. The idea has been implanted. The seed has been planted and it’s growing and you can’t stop the signal.
[00:20:01] AS: Exactly. Literally at this point, it is its own thing. Basically, I don’t know, I’m already, I believe we’re a post-type of Bitcoinization. It’s just materializing. On a long enough timeframe, and really ranting about this recently, is like this, before Bitcoin and after Bitcoin. It was in the after Bitcoin era. It’s going to be messy for a period, but there is no turning it off now. There is no finishing it. Satoshi can come back. He can dance around and do whatever the fuck he wants. None of it actually fucking matters. Bitcoin is here. The cat’s out of the bag. That’s actually the name of the article that Nick Carter wrote for Bitcoin Times edition two, the cat is out of the bag. It’s basically that idea. It’s out, it’s in the wild. The idea is already infected the world, and it’s not going away. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle.
[00:20:47] CK: No, I agree that you can’t put the genie out of the bottle. The genie can be suppressed for a long time, and that can be painful for Bitcoiners. I think, what we are all doing here as Bitcoin evangelists and educators is to try to spread that message to those who need to hear it as effectively as possible.
[00:21:07] AM: Yeah. I think, there’s a related idea to the genie, too, in science, especially of basically, humanity altering technologies. You’re basically pulling marbles every time you engineer one of these technologies out of a vessel that they can never go back in. The beneficial technologies are white marbles, and something like atomic bombs is definitely more of a black marble. Didn’t advance humanity at all.
With Bitcoin, I like to think of it as maybe even more like a gray marble, right? This is money for friends and enemies. If we can keep this stuff in the hands of good people, I think it’s a net positive for society. I think, there’s something to be said for making sure that individuals, as well as big conglomerate businesses and nations get their chance at adoption and stacking, just so that we can turn this more into a white marble technology.
[00:21:59] AS: That’s an interesting framing, something that is the term creative destruction comes to mind, but something that is fundamentally incompatible with the old is going to be gray in and of itself. Because Bitcoin exists independent of the existing financial network and the existing way we measure resources and managing all of that.
It doesn’t need any of the old primitives in order to function. For us to move across onto that, we require a bridge. It’s in the bridge that we get confused about Bitcoin’s place in the world, is that we’re trying to understand it through existing frameworks and existing analogies and existing metaphors. None of which exactly map Bitcoin to a take, because I don’t think any of us can really fathom, or appreciate how large an impact Bitcoin is going to have on the human race. In that intervening period, it may at times seem gray marble in the sense that it is it is white infecting the black, I guess. Its very presence diminishes the black, but it makes it, it makes it look quite messy. I don’t know. That’s an interesting rabbit hole.
[00:23:06] CK: Who wants to jump in? I want to pivot the conversation a little bit then. I think, Lauren, Svetski, maybe even Clancy, you all agree on a handful of movies, right? We mentioned The Matrix, you mentioned Fight Club. I’m sure that there are others that really tie into Bitcoin. Do we want to talk about some of those as well?
[00:23:29] CR: Yes, for sure. Also, like a 300.
[00:23:31] AS: Oh, yes. That’s another good one. That’s The Remnant.
[00:23:34] CK: Yeah. I was about to say that. I personally love the idea of The Remnant. Svetski, we have a recorded space with you going into that in depth. Then you wrote a great article on that, too.
[00:23:43] LS: A couple of other ones would be a – I did a short thread on The Truman Show. Then I did one on 2001, A Space Odyssey. Those are two others I compare it. I’ve been compiling a list, so if anybody has suggestions feel free to DM me. I’m going to keep doing some more threads on different films.
[00:24:00] CK: I think, the films are important because that’s how you can orange pill your friends. Just be like, “Hey, watch this movie. Hey, watch this movie.” That’s like something that’s very digestible for them.
[00:24:09] LS: Totally. I think, it’s a very simplified way. Because I think, a lot of people get overwhelmed and they don’t understand the narrative and what’s going on. I think, if you can compare it to something that simple and entertaining, I think, it’s a really great way to get people to just understand the foundation.
[00:24:24] NJ: It’s pretty incredible that The Matrix and V for Vendetta were both by the Wachowski siblings. I don’t know what you’re supposed to call them now, but that they are responsible really for those two masterpieces. A lot of people don’t realize that V for Vendetta, the character is agent Smith, the same actor in The Matrix. There’s a lot of cross over.
[00:24:46] AS: Such a good actor. They’ve got a third movie, Cloud Atlas, which is incredible, too. What’s the guy’s fucking name again? Something Weaver. Hugo Weaver. Hugo was such a fucking good actor and he’s in Cloud Atlas as well, which is an incredible, incredible movie.
[00:25:02] CR: I saw that video last night, talking about how the Terminator was supposedly the prequel to The Matrix. There’s some connection there. Have y’all heard that?
[00:25:14] AS: No. I heard a story that The Matrix was written by somebody else and that Wachowski stole it or some shit, blah, blah, blah. I don’t know how much truth there was to that. Whatever the case is, what they brought to life was incredible.
There is one thing I will caution with the two movies, is that they whilst they’re very correct, like when they were made, the fear was that the world would slip into more of – we were off the back of looking at the fascist type authoritarian regime, the 1948 type authoritarian regime as being the thing that we must all genuinely be wary of. What it did was, I think, it made a lot of us wary of that. In some ways, it left the door open for the more insidious, brave new world type utopian dystopia to manifest. A lot of that is what we’re seeing in the world today is like, I don’t know, just the messaging wasn’t as refined in that sense.
There was a bit of a maybe anti-capitalist thing about it, which is expected when you see what the Wachowski siblings transformed into. I’m a little bit afraid of what the fourth Matrix is going to be, like if it’s going to be some fucking horse shit, politically correct junk. I’m hoping to God, it’s not, but let’s see. It was extraordinarily important at the time. Despite the small issue that it had with a little bit of the [inaudible 00:26:31], I think, what we as Bitcoiners do, we interpret the nuance of what is meant in it appropriately.
In fact, there is an audio book of V for Vendetta, which is the screenplay/movie turned into an audio book. That has little bit more detail than the movie. I listened to that. That is actually a little bit more a narco-capitalist. It’s actually fucking spot on. It’s really good.
[00:26:54] CR: I think, it’s really interesting when you, I don’t know, people listening, how long you’ve been orange pilled, or if you’re in the process of it. It’s really interesting watching these movies, or have seen these movies before you’ve discovered Bitcoin, and then watching them after you discovered Bitcoin, and how much you realize it shifts your perspective on the world and understanding of these things and these concepts they’re talking about.
There was even a movie we were watching the other day. It wasn’t necessarily one of these movies that we’re talking about but, I think it was The Bourne Identity, something to do with the tech. Even just these movies that everyone knows and you watch and you think, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Then once you get orange pilled and understand the technology, and the idea and the mind virus and what it can do, it’s really interesting watching movies after you’ve been orange pilled.
[00:27:45] AS: Yeah. That’s a good point, actually. I haven’t watched Bourne Identity and things like that for a long time. That was also one of my favorite movies when I was growing up. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to go back and watch that one particularly. The first one was a really special movie in my heart. I was at a funny stage in life and yeah.
[00:28:01] CR: Even just little things when you watch these movies, the technical things, when he has, in the Bourne Identity, obviously, he has a bunch of identities and all the different passports and he’s crossing borders and he’s having to deal with hiding cash everywhere. Even the ideas that even these little things, you’re like, “That’s pointless. Cash is such trash. Why would you even have to worry about this?” It goes across the spectrum from these small little details to –
[00:28:25] CK: Brian Troll says that The Big Lebowski is about Bitcoin. I actually don’t really watch any movies. I have watched all the movies we’ve discussed so far, but I have not watched The Big Lebowski. If there’s a movie, most likely, I haven’t watched it.
[00:28:38] AS: I haven’t watched that either. It’s been on my fucking watch list for years, and it’s just been sitting there. I just, particularly the last two years, I haven’t really had time to watch much movies. All right, hearing that, I will add that to the list.
[00:28:50] CK: Anyone else concur that The Big Lebowski is about Bitcoin?
[00:28:53] CR: Absolutely not.
[00:28:54] NJ: Yeah. It’s definitely about –
[00:28:55] AS: What’s the terms of the movie? McShane, can you tell us what it’s about?
[00:28:58] LS: Maybe about Bitcoiners, but not Bitcoin.
[00:29:01] AM: It came out in 1998. It’s definitely –
[00:29:04] AS: [Inaudible 00:29:04].
[00:29:06] AM: Yeah, it’s about Bitcoin in the way that all things are about Bitcoin, once you get into. It’s basically, it’s like a guy is getting chased by debt collectors. He gets a, I think, mistaken for a millionaire. He’s a bowler and has a bunch of loser bowler friends. They try to, I think, find a millionaire’s missing wife, but I haven’t seen it in several years. Very funny movie, if I remember.
[00:29:31] CK: Maybe Shinobi is just trolling us to throw a wrench to the conversation.
[00:29:35] AM: I think, when you get into especially any book or film analysis, you can put whatever lens you want on it. Someone who knows it intimately, could definitely spin it into a Bitcoin article. Maybe Shinobi should do that for us.
[00:29:49] CK: Shinobi, focus on something else, man. I guess, where were we? I apologize for misdirecting. Ghaza, you’re onstage too. I don’t know if you want to jump in at all.
[00:29:58] GV: Hey, thanks for inviting me up. I just joined one or two minutes ago. I’m not sure what other movies you guys have covered.
[00:30:03] CK: Mostly, just V for Vendetta. I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that one.
[00:30:07] GV: Yeah. I actually relate a lot more to that one than The matrix, but that’s probably because I didn’t see The Matrix for the first time until recently. I just didn’t like it.
[00:30:17] AS: [Inaudible 00:30:16]. Not liking The Matrix is a fucking punishable offense. That’s like, you’re dead.
[00:30:24] GV: Have you all seen the new remake of Doom?
[00:30:28] AS: That was fuck, on HBO. I thought it was on the cinemas.
[00:30:30] CK: Also, on HBO.
[00:30:32] GV: I don’t know what that is. Yeah.
[00:30:34] AS: Okay. I just watched the new movie and I thought it was fucking fantastic.
[00:30:37] GV: I thought it was awesome. The conversation –
[00:30:39] AS: Yeah. The first good movie in a while.
[00:30:42] GV: Yeah. The conversation about when people start talking about Bitcoin being a planet across planetary, across galaxy currency. It makes you think about it in there, too.
[00:30:54] AS: Possibly, I’ve got a beef with a lot of sci-fi. I think a lot of sci-fi, it is completely fucked up, because it never took into account the existence of something like Bitcoin. That’s what all sci-fi is missing. For us to become an interplanetary species, we first have to clean up our own room and we have to actually master energy. We have to master our environment. We have to mask the earth. Otherwise, all we’re doing is exporting our stupidity elsewhere. In the process of exporting our stupidity elsewhere, we’ll fucking blow ourselves up. Literally, we can’t on a habitable planet with oxygen, first and foremost, and water and everything else, we can’t manage to fucking feed people.
We think we’re going to go out and fucking colonize space with our fiat fucking brains. Until we fixed that stuff, all the sci-fi shit goes out the window. I think in the process of fixing all of that, and I’ve got a theory about Bitcoin transforming humanity in an organic, evolutionary way. Whilst the fiat heads and all the globalist, parasitic scammers want to transform us by injecting us with shit, or, turning us basically, into dumb sheep and evolving us by plugging our fucking brains into the power socket and ramming Ethernet cables up our assholes, so that we can all be connected on the metaverse. I think, what’ll happen is Bitcoin will transform us in a different way, which is by aligning behavior and reintroducing consequence into behavior, I think, our DNA will start to evolve to adapt towards moral behavior. Private property and morality will start to embed itself in us over generations in the same way as it did with things like, lions.
Lions, for example, are majestic in nature. They don’t go and fucking eat everything on the first or second day. They have respect for territory. They have respect for what they do, because they’ve evolved like that over hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years. Whereas, we haven’t had that chance to catch up to embody majesty and embody the better, more moral, natural elements of our behavior, because of the way we can think about things more abstractly. We have a more complex mind and we can create more complex societies. We’ve actually got to walk along the path in that sense.
Bitcoin will enable natural order and morality to start to bake into our behavior. I think, that is an evolution. That evolution itself will mean that when we go out into the unknown, we’ll do it from not only a much stronger foundation and a richer foundation, and from a world that we’ve been able to mask the energy on. We’ll do it in a way that we export intelligence, not fucking stupidity, which is what we would be most likely exporting now. If we go to fucking Mars tomorrow, we’d blow ourselves up really quickly.
Anyway, that’s my thoughts on I think, sci-fi is completely broken and hopefully, the piece that I’m doing A, for Bitcoin Magazine very shortly, and the piece I’m doing for Bitcoin Times about Fire Bitcoin Teleportation will inspire a new wave of sci-fi that thinks about it through the lens of Bitcoin.
[00:33:59] NJ: I’m wondering how – That’s an interesting premise. At the most basic level, genes promote their own production and inhibit their destruction, regardless of the will of the larger creature. I think, at the very least Bitcoin – I think, we might self-select for more collaborative behaviors in a way that wasn’t possible, or that wouldn’t be genetically obvious before we had a sound store of value and something to trade with. I’m not a chemist, or biologist. I don’t know what that looks like down to an atomic level, but it makes sense to me that Bitcoin would promote people just collaborating on a small scale, and not just becoming embedded in our society on a greater scale. That being a much stronger foundation and measure for things like a decentralized research and then scientific process.
[00:34:54] AS: Totally. Behavior ties into this idea of memes. Because in a sense, behavior at scale is a meme. It’s a anthropological, or anthropospheric meme. If Bitcoin starts to realign behavior around collaboration and competition in the upward sense, like there’s a word, there’s distress and distress means making you stronger.
You, competition, let’s call it that. It’s a prefix to the positive version of competitions that are the destructive sense, where we steal from each other. I think over time, that behavior starts to bake into us. I don’t know. There’s a case for it. I drew up an image in one of my weird nighttime, fucking sweats, where I wake up and I pull out my iPad and draw something. I think, I called it Corpus something Bitcoinicus. It’s like looking at human evolution and the evolution of man through the lens of Bitcoin realigning incentives, such that morality, or moral behavior at the locus of everything we do and what ramifications that has long-term on humanity. I don’t know.
Honestly, that’s how we end up becoming interplanetary. Not by being fucking retards who were printing money. Anyway, I really think that all of the notions of sci-fi and the way we envision reaching out for space need to be re-thought, reimagined all through the lens of what Bitcoin does to society and does to the individual in particular.
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[00:38:23] CK: I think that there’s not a lot of sci-fi that predicts digital hard cash with Austrian economics baked into it. That’s definitely just a core building block to human action that I think is really important to take into account moving forward. I do like this idea of we can’t conquer beyond earth, unless we master earth. I think, that is extremely true. The fiat system has really taken us very far away from mastering earth. If anything, we’re just fucking it up.
[00:38:53] AS: Yeah, we are. Exactly. This is so this is the idea of the great filter, which is the name of the piece, like Bitcoin is humanity’s last hope. It’s our pathway through the great filter is if we don’t do that, we have four outcomes. Some dickhead pushes the red button, blows us all up. Some asteroid fucking whacks us before we have the technological prowess and capacity to do something about it. We’re just like sitting ducks.
We either create some artificial intelligence that use our behavior as completely moronic. As a result, just makes us obsolete. Or, we, in our attempt to build some sanitized, sterile conformance utopia, we transform the world into one big technocratic gulag. That’s the four options we have outside of Bitcoin. It’s like, it’s Bitcoin, or that.
[00:39:42] AM: I can speak on this a little. I’ve written about these risks pretty extensively. There’s basically, four ways to look at it, like you said. The categories that I would put them in are internal anthropogenic risks. What that means is just a human-centric, like we build the atomic bomb, we detonate the atomic bomb. We fuck ourselves. There’s external anthropogenic risks, which is a very low probability event, that we send out a communication. It’s received by another forest. They come back in distress, right? That’s not going to happen.
There’s external, non-anthropogenic risks, which is something you can’t really prevent at this stage, like an asteroid. Then, there are internal anthropogenic risks, which is something like a super massive volcanic eruption. There are plenty of these, just the weather could do as in, really.
The way I see it, Bitcoin has the best hope for helping us alleviate all of these risks and plan for them in the future. The one that I’m particularly interested in would be the internal anthropogenic risk of us spawning artificial, or machine intelligence. Before Bitcoin, there was no way to instill values in machines, or – and there might still not be. I think, our best hope at value accretion for machine intelligence is Bitcoin.
You wouldn’t want to instill a fiat mindset in a machine. You wouldn’t want to code US dollars in a machine. A scarce asset like Bitcoin, you could absolutely program goals. The reason goal programming is important is to keep and guide the behavior of the machine intelligence. Because otherwise, you run into like what Svetski said, these unexpected outcomes, where you ask it to find it, you water and it just vaporizes you. You didn’t account for that, but you’re 90% water, so there’s a wire. There’s a there’s a lot of dangers to the paths that we can approach. I think, Bitcoin, we’re fortunate enough to find that before making true machine intelligence. I think, it might save us.
[00:41:46] AS: Totally. Totally. Think about it as a kid. That’s like, when you have babies, or even a pet, like the pet looks at the at the owner’s behavior. Then its behavior emerges from that. If our behavior is still – if we still have fear behavior, we’re going to have fiat AI. Let’s maybe look at it through that sense. If we’ve got Bitcoin behavior, sound behavior, moral behavior, we’re going to end up with an AI that is moral, sound, intelligent. Or at least, maybe it is moral, sound, intelligent either way, but if we’re still a bunch of fiat retards, that just makes us fucking obsolete, in a bid to clean everything up.
Either way, we need to fix ourselves, and we need to clean up our room before we go on building other shit and conquering the unknown, because at the moment, we’re basically like a two-year-old kid. Psychological, collective development. All we’re doing is every time something happens, we’d throw a fucking tantrum, and we don’t actually fix anything at the core.
[00:42:44] AM: Can I ask Svetski for a distinction there? Are you saying that it’s unwise to pursue interplanetary expansion, until we’ve take care of our shit down here, or that we will not be able to achieve it? Those are different things.
[00:42:59] AS: Yeah. I think, it’s fundamentally unwise. I also don’t think we’ll achieve it in any sustainable capacity. For example, we might be able to do a moonshot and get a bunch of people to Mars, but I guarantee, either them or something along the way is going to blow up and break, or die, or something like that.
Whatever we do, now it may not happen on the first trip, or the second trip, or any of that stuff. If we bring the broken values that we have in society today, we’ll bring that behavior with us and it will fundamentally fail as well, because of that that incessant fiat mindset or stupidity. Where I would say is the other thing about mastering and cleaning our own room is not just the moral premise, but it’s also the functional premises that if we actually have a world in which we have, let’s say, a million cities that are all decentralized and we have this diverse culture and this competition towards building better stuff, what we’re going to end up with is much better technology, much better use of resources, much better methods of extracting energy.
We can actually export that. Not just exporting a better moral compass, but exporting a higher degree of technological prowess to wherever we decide to colonize and travel to. We actually get a double whammy out of it. Yeah, we may make by the skin of our teeth, fucking like a retarded goat climbing backwards up a mountain. It could get there, but we could get there in a much better fashion.
[00:44:28] AM: Can you imagine.
[00:44:31] CK: We just only got seven more minutes. Wicked, want to let you get your comment. Then, I want to switch over just to last words to close it out. Sorry, Aleks.
[00:44:38] AS: That’s all right, man.
[00:44:40] AM: All right. I was actually going to ask you, guys, can you imagine a future where maybe we don’t need Bitcoin anymore? Let me explain myself quickly. I’m thinking if we crack nuclear fusion, for example. Let’s say, Bitcoin leads us here, because technologically, we advance so much. We crack nuclear fusion. We have unlimited, free energy. Now, we basically have the means to provide anything and everything that anyone would want on the world. Thereby, making money obsolete. I was wondering, did you guys ever think about this possible scenario?
[00:45:16] AS: That doesn’t make money obsolete. Yeah, totally. That in no way makes money obsoletely. It actually makes money more important. At all times, whether energy is abundant or not, the reality of the world that we’re living in is whilst energy may be abundant, we use up as much of it as possible when we’re doing things. Fundamentally, you have abundant energy, but not unlimited energy. That doesn’t exist. You’ve got that constraint. You have then resource constraints. Resources are unevenly distributed around the world. Then you have the fact that time is also a constraint. Then, you have the temporal forward moving nature of time. It’s the time is a vector, it’s not a dimension.
Within that framework, the only way to manage oneself in that framework and to manage a complex society, which is comprised of individuals with different subjective wants, so you have this inter-subjective reality, the only way to manage that is money. Money is the tool. You have to codify energy, time, money, resources, and emphasis, objective value some way. Money, no way doesn’t exist. The only time money will no longer exist is when the universe extinguishes itself.
[00:46:23] CK: Yeah, and I would just second. That’s key here and just say that there is no evolution for humanity that obsoletes money. Money has been critical to us getting here. Money solves the way that we measure value, communicate value, store value. The better money that we have, the better that we can do that. Money is almost like communication. It’s, “Hey, Apple. When are we going to get beyond language? When are we going to get beyond communicating value?” We’re not. That’s how we continue to move forward. It doesn’t matter if we have unlimited energy.
[00:46:53] NJ: Let me frame this one other way, just to get you guys thinking, maybe in another way. If aliens came here from another star system, do you really think that they would still be using money?
[00:47:04] AS: Yeah. Aliens that have their own version of Bitcoin. Aliens would have their own iteration of energy money and its architecture would most likely look very similar to what Bitcoin’s is. It would be using math and the law of large numbers to merge the metaphysical idea of money with physical reality. In order for intelligent, sentient species to become intergalactic, the discovery of energy money is a prerequisite. That’s my thesis.
[00:47:29] CK: All right, y’all, thanks for the cosmic ideas. I want to wrap this one. We’re just going to let Lauren and Aleks close it out and tail back into their individual thoughts around Guy Fawkes, V for Vendetta, 5th of November, all that good stuff. Lauren, why don’t you start? Svetski, close us out.
[00:47:46] LS: Yeah. Svetski, I read your article and I think, a big point that Aleks and I both made was Bitcoin is truth. Satoshi’s identity does not matter. We’re all Satoshi. We’re all V. We’re all here to opt into this network for the people. It’s our responsibility. I think, that’s a major point that I made is that we have to take it upon ourselves to change the world we live in and Bitcoin is that opportunity. I’d say, that’s my main point with my article. I think, after reading Svetski’s that was the big point he made is that we’re here for truth. That’s for us to take control of.
[00:48:19] AS: Yeah, I’d say, whilst the V for Vendetta thing is important, V for Vendetta is the documentary that warns us about how we get into the situation that we are today, we’re facing, what’s called the great reset. Bitcoin gets us through something like that, but more importantly, it gets us through the great filter, which is the more cosmic brain idea, and both related because on the path to getting through the great filter, one of the challenges that we need to cross is obsoleting ourselves through some technocratic attempt at transforming our world into a utopian, fucking gulag.
Bitcoin gets us through that element of the membrane, but pushes us far further beyond. This is still very early days. Whilst we need to view Bitcoin as that thing that gets us through the “great reset,” the big picture is coming out the other end of the great filter. I would employ everybody to follow Bitcoin Magazine. They’re going to announce something in the coming weeks, I believe, which is going to be super fucking cosmic. There’ll be a piece in there from me that really doubles down on this point about Bitcoin being the tool through the great filter. Think big.
[00:49:27] CK: Boom. Love it. Love to get cosmic in Bitcoin. Yes, we will be we will be drop in some interesting news soon. Until then, Bitcoin 2022. I want to give out a shout out to Neil and his promo code. I believe, it is promo code FOMO. That gets you 10% off. If you spend it with a Bitcoin and you buy your ticket with Bitcoin, you also save an additional a $100 off GA, a $1,000 off of whale pass. You can stack those promos. Promo code FOMO, as well as using Bitcoin to maximize your savings. Coming to Bitcoin 2022, me, all your favorite Bitcoiners in person. Yeah. See you next time, guys. Peace.
[00:50:03] AS: Thanks guys. Adios.
