Even leaving aside the sort of game theory, these people are trying to force a consensus change without actually doing a consensus change.
And we've been saying what you want is a consensus change.
You need to propose a consensus change because transaction relay policy is too easy to route around.
To have strong privacy on the base layer, as far as I'm aware, pretty much always breaks the ability to trustlessly audit the money supply.
What is a large language model?
It's basically a tokenized prediction engine where you've trained it by feeding it on the entire corpus of human knowledge and data on the Internet.
And so because this was not fed into training data for large language models, they have no clue how to appropriately expect, like, what is the answer to this next sentence?
This is not a human brain.
I'm thinking of Andreas Antonopoulos.
Views expressed by the host or guests are solely their own opinions.
Nothing stated in this podcast should be considered a specific endorsement to make any particular investment or follow any specific strategy.
Welcome back to All in Bitcoin, Jameson.
I'm excited to talk to you about Bitcoin, Freedom Tech, and more.
But first, let's get to know you even better with my 21 takes on you.
Ready?
Ready.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Ooh, that's a tricky one because I don't think that I really had a specific profession in mind until I got to university.
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life until I applied to university and I saw the list of all the majors and I looked through all of them and it was actually process of elimination for me.
It wasn't that I saw one and I was like, "Oh, it's got to be that," but I marked off everything that I thought was boring or stupid and then the only thing left was computer science.
A childhood dream that came true?
I've had a lot of goals and things that came true like jumping out of an airplane, I've done racing days with cars and motorcycles, just like extreme athletic and endurance related stuff.
But mostly, I've just been pleasantly surprised that me following my interests has resulted in so much success because I never did the things that I ended up doing because I thought, "Oh, this is going to make me famous or wealthy or what have you."
It's always just been, "I'm interested in this and I have the ability to do it and to take the risks of trying something that's kind of out there, and the risks have paid off."
And what do you still dream about?
What do I dream about today?
I'm focused a lot on longevity stuff, and this is an extension of my general nerdiness and interest in technology, is the perpetual optimism that technology will improve our lives, including advancements in biomedical technology to hopefully understand our bodies better and be able to repair our bodies better and hopefully eventually slow, if not reverse aging.
So I would very much like to, I don't say live forever because technically at a cosmological scale, we're all going to die one way or another, but the longevity movement is more like you should have the freedom to choose when you are going to die.
Okay.
Do you belong to a longevity movement?
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly a community,
and it has its own cast of characters.
I think a lot of people are familiar with Bryan Johnson, for example.
He's one of the more extreme characters within the longevity movement.
But, you know, this has kind of moved from a, like, bro science
to a more rigid scientific approach with a lot of these people.
You know, we have so much more ability to measure
many different aspects of our bodies now
that we can do, we can run more experiments.
And I think one of the things that has really slowed down
the advancement, or at least adoption, of medical progress
is how slow it is to do large-scale, widespread human studies
on anything, you know, usually many, many years
across very large cohorts of people.
So I do think it's cool now that the technology,
the ability to measure a lot of these biometric markers
is becoming more affordable at the individual level
so that, you know, we can essentially have thousands,
if not millions of people that are basically running their own studies.
And while any individual, of course, is not something
that you want to extrapolate from, hopefully, if we have enough people
doing stuff, we can start to aggregate results and extrapolate.
Is it true that if you follow a carnivorous diet, you live better but shorter?
I don't know about that.
I don't know that there are any studies that would conclude that.
There are pros and cons to carnivorous diet, vegetarian diet, whatever.
My main takeaway, because I did a keto diet for several years, very strict,
and had good results, had some negative results.
But my main takeaway was, like, if you're following a strict diet,
it almost doesn't really matter what diet it is,
just because it makes you be more mindful of what you're eating.
And in most cases, most of these diets kind of naturally force you
to stop eating highly processed food.
And I think that's one of the best things that you can do,
regardless of how much, you know, meat or plants or whatever you're eating.
Like, just cut out the ultra-processed stuff.
Probably, you know, cut out alcohol as well.
And that'll get you to a position, I think,
that's at least from an American diet perspective,
that's far better.
So what were the main topics of conversation at the dinner table at home?
That's an interesting question in and of itself,
because when I was growing up,
it was a fairly, you know, traditional Southern household.
And, you know, Southern as in, like, the Southern states of America.
It was sort of our tradition to sit down and have, like, a candlelight dinner with everyone sitting at the table and, you know,
not being distracted by, like, television or anything like that.
And this was very boring to me because no one ever wanted to talk about the things that I wanted to talk about.
And so my goal as a child at the dinner table was always to finish my plate as quickly as possible,
because then I would be allowed to leave and get back to my computer or my video games or whatever I was doing.
And so that I think this is actually an interesting example of unintended consequences due to poorly thought out incentives.
And that's basically that I was incentivized to eat as quickly as possible.
And this actually turned into a problem for me later in life,
because I essentially was trained to eat my food as quickly as possible.
And that's bad from a number of perspectives.
It's bad from, like, a digestive perspective.
It's bad from a social norms perspective.
And that's something that I've had to deal with for my entire adult life.
Who's been the most influential person in your life and why?
I would say there was no single person who has been the most influential for the entire span of my life.
But, you know, when I was in high school, for example, I would say one of my inspirational mentor figures
was probably the director of my band, actually.
And I ended up going really, really deep into doing band stuff.
And I was like a part of four different bands throughout high school.
And being in marching band, for example, I think gave me a lot more discipline.
And it was uncomfortable.
It was quite often a fairly uncomfortable, like physically uncomfortable thing to do, just due to the challenges.
And the fact that I would play baritone, which in marching band was like a really large trumpet.
And so I had to hold it out like this.
And it was like probably 10, 12 pounds that I would have to hold out for hours on end.
And so, you know, required, I think, getting into a tougher mental mindset as a result.
And later in life?
When I became an adult and I was, you know, out in the world, I would say at that point
in time, the folks that I looked up to were more of the people in the liberty movement, you know, whether that was like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, you know, the people who were fighting back against the oppressive governments.
And, you know, and then that continued on with Ross Ulbricht.
And so, over the past couple of years, it's been extremely gratifying to see them be freed.
Well, you know, still waiting on Snowden to get that pardon, but otherwise, you know, it feels like a bit of vindication, but it still doesn't undo the damage and all of the suffering that they had to go through for so many years.
That's true.
What did you believe about yourself 10 years ago that no longer holds true?
Hmm, that's very difficult questions because I'm normally not so introspective.
I mean, there are plenty of things like everyone changes as they mature and they have a slightly different worldview.
But, and this might be kind of pessimistic, but, you know, I think when you're younger, you feel like you can have a bigger impact on the world, right?
It's like you settle on one cause and you're like, I'm going to commit myself to this and I'm going to change the world and what have you.
And, you know, especially as I've gone through like the Liberty movement stuff and politics and now Bitcoin and related stuff, I feel like it's just much more important to focus on yourself and changing yourself.
You know, you know, be the change you want to see in the world, I think is a good way of looking at it rather than, I think it's very easy to look at some aspect of the world and be upset with the state of the world and the way that things are operating.
And then basically raging against that for years and years and years, I think that's a great way to burn yourself out and make yourself very pessimistic because, you know, you will probably fail to change the world.
Like there are very few people who rise to the level of having a massive impact upon the world.
We can't all change the world, but we can all do our part and change ourselves and hope that that then kind of rubs off on the other people, our friends and family matriculates out through society.
But I think that's probably one of the biggest things that I has changed about my own thinking is guys, I've got a quick favorite to ask if you are listening right now, take a second and hit subscribe and then if you are on YouTube or follow on your podcast app, so you don't miss the episodes and guests that matter to you.
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Thank you.
Thank you.
And still sometimes I let myself go when I'm pigging out, when I'm eating.
There was a period of a few years where I was extremely strict on the keto diet, not so much anymore, but you know, especially when traveling now, I feel like should take advantage of local foods, customs, what have you.
And I hate counting calories or macros or what have you. Sometimes I think you just have to live a little bit and realize that, you know, you may pay a consequence for a bit, but ultimately, you know, as long as you are more disciplined in general, it's okay. You know, everything in moderation, right?
Okay.
What's the strangest rabbit hole you went down other than Bitcoin.
More recently, probably some of the quantum related stuff.
Um, I've also, as a result of my, uh, security role in this space, sometimes I've gone down some, some crazy rabbit holes on the dark net and, you know, looking into, uh, you know, effectively criminal activity online, uh, where there are various forums of people who are committing crimes.
Crimes, uh, working with each other to, uh, you know, buy and sell stolen.
Information.
You know, sometimes I've, I've had to look into claims of, of hacks or breaches of, uh, of my own companies, um, or, uh, threats that we've received, you know, claiming, you know, usually, uh, ransom demands, extortion, stuff like that.
Uh, trying to follow up on it, trying to figure out like, are, are we actually being extorted from someone who has real leverage over us?
Or are they just bluffing?
Um, there's some really weird stuff that goes on.
What shaped your distrust of authority?
That's a fun story.
Um, the seminal event that really made me lose a lot of, uh, faith and trust and authority figures.
I was in, I think seventh or eighth grade.
And what had happened was my entire like eighth grade class had received a week long punishment of silent lunch.
So basically, you know, when we went to lunch for an hour, none of us were allowed to speak.
I don't even remember why this punishment happened because I do remember I had nothing to do with whatever event it was that gave us the punishment.
But nonetheless, the entire eighth grade class was being punished.
And, uh, I was an avid magic, the gathering card player at the time.
And since we were not allowed to speak, my friends and I decided that's fine.
We don't need to speak in order to play magic, the gathering, because it's just a turn based card game and you can see what the other person is doing.
And so I was playing and I, I finished, I remember I finished my turn and I pointed to the other guy I was playing with to say, you know, I'm done.
And at that moment, the vice principal of the school is standing there and he was like, you, you have just violated the conditions of silent lunch and you're coming with me.
Because you were pointing.
Because I pointed.
Which was completely silent, by the way, like the, uh, the rule that had been explained to me was you're not allowed to speak.
And there was no, and they never said no gesticulating the no gesticulation lunch.
Um, and so I, of course was aghast, my jaw dropped and I immediately like, I didn't say anything.
And he drags me to the principal's office, um, says, um, you're going to be suspended and you have to call home and explain what happened.
And of course I'm like breaking down crying.
Like I've, I am like a perfect, uh, attendance, no, um, demerits on my record.
You know, I've never had any problems like this.
I don't know how to handle this type of thing.
And, you know, I got home and explained it to my parents and they were just like, what the hell is going on at this school?
Um, and I, I received no punishment, no punishment from my parents.
Cause they thought the whole thing was ridiculous.
I, um, I basically came away from that feeling that, you know, what had happened was there was an authority figure and he was on a power trip.
And he felt like even, you know, the slightest, um, aggression upon his perceived authority had to be swiftly dealt with and, you know, made an example of essentially.
And so I ended up spending a week sitting in the in school suspension trailer with all of the, the rejects who like they had serious issues.
And, uh, and it was, it was probably the most boring week of my, uh, entire time in school because.
You know, these people, you know, even though they, they were probably also in eighth grade, like their academic abilities were like so far below that the, uh, the work that was being handed out and in school suspension was like stuff that I had been doing in fifth grade.
And so I was like, okay, done, I would, I would finish the work, you know, three times faster than anybody else.
And of course that would only get me in trouble with all of the other peers that were then an in school suspension.
Cause you know, who's this egghead who's like making us all look bad.
So it was just a really stupid experience.
And, um, and, and like I said, it caused me to lose a lot of trust and authority because I felt like the rules were pretty clear.
And that I had followed the rules to the letter and I still got a massive penalty.
I'm curious.
What did that attitude tells you about people in general?
Yeah.
That, you know, people love to, to hold, to wield power over others.
Yeah.
And that it becomes incredibly problematic when people are allowed to interpret the rules rather freely, you know, to their own advantage or to my disadvantage.
So, you know, I had always been, I think a stickler for the rules and felt like I was always operating inside of the rules and being a good boy.
And that really blew apart my, uh, my perspective of kind of just like systems of rules in general.
What do people most often misunderstand about you?
Ooh.
Um, well, especially lately, but as a general result of social media, there's a lot of nuance that gets lost.
Um, so I will often, you know, post one very specific point about something and it's almost like a, a law of social media, especially when you have a larger following that anything you write that can be misinterpreted will be misinterpreted.
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So it's almost like a rule at this point that on like a daily basis, people misinterpret or misunderstand or just make incorrect assumptions, uh, about in many cases, like missing context, uh, from a very specific thing.
So there there's so many things that are going on now.
And then now there's like so many conspiracy theories and such that are being spread about me and my incentives, uh, because I have enemies, uh, but this is a result of anyone who builds a decent following is, um, you know, you, you can't have haters unless you have success in the first place.
So I think this is generally true that the more successful someone comes, the more prominent they become, um, they end up having some subset of people who are really not a fan and dislike them for one reason or another.
So yeah, in short, there's a lot of people that I think, um, misunderstand various aspects of me and it doesn't help that I lead a, a lead, a lead of a very weird simultaneously highly public and highly private life.
So there are a lot of things about myself that I don't expose to the world because I believe that they could create vulnerabilities.
How do you handle criticism?
Most of the time when I'm being criticized, I find it amusing because the criticism is usually, uh, due to missing context or incorrect assumptions.
The problem, especially when you have a much larger following is that I literally do not have the time to address most of the criticism.
I guess I could spend the entirety of my waking days addressing criticism about myself.
So, um, I have to be pretty diligent about deciding when it's even worth my time to address criticism.
And usually what that comes down to is, um, looking at the person who's criticizing me and first deciding, do I even respect this person in the first place?
And then secondarily, are they making a valid logical argument?
Um, or are they missing something?
If they are missing something, is it worth my time correcting them to try to get them to see what they're missing and why they're resulting criticism in my eyes is not valid.
But you have to decide how are people going to react if you do respond versus if you don't respond.
And in many cases, if you do respond to criticism, that can make it worse.
Uh, especially if you're, if you're responding to someone who isn't interested in having a calm and rational debate with you, if they are more like emotionally fired up and they're just, they just want to be angry.
Um, and that's, I guess that's basically what I was trying to allude to earlier.
Uh, you know, somewhat around reputation, but also trying to understand motives.
Like, is this person intellectually, honestly engaging with me or are they just trolling or trying to trigger me?
And they can sometimes be very difficult, if not impossible to, uh, to determine that if, if it's a person slash account that you're unfamiliar with.
And if they are intellectually challenging you, how do you react to that?
If there is new information that I was not aware of, then obviously I think that you're always allowed to change your mind about something, especially if new information comes to light.
And what about pushbacks at this point, there's probably almost nothing that I could post that won't receive a pushback of some kind.
Um, and at least part of that is because a lot of the activity out on the social networks is just bots and a lot of them are just farming for engagement.
And so, you know, I could, I could post the most innocuous neutral thing and, uh, probably get some sort of response pretty quickly that whatever I did or said was stupid.
How do you handle disappointment?
These days I'm generally trying to go further out on the risk curve.
I'm sure I take the mindset of, you know, no risk, no reward, uh, greater risk, greater reward.
And, you know, especially when, when you become more successful and you can argue about what that means.
And, but I think of success as, you know, Maslow's hierarchy, like when you reach the pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy, where all of your physical and mental and emotional needs are taken care of.
Uh, and especially if you have, uh, the financial independence that, you know, you don't have to worry about getting fired.
Uh, that, that gives you so much more independence in a variety of different ways.
Um, I believe that like, once you get to that point, you really ought to start pushing out more on the risk curve to take bigger risks.
Um, with the understanding that you may also have bigger disappointments and that's okay, because as long as you manage your risks correctly, you know, you should not end up with some sort of catastrophic loss where you get knocked all the way back down the hierarchy of needs.
Like it's in the name, right? Disappointment is disappointing.
It's, it's upsetting and unnerving and you hope it doesn't happen.
But, um, if I think every time you make a decision, if you understand what the possible negative consequences are, then you should be kind of stealing yourself ahead of time to be ready.
Ready and accepting of the potential disappointment that may come.
What happens when you don't keep your word?
Well, I mean, the biggest thing that happens when you don't keep your word is obviously a loss of trust and loss of respect.
Um, and, and once again, this can become problematic, especially if we consider, as we said earlier, that you're allowed to change your minds about things when new information comes to light.
So you, you may, for example, make some sort of statement or commitment, and then months or years later, something changes and you're like, no, actually, I don't think I'm going to do that anymore.
But some people may still hold you to your original word.
So you, you have to make this decision of like, do I constrain myself for the rest of my life based upon my, uh, my data that was available to me and the logic that I used at this one specific point in time, or do I remain more flexible and, uh, you know, change the things that I do and say over time.
I lean towards the ladder, of course.
So, you know, this is very vague hand wavy stuff, I guess.
Um, you know, I'm sure there are cases where you make a commitment and then if nothing is actually materially changing around that commitment, of course, if you break your word, then you probably don't really have a very good excuse for it.
And you probably should lose reputation as a result.
But in the context of like my audience and the perception of people's perception of me, one thing that I have noticed over time is that people build a mental model of you based upon the information that they ingest about you.
And as I already said, I don't put everything about my life out there on social media.
So we already know that everyone who is like paying attention to me on social media has a limited perspective of who I am, but it can get even worse than that because, um, you know, they probably don't see everything that I have said.
I there's, I have a lot of content out there, especially after a decade of writing and posting and, uh, doing interviews and such.
And so.
Pretty much everybody's mental model of you is going to be flawed in one way or another because they simply do not have a 100% view of everything about you.
And then inevitably, if they're paying attention to you for long enough, you will do or say something that breaks that mental model of you.
And from your perspective, you are, uh, being completely, uh, consistent, but from the out, the outsider's perspective, it's inconsistent because they were probably missing some piece of information there.
And that's just something that I think that especially as a public person, as a person with an audience, you have to get used to.
I don't think that there's any way around that.
Give me a failure that turned out to be foundational.
Uh, let's say one of the most tumultuous and, uh, disappointing and disconcerting, uh, you know, failures within my life, uh, was actually getting divorced.
And I think a lot of people have said similar stuff of, of getting divorced and it ended up being the best thing for them.
And of course, everyone's situation is different, but, uh, in my case, it led me to realize that I wasn't being my true self.
And I was essentially allowing myself to be manipulated to be someone that I wasn't.
And that had already been causing me to be quite unhappy and, um, we'll never really know for sure, but I'm quite certain that if I had not gone down that like fork in the road of my life, that I wouldn't have gotten into Bitcoin.
I, I wouldn't be sitting here today.
I wouldn't have done all of the resulting things, um, that I was then allowed to do because I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted without having to try to fit within the mold of some expectations that had been set around me.
A risk you took that didn't pay off.
Yeah, there are definitely plenty.
Um, I mean, I've had plenty of investments over the years that haven't done well.
I've been very lucky in the sense that, uh, the various startups that I have been involved in have, uh, have done well, even though the vast majority of startups tend to fail.
But, you know, there's plenty of projects that I've invested in, uh, whether it's time or money or what have you.
Um, uh, I think some good examples of that, and, and actually part of my like disillusionment around some aspects of this space is that, I mean, I'm a cypher punk.
Uh, I value privacy over most things.
And so I was very interested in a strong privacy cryptocurrency projects, and I don't even have to list them.
Uh, the, really none of the privacy oriented cryptocurrency projects over the years have done well.
You mean like Monero, Zcash and things like that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Zcash has had a, a, a pump, but who knows whether or not that'll be like organic and sustainable.
But regardless, I think even, even if you look at that pump, like over the long term, it has not done well.
Um.
But Monero, it's still out there.
Well, yeah.
I mean, the networks are still running, but they have not received meaningful adoption and then therefore, uh, you know, their exchange rates have stagnated because the demand hasn't been there.
And so point being that, you know, I've put so much time, effort, you know, educational, uh, resources into trying to help people improve their privacy and.
Uh, the overwhelming majority of people just don't care.
And I think this goes back to one of my original points where I could allow myself to be very upset about that.
And that I have failed to meaningfully improve, uh, privacy at, at a large scale, uh, because I have, I have failed to get people to adopt stronger privacy practices with their money, with their lives.
Uh, whatever.
Uh, whatever.
You know, I've created a lot of content as I have gone down the privacy rabbit holes myself and tried to improve my own privacy.
And so I could be upset at the fact that the overwhelming majority of people don't care about privacy and that, um, you know, the, the efforts that I put into that.
I think I'm not going to say that they haven't helped anyone, but they just haven't been meaningfully adopted at any scale.
Maybe you don't know it.
Maybe you don't know it.
I mean, you have vastly improved my privacy, but I don't know if I ever told you.
Yes, but you, I don't think are indicative of like a mainstream, uh, uh, person.
Uh, and, but I'm not saying that I, I regret doing it right.
Like I'm glad that some people have benefited from that.
Uh, but I think the best way for me to, to, to cope with that failure is to realize that.
I have improved myself.
I've improved my own privacy and that's good enough.
Yeah.
I haven't heard of Monero for a while.
It's true.
Um, not, not that I'm comparing it with Bitcoin, but it used to be the only other cryptocurrency that was decentralized that the creator also left the project.
Yeah, no, that is a good point that Monero was one of the few other cryptocurrencies with an anonymous creator, uh, who disappeared.
Um, I think grin was the same though.
Grin had a much shorter, uh, lifespan and, uh, did not do well.
And that was one of the many things that got me canceled as well.
Uh, was daring to even talk about grin.
Another question before we leave this thing about privacy.
Do you think privacy should be embedded on Bitcoin's base layer or, um, on top?
Uh, this is a very loaded question, I think, uh, because, well, as, as a cypherpunk, I think that privacy should be the default.
Um, defaults are very strong.
And so you can look at Zcash as an example.
This is one of the reasons why I have always recommended Monero over Zcash because Monero, you get the privacy characteristics by default.
Now you can go down the rabbit hole of arguing about whether the Monero privacy is, uh, weaker or stronger than the Zcash privacy.
I mean, I think there's a strong argument that Zcash has stronger potential privacy, you know, if you're using the shielded transactions, but the mere fact that shielded transactions are just an optional thing within Zcash has always been one of my bigger disappointments and is what has led me to believe that the, like the practical privacy of Zcash is much lower.
Um, because yeah, you can, you can move your funds into that shielded pool, but I think in most cases, people eventually pull them out of the shielded pool and then are doing like KYC related stuff.
And so their effective privacy is probably nowhere near what they believe it to be.
So getting back to Bitcoin.
Um, yeah, I mean, obviously I believe it would be preferable for privacy to be the default.
Um, on layer one, because if it's not the default, very, very few people are going to use it.
And, a strong aspect of practical privacy on financial networks or really any network that's true for any communications network as well is the total set of people.
Who are, you know, with the, it's sometimes called the anonymity set, right?
You're, you're hiding in the crowd.
And so you want the crowd to be as large as possible.
And if the crowd has to be people who opted in to an optional thing, then everybody's privacy ends up being worse.
Now, the reason why this is a tricky question is because to have strong privacy on the base layer, as far as I'm aware, pretty much always breaks the ability to trustlessly audit the money supply.
And I think it's not controversial to say that the, you know, the 21 million Bitcoin limit is like the most sacred aspect of Bitcoin as a system of rules.
And anything that, uh, puts that, uh, puts that in danger is just, it's a non-starter.
Good point.
What shaped your sense of ambition?
Well, you know, it's tricky to say how I at least treated ambition in the early days, because I never really set long-term goals.
As I said, I, I got to where I am today just because I followed my interests and I did so pretty much with complete disregard to the risks that I was taking.
Right.
So, um, you know, I, I started off with fairly traditional, uh, software engineering background.
I mean, I was ambitious in the sense that I was always looking for bigger challenges.
So over like the first decade of my career, I, I effectively changed what I was doing every few years as my ambition was basically to stay on the cutting edge of the available technology that we were using in my industry.
That resulted in me going from, I started off just like doing front end website development to then doing backend web application development to then doing what at the time, uh, was the very early beginnings of what was.
It was called cloud computing, but basically large scale distributed computing, um, back in around 2010 or so.
I did that just because it was intellectually stimulating and challenging.
Uh, but then when I got bitten by the Bitcoin bug, I would say that was, that was like the biggest risk and challenge that I took was to leave a very comfortable and predictable software engineering career to go do something in this cryptocurrency space that ever, that almost everybody thought was like a scam.
Um, and, and, and so I did that without the, I guess, ambition or expectation.
I certainly didn't have like ambition or expectation that it was going to make me wealthy.
I only did it because it was intellectually interesting and philosophically, uh, aligned with my anarchist, uh, tendencies of trying to fight against central banks and governments and such.
And, you know, the fact that it paid off financially and, and from a reputation standpoint, I think is, uh, it's just icing on the cake.
It's, it's a happy coincidence, I guess.
I have to ask you, how old were you when you realized you've made it?
That's tough because even today, I'm not sure that I've made it.
No.
Um, and well, this is something that I do think about a fair amount, um, in the sense that I'm often on, um, forums for like for, uh, do you know the acronym fire?
No.
Uh, it's financial independence, retire early.
Okay.
Um, and so I've been financially independent for a while now.
So like, like I said, I don't have to work for a living, but I haven't really been able to wrap my head around.
What do you do with that?
And, and so I've, I've been reading countless, um, posts from people who have retired early and gone on to do nothing or to do some new hobby or whatever.
Um, and then I've read plenty of posts from people who are in a similar position to me where they're, they're similarly conflicted of like, yeah, I know that I don't have to work for a living, but.
Um, I feel like this is purpose.
I guess that's one of the big disconnects between people in that community is that there are the people who just worked because they had to do so to survive and, and they never actually enjoyed their work, which is unfortunate, but I think that's probably most people.
Um, and so when you, you then reach, uh, you call it, um, escape velocity, financial escape velocity, uh, where your assets are effectively generating enough, uh, revenue or generating enough new value that you can just live off of the appreciation or the interest effectively.
Um, you know, that's when you have the freedom to do whatever you want.
Um, and if you didn't find purpose from what you were doing, now you are free to go do something or nothing.
And there are certainly plenty of people who have gone on to do nothing and perhaps waste a lot of potential.
And I'm at the point now where, uh, I mean, my, my goal, or at least when I, I went full-time into Bitcoin.
I decided that I wanted to have a call it a mission statement or a purpose, which I did not have in the first decade of my career.
That was just like, I have a job and I want to do cool stuff and get challenged and hopefully get promoted and raises, you know, your typical.
Climbing up the corporate ladder, uh, type of career trajectory.
And, and when I switched to Bitcoin, I actually decided that my purpose or my mission would be to use my, uh, skills as a technologist to empower individuals to, or to enable individuals to empower themselves, whether that's through privacy or security or what have you.
And so, you know, that I think is a lofty enough goal that I will never complete it.
Like there will always be room for improvement there.
And so then the next question becomes, you know, if this is what gives my life purpose, why would I quit working?
Maybe I will work on a different project at some point, but it's also tricky because like I said, I get disillusioned because it seems like most people don't want more privacy.
They don't want more security.
They don't want the responsibility that comes with self-sovereignty.
But they don't know they want it.
Yes, quite possibly.
Um, you know, I think in general, uh, people avoid taking on more responsibility if they feel like it's, it's not absolutely necessary.
And that's one of the reasons why, you know, me focusing on self custody for the past decade has felt like, um, my enemy is human nature, the human nature to choose convenience at the expense of almost all else.
And I think that's a decent battle worth fighting.
It may be a battle that can never be won, but if nobody fights that battle, then I think everyone ends up worse off.
You've built tools for new beginnings.
What would you build for the end of the world?
Hmm.
Well, there are so many different possible ends of the world.
It really depends, right?
So, I mean, I'm a bit of a doomsday prepper, you know, because I'm the paranoid security guy.
Um, this, once again, this is one of those things where you could become an extreme player.
And spend the entirety of your life doing nothing but preparing for these edge cases.
Right.
But I think that the average person should at least follow, and it makes me feel bad to say this, follow the federal guidelines, which I believe are that you should have at least like two weeks of food, water, medical supplies, so on and so forth.
Um, because the government makes no guarantees about like protecting you even during just a natural disaster, whether that's like a hurricane, flood, earthquake, and those happen all the time.
So you should at least be prepared for those because more likely than not, that will occur to you at some point in your lifetime.
Now, if we're talking about end of the world scenarios, you know, what does this really mean?
I mean, you know, is it, uh, is it like economic and trade end of the world where we no longer have all of the, the trade networks where we can, you know, get all of our, our, our food and our other goods, uh, that are oftentimes produced very, very far away from us.
And now we have to be much more, uh, it was self, uh, subsistence essentially.
Um, you know, if that's the case, then you should probably have some sort of plan for having gardening, uh, you know, producing some of your own food.
Uh, a lot of people, of course, probably don't have the land to do things like raise animals and such.
Is it a, you know, mad max apocalypse end of the world scenario where everybody's killing each other?
Well, that's definitely much more extreme.
And now you, you have to worry about, uh, defense.
How are you going to protect yourself from the other desperate and starving people who are going to want to take whatever you have?
Um, but I think one thing that gets missed a lot in the prepping community is that actually you want a community and that human beings are social creatures and we're not really designed to do everything for ourselves.
That's how humans operated in like pre-industrial civilization.
Uh, and probably even further back than that, the like, uh, hunter gatherers.
I mean, even the hunter gatherers worked in tribes, right?
Um, to expect that you are going to be able to do everything that you need to, to live really to live at all, uh, for any lengthy period of time without engaging.
And trade with other people without, um, you know, making use of other people's skills.
You know, it was very difficult for any one human to have like all of the skills that are, are helpful.
And I, this is why we have civilization, uh, designed the way that it has evolved over the millennia, you know, specialization of tasks.
Uh, this is, this is, this is helpful for everyone that a lot of people just, you know, they go really deep down one particular skillset rabbit hole, and then they can help not only themselves, but they can help everyone else, uh, much more effectively.
And I don't think that is going to change even in an end of the world scenario.
So, you know, having, having a community with a variety of people with different skills, different backgrounds would be one of the most important things.
If you want like long-term survival.
What's your greatest asset?
Uh, well, greatest asset and also greatest weakness is probably just the ability to be extremely logical and leave emotion out of, uh, my thought processes and, and arguments and whatever.
And, you know, that gets me in trouble a lot, uh, because, uh, it's, it's, it can be more difficult for me to, to empathize with and put myself in other people's position who have very different perspective on things.
And, um, you know, oftentimes this can lead to me sounding very callous, you know, very cold and, and unemotional and logical about, uh, my approach to any given subject.
What's the one great thing you've done that you'll never be able to top?
Well, uh, I mean, I, I really enjoy being a contrarian and being proven right as a contrarian.
And this is true across many different ideas, concepts, beliefs, what have you.
So, you know, there are still, there are still things that come up these days where I'm very contrarian about them.
And, and when I see, you know, the sort of mainstream opinion being one way, and I'm a hundred percent convinced that the mainstream is wrong.
And I, I put my contrarian opinions out there and defend them, uh, mainly under the expectation that over a very long timeframe, you know, they will age well.
And that brings me joy, so to speak.
And I suspect that I will never be able to, uh, have that level of joy over any other topic than, uh, you know, being really early interested in Bitcoin and telling people like, this is the future of money and having them tell me it's a Ponzi scheme and all this other stuff.
And, and so, you know, I, I, as a result, I have a lot of content and posts and stuff from over a decade ago.
And, and it gives me joy to go back and look at some of these things and then see the people who were telling me how wrong I was.
And, and, and now I can just like repost it and say, well, let's see, you know, whose, whose arguments ended up aging the best.
But you know, that's also what gets me in trouble of, um, the fact that I actually tend to lean into controversy, uh, because I see that as an opportunity.
The thing that annoys you the most probably what, what we've seen happen just like in political rhetoric, uh, you know, a lot of the, the social dynamics of stuff that have changed, especially like over the past five years.
You can call it cancel culture, um, taking people's, um, points out of context and like using to argue against them, like a lot of intellectually dishonest stuff.
And that's happening now, you know, in the Bitcoin space.
I mean, I would say it, it, it, it happened somewhat during the scaling debates, uh, seven or eight years ago, but it's definitely ramped up again.
And it's happening a lot more this year of, uh, of actually like people taking 10 second clips of me from podcasts out of context and, and, and making arguments that I wasn't actually making.
And in many cases within a few seconds of that clip, I had clarification that actually showed that that was not the case, but I think this is just one of the new realities, you know, the weaponization of canceled culture.
Um, and now AI is making it even worse, right.
Is, um, it's dumbing us down, or at least it seems like it's dumbing down the level of discourse on social media.
It's unfortunate because I'm, uh, you know, perpetually online guy.
And, and I think that the internet is amazing because it allows you to connect to billions of people.
You know, you essentially connect to all of humanity and have the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.
But there is this, there's push and pull like the, the flip side of that is that even though I can go out there and I can, I can create content.
I can, I can generate information and educational content.
I can spend all day long doing that.
If I want to, it's takes so much less effort to generate misinformation and disinformation and then propagate that.
And then I think there's, there are essentially some laws at play that the, um, you know, falsehoods tend to propagate faster than truths.
So this is another like potential black pill perspective of like, and I, I don't know what the answer to this is, is as humanity and human civilization.
Continues to go forward.
And especially as AI continues to accelerate and miss information and totally false content becomes easier, cheaper and faster to, uh, to generate and to propagate.
What is the result of just the integrity of human conversations and our ability to, uh, speak to each other and to argue about things and to, to have a rational debate.
Because it seems to me like now the incentive is if, if someone starts off engaging and rational debate, and then they feel like they're losing.
Their incentive is to, to switch tactics and to start using misinformation and disinformation and, and effectively rhetorical tricks to get people onto their side.
Uh, that's not new.
That fundamentally, that is not new fun.
Fundamentally that is politics.
Right.
Uh, but now what we're seeing is just the acceleration of that because of technology, because of the internet, because of AI, uh, all of these tools are.
And you could, you could say democratizing the access to misinformation, to, to generate and propagate misinformation.
And, and so the natural result, because it's bringing down the cost to do that a hundred years ago.
Are you talking about bots?
Humans and bots.
I mean, the bots are just the next step of like automating the disinformation campaigns.
And that is certainly happening.
I had, I have an entire thread, um, on X of me coming across accounts that I believe are bots.
And then I perform a touring test on it where I basically ask it a question that should be easy for a human to answer, but hard for a bot to answer.
Uh, okay.
My, my common one that I am still doing because it seems to work pretty well.
Uh, and this isn't going to translate very well for a podcast because it's very text focused, but I have a question that I ask where I say, okay, please read the following question and interpret it phonetically.
And that basically means, you know, you sound it out rather, rather than reading it because it is a nonsensical grammatical, uh, construction.
Okay.
And, and it, this, the question is, uh, do D U E U E E W E, which is, you know, a sheep, uh, and then N O no, and then wart W A R T, you know, like, uh, you get a wart on your skin.
Yeah.
Uh, and then duh.
Uh, and then duh D U H, uh, date D A T E E.
Is.
So if you sound it out phonetically, do you know what the date is, but the actual English words and grammar are nonsensical.
And this works well to trip up large language model bots, because what is a large language model?
It's basically a tokenized prediction engine where, you know, you've trained it by feeding it on the entire corpus of human knowledge and data on the internet.
And this particular sentence never existed before.
Mm-hmm .
And so because this was not fed into training data for large language models, uh, they have no clue how to appropriately expect, like, what is the answer to this next sentence?
And so I get all of these nonsensical replies, usually having to do with sheep.
And, and that's when you can, you can just tell like, this is, this is not a human brain.
You know, this is some sort of tokenized prediction engine.
And unfortunately this Turing test will probably fail at some point and I'll have to come up with something else.
And then eventually maybe it will get to the point where there is no Turing test and you can't tell at all.
Yeah.
Not versus car.
Absolutely.
Go.
All right.
Well, I mean, we could talk about this for hours, though.
I have a very lengthy blog post that was entitled.
It's not K-N-O-T a serious project.
Right.
And, and that's because it's a complicated subject, even leaving aside the sort of game theory of filtering
the mem pool, which I've been saying is ineffective.
And these people are trying to force a consensus change without actually doing a consensus change.
And we've been saying what you want is a consensus change.
You need to propose a consensus change because, um, transaction relay policy, uh, is too easy to route around.
And this has been proven time and time again.
Uh, the most recent proof of this is what we called sub subs one sat summer, where, um, for the entirety of, uh, Bitcoin's history that I recall, uh, the, the minimum fee floor for a transaction to get propagated across the network was one Satoshi per byte of data.
Um, and so if you, if you attached a lower transaction fee to that, your transaction just won't get propagated across the network because it was considered non-standard.
And these standardness policy rules are what some people now refer to as filter rules.
But at some point the fees were so low and the blocks were not full that some people decided to start playing around with, Hey, can I create a transaction that only pays like 0.1, uh, Satoshi's per byte of the transaction data.
And what they found was that even though there was only a fairly tiny number of nodes on the network that were permissive enough to accept those transactions and relay them.
And in fact, there is a project called Libra relay that is all about doing that.
It's basically the antithesis of knots from that perspective that has the most open and permissive relay rules.
Uh, they found out that actually now we can get these transactions propagated well enough that they get to the miners and they get into blocks.
And so they effectively proved that that policy, that filter rule is no longer effective.
And it only required a small number of node operators on the network to decide that they no longer wanted to enforce it.
And so I think it's similar story with any other policy or filter rule that you're going to enforce.
So this is why I've said from the very beginning that I believe that, you know, all of the energy that the knots people were putting into trying to get adoption of knots higher, uh, is ineffective, ineffective at best.
And dangerous from a security perspective at worse, because knots as a project simply is not as well reviewed.
The code is not as well audited. The, uh, it does not have the same level of integrity checks and assurances that the knots developers claim that it has.
I think I read that in the article that it was reviewed by Luke, right?
Pretty much. And he, the, the problem is that he does not follow best practices, uh, for how to like merge and code and make it odd, make the, the set of changes much more easily auditable.
Um, and the way that he does, it ends up breaking all of the integrity checks and assurances of the code review that happen upstream in the Bitcoin core project.
So, you know, Luke likes to say that knots, it has like all of the Bitcoin core developers plus the knots developers, but because my argument would be that because they are not doing an explicit.
Open and transparent code review of all of the code changes, uh, that they're making and knots that they're, they're actually breaking all of the peer review that happened upstream.
So, you know, I can't say that it's, uh, necessarily going to blow up in people's faces and they're gonna, you know, lose money or anything like that.
All that we know is that the integrity checks aren't there.
And therefore we are, we should be less confident that it is bug free.
Luke has a history of poor security practices.
And what's even worse than that is that he, he defends them and says that he has a strong security track record.
Not alone, I got me lost 200 Bitcoin.
Yes.
And that's a whole story in and of itself.
But, uh, you know, Luke does not follow what we would consider to be best practice, which is, you know, keep your keys off of online machines.
Um, you know, he does not use dedicated hardware, like a treasure or ledger or cold card or whatever.
Tell me about a moment that you felt you said too much.
Oh, I mean, that happens all the time.
Uh, the time that I said too much that had the worst consequences for me was when I was participating in the scaling debates and being controversial and ended up getting swatted.
Uh, so like if, if I had not been so outspoken and controversial in 2017, I wouldn't have had my entire neighborhood shut down by the police and had guns pointed at me and so on and so forth.
And, but, you know, like I said, um, that was much, much like, you know, my, uh, my eighth grade, uh, school suspension problem that then shattered my trust and authority.
Uh, my 2017 swatting, uh, shattered my illusion of privacy and forced me to go a lot further down the privacy rabbit hole to understand how do I harden myself against this type of attack?
And the only way to do that is to make it so that nobody knows where I live, where I sleep at night.
Um, because essentially a swatting attack is, um, it's a, an online adversary who is leveraging the lethal force of the state via your local law enforcement to target you.
And, you know, try to physically hurt you.
And there have been people who have been killed, uh, after being targeted in a swatting attack.
So this is, this is, this is probably like the most dangerous attack that I myself have ever experienced.
I could have been physically hurt.
Thankfully was not, you know, I get attacked all of the time in a variety of different ways.
I get attacked on social media.
Uh, I'm not going to shut up.
Uh, like that, that would be how I would, I would, I could, I could pull out my phone right now and I could stop all of the attacks against me on social media by deleting my account.
Right.
But I'm not going to do it.
Uh, it's too much fun.
When I got attacked in 2017, I could have done the same thing.
I could have allowed myself to be silenced.
I could have just shut up.
And then that most likely would have prevented any future attacks, but, uh, I wanted to continue to, uh, contribute my, my thoughts, my ideas, my reputation to the cause.
As I said, uh, continuing to, uh, empower individuals, uh, whether that's via sovereignty, privacy, what have you, um, or just.
Via making them think harder about certain things and kind of pushing the boundaries there.
So even though it's very tempting to censor yourself, I, I think it's, it's almost, it's worse to, uh, basically bend the knee to pressure.
And, and, and threats and, uh, you know, retreat into your own private life and, and no longer, you know, be able to participate in whatever it is.
Uh, whatever things bring you joy and, and, uh, you know, give you your life purpose.
I'm thinking of Andreas Antonopoulos.
Yeah.
Um, that's certainly analogous.
It's unfortunate.
Uh, you know, I haven't asked Andreas directly.
It's been a few years since we've actually spoken, but I certainly got the feeling that he had had enough of the vitriol that was being directed at him.
Um, especially a lot of that vitriol came from the fact that he dared to speak and educate people about Ethereum.
Um, and that's because Andreas, like myself as a technologist, uh, he didn't really treat these things as a, a tribalistic, uh, type of network, even though there certainly are aspects of that at play.
And these networks do compete for mind share.
Uh, even if you can argue about whether or not they compete.
As money or whatever, I don't think it really matters.
Ultimately, ultimately I think every crypto currency or crypto asset competes with every other just for attention.
And that is probably more than enough to then create tribalism.
And then of course the fact that people are incentivized by whatever they're invested in, uh, to try to get more attention to whatever, uh, their project is.
But yeah, I mean, we, we lost Andreas because I think he just didn't want to deal with the hate anymore.
And, uh, you know, who knows what else, what other contributions he might've made if he had kept going.
That's where I left it with Jameson.
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