What would it actually take in order for an American armed uprising against our own government?
Taxation is actually a penalty on being successful.
I've always been the weird kid. I've never been the popular kid.
You have to become comfortable with lying.
I started injecting myself with peptides and other sort of prescribed drugs.
My fear is that someday I am the old, out-of-touch person.
A bad idea that is trending right now.
Nation-state strategic reserve of Bitcoin.
Citizens are essentially tax cattle on the tax farm for governments.
We are like the economic powerhouse that the parasitic government leeches off of.
People should not fear their government. The government should fear their people.
Hey, Jameson. Welcome to All in Bitcoin.
Let's get to know you a little bit better with my 21 takes on you.
All right. I'll give it my best shot.
What's the most misunderstood gadget or piece of tech you own?
Ooh. Well, I don't know if Bitcoin counts because that's definitely up there.
I'm also a big fan of virtual reality, which is another kind of niche thing.
And not many people have gotten into it, at least from more than a surface level.
So I think that both Bitcoin and virtual reality and, of course, many other technologies,
they're just so early and still very rough around the edges.
It's very hard to envision what the world might look like in 10 or 20 years as the technology matures.
So virtual reality is still very janky.
I don't use it a lot because it's just still very annoying to actually get up and running and using and having this bulky headset on.
But I can definitely see how, you know, as the hardware and the software continues to improve,
I think it's really going to open up, you know, entirely new worlds and ways for us to communicate and interact with each other.
How do you decide what's right for you?
I don't think that I really look at it so much as deciding what is right rather than I'm just a curious person.
And then this gets me in trouble a lot as well, because I will talk about things that people will say,
oh, you shouldn't even be talking about that, especially if you're talking about any crypto currency or asset other than Bitcoin.
There's a lot of very hardcore people in this space who can get almost religious about it.
But my perspective on that is like, how did I get to Bitcoin in the first place?
It's because I was curious.
It's because I investigate new, weird things because I want to understand them better.
And this is a large part of the reason why I think I have a fairly large following of people who listen to me about Bitcoin stuff,
because I've spent the past 10 years trying to understand Bitcoin better, researching it, doing weird stuff with it,
and then trying to take what I've learned and explain it to other people as best I can.
I mean, we're all just trying to figure out like, what is Bitcoin and where is it going?
And so, you know, I'm not an authority figure.
I'm just a guy who spends a lot of his time thinking and playing around with this stuff.
And that pretty much extends to all of my different interests, whether it's technology or guns or motorcycles or whatever.
I'm just one of those guys who likes to spend a lot of time researching things and understanding them better
So that hopefully my experience while adopting them and using them will be better.
It's just important, I think, to be a lifelong learner, whatever subjects you're interested in.
As soon as you stop learning stuff, what is the point of continuing?
Life would be a lot boring if not for that.
And thankfully, the world is complicated enough and continuing to evolve that there's always more that you could learn.
It's not possible for any of us to find the bottom of the rabbit hole in a number of different subjects.
How important is music for you in your life?
Yeah, music is unfortunately a lot less important to me these days than it used to be.
There was a point in my life where music was the majority of my life.
And that was really when I was in middle school and high school.
I was at a point in high school where I think I was in three or four different musical groups at the same time.
What were you playing?
Well, marching band, like a symphonic band.
I was in an orchestra.
I was in a jazz band.
And I played many different instruments.
I played clarinets.
I played bass clarinets, alto saxophone, baritone.
And that was just during that time.
I started off at a very, very early age with piano.
That's how I got sort of my introduction to music.
And I think that's just because my parents said, hey, you should do something with music just so that you see if you like it.
For me, though, it wasn't so much about the music as it was about the camaraderie of being a team player.
You know, music, it's a team sport.
Unless you're doing something very solo, it's generally a team sport.
And, you know, you have to work with other people in order to find the optimal balance and be able to produce the very best that you can.
It was a good learning experience.
You know, it got me a lot of structure and made me push myself in a number of different ways.
But, you know, after graduating high school and going to university, I changed my interests significantly.
And then I kept changing them every few years after that.
What or who pulled you into Bitcoin?
Nerdy news sites.
I'm pretty sure that it was Slashdot, which is just one of the nerdy news sites that's out there even to this day.
And, you know, Bitcoin just kept coming up on it.
And I ignored it several times.
I was like, oh, this thing is going to fail and everybody's going to lose their money.
But, you know, after it kept coming back around three or four times, I was like, all right, it's not dead.
Maybe I should look into it.
And then when I finally read the white paper, that really made it click for me because I've got a computer science background.
And the thing that really blew my mind was that Satoshi's solution to the double spending problem, which I had never thought of before, was basically the exact opposite of how I would have tried to solve it.
And that's why it's so genius.
And the reason that it's the opposite of what a computer scientist would generally do is that we are trained in data structures and algorithms at university to find the most efficient, most optimized way of using the least amount of resources, whether that's CPU cycles, memory, hard drive, hard disks, or bandwidth or whatever.
To solve the problem.
And Satoshi's solution is entirely unoptimized, but that's why it's brilliant.
I like to call the Bitcoin blockchain like the least performant database of all time.
You know, it's very terrible in terms of performance of like reads and writes and, you know, manipulating the database.
But what you get in exchange for that, the tradeoff is that you get this really high level of resilience and robustness.
And so, you know, that's really what got me interested in it, because I was like, this is weird.
And yet it looks like it could work.
And so that's really when I started going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and deciding I need to learn more about this thing.
And, you know, that kicked off a decade long journey.
What about peanut?
Peanut.
Yes.
Rest in peace.
You know, I think that was an amazing example of government overreach.
And what can happen when you have way too much bureaucracy where, you know, you have the rules in place and they're so strict.
You know, when people are, I'm just doing my job, I'm just following the rules, then you, you're, some of the outcomes are just ridiculous.
Any reasonable person can evaluate the situation and say, look, nobody was getting hurt from this.
So, you know, the rules that say we have to make sure, for example, that, you know, there's no rabies.
Oh, by the way, the test for rabies requires killing the animal.
Like, who are you really helping with that?
You know, I think there have been a lot of great examples of government overreach in the past few years, whether it's like the Canadian trucker protests or animal sanctuaries and conservationists who they're just out there to help in their own little way.
And, you know, the government comes in and says, no, we're the only ones who are allowed to help and we have to do it in our way.
And then they actually end up causing harm.
You know, I think that's another good reason why we should advocate for, you know, the sort of libertarian ideal is you should be allowed to do what you do as long as you're not hurting other people.
And I think this was a very clear case where they weren't hurting anyone.
And instead, the government came in and hurt them.
Yeah.
What makes you weird, if anything?
This is a very deep, like, you know, introspective psychological analysis, which is not my forte.
But one of the reasons that a lot of people consider me to be weird is because I get interested in fringe things.
I basically get addicted to them and call it like OCD or ADHD or whatever.
You know, I haven't been officially diagnosed with anything, but I think a lot of people who know me very well would say, you're definitely on the spectrum.
You know, you've got a touch of the autism, which is certainly possible.
I'm not at the level where it negatively impacts me to the point that I can't deal with other people.
I'm very low on the emotional intelligence, very high on the IQ.
And that's something that I've noticed a lot in this space.
And because I actually founded the Bitcoin group for Mensa, which is, you know, a bunch of high IQ people.
And I've noticed a lot of interesting patterns with them as well.
And a lot of people who are in Mensa are definitely weird.
You can be very intellectual and be like caught up in your own head.
And when you're doing that, you might be smart.
You might be book smart.
But usually with these things, there's there's almost always a trade off.
Like, you know, someone is really, really good at something.
They're probably also really, really bad at something else.
It's very rare that you find someone who is like both really high IQ and also really high EQ.
And so what I found in the high IQ society is it's also you could generally call it the low EQ society.
And so that results in communications problems because we have difficulty, I think, putting ourselves in other people's positions or the things that they care about.
Because if we don't care about it, it's hard for us to understand why someone else would care about it.
There's a really complex question we could probably spend hours and hours talking about.
But a lot of people who are considered weird are just those who are individualists who they go their own path.
And so weirdness, and I think for me, this goes all the way back to like elementary school.
Like I've always been the weird kid.
I've never been the popular kid.
And some people have definitely said when they are around me for long enough and really understand my motivations,
they feel like I'm on this like revenge of the nerds path.
And I kind of am.
I mean, you know, I got bullied for being weird pretty much all throughout school.
And I was weird because I wasn't in the major common group, whatever that is, right?
Whenever you start saying things that are outside the norm,
And I would say a lot of things that were outside the norm because I was really book smart.
Like I would read so many books and I would have a vocabulary that was very different from my peers.
So I would use words that they were like, what is wrong with you?
Like, what does that mean?
Why are you even saying that?
So that would make me weird.
Or because, you know, I was into computers and video games and stuff at times when my peers weren't necessarily.
So, yeah, I mean, I'm just weird because I don't care what the normal people are doing.
We may have some overlap in interest, but just because a lot of other people are doing it doesn't make me interested in it.
A bad idea that is trending right now.
Nation-state strategic reserve of Bitcoin.
It's probably a good idea for the United States to acquire as much Bitcoin.
I mean, it's probably a good idea for anyone to acquire as much Bitcoin as they can.
I am very surprised that we have already reached this point where the United States is thinking about doing it.
I was actually surprised, you know, a number of years ago when El Salvador became Bitcoin country.
Because my thesis all along had been that this was going to happen.
But I was expecting that the first handful of countries that made Bitcoin like legal tender and strategic reserve and all these other things,
I expected that they would be more like micro nations, you know, because your incentive to do that
and your ability to do something as extreme as that is just much stronger.
So El Salvador surprised me because they were a much larger nation than I expected was going to be the first to do that.
And after that, I was expecting other similar size or smaller countries would do it.
But here we are with the United States saying they're going to do it.
And it's particularly weird for the United States to say that they're going to be doing that because the United States is the creator of the dominant fiat currency,
the global reserve currency that everybody else wants.
So it's going to be very interesting to see how they balance these two, really the dichotomy of trying to continue being the primary fiat currency,
but also having a decent stake in what is ostensibly a major competitor to themselves.
This does tie a little bit into something which is the innovator's dilemma.
Now, it might be a good idea for, you know, the United States to start getting into Bitcoin because I think most people would agree that it feels like the United States is peaking in a number of different ways.
And, you know, we may be near the beginning of the decline of the empire of the United States.
That is a problem that a lot of organizations run into, not just nation states, but companies, for example, run into this problem where you're innovating, you're innovating, you're slowly getting adoption.
Then you're getting a lot of adoption and you find massive success.
And at that point, you run into this innovator's dilemma, which is like, do I continue innovating?
Because if I continue innovating, then I may actually be hurting myself.
I'm taking a risk that I may cause, you know, a loss of adoption, you know, if I make my product or service worse as a result of the changes to it.
But if I don't continue innovating, I'm kind of opening up the ability for competitors in the market to come in and offer something that's a lot greater than what I'm doing.
So from that perspective, it could make sense that, in fact, the dominant fiat currency creator comes in and says, you know what, we're actually we're going to disrupt ourselves because we think that this actually may be the future of currency.
So from that perspective, it could be smart, but it really there's so many variables.
It really depends on exactly what play they make with all of it, because Donald Trump is a dollar maximalist.
It's going to be very interesting to see how he he balances these two different things that he's trying to continue to improve.
Right.
Tell me something you couldn't care less about.
What people think of me.
And, you know, that gets me in trouble, but I speak my mind.
I think it helped me to build an audience because I just I say what I think, you know, I call it like I see it.
I mean, I can certainly be wrong about things.
But then once you have a large audience, you're almost guaranteed that whatever you say, you're going to piss somebody off.
I think that, you know, having the mindset of continuing to just be honest to myself and not worry about how my actions or words are going to be interpreted by some people, you know, not let it alter my course of how I continue to act.
What is a book that really impacted you?
Well, that's an easy one because the sovereign individual definitely changed my worldview.
And I think that thesis is continuing to play out somewhat, but we're still at the level where I think the only real sovereign individuals at this point are global multinational corporations.
And then often like the heads of those corporations, basically billionaires, but technologies like Bitcoin and, you know, privacy enhancing and preserving technologies, I think will continue to lower the cost and the threshold for effectively becoming a sovereign individual.
So, you know, I think if you're willing to give up on certain things, like being permanently set at a residence in a specific physical location, then you can be a sovereign individual.
You have to be willing, I think, to make some sacrifices.
You have to be willing to actually physically move in order to take advantage of, call it jurisdictional arbitrage.
What do you fear?
So many things, but I think one of my greatest personal fears, I'll leave out like fears for Bitcoin in the future and stuff.
But one of my greatest personal fears is when I look at the older generations and how baffled they are by technological progress in general, like change in the world, I fear becoming like them.
I know, or at least my thesis is the world will continue to accelerate in how it changes in a number of different ways and that it will become more and more difficult, I think, for people to keep up with this accelerating pace of change.
My fear is that someday I am the old out of touch person who, you know, the younger generations look at and they're like, you know, how do you not know this very basic, simple thing that, you know, we're all doing to improve our lives?
While I fear that happening, I hope that we will also be able to develop technology that helps us filter out a lot of the noise so that we only get the signal.
And I think that that would mostly come in the form of like AI agents, very personalized, autonomous agents, where, you know, you have essentially AI that is trained on just you and what you're interested in and how you think and what you like and so on and so forth.
I think that data will kind of act as a sentry or a demon, if you will, in a firewall so that, you know, the AI is dealing with all of the chaos and the noise out in the world.
And then when it finds something that is useful enough and of interest to you, then it allows that data to come through the firewall and says, hey, you should look into this stuff.
I like that.
What are your thoughts on starting over?
If you truly want like the ultimate level of freedom, then you have to be willing to start over.
You have to be willing to walk away from whatever life you've currently set up.
I kind of can speak to that in the sense that that's what I did in 2018.
And from a privacy perspective, I had to sell all of my publicly registered assets, I had to pick up and move and basically burn down my old life and start over with a whole new set of legal and technological privacy protections, which I have had to maintain ever since then.
And so from that perspective, I really have a new life ever since 2018.
And I have, you know, multiple different identities, if you will, like digital identities and real world identities that I use to like compartmentalize and firewall off, you know, data leakage of my true identity, which I am going really hard to to protect as much as possible.
Though, I think astute observers might say, oh, but look, you're on podcasts, you're putting
your face out there.
And I do think that eventually we'll get to the point where like facial recognition technology
is so pervasive.
But as it is right now, you know, I'm still trying to be able to use my knowledge and reputation
to continue to continue to disseminate and educate as much as possible while avoiding doing that on like mainstream media.
Like I don't want millions or tens of millions of people like recognizing me because I am a like niche micro celebrity in the sense that like most people who know,
I think what Bitcoin is, you know, I think what Bitcoin is may run across me at some point, but I'm not a mainstream celebrity in the sense that I don't get recognized when I'm walking around in public, you know, unless I'm at a Bitcoin conference or something.
I've been able to walk a very fine line for the past six years.
So I'm hoping that I can continue to walk that line as, as long as I can.
What's your latest obsession?
A number of health things.
I mean, I've been experimenting with various diet and exercise and health related stuff for the past few years.
And for the latter half of 2024, I started doing some more hardcore experiments with injecting myself.
with peptides and other sort of prescribed drugs through a provider that's, you know, specifically about health optimization stuff,
because it kind of ties into some of my other longevity interests.
I try to follow along with a lot of the longevity research that is happening in the space, but it's very difficult to filter the noise from the signal there.
I was doing longevity stuff for a year or so with like three or four different companies.
I was doing all these like blood tests and taking different supplements and stuff.
And after a year and trying to look at like all of the data, it was just such a mess that I'm like, I can't tell if I'm being scammed.
Because like, basically, the different companies were telling me completely different things.
I'm like, I don't know what's going on here.
I don't know who to trust.
And so I backed away from doing the longevity stuff.
And now I'm more focused on short term health and things that I can actually measure better.
And so like I've been getting these full body DEXA scans, for example, which are really cool.
They give you like very precise breakdowns of fat and muscle and bone density in each limb.
And so, you know, if you're trying to work on body composition, you know, that's something where, you know, you can actually see whether or not whatever you're doing is making a difference.
I don't have the like the perfect recommendation for what to do quite yet, though.
I have tried injection.
It basically is an appetite suppressant and they work.
But I'm not a fan of some of the side effects.
Why is that?
Because if you eat less, you live longer?
That's the idea.
Well, I'm not, you know, there are some longevity stuff that are basically saying, you know, fasting is good.
Like there's a bunch of mouse studies, I think, that have shown that, you know, caloric restriction is good for longevity.
That's a really tricky thing to say, though, because there's other longevity scientists that say, actually, the most important thing for longevity is muscle mass, increasing your muscle mass.
And I tend to believe that that makes more sense.
The logical explanation for why muscle mass is more important for longevity is that as you age, and especially as you get up into like your 70s and 80s and 90s, the greatest risk tends to be falling and breaking bones and then becoming bedridden.
And if you get to the point where, you know, you can't walk and you have to be in a bed for weeks or months to try to repair your bone, that accelerates the muscle loss.
It's very easy to get to a point where essentially you're losing so much muscle, you can't even maintain the muscle you have that you just keep getting weaker and weaker and weaker.
And that kind of starts a downward spiral from which a lot of people never recover.
That's kind of what I'm going more for these days is how do I increase my muscle mass and preferably decrease my fat?
And that's why I did this cocktail of like seven different drugs at the same time last year.
I've tried so many different just nutritional like diet and exercise things to try to simultaneously lose fat and gain muscle.
And I've never been able to do both simultaneously.
I did keto hardcore for several years, which is great for losing fat.
I was never able to gain like any significant amount of muscle.
And it makes sense because if you're not eating carbs, if you're not getting glucose, it's very difficult to actually build muscle if all you're doing is eating fat and protein.
Then, you know, when I got a trainer and I started doing a high carb, high protein diet, I was able to gain a lot of muscle, but I also added a lot of fat back.
The cool thing from the peptides experiment that I did was over like a five month period, I was able to lose 20 to 30 pounds while I didn't add muscle.
For every nine pounds of fat that I lost, I only lost one pound of muscle, which like all of the, you know, physicians and, you know, sports science folks that I talked to, they're like, that is really, really good.
Because usually if you're losing weight, you're losing a decent amount of muscle along with the fat.
What's the best piece of advice you've ever given?
Probably buy Bitcoin.
And I told so many people, like in 2012, 2013, 2014, like you should probably get some of this stuff.
But I think maybe only one or two percent of the people that I was like evangelizing to back in the day actually believed me.
Something you've given up to achieve a goal.
Well, I gave up a lot of foods that I really, really liked, you know, in order to help improve my, my weight.
My health, I almost entirely stopped drinking.
I wouldn't say I'm like a hundred percent off alcohol, but I'm probably reduced my alcohol intake by like 95% over the past few years.
And that is related to just all of my health stuff.
Um, I started tracking my sleep and it became very apparent from my sleep metrics that even like a single glass of wine or a single beer with dinner would just very negatively impact my sleep quality.
And so when I started looking at the actual data and putting two and two together, I'm like, you know, is drinking alcohol really worth, uh, the sort of what I have to pay for it the next day?
I decided no.
What were you into growing up?
I read so many books that I actually had an exemption at the local library.
I think their default was they would let you check out four or five books at a time.
I got my limit raised to like 40 books at a time.
I would literally come in with a wagon that I would stack all the books in.
Uh, that was very good.
I think for my like general knowledge, uh, because I just, I read so much more than my peers, but once again, it made me weird.
I knew all of these words and all of these facts and stuff that my peers didn't.
And so trying, it made it more difficult to interact with them as a normal person.
What sort of books were you reading at the time?
Everything, whether it was, uh, you know, historical works, fiction.
Obviously I loved sci-fi.
I still love sci-fi to this day in a lot of ways, uh, science fiction can actually lead to reality.
Um, you know, it's, it's the, the creativity of science fiction writers that can actually spark ideas in the minds of engineers and entrepreneurs say like, maybe that is actually possible.
You know, can we make that into reality?
You know, these days I don't read as much as I would like.
I definitely spend too much time doom scrolling on, uh, on X and, and Noster, um, though there's not very much doom on Noster.
Um, it's much nicer social network.
The tricky thing for me is just deciding what to read.
You know, once again, it's, it's kind of related to the fact that there's so much information out there.
It's a chore just to even to decide what to pay attention to these days.
And so that's why I am looking forward to and hoping that, you know, we will get these personalized autonomous agents that will be able to do that for you.
I'm not at the point where I've like engaged the services of a personal assistant or anything.
Um, some people have said that I should do that.
I have trust issues.
You know, I don't, I don't want another human, like being able to go through all of my emails and calendar and stuff like that.
Um, but you know, I might be able to trust software to do that.
What's the hardest thing you ever had to learn?
Every child gets indoctrinated in a number of different ways, right?
Uh, you know, my family indoctrinated me into, uh, religion and, uh, that became an issue when I started getting more into, uh, hardcore science and was trying to like resolve those, uh, two different things.
Government funded, uh, public schools and doctrine, indoctrinated me into a number of different perspectives about my country that, uh, were very biased.
For example, uh, you know, uh, nine 11, I remember how I felt around then.
And for the next few years that, you know, I, I bought into the propaganda that, you know, they're attacking us for art cause they hate us for their, our freedoms and all of this stuff.
And of course, you know, it's cause our government and our mainstream media wouldn't talk about all of the egregious things that we had been doing overseas that would cause people to actually hate us and want to kill us.
A lot of that was the result of only really learning or getting, you know, our news or our education from one source.
And so that is like one thing that I think is a lot better about the internet and how much more decentralized like reporting is today.
Essentially anybody can be a reporter if you have a phone, if you have an internet connection.
So it is much more difficult today for governments and large monolithic media corporations to only push one narrative.
They can still do it.
You know, they still have big audiences, but it's very difficult for them to suppress the true narratives.
Christine Lagarde.
I mean, she's doing her job.
The central bankers are going to do what they feel is best for them.
And of course, they're going to need to say that the competition is terrible and it's only for criminals.
And, you know, you can never have a functioning world economy on it.
But I think there are a number of memes and people out there who have said that, who is it?
The head of the Bank of International Settlements is the final boss for Bitcoin.
We'll see.
Do you like change?
If there wasn't change, then life would be a lot more boring.
There's this question of how much change can you keep up with?
Yeah.
You know, we are human.
We only have so many hours in a day.
Our attention, our time is very scarce.
Progress in general, I think, is a basic requirement for continued survival of humanity.
A lot of people hate Elon Musk, but I think that he is directionally correct on wanting to make major disruptive change and just like get out of the mindset that we can only do short term specific things that are more obvious and essentially trying for more moon shots or Mars shots or whatever you want to call it.
Is like, I think that we need to continue trying to attempt to do the impossible because if we don't even try, we're definitely not going to be able to do it.
Trump coin.
Oh boy.
I think it should not surprise anyone who actually knows anything about Trump because Trump is a businessman.
And if you look at what he's done for the past decade or so, he's had all types of different products that he shills.
I mean, he sells Trump Bibles, Trump watches.
He'll sell anything that he can put his name on and make money from.
So, of course, he's going to shill Trump crypto tokens and he's going to treat the crypto industry like a business that he can leverage for his own personal gain.
I don't think it should really surprise anyone.
You can certainly be upset about it and not support it.
I don't really see it as any different from the multitude of other Trump products and services that he has done over there.
It's like Trump University.
I think there was a lot of scandal around Trump University, for example.
Yeah, Trump NFTs.
If you could trade lives with anyone for a day, who would be at the very bottom of your list?
Well, until recently, I'd probably say Ross Ulbricht or really, you know, anyone who is unjustly incarcerated or has been, you know, incarcerated for essentially victimless crimes, you know, nonviolent crimes.
That's got to be a real bummer.
And I can't imagine, you know, basically losing your freedom, I think, is probably one of the worst things.
Like, in some ways, it's probably better to be dead.
Like, you don't have to worry about sitting in a cage and thinking about all the things that you could be doing.
What does it take to disappear?
It takes a lot of time, resources, money.
You have to change your mindset such that you're extremely guarded and paranoid about what data you share.
Because that's really what it is.
Disappearing means that you're no longer leaking data that can be used to find you, to track you down or whatever.
My life has become much more complex because now I have all of these different identities that are segregated, like different email addresses, different phone numbers, different SIMs for my phones.
Keep track of all of them and make sure you don't, like, accidentally cross-pollinate data or leak data from one to the other, essentially.
And the hardest thing for me was the, call it the meat space, like the real world identity change.
Essentially, I have a different identity that I use, you know, when I'm around my neighbors and friends in places that I live.
Because, you know, I don't want my neighbors to know who I actually am because then they're going to start talking and that data is going to leak and sort of go viral and spread and it'll be out of my control.
I would say the reason why it's difficult is because you have to become comfortable with lying.
That's really the short version of it.
And you have to decide that it's not unethical to lie when you're doing so to protect yourself and when you're not hurting anyone as a result of the lie.
What would you like to ask my next guest?
Ooh, asking questions is so much more difficult for me than answering them.
What is the one thing that created an inflection point in your life that, you know, significantly changed, like, the direction of, you know, essentially how you lived your life?
Or was there one?
Okay.
Next, libertarianism.
Libertarianism can make people uncomfortable, maybe because it's unfamiliar or because it challenges the mainstream.
But when I share quotes that align with libertarian principles, people tend to agree because they just make sense.
Let's talk about these principles by exploring some thought-provoking quotes.
All right.
We'll start with the foundations of individual and human rights.
Here is the first quote.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, by Thomas Jefferson.
Do you hold these truths to be self-evident?
I think all people are created equal in the sense that we should not be aggressed upon, like we should be allowed to do what we want if we're not hurting others.
Though I think a lot of people misunderstand what equality means.
Equality of opportunity, equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, these things are not guaranteed rights.
Especially when you're talking about rights, and why a lot of people disagree with libertarianism is because libertarianism is mostly about negative rights, which means that you have the right not to have bad things forced upon you.
On the other hand, a lot of people who are more statists, and when they talk about rights, they will often talk about what you would call positive rights, which would mean things like, you know, you should have the right to get paid some minimum amount.
Or you should have the right to receive, you know, some sort of subsidy or help for things, in order to provide those positive rights, you have to aggress upon someone else's negative rights, like you have to take from someone else, often without their consent.
So, I think it's not, I think it's not really possible to have a world or a system that offers people positive rights, without harming some people's negative rights.
Next.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual.
Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities, by Ayn Rand.
How do we protect individual freedoms in a society driven by collective decisions?
It's almost ironic that it seems like the protection of individual freedoms has to be collectivist action.
If we're saying that, you know, we can't have collectivist action to protect individuals, then, you know, the only real option there is to empower individuals with tools that allow them to resist collectivist action in the first place.
Bitcoin, for example, allows people to resist central bank and related government collectivist action on our sort of economic freedoms and opportunities.
It was definitely a weird election cycle.
You know, Bitcoin and crypto have never really been a part of politics before this past couple of years.
And oddly enough, I think it happened because the Democrats and liberals decided to attack us.
If that hadn't happened, it probably never would have become such a big issue.
And it's particularly annoying for me now because a lot of, you know, friends and family are now associating me with the Republican Party because that's, you know, the Bitcoin and crypto party.
And I'm like, look, I haven't voted in over a decade.
I don't support any of this stuff.
This is just like the game theory working itself out.
If we want to take a more optimistic take, and this is kind of related to one of my projects, I have this Bitcoin politicians project that tries to track how many Congress members actually own Bitcoin, because a lot of them talk nicely about it, but they don't actually own any.
I would say, you know, it's about fixing the incentives.
And so, you know, if we're actually able to, you know, get into the highest echelons of government and have them start thinking like Bitcoiners, then hopefully that will make them start thinking more like libertarians as well.
Moving to liberty and freedom. Libertarianism doesn't offer a way of life. It offers liberty so that each person is free to adopt and act upon his own values and moral principles by Rothbard.
What makes libertarianism unique compared to other ideologies?
One of the biggest points of pushback that I get from people about libertarianism is that, oh, you know, libertarianism won't result in a utopia.
It's like there will still be people who will like use violence and aggress upon each other.
And you're just recreating the existing system, but on a smaller scale of like, usually the argument goes that it will devolve into a system of like warlords.
You know, the people who are the best at violence will always be in control at some level.
That is true in the sense that, you know, that's just kind of human nature.
But libertarianism is not about trying to strive for equality of outcome for people.
You know, something like Marxism or communism is going to be more like we're going to restructure society so that everyone ends up having the exact same quality of life.
So, you know, we're all happy together or we're all unhappy together.
Libertarianism doesn't make the promise that we will all be highly successful and happy and so on and so forth.
I think that it's more, you know, it's based upon the fundamental moral ground of how about we just don't hurt each other.
And then if we, you know, continue to build a society that's built upon this fundamental principle of not aggressing upon each other's rights, then that ought to lead to a generally more prosperous society.
If you believe in like the free market and I think that's really the catch is that you have to believe that free market ideals and the ability to freely engage in commerce with each other results in a more prosperous society.
But there's a lot of people out there that are just highly anti-capitalism who believe that, you know, capitalism can't even work without hurting other people.
A couple of quotes on democracy. I really want to know your take on this.
Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.
Absolutely true. So many Americans, I think, believe that we live in a democracy and obviously we don't.
It's a representative democracy. It's a republic. You know, we have these proxies, the politicians that we vote for who, you know, theoretically are going to stand up for our interests.
But of course that's just not possible. It's not possible for one human to represent a hundred thousand people.
A hundred thousand people have such a wide variety of different interests and perspectives and things that drive them.
You know, we are at the point where it seems like technologically, it seems like we could potentially have a true democracy.
If we just build a like secure voting system that works through your phone, for example, the real question is how our government or really any government going to continue sustaining itself indefinitely.
And I think, you know, this is where the thing is like spending more than you make, you know, for decades and decades and generations probably does not end well.
The sort of rise and fall of empires and civilizations. I don't see any reason why that cycle is going to stop.
Is democracy a threat to individual liberty?
I think a lot of political or constitutional scholars would say that, you know, the Bill of Rights in the United States is, you know, one of the most important counterbalances to, you know, the democracy aspects of the country.
You know, people can't simply vote to ignore the fundamental rights that are enshrined in the Constitution.
The political system has become so bifurcated and polarized that it's pretty much gridlocked on most issues, it seems like, which is good in some ways and bad in other ways.
Personally, I prefer my government to be as gridlocked and doing as little as possible.
But I'm sure we could come up with a number of amendments to the Constitution that would enshrine more individual rights that would be good for all citizens.
Yeah.
A nation of sheep breeds a government of wolves.
Edward R. Morrow.
Your take.
Yeah.
And similarly, you know, there's a different quote, I forget who said it, but the people should not fear their government, the government should fear their people, you know, and this is all about balance.
Citizens are essentially tax cattle on the tax farm for governments.
You know, we are like the economic powerhouse that the parasitic government leeches off of.
And I think it's going to continue that way as long as the people don't put up much of a fight.
It's a particularly difficult problem to deal with, I think, over extremely long time periods, because if you if you look at America and you go back, it was very much focused on limiting the power of government.
And I think that a lot of those limits that got put into the Constitution were what allowed America to do so well for several hundred years.
But it seems almost inevitable that whenever you create an organization or a bureaucracy that over a long enough period of time, the people who are a part of the bureaucracy will continue finding loopholes in order to empower themselves.
You know, power begets power.
And so the the America that we have today is probably unrecognizable to the founding fathers.
It's a problem because governments, you can almost think of them as an organism that doesn't die.
I mean, they can die, but like they don't die of old age.
That means that this organism can slowly continue to restrict the rights of the citizens within it over such long time frames that the citizens don't even notice.
So especially if we're talking like over generations, the people who are 20 years old now who were born like after September 11th, they don't even know what the before times were like.
They don't know the levels of freedom that we had that were taken away and never given back.
And I think that that type of situation just is going to continue playing out over the generations.
And it has played out over the generations.
For example, you look at income tax, right?
Like there was no income tax for the first couple hundred years, I think.
And some would argue that it's unconstitutional.
But we've we've had it for so long now that, you know, very few people even think to dispute that it should exist, though Trump does seem to be disputing it, which is somewhat interesting.
I have no idea if anything is going to come of that.
It's a tough problem to have because I think that the only way that you really fight that type of stuff is that you need you need people to understand history better and to understand what the world used to be like.
But when most people are learning their history from the government indoctrination system, then that's much more difficult to expect a happy outcome.
Next, the right to agree with others is not a problem in society.
It's the right to disagree that is crucial by Ayn Rand.
I think this is also this is also highly related to just progress of society and civilization is that the people who really helped move civilization forward were the weird ones who had ideas that almost everyone disagreed with.
Almost everyone disagreed with.
And in many cases, they end up being persecuted, possibly even murdered for daring to disagree with what the majority believed.
And so, you know, I think it's important to allow a dissent because there's absolutely no guarantee that the consensus opinion on something is like the correct one or the best one.
And oftentimes, you have to think outside of the box and take a completely different approach as something in order to improve upon an idea.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it by Evelyn Beatrice Hall.
Is offending others a necessary part of free speech?
Absolutely.
I mean, I take advantage of that all the time.
I really like to say things or approach certain subjects from a weird perspective, even though I know that a lot of people will disagree with that.
I think it's just important to be open to a diversity of perspectives and understand the way that they see something is not the only way.
I see it as a form of an immune system.
If you're censoring, if you're suppressing certain ideas because they're not popular or because they go against some authority's interests,
you're probably going to end up worse off in the long term because society might get blinded or have some sort of weakness where they're not seeing a problem because nobody's talking about it.
This comes into, I think, a lot of the modern day issues of misinformation and disinformation.
Like, should we allow people to lie or to spread things that are not entirely accurate?
If you believe in the free market of ideas, then you would hope that the best ideas would be the ones that basically have staying power that stick around.
Now, there's some tricky dynamics here because oftentimes misinformation and disinformation and lies spread a lot faster than truth.
You know, it would take a lot more effort to disprove a lie than to prove the truth.
The problem is, like, who decides what is the truth and what is the lie, right?
And so, you know, you don't want there to be some central organization that is saying, no, you can't say that.
Next.
Privacy is the power of privacy.
To selectively reveal yourself to the world by Eric Hughes.
Yes.
And privacy is not anonymity.
I see privacy as the outermost layer of your security system.
Privacy and security are highly intertwined.
And having a layer of privacy will prevent you from being targeted for an attack that then tries to get through your various layers, your defenses of security in the first place.
And this is not a new idea by any means.
I mean, for example, a number of the founding fathers published philosophical and political ideas anonymously, you know, under pseudonyms.
And they did so because they didn't want to be targeted and attacked and murdered because they were going against the grain, they were saying things that were not like the popular opinion or the allowed opinion by the current regime.
And, you know, this is why I think it's important to allow people to speak their mind, even if they might be wrong or they might be lying or whatever, and to allow, you know, the rest of the world to decide for themselves what they want to believe.
Now let's move on to education and responsibility.
Two quotes for you.
No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them by a status accord.
And only a fool will let his enemy teach his children by Malcolm X.
Yeah.
And this is why it took me a while to unlearn a number of things from my government indoctrination camp.
You know, this is where curiosity, I think, becomes very important because the information is all out there.
Right.
You just have to be willing to put in the time to do the research and to learn for yourself what has actually happened historically around the world.
Like what are other people's perspectives on things?
You can learn that if you're willing to go out and actually find the information and ingest it.
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality by Ayn Ren.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, this is a big problem that I run into a lot in the like libertarian and anarchist circles is the people who get very upset about.
I think a good one is actually taxes, for example, of look, I pay my taxes because I don't want to go to prison and I don't like it.
I disagree with it.
But the reality is, if I just stop paying taxes to my government, they're going to come after me and they're going to make my life miserable.
So, you know, would I rather pay the extortion and be able to continue to operate somewhat freely?
That's the decision that I've been making.
Yes.
What did you advocate for?
I think people need to figure out their own risk and reward.
If you're going to be like a hardcore libertarian or anarchist who doesn't pay your taxes, there's a number of ways you could go about doing that.
You probably shouldn't broadcast it out to the world like John McAfee did, for example.
That didn't end well for him.
It makes you a target.
Small time folks could probably get away with it.
The IRS, especially now under Trump, is not going to have quite as much manpower as they used to.
Or, you know, you can always look into going elsewhere in the world to more favorable jurisdictions.
I mean, I've looked into that and it's been difficult for me to find any places that I felt were more favorable, but also still have the same levels of freedoms.
Like there's plenty of places that have lower taxes.
I think very few of them also have like the level of firearms rights, for example.
So it's like, usually you're giving something up.
You're having to make some sort of trade off there.
Next.
Nobody owes you anything regardless of what you may think you deserve, the Libertarian Institute.
Pretty much.
You know, this comes down to like negative rights versus positive rights.
Think of it like in terms of freedom of speech, for example.
I think, you know, everyone has the right to be able to speak without being silenced or oppressed or thrown in jail or whatever.
But you don't have the right for anyone to listen to you.
You don't have the right to other people's time, to other people's resources.
They have to decide for themselves to allocate those things to you voluntarily.
I give you these two quotes together.
Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles by Dostoyevsky.
And if we extend unlimited tolerance, even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them.
Karl Popper.
Oh, yeah.
Tolerance is a tricky issue.
It's the paradox, no?
Yeah.
I think I've said in the past that I'm tolerant of everything except intolerance.
But there's also some issues like from a social level, when you're in a group of people, whether it's, you know, just a few people in a chat or whether it's millions of people in a society in a whether a city, state, nation or whatever, you eventually get to the point where you have to ask yourself, at what point do we kick people out?
Right?
Like, what does someone have to do for us to no longer tolerate them being a part of our group?
At the society level, it's usually, well, physical violence is bad.
You know, if you're going around physically hurting people, then we're going to segregate you.
But then it extends beyond that of like, well, what are all of the different types of harms that we consider to be so egregious that you should be excluded from society?
And it becomes, I think, very dangerous when you reach the point like we did a few years ago of saying, well, if you're not respecting my like diversity program requirements or whatever, then you're harming people so much that you deserve to be punished somehow.
So this is actually a tricky question that comes down to, I guess, the non-aggression principle itself and how some people will interpret that of like, what is aggressing upon others?
And I think we can all agree that physical aggression upon others is bad, but is, for example, refusing to use someone's pronouns of choice and aggression upon them?
Some people, I think, would say yes.
And that's where things can get pretty conflicted.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you don't control your mind, someone else will by John Alston.
Yeah.
I mean, are you an independent free thinker or are you just a content consumer who is allowing other people's ideas and opinions to get absorbed and then regurgitated by yourself?
You know, there's so much information and opinions out there these days that it's very easy to find yourself get stuck in an echo chamber, depending on whatever platform you're using.
Pretty much every platform has echo chambers in different ways.
It takes, I think, a real concerted effort to prevent yourself from falling into that trap, because I think once you get into an echo chamber, it can feel very good.
But then you might come across some sort of idea or opinion from outside the echo chamber, and instead of carefully considering it, you just reject it outright.
And this is the type of thing that I think also just leads to more polarization and fracturing of society, of us just like not even being willing to speak with someone because they're the enemy for whatever reason.
I've been told a few times that Noster is an echo chamber.
What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, Noster is tricky because it's still mostly like Bitcoin people who are focused on Bitcoin stuff.
Though I have seen, for example, musicians join artists and other people who did not come in from a Bitcoin first perspective.
But that's just going to require us to grow it a lot more.
And I think it's interesting to look at what has happened with the different platforms.
A lot of people would say, well, X has gone from being a lot more like liberal echo chamber.
It's being conservative echo chamber.
I think Mastodon is a very interesting network because it's mostly comprised of liberal people who exited from X, you know, when Elon took over because they hated him so much.
Mastodon definitely feels more like a liberal echo chamber as does blue sky.
Noster is probably more of a conservative or anarchist echo chamber.
It's much more about freedom and self sovereignty.
Yeah, I like it.
The price of anything is the amount of life just changed for it.
Henry, David, Sorrow.
What do you think?
What is price?
Most people, I think, think of price in terms of money and I see money as a time storage mechanism.
So when you acquire a lot of money, you can spend it to buy other people's time.
You know, this is how human civilization progresses through specialization.
It's much simpler to buy someone else's time if they're a specialist in a given thing because they can essentially do more with their time because of their expertise and their tools and all of the infrastructure and other things that they've built up.
around it similarly, like why would someone pay us at Casa a decent amount of money to help them set up their self custody wallet when there are free options out there?
It's all about time.
Anyone can go set up like a multi signature distributed self custody Bitcoin wallet.
But if you've never done it before, if you have very little knowledge about it, you're going to have to invest a lot of time to make sure that you do it correctly and that you avoid a lot of the potential pitfalls.
And if you don't want to invest a lot of time, you can essentially buy our expertise and consulting services in the many, many years that I and other people at our company have put into understanding this very specific problem.
So that, you know, we can essentially save you from yourself and ensure that you get into the optimal setup because there's just many different decisions that go into that.
And if you make some bad decisions, you might end up losing all your money.
Some quotes on property rights and economic principles.
No one has a right over a person's property except the person themselves by John Locke.
Why is individual ownership of property crucial in a free society?
Well, you know, property rights come in at many different levels.
You know, it's not just about like land or ownership of physical things.
But, you know, I think ultimately it comes down to owning yourself.
If you are not your own property and you can't defend yourself against being encroached upon by governments or other authorities, then that is what leads to, I think, the downfall of quality of life.
If you can't decide what happens with your own property, then you're probably either under a tyranny of the majority or a tyranny of just some sort of authoritarian figure.
So property rights are, I think, the fundamental thing that need to be imbued into any society.
If we don't have property rights, you're going to be subject to probably like the political whims of the day.
And like this is one of the things that I really hate about politics, especially these days with how polarized everything is.
You know, I see a lot of liberal leaning people that I know who are just like they're wringing their hands on a daily basis of like, oh, the next thing that, you know, Trump and the people in power are going to do are going to be terrible for me.
And I sympathize with them because we were in the same situation with the last political cycle.
It was always like, what's the next terrible thing that like the SEC is going to do to the industry?
What's the next terrible thing that regulators are going to do to make it harder for for Bitcoin companies?
We at Casa were constantly afraid of being debanked again or of being have our entire business model being made illegal because we since inception in 2018 have operated in this kind of gray area where if we are not holding a threshold of keys that, you know, can either unilaterally spend someone's money or unilaterally prevent.
If we want to prevent someone from spending their money, then we should not be considered a custodian.
We should not be considered a financial service.
You know, we're just a software provider.
And the fact that self custody itself has been under attack and is not been guaranteed by any means.
It's unfortunate that we got to the point where I'm actually happy that like Trump had this executive order that was basically enshrining that self custody should be considered a given that people should be able to do.
Because before that, it certainly wasn't.
And we were afraid that it might become the opposite.
Would you ever consider leaving the States?
It would have to get pretty bad.
And thankfully, it looks like we shouldn't have to in the near future, especially if you want to operate under the sort of sovereign individual thesis.
You need to be willing to leave.
If you're not willing to leave, then you don't have the optionality.
You don't have the ability to take advantage of more favorable jurisdictions.
What happens to freedom when property rights are not respected?
Yeah, there is none.
You have no freedom of defending your life, your liberty, your pursuit of happiness, you know, those fundamental things.
If you're not allowed to have property that, you know, is protected by some sort of system of rules, then it can very easily get to the point where, you know, you're not even allowed to protect yourself against any number of encroachments or aggressions.
I think it's very easy to then go down the rabbit hole of essentially you are the property of the state.
You know, you are the tax cattle of the state and they get to decide how you live your life because the state is not trying to optimize your freedom.
The state is trying to optimize its control over you and possibly it's, you know, extraction of value from whatever it is that you produce.
Two quotes for you. The right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor is the essence of freedom.
And it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest by Adam Smith.
Why is economic freedom the foundation for all other freedoms?
If we can't take advantage of and benefit from our own labor, then, you know, what is the point of, I guess, doing anything or working at all like this is it's a matter of incentives.
I think this is why like free markets and entrepreneurship are very important.
Some would say, for example, that taxation is actually a penalty on being successful.
It's almost a disincentive to be successful, you know, depending on the level of taxation.
This ends up, I think, being a larger issue for just the continual improvement and innovation at a civilizational level.
If we want people to keep going out there and taking risks and doing weird stuff and innovating, then the primary reason why people are going to do that is not just because they're bored or out of the goodness of their heart.
It's going to be because they expect to benefit from, you know, succeeding and taking those risks.
If you don't have economic freedom and the proceeds of what you're doing or going to someone else, then you don't have that, you know, ownership over yourself.
Right.
This is once again, this is like the fundamental property, right, of owning yourself and owning the output of whatever you create.
You know, you are enslaved in a sense.
If slavery means that 100% of the output of your labor is taken away from you and used by some authority, at what percentage of taxation are you no longer enslaved?
Yeah.
To quote Walter Williams, there is no moral argument that justifies using the coercive powers of government to force one person to bear the expense of taking care of another.
If you believe in positive rights, you can't really believe in negative rights because you're willing to take from one person in order to try to help someone else.
So, you know, the libertarian solution is, of course, that voluntary charities have existed for pretty much all of human history.
We haven't relied upon governments and authorities to forcefully do wealth redistribution until more modern times.
Okay, someone could ask, if the government can print unlimited amounts of money out of thin air, why do they collect taxes?
The answer is simple, but shocking.
The real problem is that you pay high taxes only to uphold the illusion that you are funding the government, which you are not.
It's shocking, but it's true.
The government is funded by money printing paper backed by paper, a bubble that will inevitably burst by naive Bukele.
What's the real purpose of taxation in a society?
Taxation generates a decent amount of revenue, but it creates jobs for the actual tax people.
I think that the U.S. federal government employs several million people.
Yeah.
So you can see it as a kind of a job creation thing.
Control?
But yeah, I mean, I think at a higher level, it's just a way of reminding people that the government owns you.
Like they own the result of your labor.
And if you don't concede to that extortion, bad things are going to happen to you.
What do you think about the illusion of accountability?
Who will build the roads, right?
It's like, we have to pay our taxes in order to get our government services.
Yeah.
So on one hand, there's like the fear and control aspect.
On the other hand, there's the, well, the government is protecting me and providing for me.
And I just have to help, you know, pay for some of these, you know, socialized services.
Well, some quotes on arms and libertarianism.
To disarm the people is the best and the most effectual way to enslave them by George Mason.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, how do you resist your government?
You know, we've, we've seen a number of different authoritarian regimes do crazy stuff and then people protest against them.
Um, uh, whether it's like, um, in Hong Kong, for example, or Iran.
Um, kind of though.
Yeah.
I think it's much more difficult to, uh, protest and resist against the government when they just, you know, bring out all of their armed stooges to sit there and intimidate you.
It's much harder, I think, to ask people to confront an armed force when they have no weapons themselves.
But, you know, I'm, I'm also kind of pessimistic on like, what does it actually take to get to the point of armed resistance?
I think there are times where armed resistance may have been called for, but haven't happened.
And I think this is also a result of what I talked about earlier of those kind of like multi-generational, like slowly tightening the grip of removing freedoms and such.
And so, you know, I think one good quip that I've seen a number of times is that back in the 1700s, the British tried to put like a couple percent tax on our T and we took up arms and started shooting at them.
And these days our government like taxes is like 25, 30% and we're just like, Oh, okay.
The boiling frog.
Yes.
The boiling frog problem.
Yeah.
And lastly, an armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense and the final defense against tyranny by Edward Abbey.
One certainly hopes so.
Um, but yeah, there's the, the boiling frog problem.
And, and this is a question that I grapple with quite a bit myself is what would it actually take in order for, you know, an American armed uprising against our own government?
That's a very difficult question to answer, but at least we know it's theoretically possible.
Whereas in many other countries it's not even theoretically possible.
And so hopefully going back to like a quote that I said near the very beginning is, you know, hopefully the government still at least somewhat is afraid of its citizens and which is the way that it should be.
You want there to be a balance of power there.
Well, thanks James.
That's it for part one on libertarianism.
It's been amazing having you on the pod.
I've learned a lot.
Where can people follow you and your work?
Well, I'm on X and my handle is just LOP, L O P P.
Uh, you can find my company CASA at C A S A dot I O.
And I have a ton of Bitcoin educational resources at Bitcoin dot page.
Well, I can't wait to have you back.
Thanks for having me.
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