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The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
BTC239: Bitcoin, Psychology & the Return of Meaning w/ Seb Bunney (Bitcoin Podcast)
01:23:37
A deep dive into how fiat distorts our psychology, identity, and values—and how Bitcoin may offer a path back to meaning.
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- [00:01]
Preston Pys
You're listening to tip.
- [00:03]
Seb Bunny
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On this week's show, I'm joined by author and deep thinker Seb Bunny to explore how fiat money destroys our psychology, relationships, and sense of meaning. We talk about time preference, identity, savings, fear, and how bitcoin reorients us towards connection, creativity, and human flourishment. This conversation goes way beyond economics and I'm really excited to bring this to you guys because I am a huge fan of Seb and he is just super insightful, as you're going to see in this interview. So without further delay, here's my interview with Mr. Seb Bunny.
- [00:44]
Preston Pys
Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pys.
- [00:58]
Seb Bunny
Foreign. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Seb Bunny, author of the Hidden Cost of Money, and I'm excited to have this chat with you. Seb.
- [01:10]
Oh, man, Preston, Every time we hang out, every time we chat, I just, I really enjoy where the conversations go.
- [01:16]
So think in the name of this episode. We were talking, we had a little bit of a chat as to what we were going to discuss. And I think the theme here is money psychology and the return of meaning to people's lives. And I guess where I want to start off is just the personal cost of fiat. You do a phenomenal job kind of laying this out for people and just how it psychologically distorts all of our incentives. And I guess let's start there and let's have the conversation there.
- [01:45]
Absolutely. So maybe like a little bit about me because I think will make more sense. Like, I started off as a mountain bike instructor and I realized very early on, like, freaking $15, 75 an hour, how am I ever going to be able to, like, afford to have a family, to be able to buy a house, to put a roof over my head? And so on reflection, looking back, I'm like, man, money really does impacts our ability to show up how we want and direct our energy to whatever it is that motivates us. And from that kind of evolution of going down the rabbit hole of mountain biking, I was like, well, I've got to figure out some other career. And so I kind of started playing around in the psychology space. I trained to become a somatic therapist, which is a form of therapy where you're moving into the body, out of the mind, and healing on a nervous system level, and absolutely loved it. But all of these tools, whether it is coaching, whether it's somatic therapy, my fascinations with the markets and finance. It starts to kind of piece together how I think the world works. And I think that what I always find fascinating about bitcoin is in general, is just this curiosity of trying to figure out how the world works. And I would say that, and you're probably on a similar page, that money is a core thread that really ties to every single facet of our lives, whether it is how we show up, whether it is the environment, whether it's our relationships. And so as I've gone down these rabbit holes, I've started to realize just how profound and how pervasive money is throughout society. And you know what? I'll start with one quick little story to kind of, like, ground the conversation. A few years back, I was kind of running this mountain bike camp, and this group of, like, unbelievably inspirational individuals were on the camp. And some of these guys have made well into eight, nine figures. And one guy in particular, we sat down and he says, you know, through reflection, I've realized that most of us look at the world through the lens of and set goals through the lens of what are called the three Ps, which are prestige, power, and possessions. We want to own the newest car. We want the Rolex. We want to be in the position where people look up to us and they kind of. They idolize us. And so we're setting all of our goals around this idea of kind of the 3Ps. When in reality, if we step back and we ask ourselves the question, what actually brings meaning to life? What actually motivates me in life? It is not the 3Ps of prestige, power, and possessions. Instead, it's the 3C's. Connections, contributions, and challenges is connecting to one another. It's the conversations you and I have had in person when we've hung out skiing in Jackson. It is the challenges where we're trying to challenge ourselves to, like, show up more wholeheartedly and authentically in life. And it's the contributions when we're kind of giving back to society. And so when I had this conversation, it made me reflect a little bit what is causing this kind of disconnect. Why in life are we constantly focused on the three ps? Prestige, power, and possessions, and away from what really matters, connections, contributions, and challenges. And I would argue that one of the primary factors is money. When money breaks down, we look for a way out. We're constantly trying to distract ourselves as opposed to looking for a way in, which is like Deepening that relationship with the self.
- [04:54]
Okay, so at a fundamental level, when we think about money, it's representing energy and it's representing the exchange of energy between participants. So know, if we go and work together and I'm performing a job and you're my boss or whatever, I'm performing that work. And in exchange you're giving me these units to represent that energy that I expended and going to. This idea which I think is super profound that you're talking about is this prestige, power, possessions, you're pointing these energy units inward towards yourself. And then when you talk about the other one, the connection, challenges and contributions, you're pointing these energy units or packets towards somebody else oftentimes. And I find that difference to be quite profound. And when, when we pull this back and even think further from first principles about this idea of these energy packets representing the work that we performed, if they're breaking down and they're not trustworthy, you can see how a person goes into, you know, just similar to the way the biology of your body works. When you are in growth mode and you're not sick and you have excess energy, you can point it outwards, but when you get sick and you're unhealthy, you have to point the energy inward and you have to settle down and you got to retain as much of it as you possibly can and you can't share it outside of yourself. Isn't that interesting? What a profound. Where did you learn this again? Because I've never heard this before. There's both the three Ps and the three Cs.
- [06:29]
It was, it was this guy that used to own a toy company. And so he spent his whole life trying to figure out how to create toys, how to distribute toys, how to create happiness. And a lot of it is just on self reflection that we have this world that's constantly focused on this outward appeasing. I'm going to build happiness by consuming. I'm going to build happiness by being in positions of power and prestige. When in reality happiness doesn't come from this external thing that we need. Happiness is very much an internal state of focusing on how do I want to show up in life, what is it that really motivates me? How do I want to challenge myself? How do I want to contribute and get back to society kind of to the points you're making. And I would even take it a step further, which is like in psychology there's this idea which most listeners are probably familiar with, which is called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it's been around for a long time. And you can envision it as like a five tier pyramid. And at the base of that pyramid we kind of have our psychological needs. We need food, we need shelter, we need warmth. And then as we start moving up, we get into kind of safety needs. Well, yeah, we may have property. And then as we start moving up into belongingness and love, which is like relationships and intimacy. And then the fourth stage, you've got esteem needs, which is kind of like working on the self, personal development, meeting, kind of like confidence, the ability to kind of help others, love oneself, love others, and then finally into kind of self actualization which is the top tier of the pyramid. What is interesting, and I would argue is that like as purchasing power declines and our cost of living in relation to our earnings increases, life gets harder. So we start falling down this pyramid, we start getting stuck on the base layer. We get stuck focused on our survival needs of food and shelter. And you see this in society, like 74% of Canadians and Americans live paycheck to paycheck. That's just mind blowing. They're stuck on this base layer and it's very hard for them to move up into belongingness, love, self esteem needs, or even spiritual growth through like self actualization. And so we have a world which is stuck on this base layer. And when I went down the rabbit hole of somatic therapy, there's a book that really stands out, and it's called the Body Keeps the Score by a lady called Bessel van der Kolk. And there's one particular paragraph which stood out to me, which is if an organism is stuck in survival mode, its energies are focused on fighting off the unseen enemies which leave no room for nurture, care and love. For us humans, it means that as long as the mind is defending itself against invisible assaults, our closest bonds are threatened, along with our ability to imagine, plan, play, learn, and pay attention to other people's needs. So I think that we have got a society today that is stuck on this base layer where we're just trying to meet our basic survival needs, put food on the table, put a roof over our heads, and it's no wonder that we have like the average 30 year old today. Only 65% of them live on their own. And as for those that are married, it's less than 50%, live with children, less than 35%. And so we're seeing this society that is kind of like breaking down because we're stuck trying to survive.
- [09:34]
I get frustrated when you have folks that are in their 60s or 70s and they're pointing at these younger generations and they're just saying their values have gone to hell in a hand basket. And it's just, you know, they're pointing it as if it's something other than this fundamental shift or change that has occurred in how humans are interacting. And you know, I obviously think it's at the core of the money. I'm assuming you agree. In your book you wrote money is how we express our values, this hits really deep. But what are you getting at when you say money is how we express our values?
- [10:11]
Now this is, it's such a good point. And I would say that the way I look at money is like language. It's a medium of expression. It's how we express to the world what we value monetarily. We can use language to talk about what it is that we value, whether it's internally through language. But where we direct our capital highlights what it is that we value monetarily. And so like if you walk into a grocery store, you can determine what someone values by looking at where they're directing their capital. Is someone buying grass fed beef, organic vegetables, or is someone buying cigarettes and microwave meals? Is someone spending their time and energy or their capital on spending time in nature? Or is someone just trying to meet their immediate impulsive needs and they're just buying Kind of the newest thing, very consumerist approach behavior. So I would argue that money is how we express to the world what we value. Now let's take a step back for one second. If we look at the interaction between a parent and child, if as a child our parents didn't allow us to express certain emotions, let's say sadness or anger, your parents were like, you know what, we don't want these negative, heavy emotions. You're only allowed to be happy. And if you're feeling unhappy, well, you've got to deal with it. Go stand at a corner. That kid growing up never learns how to express themselves and what it is they're feeling internally. And what does it lead to? Leads to things like depression, leads to things like anxiety. Because what is depression? It's the depressing of emotions. It's that we never learned how to express certain emotions. Well, now let's take that to money. If we have a society where money is breaking down and we're facing inflation, where our cost of living is rising in relation to our wages, life is getting harder, well, all of a sudden we're limited in our ability to express what it is that we value. It's altering how we're showing up. If I want to go and support my family to be able to purchase things that allow my family to thrive, but life is getting harder and harder and harder, I'm no longer able to express myself monetarily. If we've got regulations in place that impede our ability to direct our capital where we see fit, they prevent us from spending money on certain things. I'm no longer able to express myself monetarily. And so just like how minimizing a kid's ability to express himself leads to anxiety, depression, a whole host of other health issues, I would argue that impeding humanity's ability to express themselves monetarily leads to so many of the symptoms that we see in society. Whether it is like a breakdown of meaning because life is so unbelievably hard that people can't plan where there's a breakdown in the parent child bond because parents having to work more spending less time with their kids and their kids are spending more time with their peers. Whether it's a breakdown in greater consumerism because we're no longer incentivized to save or incentivize to spend because our purchase power is declining. So these are all symptoms of a lack of expression with breakdown in our ability to express ourselves monetarily. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [12:59]
Sponsor
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- [15:35]
Seb Bunny
Fed, they watch the world.
- [15:37]
Preston Pys
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- [16:56]
Seb Bunny
All right, back to the show.
- [16:58]
So you talk a lot about time preference and human flourishment and help us just walk through what this actually looks like for someone that's moving from high to low time preference in their daily lives and what changes in their relationships, their work, their mindset as they go through this shift.
- [17:17]
So I think that's, this is such a fascinating topic. And for most bitcoiners, they're intimately familiar with this idea of time preference. For those, this is the first time hearing it, you can think of it as just like a spectrum. And on one end of the spectrum you've got high time preference, on the other you've got low. What is high time preference? High time preference is I'm trying to meet my immediate impulsive needs right here, right now, in this moment, whereas you've got low time preference. The flip side, I'm going to think about building the best version of myself. I'm going to think about the future, I'm going to think about prosperity, I'm going to think about showing up authentically. And what's interesting about money is that as money starts to break down and we spoke about Maslow's hierarchy of needs where at the base you've got our basic survival needs, food and shelter. And then as you go up, you get into relationships and self actualization esteem needs with life is getting harder and harder and our purchasing power is diminishing. We're getting stuck on our survival needs. And I would argue that as we become more fearful, as we get focused on survival, our aperture of awareness narrows and we get hyper fixated on meeting our immediate impulsive needs. And so as money breaks down, society becomes more and more and more high time preference. We get impulsive, we want to meet our immediate needs. We're not looking out for others, we're only looking out for ourselves. We're only looking out for getting food on the table roof over our heads. And this is where I just think what is so unbelievably profound about Bitcoin is it flips all of this on its head. It flips it all on its head because all of a sudden when you have something with true scarcity, 21 million Bitcoin, as you see humanity's incredible ability to increase efficiency, increase productivity, innovate as we create more goods and services in relation to a fixed unit of account, then all of a sudden we start to see purchasing power increase and cost of living decrease. Life starts to get easier. As life starts to get easier, you have more capacity. As you have more capacity, you have more time to look inwards and if you look spending more time looking inwards, you're asking yourself those questions of like, what is it that motivates me? Like, what are my values as an individual? How do I want to show up as an individual? And this to me is profound because all of a sudden our time preference starts to shift towards the low end of things, where we're thinking long term, we're thinking about what actually motivates us and how do we build prosperity and we're willing to do things that may be painful or hard to do in the moment, but in the long term, it benefits us. And so I'm sure, like, first to flip this question around on you. Since going down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin, Preston, how do you think your time preference has shifted?
- [19:47]
Oh, it's crazy. I mean, I remember what it was like prior to Bitcoin where you're totally caught up in this consumerism of you have to spend it as fast as you possibly can. It's very hard to save. And if you could save, if you did have any disposable income in and you did save, the return rate was so minuscule for most things that you could invest in that it was just really frustrating and hard and difficult because you were just treading water with the debasement rate, really. And whether you knew that or not, you felt it. I think that's the thing that a lot of people might not be able to quantify why they were just treading water with the debasement rate, but they could feel it and they could just sense that they weren't getting ahead. And so, yeah, it's just caught up in consumerism. I want to hit on this quote that you just said, like very casually said, as we become more fearful, our awareness narrows. I think this is like, really profound. I love reading some of these books, like the Secret and Other Things. A lot of these books profess that at the core of what you are as a human and your soul is this idea of awareness. And so when I hear you say something like, as we become more fearful, our awareness narrows or get. Or the aperture gets tighter, but it's the exact opposite. If you're able to remove that fear. If you're living in this world where your money becomes more valuable, or let's just frame it this way, it actually retains the buying power and the energy that you expended, we'll just say that all of a sudden you don't have to be fearful that it's going to be stolen from you tomorrow. And your awareness and Your aperture opens up and you're now aware of more and you're able to assess your environment. You're able to understand your environment and operate inside your environment more effectively, I think is probably the best way to say it. So I want you to expound on this idea of as we become more fearful, our awareness narrows and then the contra to that, which I think is the really important thing to think about.
- [21:41]
Well, I think to start, I would say that this isn't even just like an idea. This is something that you can factually prove, which is this idea that when we become stressed, and we know money is the number one stressor globally, when we become stressed from a neurological perspective, that stress shuts down our prefrontal cortex, shutting down our prefrontal cortex. The challenge is our prefrontal cortex handles sequencing, speech, planning, logic. And so you have a society that is basically, they've just had a lobotomy. We're stuck in this, like, survival mode, just trying to pull an income to put food on the table. We're not able to plan, we're not able to think logically. It's impacting our relationships, that's impacting how we show up. And that I would even argue to the extreme side of things, money being the number one stressor. Well, when we feel stressed, what happens internally inside our body? Well, our body releases a whole bunch of stress hormones. Stress hormones like epinephrine, adrenaline, cortisol. Those stress hormones, if our body is constantly flooded in them, has huge negative effects on our physical health and how we actually show up. And what I found really interesting, I talk about it a little bit in the book that in Costa Money is that before we're even born, during our developmental years inside the womb, we're already being impacted by our mum's stress. So if money is impacting our mom and we are inside the womb and we're being flooded by all of these stress hormones, then all of a sudden, it's creating a hypersensitive nervous system. That means we're getting stuck before we've even entered into this world. We're getting stuck in bite, blight, freeze. Well, let's take us back a second. What are these stress response systems? Fight, Flight and Freeze are evolutionary response systems to maximize the chance of survival. If we're stuck in, say, freeze, for instance, this is. We're walking along kind of the plains of Africa. We see a line. We realize we can't outrun this line. So to maximize our chance of survival, our breathing rate slows, our blood flow Slows our nutrient absorption, slows. Well, if during our developmental years we're flooded with stress hormones and all of a sudden we're stuck in this functional state of freeze, it's impacting our long term health. It's rising rates of allergies, our ability to digest, our ability to sleep. And so I would say that money being the number one stressor globally has an immense physiological impact on how we even just show up from a health standpoint. And then to that neurological standpoint, it's narrowing up aperture of awareness where our prefrontal cortex is shutting down. We can't think about anything else around us. We're just stuck in a survival mode. And so to me, bitcoin is this kind of antidote to this kind of lobotomy that we're facing in fiat. It's this antidote and that all of a sudden it's giving us back capacity and healing begins when we terminate this continued stress mobilization and restore our nervous system back to a place of safety. And bitcoin is kind of giving us that safety again. It's giving us that capacity to then start moving back up that Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's giving us that capacity to start thinking again about, you know, what, like what does belonging, love mean to me, what does, how do I meet my own internal self esteem needs, how do I think about maybe growing on a spiritual level. And I think it is through that aspect that our aperture of awareness starts to widen again. We start thinking more about community, thinking about how we can contribute. It's profound. It's profound money's impact on how we show up. But again, outside like bitcoin can completely shift how we're showing up as well.
- [25:02]
If we had a listener that was hearing all this, they might agree with all of our points. But bitcoin, they would say, I agree with all these points. You're talking about stress and how it's harder and I'm making these psychological decisions because I have financial issues. But then you're telling me bitcoin solves this. But bitcoin has like 70 to 80% annualized volatility and it's all over the place. And I've seen all these tech bros and greedy people running around in Lambos and there's just this, I think this perception that an outsider has of what is bitcoin. And so how do you square that up when you're having a conversation with somebody, when you're saying all of these amazing things that totally make sense and I get it. And but then you're saying bitcoin's the solution. And in their mind, the way they see bitcoin is what I just described, as opposed to how you and I, you know, so how do you have that conversation?
- [25:54]
This is the thing that is so challenging is that as we've just discussed, our current system, unfortunately is pushing us towards this high time preference thinking. We're just trying to meet our immediate needs so people aren't thinking long term. And so when you see the whipsaw of bitcoin's price action, people are scared. But the interesting thing is when you start looking big picture, when you start reading books like Jeff Booth's the Price of Tomorrow, and you realize actually prices should be falling, life should be getting easier. If we had a monetary system with a fixed supplier that had true scarcity, life should be getting easier. People start thinking bigger. And I would say if there's one thing that really I've been thinking a lot about over the last kind of year, two years, is this idea of make saving great again. I think that. And I don't want this to be politically affiliated, it's more just this idea of like, make saving great again. Because unfortunately, when money breaks down all of a sudden, it's not as if we're just going to go and keep our purchasing power in the currency. We go and flood into all of these other assets. So we go and put that purchasing power into things like farmland, we go put that purchasing power into things like real estate. And all of a sudden, asset prices, real estate, farmland, skyrocket, and all of these things, they're not being used for their utility value that offers products, goods, services, whether it's like a roof over people's heads, whether it is food on people's tables. We're not using farmland and real estate for its utility purpose. We're using it to store money. And there's an interesting one of Marty Bentz emails that came out a little while back, maybe like three months ago. He was highlighting that if you'd taken just inflation from 1945 to 2025, $1 in 1945 would basically have $17.65 today of purchasing power for $1. Back in 1945. Well, the average home back then was $4,000. So if you were to use that inflation rate on housing, the average house today should be $70,600. But instead it's 530,000. So you could say that 530 minus 70,000. We've got $460,000 of monetary premium we are trying to store our purchasing power in housing. We're trying to store our purchasing power in farmland. We're trying to store our purchasing power and all of these other assets but money. And so I think that if we had a monetary system that allowed us to simply save again without having to think about investing, without having to all become financial experts, dedicate all of our time and energy trying to figure out the markets, if we could simply just save in the currency again, we could direct all of that excess capacity towards whatever it is that motivates us, whether it is family, whether it is community, whether it is freedom, sports, mountains, personal growth, spiritual endeavors. And so I would say that at the moment when you look at bitcoin, most people look at it as an asset. But if I was to step back, bitcoin is just money. It is just money. It's digital money that allows us to get back to saving so we don't have to think about all of this investing, all of these ways to protect and preserve our purchasing power. And so if I was to say kind of one thing that has really stood out to me, it's that, like, the irony of bitcoin being money is that it gets us to stop thinking about money, money, money. Today, when it's losing value, we're hyper fixated on where do I get more money, I need to optimize to make money. Whereas when money stores value effectively, we don't have to think about money. Yeah, we can think about everything else.
- [29:15]
Yeah, it's safe. Adina Moose said this is a couple of years ago. He says it's really terrible because you have to first be an expert at whatever the operational value, your business, you know, product you're selling into the market, you have to be an expert at that first. And then you also have to be an expert at how in the world do I preserve what I've already made the first time in an investment that will just retain that buying power that I worked so hard to get? And so, yeah, I completely agree with you. I'm curious, do you think that fiat money has created a kind of identity crisis? People chasing careers they hate, metrics that don't matter and goals that they never chose, they're like, deeply thought about in the first place. Walk us through some of your thoughts and ideas on this.
- [29:59]
I would say that it's created an identity crisis from two perspectives. One, at the start, I spoke about this idea of kind of the three Ps, prestige, power and poss. And then the three Cs, connections, contributions, and challenges. Well, I think when money breaks down, we become hyper fixated on a way out rather than a way in, rather than looking inwards and trying to determine what really motivates us. We just want a way out. We just want like the next thing to distract us. So we become hyper fixated on social media or the newest car or the newest gadget, whatever it is. But the reality is that that doesn't create happiness. Those moments are really fleeting. And so we have a world today where no one really knows what motivates them. They're not spending time in contemplation or looking inwards. And so it's no wonder we're facing rising rates of depression and anxiety. And so kind of that's the first point, is that I think we're optimizing for the wrong things. When money breaks down, we're optimizing for a way out rather than a way in. The second point is it's slightly more nuanced and it is this idea that when money breaks down, parents have to go out and work more. That means they're spending less time with their kids. We've seen from the statistics that from like basically since the departure of the gold standard, we've seen a halving of single owner households and a doubling of dual owner households. So both parents having to go out and work as opposed to one parent being able to support a whole family. Well, that means that parents are spending less time with their kids, kids are spending more time with their peers. What difference does that have? Well, parents, especially elders, have the ability to kind of have a more set a moral compass, help guide that kid because they already have experience because they've been through this world for many decades ahead of that kid. So they help instill certain morals, certain values that allow that kid to show up and individuate and understand how he wants to show up in life, how he wants to be treated. Whereas when kids spend time with their peers, away from their parents and their elders or kids, they're entering this world with no experience, they're learning together. And so kids want to look the same, want to sound the same, they want to dress the same. So you have this identity crisis. Kids from such a young age, because they're not having that cultural knowledge being passed down, those moral values being passed down. We have a society that has no idea who it is. And what's interesting is you take the Aborigines, the Aborigines, we have data that dates back hundreds of thousands of years showing they've passed down cultural knowledge through tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. And you're like, that is amazing. And it's because they're spending time in generational families. You then take something like the hippie movement from the 60s. We're only two generations into that and it's already nearly evaporated. And it's because the hippie movement was a peer movement. It was a movement built on looking the same and sounding the same, as opposed to a cultural movement trying to pass down knowledge, moral values, you name it. And so I would say that money, when it is breaking down, is impacting our ability for parents to meet the emotional needs of kids and spend time with with their kids. And to me, that is mind blowing. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [32:57]
Preston Pys
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- [36:29]
Seb Bunny
All right, back to the show.
- [36:31]
What would be your recommendation for somebody that's hearing this? They're saying, I agree. I feel like I'm somewhat a victim of exactly what you're describing. What's your recommendation for somebody that is just listening to this and wanting to become more authentic, wanting to try to start trending this in a different direction, I would.
- [36:50]
You know what I'd say the challenge is? It's that today we've been put in this box where we're basically stuck in survival mode. So if we're not able to preserve our purchasing power, if we're not able to save, then we're forced to go out and work to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. And so I think the first step is just grasping something like Bitcoin so you can have to your point earlier conviction when Bitcoin's price is fricking fluctuating. 20, 30, 40, 50%. You can have conviction that yes, this may be short term volatility, but in the long term, bitcoin is as long as we're printing money and more people are wanting to be more sovereign. Bitcoin's price is most likely going to continue its trajectory. That has been on for the last 16 years. And so I'd say once you start understanding bitcoin, you start looking at the world so differently. And it is so amazing to go to these bitcoin events and see how bitcoiners are showing up. I would argue that they are almost the inverse of the average individual in kind of today's society where the average individual, we're having less kids, fertility rate is falling off a cliff and we're seeing rising rates of depression, anxiety, we're seeing a loss of meaning because people have no idea what their future is going to hold. They feel like they're never going to own a house, they're never going to have security. And so people are very impulsive. And then you take the average bitcoiner and they're starting to have children again. And I know countless bitcoiners that are posting pictures of the block height of their new child they've just had. And we're seeing countless bitcoiners show up, they're getting married again, they're starting to own their own house, they're going to have property again. They're starting to think about their long term future and how they want to give back to society. They're finding meaning. And so when you go down that rabbit hole of bitcoin, as I mentioned earlier, all of a sudden you start removing that fixation on money because you have more mind share to focus on whatever it is that actually motivates you. And so it's more about like trying to understand what is it about the current system that is impacting our ability to show up right now and how can I reorient? And I think bitcoin is the ability to reorient. I would say that bitcoin, to me, if I was to say it's one kind of like core characteristic, it is that bitcoin is a spiritual tool. Bitcoin is a spiritual tool in that it gives us capacity back, it gives us capacity to look inwards, it gives us capacity to show up more authentically or figure out how and what it is that showing up authentically means to me as an individual and that I just don't think we talk about enough we still talk so much about it from a monetary perspective.
- [39:10]
100%, yeah. Another idea that you often talk about is this idea of fiat rewarding abstraction over reality. What do you mean by this? And give us some examples if you have them.
- [39:22]
I would say that. And maybe this is taking a little bit away from kind of the individual for a second, but we spoke about this idea of Bitcoin or money is a medium of expression. It's how we express to the world what it is that we value. Well, what is interesting is if you were to take a step back and look at an economy, money in a free market flows to where value is being created. And so if you want to create a new business, you have to create value. You have to create a product that people want, a service that people want. And money will flow to you because you are creating value. Or the challenge we have today is we have a centrally planned economy. That centrally planned economy allows, it distorts capital flows. It's like damming a river and allowing water to flow to where no value is being created. And so we have got a society that is incredibly capitally destructive. We go and prop up whole industries, whole sectors that shouldn't exist, and we allow ones that should exist to deteriorate and waste away through regulation and in the impeding of capital flows. And so I would say that it becomes very challenging as a society to actually create value and actually see what it is that reality is rewarding because we're altering capital flows. And how do we survive in a society when we don't know truth from fiction? And I would say that this is one of the biggest challenges we're facing today.
- [40:37]
Seb, why do you think that the bitcoin community is just so curious? I've met a lot of people at different conferences and yeah, there's something to this community that is just crazy curious, just introspective, very creative. Like, I don't know, I'm kind of curious. Just your take on what's driving this and why this exists.
- [41:01]
That's a really good question. I would say that we receive a lot of training throughout our lives, whether that is the educational system that we're brought up in, whether it is through our parents and the educational system they were brought up in, whether it's mainstream media. So we tend to have a very locked in view on how we think the world works. And it can be very hard to question some of these beliefs on how we think the world works. And what is interesting about Bitcoin is it breaks down. I would argue one of the core beliefs we have, which is that the government has our best interests at heart, that our current monetary system is there to support a thriving economy. We need inflation, because otherwise how do you incentivize spending and growth? And so all of a sudden when you start questioning these beliefs and you realize, huh, they're kind of built on a very shaky foundation. And then you start going down the rabbit hole of bitcoin, you look at the world very differently. And then from pulling on those beliefs of kind of our monetary system, you start looking into things like subsidies, you start looking at subsidies, you start realizing maybe our educational system is pretty flawed, maybe our food industry, the health care industry, the, you name it. Like there's so many areas of society that when you pull on those threads, they're built on a shaky foundation. So many of our foundational beliefs, we've been told this is the way it is. But if we ever actually questioned that, that is the way that it is. And you know what? Maybe just quickly pulling on one little thread, like a side, little side tangent, it is that one of the areas that really open my eyes up when I started going down the bitcoin rabbit hole was this idea of subsidies. And one of those in particular was grain subsidies. So if we take a step back for a second, Humans separated from apes around 60 million years ago. For 57 and a half million years, our brain size stayed pretty much exactly the same size. We were kind of scavengers, opportunists. We would eat meat if we had the opportunity to. Then all of a sudden we developed kind of three main traits. First, we developed articulating shoulders. This allowed us to throw spears, throw rocks, hunt. Second, we became bipedal. We could stand up on two legs so we could run long distances and hunt things down. And third, we developed the whites in our eyes, which allowed us to hunt in silence. Other chimps, other monkeys have black eyes, which means they're optimized for food scarcity. They can look around and see where food is without others seeing where they're looking. But what that means is they can't hunt in silence. They have to communicate. And so when we develop these three traits, bipedal, articulating shoulders, whites in our eyes, all of a sudden we became the apex predator. And in two and a half million years, our brain size tripled because we were predominantly eating animal based. Now what's really interesting is 10,000 years ago we had the agricultural revolution. We started eating grain. And the average human pre agricultural man went from 5:9 to 5:5. As a result of poor nutrition. We started to see spinal lesions impacting, like showing kind of like poor immune function. We started to see kind of like a breakdown in cavities and decay. And so it's like, huh, we're kind of predominantly eating animal based. Where does money come into all of this? Well, after the Depression, the US government came in and said, you know what? We need to make grain readily available. So they subsidized grain production. They started to put all of this artificial capital into grain. And we were just talking about the free market distorting the flow capital. They started to put all of this artificial capital into grain production. We saw the absolute boom of the grain industry from that because there was all of this excess grain. We saw the growth in seed oils. We saw the growth in high fructose corn syrup. We saw all of the grain monopolies. Kellogg's and Quakers, we saw the monocrop agricultural industry completely decimate all of the topsoil because they were no longer rotationally farming. And we disincentivized people to look at traditional rotational methods of farming that maintained nutrition in the soil and created like phenomenal, highly nutritious food. And so all of a sudden, because of grain subsidies, we destroyed basically our food industry. Not only that, but then Kellogg's and Quakers, because they had all of these artificial margins. What do they do with this excess capital? They lobbied the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the FDA created the food pyramid. In the second half of the 20th century. We were told for millions of years we've been eating grain. We've got to continue eating grain and saturated fats. Animal products are bad for us. What have we seen since the creation of the food pyramid? We've seen absolute growth in obesity, in diabetes, and all of these health issues. And so I would argue that when you step back and you start looking at money, it really is pervasive into every single aspect of a society. And even something as what you would think as nuanced as a grain subsidy has completely altered the whole health of a nation like the US it's profound.
- [45:47]
If you're looking for a really good book that hits on some of these ideas that Seb was just talking about. Fiat Food is an amazing read. We had the author on the show, I don't know, probably a year ago or something. But this is, if you're not intimately familiar with the space, this is a topic that bitcoiners love to really get into, is just food and health. And it goes to the Core of the original question, Seb, which was, why are bitcoiners so curious? And why. Why do they go off into all these things? But to your answer, it's. When you start looking at the money, all this other stuff starts to unravel in a way that, like, I never ever expected to, you know, start going down some of these paths and have an interest in some of these ideas. But it was just so obvious and just so interesting, I think, is really what it is when you start pulling the thread on some of this, because it's. It just goes deeper and deeper into 20 different rat holes that you never expected to end up in.
- [46:42]
Well, and I'm curious from your own perspective, maybe we'll share something quickly, which is. I've noticed that bitcoin is almost. It's a filter feature. It's like if you walk into a. Into a group and someone says, oh, yeah, I know about bitcoin, you can ask a couple questions and you can get an understanding. If they've put 10 hours into Bitcoin, if they put 100 hours, if they put 10,000 hours just by asking two or three questions.
- [47:05]
Yeah.
- [47:05]
And then the interesting thing is if you're like, okay, this person knows what they're talking about.
- [47:10]
Yeah.
- [47:10]
If they recognize that deflation is the key to an abundant future, then I'm curious what other aspects they've dove into. And nearly all of the time, they've dug into so many of these other rabbit holes. Like, would you say you find the same thing?
- [47:22]
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you could ask somebody what they had for lunch and probably have a really good idea as to how deep they are down the bitcoin rabbit hole. Oh, my God. So Seb and I share book recommendations with each other. We're both avid readers. I'm kind of curious, you know, just learning in general. Seb, how do you personally digest and integrate everything you read when you're going through different ideas? Like, I mean, your last answer is just proof to somebody that Seb reads a lot. He really likes to ask a lot of questions and think critically about things. But what are some of your tips for people? Just on the learning front, how do you become a better learner? How do you do a better job of synthesizing ideas? How do you do it? This is the question I personally have for you. How do you make sure that when you come across some great ideas and mental models, that you just don't lose them over time and that they become kind of incorporated into, you know, your daily life? Because I'll tell you, I. I read a lot too, but I know there's books that I read five, 10 years ago that I forgot a ton that I learned in the moment that I felt was really important, but just, you know, if you don't use it, you lose it kind of thing. So how do you think about this? How do you go about it in a productive and thoughtful kind of way?
- [48:39]
So I would say, and this is the topic that it's always really interesting. Like, we go down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin, and we go down the rabbit hole of money and how the world kind of pieces together. But there's so much content we consume, and most of it goes in one ear and out the other. Or even if when we were reading that thing, we were just completely mesmerized by it and fascinated by it. Two years later, we've just forgotten. And so how do we try to retain information or at least store that information in a way that we can access it later on? And there's many individuals that talk about this idea of kind of like my second brain. And it's this idea that our brain is phenomenal at creating connections between abstract ideas. So when we read one book about money and then we read another book about psychology, and then we start to notice, huh, I'm noticing that money is triggering this in our psychological experience. We are really good at piecing together these abstract ideas. What our brain is useless at doing is trying to memorize specific facts. And so because of that, we've got to be able to a way to store this information so we can actually step back from having to memorize the facts and focus more on the abstract ideas and the connections between things. And it's almost. It's mimicking the brain's neural pathways, allowing us to connect the dots between stuff. And there's kind of a way that I approach things. First off, when I'm reading, I don't just take notes for the sake of taking notes. I only take notes on things that motivate me and that interest me. And I'm like, that is a really interesting point. I'm going to take note on this interesting point. Once I've finished the book, I then go through and I read all of those notes and I bold the ones that stood out to me. So now I have two sections of notes. I have the first ones regular, and then I have the bolded ones. The ones were like, well, that was a really interesting point. Then I go through one more time, read the bolded ones and the Ones that were like, that is a profound point that actually alters maybe my world perspective or how I think about something. And I go and expand and put those in my own words. And so having this three tiered approach to taking notes ensures that you're starting to actually understand it from your own perspective and you're starting to put those really inspirational eye opening moments into your own words. So that's kind of like the first step. The next step is this idea that, okay, you've taken all these notes. If you just have it stored in your regular Apple notes, if you just have them stored in Evernote, it's almost impossible to find those notes because you read a book and you're like, I don't even remember what was the name of that book? What was. I remember it spoke about this, but I can't find it. And so then it's about creating some form of structure. So for me as an individual, I use something called Obsidian. And Obsidian is an open source software that basically saves things and it's called Markdown, but it's effectively just like a text document, a basic text document. So we can move that to any app down the line. From there I take notes and I have these templates, like a book template. And so the moment I start reading a book, I then I bring up the book template and then it says subjects. And I have a whole bunch of various subjects. Whether it's like health, whether it's psychology, whether it is whatever, it's kind of like a library. And then I have the book status. Am I reading? Have I read it? And then once I've read it, I have tags, as in like, was it a one star book? Two star up to five star. So now I've rated my books. I have all of the various subjects and I have the name of the book and the author of the book and I have all my notes. And to me, this structure has profoundly improved my ability to one, retain information. Many times I don't even go back to review the information, but it's the act of creating and taking note that it's allowed that information to absorb in. But two, at the back of the Hidden Cost of Money, I think there's something like 500 citations. And people are like, when you wrote the book, you went out and you sourced all of those citations and was like, no, I had like 10 years of reading and 5, 600 books that I had already taken notes on. So when I started writing the Hidden Cost of Money, I was like, oh yeah, there's a connection between this and this, and I think it was in this book. And then I'm able to look up psychology. I can find, oh, four star book rated. This book, Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. She talks about the impact of money in this area of life. And then I can go and cite that in my book. And so for me, being able to structure notes, being able to organize your notes, being able to actually go back and find those notes is so unbelievably important. And the one other final point that I'll make is that I came across this point a little while back, probably about seven, eight years ago, which is that when we read, we do what something called sub vocalizing. We're talking the word. We're basically saying the words in our head and in doing so, we're having to read the words. That's one step of processing. And we're saying the words in our head and listening to the words. That's two steps of processing. And when we're listening, you skip the whole step of interpreting the words and saying them in your head. And so if you can stay focused while listening, you get much better retention through listening. And so this kind of moved me over and I'm curious to hear your thoughts. It moved me over to predominantly listening to books as opposed to reading books these days. And so I can go for a walk in the forest. As long as it's in a very low stimulus environment, I can go for a walk in the forest. And I notice my retention is exponentially higher. And that is for certain books. If you're looking for mathematical stuff, I'm not listening to that kind of stuff. But I'm curious on your experience.
- [53:36]
So I read, unlike you, I actually prefer listening. But I read this in some, this goes to the, to the core point of my question to you, which is I read this somewhere probably five years ago or something that broke down by like a stat that like 30% of the population actually learns better through listening. The other 30% learns better through reading, and then the other 30% are hands on type people. Obviously the math is wrong on what I just said, but it's approximately somewhere in that ballpark. And the reason it stuck with me is because I've always preferred listening as opposed to reading the physical hard copy, even though I've got a ton of physical hard copies back there. You know, depending on my environmental setup, sometimes I'll mix it with both. And that's why I've always had the hard copy, is because sometimes I needed to have the hard copy. Sometimes I needed the, you know, listen to the audiobook. But what I've found is like the ultimate hack is both of them together. If I can sit down and look at the hard copy and listen to somebody reading it to me, I don't know, it sticks in my head way differently than just doing one or the other where I'm like a little confused. I guess right now from a learning standpoint is just AI. AI has solved so many problems for me personally of just being able to recall or find something that, you know, you go back to books that I read 15, 20 years ago and you'll find in the COVID all my notes, all the stuff that I had. I mean I was like hardcore. And nowadays, like, it's not that at all. It's me just kind of going through the book. A lot of the stuff I feel like I've read somewhere else before. I'm sure you've used kind of a similar thing from a lot, especially on the business side of books. But when I'm done reading and I'm not taking notes and I'm not putting these things in there and I'm just saying, ah, I can fetch whatever I want from AI by saying, hey, it was in this book. This was the general idea. What was the exact quote or help me, help refresh me on what the three points were. I can only remember one of the three and it just spews it out and it's pretty dang good. Like it's good enough that maybe this is just me being a little lazy lately. And so then I asked myself, like, what's causing that? And is it somehow tied to Bitcoin's performance? Right. And I think this is a area that want to ask you next is. So let's say we're right about all this. Let's say we're 10, 15, 20 years into the future and people who, you know, were pretty early into this thing and they just got buying power for eons, how do they stay motivated? How do they continue to want to contribute? Walk us through your thoughts on some of these things. And I guess it goes to some of the stuff we were talking about earlier in the show. But I'm genuinely curious how you think about this.
- [56:22]
This is. And maybe I'll start by just saying I have not formed my opinions on this strongly because I find it AI in this field intimidating. I find it intimidating in that, like take mobile phones, pre mobile phones. I used to remember every single one of my friends home phone numbers. And I'm sure you're probably pretty similar. I used to be able to go home and I can still remember my home phone number from when I was a child.
- [56:47]
I would remember the numbers by how the order on the dial pad. This is how I could remember a lot of numbers in a day. To this day I still know some of my high school friends numbers that way. But I couldn't tell you if you asked me what the numbers were. I couldn't tell you. I had to look at the dial pad and show the geometry on the dial pad. But go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt you keep going.
- [57:08]
No, to that point as well. Like the physical keyboard, I can still like if I want to send a message in my head I know how many clicks I've got to do to get the H, how many to do the E like your. It gets programmed into your brain. Anyway. When we think about our ability to memorize strings of numbers, it has deteriorated significantly since moving away from home phone numbers to cell phones. We just don't have to remember numbers anymore. Well, I think we're on the transition period right now where the majority of people in the world, their knowledge has come from analog forms of consumption. We've read books, we've gone, we've taken courses, we've kind of been out in the world. We've experienced these things, we've consumed all of this information and we've created this idea on how we think the world works. And now all of a sudden we're using AI and that's awesome for those that have this idea of how they think the world works because we can check it is what's coming out of the AI legitimate. And as we probably know and you've probably had the experiences, I many times make stuff up. It pulls information that is not accurate. But because we've spent time in, let's say the bitcoin space and we're questioning about bitcoin, we understand when it is telling us something that is false or is pulling the wrong information. And so we're able to determine what is truth because we have our own source of truth. The challenge I find is that as we increasingly lean upon AI we no longer we lose our sense of truth as an individual. And that is what I find a little scary is that I'm noticing even in my own ability to show up. I used to spend like I feel really lucky that I wrote the Hidden Cost of Money. I wrote Beers for Bitcoin most of my long form articles pre AI and you sat down and you really Fleshed out your ideas on how you thought the world worked.
- [58:50]
Yeah.
- [58:50]
And I would only talk about them once I'd fleshed them out. Whereas now I'm kind of like, wow, that's a really interesting idea that came up in this conversation. I'm going to feed it into AI and see what it thinks. And then it spits out some stuff that I'm like, I would never have thought about that. That's my idea now. And so I'm noticing that it's almost solidifying some of my ideas before I have worked through them myself.
- [59:09]
Yeah.
- [59:10]
And so that's where I'm a little nervous and I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
- [59:12]
Where I'm nervous is when you read a lot of different books, you get this serendipitous information that you never intended to get from just it being a full length book. Right. I might read a book because of, you know, a core thesis or whatever. And then as I'm reading it, I get five other ideas or mental models that I never anticipated in getting just because I'm going through the entire book over time. The emergent property of that is I think you're able to, especially when we think about how you interact with AI, the person who's going to be the most lethal with AI is the person who has the best conducting skills or the best ability to ask questions and to troubleshoot. When it spits something out that seems like it's off, you can say, hey, did you ever think about it from this point of view? And then you get this aha moment where it's like, oh, wow. Yeah. In fact, here's three other things to think about on that specific angle. Right. That person is going to be crazy lethal when they're interacting with AI because they're a great conductor of the questions and the prompts that they're giving it. And they're able to kind of work it down to this really incredible outcome. My concern is like, if you haven't done this work where you've read 500 books is just an example. The, you know, naming 50 a year, you know, is, is a really lofty target. I know that was always kind of my target for a very long time, for decades, was to try to knock that out. And I think that those people, like, when I think about the future, like my kids, and they're in their 40s, it's just going to be so different. And I think their lack of serendipitous information that they were able to acquire just through brute force work of Trying to become more knowledgeable on a daily basis, it's not going to be there. And I can't figure out for the life of me whether this is a good thing, bad thing, whether it'll matter. I don't know, but I don't know. I think it's concerning, but I don't know. I.
- [61:14]
It's challenging. It's super challenging. And what comes to mind as you're saying this is that, like, I tend to believe that the longer something takes to create, create, usually I'm sure if you were to graph this, there'll be more quality or more value in something, the longer it takes to create because someone's had to invest that time and energy. So it's like when you read a book, sometimes you can get someone's whole life experience condensed into 300 pages, 400 pages. Whereas a TikTok video that's five seconds long, there's very little value most of the time in a five second long TikTok video. And so the world today, unfortunately, as life is getting harder, as we're looking for a way out rather than a way in, we're looking for things to stimulate us and meet our immediate, immediate needs. So the length of content we're consuming is getting shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. And so I think that to your point you made a second ago, the people that I think that have success in this type of society are the ones that have a broad knowledge or a depth of knowledge that they're able to look at the content that's coming out of AI and structure meaningful information. But to the average individual, they're just going to be lost because they're just going to be getting so much noise coming at them, so much stimulus. And to them to be able to find the cognitive capacity to sit down and read a book, it's just going to be too much. And so what I think is just profound about Bitcoin and we kind of bring it back to Bitcoin, is that bitcoin gives us capacity again. Bitcoin, I think, gives us the time and the space to, rather than looking for a way out, we start looking for a way in. And I've noticed personally that I went down the knowledge consumption rabbit hole when I really started getting deep into Bitcoin. And at one point I was like, I want to try and reach 100 books a year. And then I realized I'm like, how much of this content am I really like integrating, That's a lofty goal. Making this content. It's I'm not really consuming this content in the way that I would like to consume it. And so as I've gone down the bitcoin rabbit hole and my time preference is lengthened, I'm noticing that I'm spending less time on social media. I don't want the short, immediate gratification content. I want the long form content, but specifically the stuff that makes you think where you can read a page and then you can hit pause and you're like, you can think about that, that one page for an hour, two hours. You can go for a walk thinking about that page and it's kind of on your mind. And so I believe that bitcoin is shifting our focus. And even though we've got all of these distractions, bitcoin is kind of like trying to find that signal through the noise.
- [63:34]
Yeah.
- [63:35]
It's allowing us to refocus on what matters. And that only comes about through capacity, I believe.
- [63:41]
Yeah, yeah. This idea of trying to limit some of your social media consumption is, I think, a amazing point and something that, you know, I have this bittersweet relationship with social media. For me, what it has really provided is just an ability to test an idea in an open market and get just tons of like, candidates, human feedback as to whether the idea is warranted or just plain stupid. If it's stupid, man, do you find out fast and in a way that some people are jerks about it, but then there's other people that are just extremely thoughtful in their ability to show you and demonstrate to you why you're wrong? You know, if you don't mind being publicly humiliated, which has happened to me countless times via social media, it's a great way to learn though. Like, you can learn something super fast that way.
- [64:35]
Do you think, and I'm curious, like, given that your follower count has grown immensely over the last kind of decade, do you think that you self silence at all or do you think what you put out there has changed?
- [64:48]
I think you definitely do self silence because once you've been humbled a few times, you're just way more careful in what you say. Like, I know, you know, when you don't have a lot of followers, you'll put an idea out there and you won't get any feedback because you might not have a lot of people that are following you that have the expertise or know how or knowledge to even reply to what it is you're testing or trying to figure out. Yeah. And I would say more recently, you know, with anybody that has 10,000 plus, followers. Like, you're going to get feedback. If they're real followers, you're going to get feedback and you're going to learn things that, you know, be very humbling again. But yeah, to your point, I think you do start to be careful in what you say because you just don't want to look stupid. I mean, nobody wants to look stupid in front of, you know, a bunch of people. And, you know, you have it happen a couple of times and you think twice before posting anything. And then sometimes you still don't. You still do stupid things. But yeah. What are your thoughts? I mean, you have I don't know how many followers you got. Quite a few followers.
- [65:49]
I would say that. I would like to say that it hasn't, but I don't think that's true. I would like to think that I want to be able to show up and put myself out there from a place of humility and recognizing. Look, I don't have all the answers. This is. It's kind of like the strong opinions loosely held. I'm always willing to debate someone. I'm always willing to have those conversations with someone. But if someone comes up with a better response, I'm going to be like, huh, That's a really interesting point they made. I'd never thought about it from that perspective. And I'm willing to drop my belief. And so I think that bitcoin, to me has one, because most of my followers have come about through Bitcoin has been a test in humility. And this idea that I'm going to put myself out there in a way that the world is very, very much. My beliefs in the world is not fixed. The world is constantly fluctuating. Our interpretation of the world is constantly fluctuating. And being able to have that intellectual honesty at recognizing when we're wrong. And I think bitcoin has also. There's been some huge areas of my life that have completely shifted as a result of looking at the world from a different perspective. And that's what bitcoin has allowed me to kind of see that perspective. And it kind of goes back to our conversation we're having previously. What I think is so fascinating about bitcoin and kind of creating this curiosity is sometimes you think the world works a certain way. We should be eating vegan and vegetarian. Then you realize, maybe I shouldn't be eating vegan and vegetarian. And then you think the central banks and the government have our best interests at heart. And then you're like, maybe they don't. And maybe I just need to support myself and support my community and give back. And that's how we create a flourishing world. And then you think that pharmaceuticals are there because they're treating the symptom and we need to treat the symptom. And then you're like, actually, I'd rather treat the root cause so we can actually build a foundation on health and prosperity. And so I do find, yeah, the journey of Bitcoin is a really interesting journey and it makes you. It's completely reshaped How I think about the world, how I think about my values, how I show up, how I communicate. And I'm trying not to self center a sensor because if I am censoring then I'm not putting that view out there. So I'm not actually having that view tested.
- [67:47]
Yeah, I think the problem with the social media is just the incentives with the likes and the retweets and the looking at the number of views can really cause a person to become egocentric. They're chasing that. As opposed to am I trying to learn something through questioning or putting something out there? Or am I truly trying to help people by posting this comment or this idea so that more people can learn about something that you think is important for the world to know versus if I post this, am I going to get 10 new followers or whatever it is? Right. And if it's in that latter camp, I think social media can turn into just an absolute train wreck, making you miserable and you will not be fulfilled because you're spending every waking moment just trying to get another like. And you know, it's something that I try to think about a lot as to like, okay, am I logging in? Am I doing this to learn something new about the market? Am I trying to prepare for a show and just kind of learning what's out there? Or am I doing this to look like I am? If it's in that latter category, it's like it's time to log off. Like, what in the world are you doing? And I guess the reason I say this is the incentives there and the way that these. And you've heard Jack, I'm sure, talk about how these systems, these social media systems are designed to capture people. They are designed to suck you in and go after the little almost like video game, you know, like button of. It's like collecting Mario coins or collecting whatever, that the human nature is driving people to keep coming back for more because they feel like it's making them happy, but actually it's making them extremely depressed.
- [69:33]
So I'M curious, like, I'm sure if I was to speak to a handful of bitcoiners, one of the traits that you very much represent unbelievably well is just this sense of humility. I think you're one of the most humble people in the space. And I'm curious, do you think that given that social media has only come about in kind of the latter half of your life, coming into the space, you'd already developed a sense of self, you've already developed a sense of individuation, so you're able to be grounded in that space? Or do you think it came from the way your parents raised you? Like, where do you think this sensibility came from?
- [70:06]
The real question, Sab, is because you're so old, Preston, is that your advantage in dealing with social media? Is that the real question?
- [70:13]
How would you guess?
- [70:17]
I honestly think that that is an advantage. I couldn't imagine if I grew up with this. Like, I can't imagine. Like, I didn't have. I didn't have a Twitter until I was in my 30s, I think. Right. So, yeah, I think that that was a big advantage not having this being wired into my mind at a very young, you know, teenage age. Because I think it is. I think it's gonna be hard, especially all this tick tock stuff. Like, I don't have a tick tock. I don't even really realize fully what it is other than like short video clips is my understanding of tick tock. But it seems like it's just kind of wired these young kids into. If it's longer than 20 seconds, like, I'm sorry, I don't have time to even consider watching or viewing whatever that is. So I was talking with a younger kid the other day and they were just like, hold on a second. So like you're creating content that's like an hour long. And I was like, yeah. And they were just flabbergasted that anybody would want to listen to that. Oh yeah. I don't know.
- [71:24]
Preston Pys
It's crazy.
- [71:24]
Seb Bunny
The world we live in is such a different world from even, I think, pre pandemic and then early 2000s. Yeah, I feel really lucky. Like, I'm 32 years old and I feel really lucky that I didn't have a cell phone, I think till I was about 13, 14. And so I have vague memories of the world pre Internet, pre technology. And I just can't imagine growing up in the world that we live in today. Because to your point, like, I think social media creates certain incentives and we're just becoming so disconnected. And you know what? Actually, if I was to. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. We had a conversation and it's a slight tangent from what we're just talking about. We had a conversation when we were in Jackson and we were in the little speakeasy one night, you, Alex, myself and a couple others, and we started talking about our go to spot, how society is very. We were talking about kind of society and how we've got kind of this disconnection. And one of the things that we're seeing with this disconnection is actually a drop in people looking to religion and people kind of looking to state.
- [72:29]
Yeah.
- [72:29]
And I think that religion from a moral framework kind of passes down kind of honesty and accountability and kind of stewardship and like a sense of community. And one thing Alex mentioned that blew my mind was this idea that bitcoin in a sense is a moral framework that can be verified. Like, the challenge with religion is it's built upon trust. And that's not to say I'm not going to have an argument about whether religion is true, whether God exists. It's more this idea that unfortunately there is a lot of trust in religion. And so as we're seeing this transition away from religion, we're seeing more people look to the state to fill that loss of religion. Whereas something like bitcoin is profound because all of a sudden it's creating this transition point where now we have a moral framework being passed down. We're having honesty and accountability. You've got stewardship, you've got a sense of community that's kind of bringing people together. And it's being passed down through this framework that's verifiable. You can go and interrogate the code. You could never do that with religion. And so I'm curious to kind of hear your thoughts on this. We've got the system that previously relied on trust and now it's breaking down and we're looking to the state to fill that spot. And now bitcoin is kind of emerging as this way that is passing down these values without the need for the state, without the need for traditional religion.
- [73:42]
I just try to think about it just very simply and from first principles. You know, if I go out and let's say I'm picking 10 apples and I consume eight or nine a day for my family and me, and that sustains us and we don't have to do anything more than that, and I have a couple apples in reserve. Like I can Be more giving, I can be more kind. I can go out and I don't have to worry about where my next meal is going to come from because I'm able to go and perform work and have excess. But if I go and I do the same drill and I go into the kitchen and the excess apples are gone, they're being consumed somehow some way, and they're not there. And now all of a sudden I don't even have enough for my family because they're dissipating at a rate that's way faster. You're going to find that on a net basis. If you had this scenario that I'm describing playing out with a thousand or ten thousand or one hundred thousand families. What I think you're going to find is that on a net 100,000 different families, they are, quote, unquote, less moral in what they're doing to try to survive because they don't have enough, even though they know they're working for enough in abundance, in excess. But when they go to the excess that's not there, they feel robbed and they feel taken. And so they feel justified going out and trying to get it from somewhere else. And I'm not saying that makes it right. I'm saying that just looking at it from a sheer number standpoint, that I think human nature will become, and we're using the word quote unquote moral. I think they become less moral just because of the math of what I just described from a first principle standpoint. And I think when I look across a lot of religions, I think you have the quote unquote influencers or the people that are talking on behalf of some of these religions will point to it's a breakdown in the family values, it's a breakdown in this. And I'm looking at it more from. And of course, my engineering hat comes on. I'm just saying I'm just looking at the numbers and the numbers are telling me that what I'm seeing from a trend standpoint just makes sense is how I would describe it.
- [75:53]
No, and I very much agree. And I think that it comes back to just like capacity. And I think you're always going to get Gandhi, you're always going to get these unique individuals that can step outside of their environment and create and make change. You're always going to get those individuals. But I do believe that for the average person, people are a product of their environment.
- [76:12]
Yeah.
- [76:12]
And so when you have an environment that's just putting so much pressure on people, like in Canada, we have seen since, what is it, 1970 to present day, the average house went from 3 times the average average person's wage to 9.7 times the average person's wage.
- [76:27]
Yeah.
- [76:27]
Like the average to buy one share of the S P 500 went from 24 hours to 251. When life is just getting harder and harder and harder, we just have no capacity. Yeah. Bring someone keeps stealing all our apples.
- [76:40]
That's right.
- [76:40]
And it's just like we want to be able to show up and it's just. It's hard. And so I think, exactly to your point, I think that the first thing that gives when life is getting harder is our ability to be compassionate, our ability to be altruistic, to be able to give back to society, to be able to think about others, to be able to think about supporting others, putting others sometimes before ourselves, because we can see a bigger picture. And it's what I feel is happening in society today. We see it in the social unrest. Like society, the social fabric feels like it's breaking down and people just have this loss of meaning. And I think if I was to kind of really pinpoint it down to kind of one specific point, it would be this. Imagine if you're a 20 year old and you're like, I want to try and save for a house. I want to have kids and I want to save for a house. I think it's going to take me, based on my current income, 15 years to save for the house. And then five years in, it's like, oh, no. Going to take 25 years.
- [77:28]
Yeah.
- [77:28]
Like, can you find meaning under that world?
- [77:30]
No.
- [77:31]
It's so hard. Whereas in a bitcoin world, it's the inverse. It's like, this can take me 15 years to save for a house. Five years in. Oh, you know what it's going to take seven years.
- [77:40]
Yeah.
- [77:40]
Fricking amazing.
- [77:41]
Yeah. Yeah, totally. And by the way, the house keeps getting cheaper if I'm measuring in bitcoin. Seb, for people listening. So Seb has this incredible book. It's called the Hidden Cost of Money. Can't recommend this enough. It's on Amazon. You can find it pretty much anywhere you buy a book. What else you got, Seb, that you want to highlight for folks that are wanting to learn more about you, because clearly they can see you're a very thoughtful guy.
- [78:04]
I would say, like, you can check me out on Twitter, which is just. Or X. I'm still in the habit of calling it Twitter. I prefer Twitter to X. Yeah, you can Check me out on Twitter, which is just set bunny and bunny is B u n n e y. I do have a blog called setbunny.com and on there I talk about a lot of these ideas. And to be honest, like, I just think that money really is like, everything is downstream of money. When money is broken, it leads to all of these byproducts in life. And it's like, how do we talk more about the byproducts and the unintended consequences of money? Because through that, I think people start to recognize how bitcoin can resolve so many of these issues. And it's really easy to get fixated on the number go up technology. Bitcoin makes life a little easier. And so we get hyper fixated on the financial aspect of money. But I'd say that's it's a feared approach to money because money is breaking down. We're constantly looking to kind of preserve our purchasing power. So I love talking about that kind of stuff. And you can check out the hidden cost of money. But again, Preston, I just, I really appreciate how you show up. I really appreciate you as an individual. And I think I mentioned this on the first time we or the second time we had a podcast a few years back, which was. I started listening to you in maybe 2017 or 2018 when you started your podcast.
- [79:15]
Yeah.
- [79:16]
And I was deep down the Warren Buffett rabbit hole.
- [79:19]
Yeah.
- [79:20]
And you were the absolute, like key inspiration that led me down the rabbit hole of bitcoin. Like, I remember being like, I don't want to invest in gold. Doesn't throw off cash flows. I need businesses. Value investing, it's the way to go.
- [79:31]
It's wild, man. It's weird to see where I suspect a lot of this is going and how the value investing stuff is going to eventually come. We might be five or 10 years away from that, but I think it's going to come full circle, man. I think the value invest thing is going to come back into the scene here later in all of this. But thank you, Seb. I really appreciate that. Really means a lot. All right, folks, Seb Bunny. We'll have a link to his book. We'll have a link to all the other stuff that Seb's up to in the show. Notes. Thank you for making time, sir. Always a pleasure.
- [80:01]
Thanks, Preston.
- [80:02]
Preston Pys
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