Lead-Lag Live

Aleks Svetski on Bitcoin's Transformative Potential, Quantum Computing Challenges, and Philosophical Insights from "Bushido of Bitcoin

• Michael A. Gayed, CFA

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Can Bitcoin reshape the societal structures we know today? Join us as I, Michael Gayed, publisher of The Lead Lag Report, engage in a compelling dialogue with Aleks Svetski, a seasoned Bitcoin enthusiast and entrepreneur, who shares his transformative journey from skepticism to profound understanding of Bitcoin's intricate relationship with global economic systems. Together, we unravel the constant waves of criticism Bitcoin faces, from claims of being a Ponzi scheme to the challenges posed by emerging technologies such as quantum computing. Aleks offers a unique perspective stemming from his entrepreneurial background, shedding light on the complex interplay of volatility, risk, and earning, which has enriched his relationship with Bitcoin.

We navigate the contentious discussions around quantum computing's potential impact on Bitcoin and cryptography. Aleks and I delve into the skepticism surrounding quantum computers' ability to outperform traditional technology while exploring the potential benefits they could bring to Bitcoin, such as enhanced security and increased hash rates. We also ponder whether Bitcoin can truly transform societal structures by addressing broader issues of inequality and fairness. Our discussion challenges the notion that simply fixing monetary systems can solve deep-seated human behaviors, advocating instead for a focus on fairness over forced equality.

Finally, explore with us the profound themes in Aleks' latest work, "Bushido of Bitcoin," which weaves together philosophy, ethics, and visionary storytelling to provide a sophisticated narrative on Bitcoin's potential. This book is more than just a critique; it's an invitation to foster critical thinking rather than blind optimism about Bitcoin's role in governance, culture, and wealth. Aleks recounts his personal transformation throughout 2022 and 2023, finding renewed energy in nuanced discussions, leading him to share his insights in the book. With parts available for free at BushidoBitcoin.com, listeners are encouraged to engage with Aleks' work and join the conversation on Bitcoin’s evolving landscape.

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Speaker 1:

I've seen this cycle happen again and again, and again. To me it's like Groundhog Day and everything almost duplicates. The same kind of FUD comes out. The same people are like oh, quantum computing is going to kill Bitcoin. Oh, fucking this and that. Oh, it's not divisible, oh, it's a Ponzi scheme. The same shit just gets rinsed and repeated because people have a short-term memory. And the problem is, I think, these days, with socials and everything like that is, people's memory is getting shorter and shorter, and shorter and shorter, and I kind of like paint this picture of what the future might look like and how it's going to bifurcate, because I don't think Bitcoin just straight out wins. It's not how the world plays out. There's nothing ever so clean Like I think Bitcoin is going to win in some areas and in other areas, cbdcs and you know, globalism and that stupidity is going to win and there's going to be this grand battle that may last hundreds of years as the, as the world sort of transforms. I've seen these arguments around.

Speaker 2:

you know Bitcoin can prevent wars, right, which sounds fantastical, and I always question sort of whether or not you know code can counter human behavior and like what's kind of embedded in us from a very biological perspective. Do you share skepticism sometimes with some of your fellow humans?

Speaker 1:

I do, I do, I do. Man, I'm not the quintessential Bitcoiner anymore. I used to be. I was very naive. It's not that fucking Bitcoin magically fixes everything. Now I don't believe that shit anymore. Humans are way more complex than just fixing the money can do Like there's other things that need to be sorted out.

Speaker 2:

Thankfully, I'm in the top 5% most downloaded podcasts out there and please help me keep that momentum going. I know that Alex will get me to the top 1%, because Bitcoin always gets the crowd. Man Does it Okay, so we'll get into it. So, with all that said, my name is Michael Guy, publisher of the Lead Lag Report. Joining me here is Alex Sivetsky. Alex, I know a lot of people follow you on X and are familiar with you. Back in my post. We don't know who you are. Introduce yourself. What have you done throughout your career? How are you involved in Bitcoin? What do you do now?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so really brief introduction. Most people know me probably more from my writing. I've written a couple of books now. The first one was the Uncommunist Manifesto. That was with Mark Moss a couple of years back I think it was 2021 or something like that and then just published the Bushido of Bitcoin, and we'll get into what that means in a second. And prior to that, though, and probably for most of my life, I've been more entrepreneurial. So I built businesses. I traded markets.

Speaker 1:

When I was young, I was a gold silver bug in 2009, 2010, 2011. That was the first time I came across Bitcoin, and I disregarded it. My life took me on a path of building businesses. I was in hospitality, I had a gym. At one point, I got into tech, all this sort of stuff. Many failures, a couple of successes, and I found my way into Bitcoin around 2015, 2016. I built one of the first Bitcoin exchanges in Australia that was specifically Bitcoin only. We weren't the first exchange, but we were the first Bitcoin exchanges in Australia that was specifically Bitcoin only. Like we weren't the first exchange, but we were the first dollar cost averaging app and savings app, so kind of like the equivalent to River or Strike in the US or Relay in Europe, and, yeah, we did that for a while.

Speaker 1:

I left that around the time I left Australia when things kind of went crazy during COVID and all that sort of stuff and my life took me in a different direction. So that's when I did a bunch more writing. Basically, I wrote for the Bitcoin Magazine, for Zero Hedge I don't know why that was escaping me for a second. I probably put like a million or two million words on my own blogs and decided to put a bit of time and effort into writing some books. And I still stay entrepreneurial. I'm building some other stuff, um, in in the tech space as well, which, uh, I'll be releasing next year, but, uh, for now, the the focus is a little bit more on the book do you think that um being an entrepreneur has made holding on to bitcoin easier, because part of being an entrepreneur means you're used to volatility?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think so. I think I have a different relationship with volatility, number one. I also have a different relationship with risk, and I guess they're somewhat related. And I also have a different relationship with earning money. So I've never had a paycheck actually.

Speaker 1:

I came out of university, I took my scholarship money, put it on the stock market, lost it all and then had to. I ended up digging myself into about a quarter of a million dollars in debt. By the time I was 20, 20 and a half years old. So the only thing I could do at the time was go and knock on doors, do door-to-door sales actually to find a way to pay the goddamn debts that I had with two banks that had let me all this easy money. Back in the day, and that sort of journey took me into the entrepreneurial path, where nobody was paying me a paycheck for my time. I never traded hours for money. It was always a result of some sort, so I had to earn it in some way.

Speaker 1:

And the thing about entrepreneurialism is sometimes you make good decisions, sometimes you make bad decisions, and in an entrepreneurial paradigm you pay for your losses. Uh, someone else doesn't pay for it. Right, like it doesn't doesn't gel well with the political paradigm where you can socialize the losses by printing money or borrowing from the future or issuing debt and all the other bullshit that governments do, taxation, etc. So for me, the concept of Bitcoin made a lot of sense, which was effectively responsible money. It's like you make a mistake, it's your keys and therefore your coins and therefore your loss or your gain. If you make the correct decision and and I've made shit loads of mistakes with bitcoin, like I've lost bitcoin and sent to the wrong places and fucked it up and all sorts of dumb things um, but it it teaches you, in the same way as business and life teaches you to to be more, uh, thoughtful, to be more intentional, to be more uh, uh what's the word like to have a lower time preference and to extend your timeframe, which I think are all positive things, civilizationally speaking.

Speaker 2:

I like the thoughtfulness and the intentional, as you mentioned. I wonder, though, if you know when Bitcoin has these runs and people chase. I wonder if you think that that sort of primitive part of our brain right, which is much more emotional, reactive, swells the thoughtfulness aspect of why Bitcoin.

Speaker 1:

It does, I mean, but the thing is it generally swells that for people who are new. So they come in and they chase right. So people have sort of been around like I've seen this cycle happen again and again and again. So to me it's like Groundhog Day and like everything, almost like duplicates, the same kind of FUD comes out. You know the same people like, oh, quantum computing is going to kill Bitcoin. Oh, fucking, you know this and that, oh, it's not divisible. Oh, it's a Ponzi scheme. Oh, this exact same shit was said um, a couple years back. And like, oh, bitcoin was dead, and blah, blah. So it's like they get bored of it, and then they chase it, and then they get bored of it, then they chase it.

Speaker 1:

And then the thing is, though, each cycle, I guess, mints new, you can say bitcoiners, so they sort of understand it a little bit better. And from the you know, let's say, from every thousand people that get involved and buy some Bitcoin, maybe a hundred end up holding it and actually taking self-custody, and then maybe 10 actually spend the thousand or 5,000 hours necessary to understand it technologically, sociologically, et cetera, et cetera, like, etc. Etc, like, because it's it's, I think, of bitcoin as a new socioeconomic paradigm like it. It touches many things more than just the money and when you start to take a more holistic view of it, you start to realize that this is actually a significant, uh, invention or a significant discovery. So you know this sort of these cycles and this you know almost.

Speaker 1:

I imagined it as a there was this movie I watched ages ago. It's like an alien movie where it the it had. The aliens had this machine where they like suck things up and they slammed them. It's sort of like Bitcoin does that thing it sucks a bunch of things up and then it dumps it. And sucks a bunch of things up and dumps it and each time it just grows in significance and that is reflected by its overall liquidity, value and number of users.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, actually, my mind goes to man of Steel, oddly enough.

Speaker 1:

I think that's what it was. I think that's what it was.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, as I recall right. Okay, so since you mentioned the quantum computing, I think it's interesting just as a thought experiment. Let's face it, quantum computing is on the way already here, and you know as powerful as maybe it can be, or more powerful than what we've seen. Everything is thought right, it's not just. You know the argument that it can maybe break into a blockchain, but you know certainly anything on the bank side, password side, everything is kind of done. I'm just curious, maybe related, but not related to Bitcoin, does the quantum computing advancement maybe scare you a little bit, because that seems like it has some huge Zero?

Speaker 1:

Nah, zero man. The whole thing is a fucking scam. Quantum computing is a stupidity. There is not even a chance that quantum computers will be able to compete with ASICs, because you can't chain quantum computers will be able to compete with ASICs because you can't chain quantum computers together. And again, I'm not an expert here. But there's some people that I know that I've spoken with in detail who have sort of described it. I'm going to really butcher and paraphrase what they're saying. But you can't just join qubits together and all of a sudden compound your compute power and beat an ASIC right.

Speaker 1:

Asics will always like the word ASIC stands for application-specific integrated circuit. They will always outperform a quantum computer which is designed to be a little bit more general speaking, like it's not application-specific, it's. The point is to make general computing way more efficient. So that's number one. Number two, let's say I'm even wrong about that. All that quantum computing would do in that case is we would create quantum miners and that would increase the hash rate, therefore making Bitcoin more secure. So like it has nothing to do and it has zero impact on the mining side of things. In fact, it's a benefit for mining, where the potential risk does exist.

Speaker 1:

And again. I think this is decades out. I think we're so far from it it's not even funny but is the possibility of reversing the public-private key cryptography. So right now, thanks to the law of large numbers and the way cryptography works, you can go from private to public very easily. But going from public back to private key will require take all the supercomputers on the planet, put them all together, multiply it by a billion years and then maybe you can get from public key to private key, right? The promise is that with quantum computing that'll happen a lot faster.

Speaker 1:

I'm still, like, extremely skeptical, Like I think the chances of that within the next five or 10 decades is probably 0.00001%. But let's say, even if that happens, the goal will be to create a relationship between the public and private key that is more quantum resistant. Now, that may require a soft fork. It may require a hard fork for Bitcoin or something like that, but when the time comes for that, bitcoin is actually much better prepared or in a much better situation than any other technological software thing that's going on at the moment. Um for quantum resistance. So I I just have zero, zero care for that stuff right now yeah, actually someone on youtube makes the point you're just making.

Speaker 2:

Seems like quantum computing could be used to complement the bt bitcoin network, not just attack it. So I think essentially we kind of frame it um, okay, so and listen, I've had plenty of Bitcoin maxis on and people seem to think I'm anti-Bitcoin. I'm not anti-Bitcoin by any means. I'm very public about that and I can certainly appreciate a lot of the frustrations at the extreme that everyone has around fiat, obviously because we've seen what it can do. You say new social economic paradigm. I've seen these arguments around. You know Bitcoin can prevent wars, right, which sounds fantastical, and I always question sort of whether or not you know code can counter human behavior, like what's kind of embedded in us from a very biological perspective. Do you share skepticism sometimes with some of your I do, I do, I do, man, I'm.

Speaker 1:

I'm not the quintessential bitcoiner anymore. I used to be. I was very naive, and all this sort of stuff fix the money, fix the world, all this sort of shit. My new book actually goes and refutes a lot of this stuff. When I when I started writing the book and the funny thing is, I wrote the fucking thing eight times. It took two years. I rewrote the goddamn thing like every couple of months as I transformed and evolved and changed as a person and a big thing for me.

Speaker 1:

When I set out to write it, I was looking for the emergent values or virtues that were coming up and around in the Bitcoin spaces. Where the book ended up was somewhat, completely different, which is a look at what were the principles and behaviors so in other words, the virtues that the greatest cultures throughout human civilization, what were the virtues that they had embedded in their cultures and how did they use those to construct strong civilizations, and what can we learn from that as we move to a new socioeconomic paradigm? It's not that fucking Bitcoin magically fixes everything. Now I don't believe that shit anymore. Humans are way more complex than just fixing the money can do. There's other things that need to be sorted out, and, ultimately, we're just going to end up in a news cycle. So, if Bitcoin brings, or helps to bring, a period of greater economic and, hopefully, social prosperity, there will come a day once again when shit hits the fan. My hope, though, is that, at least with Bitcoin as a sort of a monetary economic substrate, you make it a little bit harder for widespread I guess corruption in the monetary base to exist, because that's a very easy place to make the game unfair, and I think that's really the fundamental problem in the world today is that inequality is not a bad thing.

Speaker 1:

Inequality is actually perfectly natural. You want inequality in any system. Some things need to be taller, some things need to be shorter, some things need to be larger, some things need to be smaller, right. Some things like you don't go to a forest and every single fucking tree is the same, right. That's why, when you look at these like uh, suburbs and stuff like that, when people build every single house the same like it's, there's just something like uh, creepy and weird about it, right, like you need variance, you need inequality.

Speaker 1:

What you want, though, and in fact, the only way to get real inequality, is fairness, right. So if you create equality, you have to be unfair, right, and this is something that people have a real hard time understanding and they often conflate the topic. So what you want is fairness, and any functional game, be it a football game, be it a boxing match or be it the game of economics and society and civilization needs to have some fair rules that people abide by, and that's what sort of, in my opinion, bitcoin does. In an economic way or in a monetary way, it's like OK, we know how much money there is. No fucking dickhead central bank or government can go and create more of it out of thin air. And if they want to do it in a rehypothecated fashion, let's say on some sort of abstract layer, at some point, if they extend it too much, it will collapse, and when it collapses it'll affect anybody in and around their micro environment, not everybody else on the Bitcoin network. So it kind of localizes economic and political consequences. So they're all good things. Does that mean we stop wars? Absolutely fucking not.

Speaker 1:

I'm actually writing an essay now where I'll just read out a section here. It said to libertarians the non-aggression principle is sacred, but it has very obvious limitations, which is to be a useful framework for cooperation, it requires everyone to subscribe to it, in other words, and that breaks down as soon as one actor chooses to violate it. You may decide to orient yourself according to natural rights, but nothing guarantees you'll be treated in this way by others. This may work in smaller communities based on trust or in groups, but at scale, it's incredibly naive, and the reason behind that is because force is the universal language, so we're not going to get away from that. Like, he who carries the big stick and you know money just brings you a bigger stick ends up calling the shots.

Speaker 1:

So and that's not a call to like rule or lead by force, you know, because that's just stupid and uncivilized and there's just way better ways to do it but, like, the underlying existence of force is something that we can't get away from, and the fact that people are going to have disagreements, that resources are going to be scarce, that you're going to deal with both smart and stupid and idiotic people, um, means that we're going to have fights and on a macro scale, uh, fights are wars basically. So so we're not going to get away from that. Um, my, my hope is that just there's a, there's a more real cost associated with those things, which will lead to, uh, hopefully, more sensible outcomes, um, with those kinds of conflicts let's talk about, uh, the bushido of bitcoin.

Speaker 2:

Uh, first of all, please help me, what? What is the bushido? All right?

Speaker 1:

so. So it's a japanese word. The closest uh western equivalent is like chivalry, right, so it basically it means the word itself, means way of the warrior, and it references, uh, much like what chivalry referenced was a code of ethics or code of virtue or a moral code that specifically the warrior class established to kind of guide them or as a way of being right, because the warrior class traditionally has been the, the sword of civilization. It is the white. You can think of it as the white blood cells of the organization, of the organism that is, a civilization or a society, um, and the white blood cells, if they're not, uh, how can I say like restrained is not the right word, but sort of like, held to some sort of higher standard, uh, can eat everything, um around them, right? So the white blood cells often and you can think of it in a biologic capacity, and, uh, in human beings. And you can think of it in a biologic capacity in human beings, or you can think of it in a sociological capacity, with people need to set some rules up or some guiding principles around how to behave so that they don't use their power of violence, I guess, to a degree that damages all of the other components in a system. So this is effectively what Bushido was, and it emerged in feudal Japan and, like a very similar code, emerged around the same time in a completely different part of the world, which was feudal Europe. Lo and behold, the most powerful, sophisticated civilizations on earth. Both had the same kind of virtues and if you go back to Rome and Greece and everything, these sort of same virtues overlap. So what I did was I tried to say okay, if we are going to reconstruct civilization and move on from the clown world that we're in, and a big part of that will probably be this restructure of the socioeconomic layer of civilization and which, in my opinion, the leading candidate for being the base layer for that is Bitcoin, hence the Bushido of Bitcoin.

Speaker 1:

What are the virtues? What is the playbook? How must we live on this new standard? Because currently, in the fiat standard, you want to get ahead. You should be very good at lying, cheating, stealing, being a parasite, politicking, all that kind of stuff right Now. That doesn't mean you can't get ahead by being talented and everything else, but more often than not, the Nancy Pelosi's of the world are far wealthier than you and I, right um, whereas on a bitcoin standard with on a new socioeconomic standard and one that we want to construct like how must we behave?

Speaker 1:

And then I pull out these 10 virtues, which are justice, courage, compassion, honor, integrity uh, respect, responsibility, excellence, loyalty and self-control or restraint. So they're sort of the 10 virtues, and this isn't like Spetsky's 10 commandments. This is a set of virtues that overlap across culture, across belief system, across religion, across the world, across time. That if we look to inculcate these in our culture, I believe the fruits of that will be a stronger, more vital, more ascendant civilization. So that's sort of the idea and I can go into how the book is split up, but that's a long answer to your question.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, let's get into that because I think it's. I'm curious to read it myself, but give me some context as far as how you frame it. So the book's split up into six parts.

Speaker 1:

It so the book split up into six parts. Part one is this sort of prelude where I kind of like throw a couple of things up and wet people's appetites. I talk about how equality is the great evil. I talk about how we need to resist mediocrity and sort of move away from this idea of average and all this sort of stuff. So there's like kind of like six or seven micro essays there that sort of open it up. Then I go into like the history of Bushido, the samurai and parallels in the West and other cultures.

Speaker 1:

Then the core, the meat of the book is each virtue. So I spend an entire chapter on the virtues where I dig into the etymology of the English word down through to the Latin roots, the etymology of the Japanese kanji and into Chinese roots. I look at examples throughout history from great men and great wars and great battles and great, all of that sort of stuff that show these virtues in action and then also show examples of where the opposites of these virtues were used. What happened there? Then I go into the third section, or sorry, the fourth section of the book called integration, where I ask a bunch of hard questions. I look at four big pillars governance, culture, wealth and seasons and cycles and I asked really hard questions in there. It's like, look, does wealth ultimately lead to moral and civil corruption? Like, is that what happens? Because it seems like that's what happened in Rome, in Greece, in Japan, in the Christian West and all this sort of stuff. Like it's happened over and over and over again. And then I like, after I sort of lay all of these things out and you know I talk about Rhodesia, I talk about all these sort of examples in that I ask can Bitcoin help and what influence does it have on these things? And I try and like sort of grapple with these things. I don't know if I come out with a conclusive answer, but I put forward to the best of my ability where these things interrelate and what effect Bitcoin has on culture, governance, season cycles and wealth.

Speaker 1:

And then the fifth section of the book is called Praxis. So I said, okay, well, we've discussed all of this stuff. Now what the fuck do we do about it? Like I then look into how's the world going to restructure, what are the skills you need, what are the things you need to know if you want to become a sovereign individual or a leader or a player in the new game, like on on in in the way the world is changing. So I'll go into everything there, from like stuff that you can do as a content creator or an entrepreneur or something like that, what you can do as a potential Bitcoin holder, what you can do in terms of skills and like mindset and rituals and all this kind of stuff, and then finally, at the end of the book it's called Visions of the Future and it was originally.

Speaker 1:

I started writing out like new frameworks for governance and my editor at the time he said dude, he goes. You just spent like fucking 150,000 words like writing this abstract stuff. He's like paint me a picture, tell me a story. Like what is this going to look like? So I create a short story called the sovereign cross, which is set in, uh, the year 2084, and it basically juxtaposes uh, what I'm thinking of is like these executive states, so, so these new sort of sovereign microstates that are scattered around the world, kind of.

Speaker 1:

It's like a blend of Bellagio's sort of vision of the network state and things like that sovereign individual, et cetera, and, like you know, it includes the free state of Texas, it includes the Central American kind of like, led by El Salvador, the Central American Coalition, the Balkan Coalition, all this sort of stuff, and kind of map out this like world in which you've got these executive states versus the old blob world, the UN, which is run on CBDCs and everything is surveilled and all this sort of stuff, and I kind of like paint this picture of what the future might look like and how it's going to bifurcate, because I don't think Bitcoin just straight out wins.

Speaker 1:

It's not how the world plays out. There's nothing ever so clean. Like I think Bitcoin is going to win in some areas and in other areas CBDCs and globalism and that stupidity is going to win and there's going to be this grand battle that may last hundreds of years as the world sort of transforms. So it's never all sunshine and roses. So anyway, I kind of lay out that um, that thing, and that's that's where I finished the book. So I kind of take the reader through a journey of a whole bunch of philosophy, ethics, ideas and all this sort of shit and then I try and like wrap it into a, into a story at the end and you know when you, when you do that process right, the book is that you feel like you have to get it out.

Speaker 2:

I mean, what's, what's the motivation for you? Obviously you've been very successful. You've got money, you've got Bitcoin right, so why even do that effort?

Speaker 1:

I say this at the start of the book. I said I wrote this for myself. First and foremost, I was in a dark place in 2022, 2023, man, I thought the world had completely lost its mind. I felt like I was surrounded by maniacs. Um, you know, like I'd go into a shop. I remember this experience I had in, um, costa rica. I went in to buy a bottle of water and I, like I fundamentally refused to wear a mask under any circumstance. I didn't give a fuck. And I go in there and this lady, like I give her the money and she's like no, you have to put a mask on. I'm like here's the fucking money. I'm taking the water, I'm leaving it. She's like yells at the security and all this sort of shit. I was like what fucking planet? Like what, what is, what is going on here?

Speaker 1:

And, yeah, it took, it took me to a really strange place and, you know, the the more sort of 2022, 2023 came in. You know, I don't know, I just sort of got disillusioned also with a bunch of the like, the weak arguments by Bitcoiners and like, oh, you know, bitcoin's going to save the world. And, you know, just stack sats and sit back and do nothing and I was just like what the fuck is wrong with these people? And I kind of went down the um, the dissident rabbit holes sort of like right wing sub stack and all this kind of other stuff, and I found like a, a new, a new more I don't know energetic view on life and it started to sort of transform me. So it was around.

Speaker 1:

Sort of the same time I started writing the book, I was, I don't know trying to trying to discover something and it's funny, this book changed me as much as the book changed right. Like it sort of went lockstep in that and it, I don't know, it was almost like cathartic or it was almost like a form of therapy. It was almost something that I wanted to read and I was. I mean, I've always been interested in history Like I've got this screenshot of my Audible from 2022. And I think my average listening time on a weekly basis on Audible was something like 92 hours and it was all like history and, uh, historic fiction, all this sort of stuff. So I was just like engrossed in that and I don't know I wanted to get what was all in here onto paper and uh, it was.

Speaker 1:

It was an incredible, an incredible journey. I, I, it's not for everyone. Uh, writing is very hard, um, and particularly when, I mean, I'm a little bit of a perfectionist, so going in and again and again, and again and again editing it. I think I could have done it another 10 times, but, um, yeah, man, long way of saying it was uh, I didn't set out to write what came out, um, and it was, uh, it was a journey credit for calling out a lot of the uh bullshit ways with which people think about things.

Speaker 2:

Um yeah, while obviously being an advocate for for bitcoin right it's. It's. To me, that's the next evolution of how to properly communicate what bitcoin is and get people to think about it the right way, not in this kind of myopic, extreme, almost cult-like type of tone yeah, it's very naive, it's very naive.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's like's like, it's really low IQ. It drives me nuts and I mean, look, I have some empathy and sympathy for that as well, because I was one of those like very simplistic believers, right. But I don't know something about me. Maybe it's my personality, maybe it's whatever, but I just I and I've always. I should also say like I've, I've. I was never entirely that naive, like I was always a bit of a renegade in the in the space, but it sort of happened more and more and more as I saw these, uh, echo chambers just continually form and just the same tired argument, um, or the same tired justification come up again and again. And I was like, well, no, it's not that simple, like Bitcoin doesn't just fucking fix everything. And yeah, anyway, and that's why I like your content as well, man, because you just can't like be an ostrich, just bury your head in the sand and just think that everything's going to magically get better. It just doesn't work like that. Life is way more complicated.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think that everything's going to magically get better. It just doesn't work like that. Life is way more complicated. Yeah, and I think it's just. You have to have an embedded sense of skepticism around things, including your own views on things, and that's just. Which is interesting, because I think you and I we share the entrepreneurial spirit, and that suggests that we both have times where we have to have self-doubt, which, when you're an entrepreneur, you don't want to go through because that makes right um alex, for those who want to track more your thoughts, more your work, and get access to the book and read the book where he's pointing to yeah, so the in my bio, I think I've got a link.

Speaker 1:

On my twitter bio, I think I've got a link to the book. But if they go to bushido of bitcoincom, um, everything's there. There's a, there's an awesome trailer which I recommend everyone watch. It's sort of like I tried to distill the essence of the book into like a visual trailer and I promise it'll blow your ass away, like it's. It's also my pinned tweet, so you can watch it there or on the on the website, or you just search for Bushido of Bitcoin on on Amazon and check it out.

Speaker 1:

I mean, my other work is all over the place, like just search my name, you'll find it, but I do without blowing smoke up my ass. I think this is my best bit of work and I encourage everyone to grab a copy, not because it's going to make me fucking rich, but because I want these ideas to spread and if what we discussed today was of use, go and check it out. You can also get a bunch of free chapters. Actually, if you go to the BushidoBitcoincom the website itself, you can just put your email in there and I give a very generous amount of the chapters out so that people can read it and get a sense of it.

Speaker 1:

I promise I am going to read the book.

Speaker 2:

So again our anti-Bitcoin. I'm pro people like Alex, Thank you. Thanks, Alex, Appreciate it. Thank you, Mike, Cheers everybody.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Michael A. Gayed, CFA

Host